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Hardback or paperback – 217 x 145 mm – 412 pages

Twenty colour illustrations and forty-three in black and white

Hardback ISBN 9781843681762

Paperback ISBN 9781843681687

Artist, critic, thinker, social radical, John Ruskin was one of the most important writers of the 19th century. To celebrate the bicentenary of his birth in 1819, Ruskin and His Contemporaries sets his life and work in the context of his times and proves their relevance to the present day.

Robert Hewison is one of the world’s leading scholars of Ruskin. Here, in this dazzling collection, the reader finds illumination, surprise, and clarification on every page. Ruskin’s exceptional energy is confirmed in Hewison’s investigation of his institutional connections, his enormous circle of admirers and in influential friends, and his return over and again to the guiding idea of Paradise. Hewison, who does not shy from discussing Ruskin’s faults as well as his achievements, is a historian of the first order and a magnificent guide through Ruskin’s sonorous writing and complex mind. Out of this book springs a living man and a living age
Francis O’Gorman, Saintsbury Professor of English Literature, University of Edinburgh