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REVIEWS Image Credit: Yale University Press
Robert Hewison, Ruskin on Venice. London and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-30012178-0 Reviewer: Marcus Waithe, Fellow in English and University Lecturer, Magdalene College, Cambridge Ruskin presented Venice as a ‘vain temptation’ in Praeterita (XXXV. 296), one that distracted him from worthier subjects in Rouen, Pisa and Geneva. The allure of the city is framed more positively in the Acknowledgements to this volume. Dating his professional engagement with Ruskin back to an invitation to speak at a conference in 1969, Robert Hewison reports having found ‘a direction in life’ (i). More than a bid to establish credentials at the threshold, this anecdote discloses a family relationship between Ruskin on Venice and the first wave of attempts to rehabilitate Ruskin after the critical nadir of the 1950s. The book is the product of a life thinking, speaking, and writing, about Ruskin, informed by depths of knowledge that few younger commentators could hope to muster. These advantages are coloured by mindfulness of the ‘long years of neglect’ (i) that made the study of Ruskin so seductive and potentially dangerous to those of Hewison’s generation: dangerous because Ruskin’s paternalism and personal life made the task of public justification difficult, and because Ruskin’s vast and demanding legacy threatened to engulf anyone making the commitment required to understand him. An allusion to having avoided ‘an orthodox academic career’ (xi) recalls the singular character of Ruskin studies in its revived form: though benefiting from a change in the public mood, and from new disciplinary openness at the universities, the field remained a product of personal commitment. Ruskin on Venice represents a notable flowering and culmination of this late twentieth-century