Discussion
Sources
(some of this should be taken out and incorporated into master essay, with only material specifically relevant to Concluded here)
x-ref to “furious” and point about structure leading from lesson to ode to industrial sublime
	At points where Ruskin is copying nearly verbatim???, the text abruptly shows the kind of errors associated with copying (e.g., words stricken through, because the writer has inadvertently omitted text and must reinsert it). Such text starts with the discussion about silkworms??? Yet the most noticeable direct copying from sources occurs when Ruskin’s Harry and Lucy follow their father “upstairs to the workshop” (<link>chap. 2</link>), where they engage in a series of experiments drawn directly from Jeremiah Joyce, Scientific Dialogues. 
	In chap. 1 and the first part of chap. 2, except for the exchange about silkworms, the text relating Harry and Lucy’s interaction with their mother is free of such errors and, apparently, more original, although based on the kind of discourse found in Edgeworth’s books, and probably reflective of actual experience at Herne Hill. One might speculate that Ruskin needed to construct experiences with the father character directly from texts because John James Ruskin was absent on business much of the time; in the very first sentence of the narrative, Lucy remarks that “papa has gone out to town earlyer than usual” (<link>chap. 1</link>), and when he returns at the start of (<link>chap. 2</link>) he “fear[s] I shall not have time” to hear Lucy’s lesson. By comparison, Ruskin could describe vivid, everyday experiences with his mother, a constant presence, albeit related in Edgeworthian discourse (though not true of the silkworms passage). Noticeably, the episode about Lucy’s saying her lesson to her father when he first arrives most has the air of reality.
	Servants make no appearance in the “Harry and Lucy” narratives at all, his nurse Anne Strachan??? first occurring in Iteriad????
	Is the emphasis to one thing at once and in an orderly fashion from Edgeworth? One would think that it actually violates the Edgeworthian emphasis on discovery. 
	Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, which was first published in 1825, cannot have been in the Ruskin household for very long before Ruskin began his own derivative narrative in 1826 (a surviving <link>copy owned by Ruskin</link> may or may not have been his boyhood copy). In imitation of Edgeworth, Ruskin’s title page announces four volumes (see <link>title</link>), but the project ultimately extended only to three (“Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1,” <nolink>”Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 2,”</nolink> and “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 3”), with the third volume itself left unfinished. Ruskin is generally correct in Praeterita, therefore, that the series is unfinished, but inaccurate to accuse himself of having “accomplished but one and a quarter” volumes (Works, 35:52). [Could this count be reflected in JR’s notations of red books?] [Does JR’s plan divvying up of topics in the volumes reflect a plan in Edgeworth?]
	What Ruskin read of Edgeworth and in what order by the time he imitated Harry and Lucy Concluded in 1826. . . . He certainly knew Maria Frank: A Sequel to Early Lessons (1822); what is certainly his <link>boyhood copy</link> . . .
	A second important source is Jeremiah Joyce, Scientific Dialogues. Though an influence in other early works (e.g., “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 2,” Travel Itinerary and Tour Notes [1828]), the Dialogues are most heavily tapped in this first volume of “Harry and Lucy.” Joyce’s book is written as a series of “conversations” between a girl Emma, a boy Charles, and their father (and, at times, between two boys, Charles and James, and their tutor). The conversations introduce the children systematically to the major fields of scientific knowledge.
	Scientific experiments drawn from Edgeworth’s tales and from Joyce’s Dialogues are blended in Ruskin’s imagination with the records of actual family journeys and projects. While the dangerous experiments involving exploding gunpowder and specialized scientific apparatus are obviously fictional—some of the texts copied almost verbatim from Joyce—Ruskin did actually carry out Edgeworthian projects at Herne Hill. Like Harry, Ruskin built a “cave” in May 1826 (Ruskin Family Letters, 149; see <link>chaps. 4–5</link>), and the story of Harry’s mud globe has the sound of reality (<link>chap. 9</link>). These actual projects then became stories in “Harry and Lucy,” the influence of fiction on life thus being channeled back into fiction. As Ruskin says in his poem on the steam engine, based on similar Edgeworthian sources, “From the engine might be formed a phrase” (“When furious up from mines the water pours”). Ruskin was keenly observant of relations between words and the worlds, fictional and natural, in which he engaged.
	Works by the Edgeworths, Joyce, and Anna Letitia Barbauld presented a unified educational program, and their works were indebted to one another. Joyce attributes his book’s interlocutional method to Maria Edgeworth, Practical Education, as the most effective means communicating ideas to children and gauging their intellectual progress. The spirit of this method is captured in Ruskin’s own “Harry and Lucy,” if on an elementary level, by having Lucy’s Mamma exploit a task of winding balls of silk thread in order to quiz her daughter on the multiplication tables.
