Selected by New York Times Book Review as a Best Book Since 2000

“The finest and fairest life of Ruskin that has yet been written. . . . To every phase of Ruskin’s highly variegated literary oeuvre Mr. Hilton brings a judicious and informed critical intelligence. It has taken 100 years, but in Tim Hilton, Ruskin has found the champion he deserves.”—Hilton Kramer, Wall Street Journal

John Ruskin, one of the greatest writers and thinkers of the nineteenth century, was also one of the most prolific. Not only did he publish some 250 works, but he also wrote lectures, diaries, and thousands of letters that have not been published. This book—the second and final volume of Tim Hilton’s acclaimed biography of Ruskin, which is published on the centenary of Ruskin’s death—draws on the original source material to give a moving account of the life of this brilliant and creative man.

The book begins in 1859, when Ruskin, a famous author with a disastrous marriage behind him, is living with his parents, writing and traveling, and tutoring—among other pupils—Rose La Touche, a girl of ten, with whom he slowly falls in love. Hilton recounts how this relationship developed into one of the saddest love affairs of literary history, ending in tragedy in 1875. Thereafter, says Hilton, Ruskin’s life was punctuated by bouts of insanity and despair that culminated in total breakdown for the last ten years of his life. During these years, however, his intellect and imagination reached new heights, as he produced Praeterita andmost of Fors Clavigera, the series of monthly letters to British workers. Hilton’s magisterial narrative follows Ruskin through this period and shows that he was the most eloquent and radical of all the great Victorian writers.