John Ruskin's Praeterita, edited by Francis O’Gorman. Oxford University Press, £10.99, reviewed by Bernard Richards

Praeterita is one of the very best autobiographies of the 19th century. This new edition is in the Oxford World’s Classics series, and comes with an excellent introduction and notes. It records the life of John Ruskin, art critic, polymath and social thinker.

Alas, Ruskin went mad before it could be finished, but even in its incomplete state it is a charming and engrossing read.

There will be renewed interest in Ruskin shortly, because he and his wife are to be the subject of Effie, a film written by Emma Thompson and starring her husband Greg Wise as Ruskin and the teenage Dakota Fanning as Effie. However, Praeterita will be unable to fill in the blank spaces of the notoriously disastrous marriage, which was never consummated, because the whole episode was so distressing for Ruskin that he could not bring himself to record it.

It was not reticence that explains the lacuna but sorrow, since elsewhere Ruskin does not hesitate to reveal embarrassing facts about himself, rather as Dickens’s David Copperfield and Pip Pirrip put aside vanity and make fun of themselves.

Of special interest for Oxford readers will be the chapters concerning his undergraduate life at Christ Church, and his famous evocation of worship in the cathedral, the congregation “orderly, as the crew of a man-of-war, in the goodly ship of their temple”.

It’s not all serious though — there is an account of the geologist, fossil collector and dinosaur discoverer William Buckland, Canon of Christ Church, serving mice on toast and employing “polite little Carolina lizards” to keep flies from the table.