Publication date: May 2025

Hardback – 185 mm x 145 mm – 64 pages

Twenty-five illustrations in black and white

ISBN 9781843682660

Ruskin wrote this fable in 1841 as a lighthearted present for a teenage friend of the family, Effie, and seven years later he married her. The marriage was famously disastrous; but before it fell apart the Ruskins allowed The King of the Golden River to be published, and it almost instantly became one of the most popular works for children of its time. The great illustrator Richard Doyle contributed over 25 full pages and vignettes in his characteristically romantic but sharp-edged style.

The King of the Golden River is the first literary fairy tale in English (as opposed to collected folk tales); Ruskin himself said it was ‘a fairly good imitation of Grimm and Dickens, mixed with some true Alpine feeling of my own’. Later he spoke of the value of the traditional tales, with their power ‘to fortify children against the glacial cold of selfish science’; and indeed many have, like the great critic Northrop Frye, seen it as an introduction to the radical theories of economics and the passion for the environment that were Ruskin’s lasting legacy.

More than that, The King of the Golden River remains a powerful and effective fable about humanity’s dual capacity for destructiveness and redeeming love, with a hero, villains and as strange a brace of fairy-tale creatures as one could hope to meet.

A specially commissioned essay by Simon Cooke (author of Reading Victorian Illustration and other textbooks about the period) explains the book’s importance in the history of children’s writing, illustration and publishing and in the context of Ruskin’s own development.