John Ruskin: A Life

Early in Batchelor's splendid one-volume life, he notes that young Ruskin (1819-1900) suffered as ""an overloved child [who] has been emotionally mutilated by its parents""Dand that this suffering was to affect him for the rest of his life. For example, when Ruskin went to Oxford, his mother took lodgings nearby to oversee him. When he went on holiday to Italy to study its art and architecture, his parents accompanied him. When Ruskin wed the beautiful Effie Gray, his mother and father accompanied the bride and groom on their honeymoon, where he proved unable to consummate the marriage. Claiming for much of his life to be a semi-invalid whose first priority was himself, Ruskin, financed by his father's wealth as a wine merchant, was an indefatigable climber and walker, and a hugely productive writer and lecturer. He proposed linked social, economic and aesthetic cures for all the ills of 19th-century life, but no cure emerged for his manic-depressive swings emanating from sexual obsessions that, Batchelor writes, ""filled him with grief, guilt and conflict."" While such a calamitous life might produce in others only suffering and self-absorption, Batchelor (The Life of Joseph Conrad; etc.) shows how Ruskin's self-destructive discontent was turned into passionate, crusading prose about the dignity of work and the worth of art. Well received in England, where it has already been published, and hardly more than half the bulk of Tim Hilton's recent and swollen John Ruskin: The Later Years, Batchelor's complete life takes by far the more accessible approach. As this is the centennial of Ruskin's death, this bio should draw some attention here, especially if linked by New York booksellers to the current ""Ruskin's Italy, Ruskin's England"" show at that city's Morgan Library, but interest won't approach that in Ruskin's native England, where the book previously appeared to critical acclaim. 8 pages b&w, 8 pages color illus. (Nov.)