Sources
	(unrevised)This little tale about a mouse and a dog suggests the influence of Anna Laetitia Barbauld, whose books are believed to have been in the Ruskin family library, such as Aiken and Barbauld, Evenings at Home (for Ruskin’s copy of the book, see Viljoen, Sharp Collection, 8, and Note on Ruskin’s Boyhood Books). In the editions of Evenings at Home available to me, I found no tale resembling “The Needless Alarm” specifically, although Ruskin’s poem does recall the tales generally. The poem lacks Mrs. Barbauld’s conventional closing morals, but even she could occasionally relax this requirement, such as in “The History and Adventures of a Cat,” which relates a cat’s life from its own point of view and without didacticism.
	Barbauld was in keeping with Ruskin’s other reading and imitative writing of 1826–27, her work having been recommended by Richard Lovell Edgeworth (in his “Address to Mothers” prefacing later editions of Maria and Richard Edgeworth, Early Lessons) as accessible and entertaining reading for younger children. In fact, Ruskin’s MS I poetry anthology reflects a condensation of the Edgeworths’ recommended program of reading for children, if also a precocious acceleration of that program. In the anthology, “The Needless Alarm” is preceded by “When furious up from mines the water pours,” drawn from Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, which Edgeworth recommends for older children. If the Ruskins strictly followed Edgeworth’s advice that children advance by stages through reading of increasingly difficulty, “The Needless Alarm” represents his response to an earlier stage of reading, as compared with the scientific interests represented by “When furious up from mines the water pours” (see also Edgeworth, Frank, 7-9; and Joyce, Dialogues, 9, which likewise suggests that younger readers learn Evenings at Home before tackling Joyce’s scientific lessons).

Occasion
	<start>That “The Needless Alarm” is earlier than the other poems in its group could be explained by its “Jan 1826” notation referring to the occasion of a New Year’s gift to his father, one year earlier, an occasion Margaret would surely remember. This interpretation is supported by a similar pattern in MS III, the red book containing “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 2,” in which the prose tale is again followed by a group of poems including the previous year’s New Year’s poem (see “Time: Blank Verse”).