OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
PRAETERITA
JOHN RUSKIN was born in London in 1819. His father was a wine merchant, born and brought up in Scotland; his mother, a devout Evangelical Christian, gave him the early religious training that influenced him throughout his life. He was largely taught at home as a boy, and later became an undergraduate at Christ Church, Oxford. In 1843 he began his career as a critic with the publication of the first volume of Modern Painters, a passionate celebration of the painting of J. M. W. Turner. Seventeen years, and four further volumes, were needed to bring that work to completion in 1860. Two further works on art and architecture belong to these years—The Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849) and The Stones of Venice (1851–3). He married Effie Gray in 1848. The marriage was unhappy, and was annulled in 1854. In 1858 he met Rose La Touche, and his frustrated love for her shadowed his later years. Throughout the late 1850s and 1860s he wrote a series of essays and lectures addressing political and economic issues, including Unto This Last (1860), Sesame and Lilies (1865), and The Queen of the Air (1869). His work as Oxford’s first Slade Professor of Fine Art began in 1870. In the following year he started to publish Fors Clavigera, a series of letters to the ‘Workmen and Labourers of Great Britain’, associated with the foundation of the reforming Guild of St George. His mental health became increasingly fragile in the 1870s, and the first of a series of serious and damaging breakdowns came in 1878.
He began to publish his autobiography,
Praeterita, in 1885; it was still incomplete when a final breakdown, in 1889, brought his publishing career to an end. He died in 1900.
FRANCIS O’GORMAN is Professor of Victorian Literature at the University of Leeds.
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
JOHN RUSKIN
Praeterita
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
FRANCIS O’GORMAN
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