Red Book
The term by which
Ruskin and his parents referred to store‐bought stationerʼs notebooks with reddish‐brown,
flexible leather covers (described specifically as
roan in Sotheby & Co.,
Catalogue of the Manuscripts and Remaining Library of John Ruskin [
1930], 20–21),
each approximately 15 centimeters tall by 10 centimeters wide.
Ruskin and
his father exchange the term in referring, for example,
to
MS III (letter of
10 March 1829, in
Ruskin Family Letters, 192), and presumably extended the term
to all the (presently known and extant) notebooks resembling it: that is,
MS I,
MS IIIA,
MS IV,
Juvenilia MS A,
Juvenilia MS B, and
Juvenilia MS C.
Judging by references to the
Red Books in family letters,
Ruskin composed in these notebooks mainly at home, although their contents
suggest that he may occasionally have carried some of them on family travels through
England,
Wales,
and
North Britain. Certainly, he used the
Red Books to reflect on travel, as in his small anthologies of topographical verse,
such as
“Poetry Discriptive”,
Juvenilia MS C served the family as his imitation of a travel guidebook,
containing the
Travel Itinerary and Tour Notes [1828]
(see
Tours of 1826–27).
The term
Red Book was perhaps a family jest. According to the
OED,
the term applies to “official books, usually distinguished by having a red binding, of political, administrative, or economic significance,”
a usage current since the fifteenth century (“red book, n.1”,
OED Online, accessed
30 December 2015),
although, for the Ruskins, the term may have referred merely to the color. In later years,
John James Ruskin may also have intended these
notebooks when using the term
Little Book for manuscripts containing juvenilia composed by
Ruskin up to age ten—a
description that matches the
Red Books accurately enough, since it was starting at about that age, in
1829–30,
when
Ruskin put aside the
Red Books for larger, ledger‐like, half‐calf notebooks, some of which he dedicated solely to rough draft,
and others solely to fair copy (although for a few years after
1829,
Ruskin did continue to exploit the
Red Books for left‐over blank spaces
in which to rough‐draft poetry and prose). (See letters of
1 February 1850 [MSL 002/003/096] and
2 February 1850 [MSL 002/003/097],
in
Letters from John James Ruskin to John Ruskin, 1829–1862,
both letters also quoted in
Dearden, “Production and Distribution of John Ruskinʼs Poems 1850”, 156–57.
It is possible, however, that
John Jamesʼs usage of
Little Book refers, not to a
Red Book, but to
MS V, a small half‐calf notebook that
Ruskin entitlted
“Miscellaneous Poetry”.)
The term
Red Book stuck throughout
Ruskinʼs life. As late as
1891,
W. G. Collingwood employed the term in
“Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems”, his descriptive bibliography
compiled for
Poems (1891).
Describing
MS I as a “ruled note‐book, bound in
red leather,” roughly 6 by 4 inches,
Collingwood goes on to use the term
Red Book
as a shorthand to designate
MS III and
MS IV as
conforming with this description (
Poems [4o, 1891], 1:262;
Poems [8o, 1891], 1:263).
On
8 September 1870,
Ruskin remembered the term when docketing
MS IV as
“Red book No. 1,”
MS III as
“Red book No. 2,” and
MS I as
“Red book No. 3.” What prodded his selection and arrangement of these three of the seven
Red Books is unrecorded,
but there are clues to his motives. On
9 August, he had visited
Herne Hill,
where he “put all in order”, confiding to his diary that he “worked once more in that old house, going through the room where
I lay in the morning looking at my first watercolour painting”, and one wonders whether he found his juvenilia there, or whether the old
associations prompted him to unearth the
Red Books on return to
Denmark Hill. The diary entry for
8 September remarks only on the bad weather, but, on the
following Sunday (
11 September),
Ruskin looks back on a depressing week (“for many a year” not one “so
miserable”), during which he “put much into order” and “read old poems of
1848”:
“I have gained something in
these twenty‐two years”, he pronounced
(
Ruskin, Diaries 700, 702).
Ruskinʼs reasons are also obscure for having chosen these particular
Red Books to number, and for numbering them in this order.
Curiously, he numbered them in reverse chronological order. “No. 1,”
MS IV,
is plainly dated
1828 in
Ruskinʼs own boyhood hand; “No. 2,”
MS III, contains dates in his and his
his motherʼs hands ranging from
1826 to
1829; and “No. 3”,
MS I, is dated
1826–27
in his
motherʼs hand (see
MS I: Date,
MS III: Date,
and
MS IV: Date).
Perhaps he gave first place to
MS IV because its chief work is the botanical poem, “on the universe”,
“Eudosia”,
for which had two possible reasons in
1870 to assign priority: his preference at this time to emphasize his boyhood talents for natural history; and obscure symbolic
connections with
Rose La Touche (1848–75).
In
1869,
Ruskin had mined
MS III
for the boyhood poem
“Glenfarg” and “Glen of Glenfarg” (“Papa how pretty those icicles are”,
which he reprinted in
The Queen of the Air as an illustration of his “birthright” of “art‐gift”
that came to him “by Athenaʼs will, from the air of English country villages, and Scottish hills”
(
Ruskin, Works, 19:396–97, and see 283).
In
September 1869,
Rose sent him a cryptic message,
by returning her copy of the book, enclosing only a weed and a rose leaf between its pages. An accidental face‐to‐face meeting between
Rose
and
Ruskin in
January 1870 only deepened the enigma and tension of their relations,
and
Ruskin began compiling notes for a book that would become his own contribution to the “language of the flowers”,
Proserpina. Their conflicted and rebarbative exchange continued throughout the year; however, a letter from
Rose
gave
Ruskin hope, and in
September 1870, when he annotated the
Red Books, he sought counsel to prepare a statement
defining his legal, moral, and sexual status regarding his marriage—a document that would later precipitate disastrous commentary from his former wife, nee
Effie Chalmers Gray (
1828–97), now Effie Millais (
Hilton, John Ruskin: The Later Years, 171–73, 179).
Perhaps, at this crisis,
Ruskin found some sort of consolation in
“Eudosia”, which, as he would later summarize the poem
in
Praeterita, “ascends from the rose to the oak” in its first book
(, 35:60). As the for the mysterious “poems of
1848,”
perhaps they related to
Ruskinʼs marriage to
Effie in that year, which also happened to be the year
of
Roseʼs birth.
Another possible explanation for
Ruskinʼs treating
MS IV as “Red book No. 1”
resides in his
father having used a blank space in that notebook to compile his
List of Published Poems, 1830–46.
John James made the list
in preparation for his affectionate task of collecting and printing the
Poems (1850),
ending the list by proudly remembering the great men to whom
his son had been “compared”—
Goethe,
Coleridge,
Isaac Taylor,
Edmound Burke, and
Juvenal.
