John Ruskin: The Early Years

by Tim Hilton

This is the authoritative biography of John Ruskin, the most influential nineteenth-century critic of art and society. It draws on the complete text of Ruskin's diaries and many thousands of unpublished letters and other documents to provide fresh insight into the background and content of Ruskin's numerous books.

Genres: Biography, Nonfiction

320 pages, Paperback

First published September 10, 1985

Reviews

[Liam Guilar · Rating 3 out of 5]

In most biographies the subject often feels slightly off centre stage. Perhaps the quality of the biography can be measured by how far off the subject is, or, in the case of early modern Biographies, how well the writer pulls off the conjuring trick of making the subject appear at all.

This book is the first part of a two volume life. It covers forty one years (plus his parents) in under three hundred pages, and feels like an extended essay. That said, Hilton knows his subject well, and has managed Ruskin's voluminous writings into something like a readable narrative. For anyone wanting an introduction this is a good place to start but by the end of volume one, apart from knowing Ruskin's various itineraries and publications, he remains out of focus unknown.

At times the essay like quality produces startling moments: 'Towards the end of this summer in Switzerland and Turin we find that the forty-year-old Ruskin was developing a different interest in the opposite sex. Ruskin's sexual maladjustment is not an uncommon one. He was a Paedophile" (p253)

Now your honour, my client objects to being slandered in this way and wishes to know what evidence Mr. Hilton has for making such a blunt claim. My client also demands that Mr Hilton explain his terms. Surely "an attraction to young girls" does not a paedophile make...especially at a time when the age of consent was 13.

Hilton's evidence, in the paragraph with which this quote begins, is that Ruskin saw a young girl in Turin (about ten years old) and the image remained with him "for a quarter of a century and more"....Does that make him a paedophile your worhsip? Is there any evidence he acted on this attraction in any way? If there is Mr. Hilton doesn't give it.

The aspect of this book that I found most disappointing is the way Ruskin's relationship with Turner somehow happens off stage as well. Maybe that disappointment is personal, I read this because of my interest in 'Modern Painters' which is driven by Ruskin's opinions of Turner, but given the central role Turner plays in Ruskin's life and thinking, it seems odd.

Having said that it's a readable biography of a man who doesn't seem to have had a lot going for him as a human being: a rotten self-centred husband; a fragile friend, an over devoted son, living comfortably off daddy's hard earned wealth, but whose work rate was phenomenal even by the standards of the writers of his own time and who produced some classic pieces of writing.

Volume two covers a similar span of years but blows out to over 600 pages...onwards....

[L · Rating 4 out of 5]

Glad I read it, but I will not be moving on to volume two. I've had it with Ruskin, especially when he starts talking in baby talk.

[Mary Ronan Drew · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the first of two volumes of Hilton's thorough biography of Ruskin. This one was 320 pages and the second is 544. I will, perhaps, probably, maybe get to reading that second volume. Someday.

[Laura McNeal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am disturbed.

It's an engaging, concise book, and it seems like a very thoroughly considered one. It was critically acclaimed when it appeared in 1985, and I can see why. It's an interesting blend of reverence and critical distance wrapped in astonishingly fluid and informed prose. While I'm accustomed to watching a biographer smash the old statue (the biography that came before it) in order to build a monument that better suits the times, I somehow didn't expect Hilton to take a hammer to Ruskin's own life history, Praeterita. Biography is an act of love like no other. Writing historical fiction about real people (as I do) is a long game that requires a lot of research, passion, and fact-checking, but biography is an even longer game with much stricter standards. Instead of getting most things emotionally right, sort of, the biographer has to get EVERYTHING right and include footnotes. You run the risk of discovering something you don't want to know about your subject, and of needing to reveal that thing without ruining the appeal of someone in whom you have invested a staggering amount of time--and with whom you will be associated for good or ill.

I have been studying Ruskin myself because I love Praeterita and his theory of drawing, and I am about to spend a month reading his correspondence with an eye toward writing something. Fictional, maybe. Non-fiction, maybe. I knew, going into it, that Ruskin was very, very different in his personal life. That he married a woman who was by all accounts lovely and he lived with her for six years without ever consummating that marriage. She accused him of incurable impotence and was granted an annulment. He continued to be a public figure, somehow, and he later proposed marriage to a girl who was under the age of consent. He offered to marry her when she came of age and to be her husband in an asexual arrangement.

