ABSTRACT
When John Ruskin came to assemble his 'Outlines of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life' for the composition of his final work, Praeterita, motivated partly by seeking the causes of his mental collapse, the prevailing note was elegiac. The autobiography attempts to salvage a sense of coherence within his works despite contemplating a life he had come to view as one of largely defeated endeavours, both public and personal. He goes from one idea to another without apparent order. But in reality the fancy that leads him follows his profound affinities which in spite of himself impose on him a superior order', culminating in the characteristically incomplete, and uncompletable, Praeterita itself. The narrative of Praeterita is contrapuntal, as Heather Henderson describes it, following 'the traditional, end-oriented model of autobiographical narration based on Christian autobiographies of conversion and classical narratives of journeying, while on another level there is a pattern of repetition and return'.
