Praeterita is the autobiography of John Ruskin (1819-1900), art critic and social commentator and one of the most influential figures of the nineteenth century. An elegy for lost places and people, Praeterita recounts Ruskin's childhood, and his travels across Europe with passion and intimacy.

Praeterita is perhaps the best-loved of all the fruits of Ruskin's many-sided and tormented genius. This exceptional biography - the first of Ruskin's works in the Whitehouse edition - simultaneously presents a deeply reflective portrait of an early 19th-century Protestant family - its genuine piety, its severities, its suffocating possessive affections - and the product (at once intellectually brilliant and emotionally damaged) of its educational system.

Volume 1-35, works. Volume 36-37, letters. Volume 38 provides an extensive bibliography of Ruskin's writings and a catalogue of his drawings, with corrections to earlier volumes in George Allen's Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin. Volume 39, general index.