To me this suggested a man defined by an inability to do normal physical things, a man to whom sex itself--any kind of sex--was impossible. Pleasure was bad; work was good. My working theory was that his mother's mania for religious denial of pleasure had deformed him emotionally. She was abusive by our standards, though not, apparently, by the standards of the 19th century. She made him feel that the only goodness was a childlike goodness. I would not have called him a pedophile, but that's what Tim Hilton does in chapter 13 of 15. It surprises me that the word, once spoken, has not attached itself to Ruskin as it did to Lewis Carroll. Can you be a pedophile if you adore, revere, idealize, but do not ever touch the object of your reverence? I suppose that technically you can, since "phile" "denotes fondness for a specified thing." The connotation of the suffix is all over the place. Bibliophile does not mean a person who has sex with books. Anglophile does not mean one who has sex with the British. But pedophile only ever means you are a person who wants to have, tries to have, or does have sex with children, not a person with a fondness for children.

Is the label fair? Where does the evil lie--innate, as we believe sexual preference to be? Or was it, in his case, a bizarre result of a particularly strange kind of child abuse? Did he act nobly in repressing what he felt? If I don't condemn him, am I failing a moral test? And if I do condemn him and recoil, does that make his drawings and writings reprehensible in some way?

Disturbed, as I said.

[Helen · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘The early years’ take us from Ruskin’s birth in 1819, adored child of parents whose troubled younger days made them invest all their hopes in their infant prodigy, through to 1860 and the forty year old Ruskin, acclaimed author, still not convinced he has found his true voice or mission in the world. It’s a competent biography which is dispassionate about Ruskin’s personal life to good effect, but more critical of his professional endeavours, because Hilton is convinced that Fors Clavigera is Ruskin’s true magnum opus. The one thing I don’t like is the overlapping dates as Hilton concentrates on first one theme then another, so that you keep thinking he is on spring of one year and then find that he has darted back to the summer of the year before. But a lot is told clearly in this relatively short book, and its illustrations are extremely helpful in setting Ruskin’s work in context. There are also choice substantial extracts from his work, illustrating key styles and themes. The one point where I really disagree with Hilton’s approach is where he extrapolates a lot from one passage about Ruskin’s interest in young girls - it’s almost as if he doesn’t understand quite how serious the label he attaches to him is in this context, and blithely describes later in the book Ruskin’s sojourn in a girl’s boarding school as though it can have no unproblematic overtones. Either Ruskin’s interest in young girls was deeply problematic, in which case so was his engagement with a number of different girls’ schools, or something else was going on here which should not be described in the terms Hilton uses.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed this, perhaps because I never felt that I had to read every word to get from it what I wanted, which was the broad sweep of Ruskin's life. I have no dog in the 'was he a pedophile' fight; the Victorians were all messed up sexually, so whatever, provided he didn't actually harm anyone, I don't care.

I do wish Hilton had done much more with Ruskin's ideas, which are, after all, the main reason to care about him. But the book has short chapters, and gives you a good overview of Ruskin's social circle. Also, I learned just how awesome Effie was, so that was nice.

Trying to work out if the later years will be as light on ideas as the early years. I very much hope not; the point, for me, is to learn more about the author of 'Unto this Last,' and his arguments.

[Will · Rating 1 out of 5]

The reviews here are dishonest about this disastrous biography. I can separate my love of Ruskin from the stupidity of liking everything written about him. This book, says one, "doesn't quote enough"? Half the book is block quotations! The dumbest moment is when Tim Hilton refers to Carpaccio's St. Ursula as a portrait, then goes on to misspell a string of Italian names.

[Julian · Rating 3 out of 5]

Just a word of warning to those interested in Hilton's follow up; John Ruskin : The Later Years is a mighty 3 pages long.

[foundfoundfound · Rating 3 out of 5]

disappointing. hilton tells the life, but he don't delve. he doesn't adequately examine ruskin's thought, nor does he quote enough. this isn't an intellectual biography (which it should be).