Red Book; 9.8 × 15.2 cm; 38 leaves (counting from Yale's bookplate, and including final leaf or endpaper, which has been partially glued to back board), of which 2r-15r numbered by
Ruskin as pp. 1-29; watermark
1823. The leaf 31r-v has been attached to 30v with tape, and a stub along the inside margin of 31v shows that a leaf has been torn out. Following 31v, the gathering 32r-37v is loose and could be missing outermost leaves.
The inside front board is blank except for Yale's bookplate and, unlike the other
Red Books in the slipcase
Harry & Lucy, does not have glued or tipped in a brief description of the notebook penned by
Wedderburn(?) with a clipping from PJR.
MS IIIA was never described by the earlier editors, however, neither in PJR nor in Works.
Wedderburn, or whoever was responsible for slipcasing the juvenilia, was evidently content to include
MS IIIA in the
Harry and Lucy slipcase, where it logically belonged.
Title page (1r):
HARRY AND LUCY / CONCLUDED / BEING / THE LAST PART / OF / EARLY LESSONS / BY /
JOHN RUSKIN/ IN FOUR VOLUMES / VOL III / HERNHILL / DULWICH. On back of the title page (1v),
Ruskin imitated a printed page of ERRATA.
Unlike the
Harry and Lucy narratives in
MS I and
III, this volume of the tale is written entirely in ink; however, this volume contains no plates, for which pencil had been reserved in
MS III, even when the text was ink. Later in
MS IIIA, the mineralogy notes and sermon draft are written in pencil.
The pages following
Harry and Lucy that are blank except for
Ruskin's page numbering (pp. 10-29) must have been intended for the continuation of the narrative, since
Ruskin prepared the pages in the same way as pp. 1-9--i.e., with verticle rules in pencil near the inside and outside margins, serving as guides to justify
Ruskin's printing.
Viljoen misdated
MS IIIA as autumn
1828,
1829-30,
1832. The mineralogy notes, no. 172, are presumably no earlier than the note on payment for the
Homer and for mineralogy articles, which precedes the notes written from the end of the volume. Payment for
Homer must refer to translating the
Iliad (no. 160a) in late February
1832: But
Homer! I am happy to inform you, sir, that I have translated about 550 lines of the first book. . . . These however I do suppose are news to you extremely unwelcome --unwelcome owing to what
John James will have to pay (RFL 268-69). The following mineralogy notes were entered considerably later, I believe, probably after December
1832 (see note to no. 172). Finally, following the mineralogical notes, the rough draft of the eighteenth
Sermon on the Pentateuch could have been entered anytime in
1833 after sermons
VIII-X were drafted early in that year (see nos. 174-75).
