The Life of John Ruskin

W. G. Collingwood's intimate biography of John Ruskin grows out of personal acquaintance and follows the writer's life through four great phases: boy poet, art critic, hermit and heretic, and professor and prophet. It opens by tracing the strong Scottish bloodlines behind Ruskin's London birth, from the Adairs, Agnews, Rosses, Tweddales, and early Ruskins to the temperament of his father, John James Ruskin, whose education, business talent, and success in the sherry trade helped shape the household. His mother's affectionate firmness, and the family's blend of practicality, piety, and intellectual seriousness, form the moral climate of Ruskin's upbringing. From this foundation, the book follows Ruskin's extraordinary childhood: precocious, imaginative, and fiercely observant, he absorbs nature, travel, drawing, printing, and his father's readings into an early literary life. His love of Scott, his rapid self-education, and his disciplined yet vivid home environment all prepare the future critic and poet. Later chapters carry him into public life, where his art patronage, charitable instincts, lectures, and gifts of Turner drawings reveal a mind equally devoted to beauty, preservation, and moral purpose. Even in criticism and controversy, he remains a restless, solitary worker, sustained by landscape, travel, and an unyielding sense of duty. This edition has been fully restored with modern typesetting, custom cover design.