	Another characteristic of these books is reflected in Ruskin having his fictional Mamma caution the children to “do one thing at once.” Learning in Edgeworth’s Early Lessons is measured. The mother says she will answer questions at her leisure, and only if the child minds and remembers the answer. The father checks overly eager inquiry, for “thinking, without tiring ourselves, is very agreeable; but thinking becomes disagreeable, if we tire ourselves,” and Frank is frequently exhorted to save until later what he cannot comprehend immediately (Edgeworth, Frank, 1:120 ed???). Even more systematic and graduated procedures are adopted in Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, starting with simpler concepts in mechanics and astronomy (vol. 1), and progressing through hydrostatics and pneumatics (vol. 2), and finally optics, magnetism, electricity, and galvinism (vol. 3).
	If Ruskin has his “Mamma” adopt this methodical approach, he himself is not so easily restrained. In response to Mamma’s declaration, “Well I think we have had thought enough for the present,” Lucy returns “just two or three questions” more (<link>chap. 1</link>). Harry and Lucy are put in the middle of Joyce’s course—“he must begin with pneumatics,” Harry declares—and then, within that topic, the text works generally backwards through Joyce’s series of experiments. Ruskin’s determination to have his own way with the system must have been driven partly by a taste for spectacle. He relishes the fancier hardware in Joyce’s later chapters, and, consequently, he sacrifices preparatory concepts. Although Ruskin does appear to grasp the central purpose of Joyce’s experiments in pneumatics—that they are meant to investigate atmospheric “pressure and springiness,” as Harry puts it (chap. ?)—the Edgeworths would have preferred that the seven-year-old Ruskin, like Frank, explore the more fundamental concept of experimentation generally, using a homely trial such as testing for effective ways to mend a broken saucer (see Frank, part 2, in Edgeworth, Frank, 1:123–31). 
	Ruskin’s advancing sophistication culminates in the well-known combination of science and poetry in Harry’s “witch of the alps” fantasy (<linki>chap. ?</link>), in which Joyce’s Dialogues meets Byron’s Manfred. Joyce himself ornaments his dialogues with verse quotations, albeit from Enlightenment rather than Romantic poems, and some of these quotations undoubtedly inspired Ruskin’s poems that fill out MS I (see, esp., “When furious up from mines the water pours”). In Harry’s vision closing “Harry and Lucy,” however, Ruskin goes beyond the verse ornamentation of scientific prose to reveal a keen consciousness of the pleasures of crossing genres, for Harry was “affected . . . when he saw in the clouds something like” an image from a poem.
	Harry’s “affection” is psychological, as well as literary. For Ruskin, Harry and Lucy’s adventures at Hastings would have represented a joyful release from a period of grief and loneliness earlier in the year. Business had kept Ruskin’s father from home for an unusually extended period, and a fatal illness had deprived the boy of his cousin’s companionship forever (see no. “On Scotland,” where it is speculated that, in April of this year, Ruskin may even have experienced his first separation from both parents at the same time, while they accompanied James back to Scotland). This deprivation may have influenced Ruskin’s decision to imitate the Edgeworths’ partnership of Harry and Lucy. Not only would the fictional pairing have compensated for Ruskin’s actual losses, but also the losses could be played out and controlled in fiction, as when Lucy is made to bide the time, first, of a busy father, and, immediately afterward, of a preoccupied brother (<link>chap. 2</link>). Ruskin’s real-life deprivation particularly adds poignancy to certain stories in “Harry and Lucy,” such as the children’s kidnapping their mother to imprison her in Harry’s “cave,” where she must attend to one of Harry’s “schemes,” a procession of birds (<link>chaps. 4–5</link>). Psychological fantasy may also enter into the concluding “witch of the alps” episode with its spectral female form. The passage, with its exchange of negative and positive electrical discharges, might be read as an attempt to control and neutralize some sort of trouble--parental anger, one is tempted to say, although both the Mamma and the Papa of Ruskin’s narrative are generally made to react indulgently to the children’s mischief.
Drawings
	See . . .
	If Ruskin exhibits impatience with Joyce’s system, MS I does reveal a steady development in the writer’s ability to represent complex relationships. In the plates at the beginning of the notebook, which are among the earliest surviving drawings by Ruskin, objects are lined up on a single plain, but later plates attempt more complex spacial relationships. Likewise, verbally, the first portion the narrative lines up events in simple sequences, whereas, toward the end, the representation of journeying inspires a more serpentine and surprising description like this one:
they climbed a high hill and went on sometimes by the sides of rivulets at other times half rubbing against hedges but oftenest so attracted by the bubbling of a pure clear stream that they were like to jump into it they went through dark avenues and between hedges forming a sort of foot-path sometimes a full view of the sea sometimes none at all till unexpectedly they arrived at home. (<link>chap. 8</link>)
The often verbatim experiments from Joyce, which are especially clustered in these later chapters eight and nine, and which appear merely to take up space with tedious copying, may have interested Ruskin with the language required to explain multiple and complex causal relationships, just as Harry poses “riddles” and word games to Lucy (<link>chap. 4</link>, <link>chap. 7</link>).
	What the author calls his “plates” for this volume of “Harry and Lucy” may have been inspired by engravings in Edgeworth or other volumes of children’s literature, but the precise sources are unknown. In the editions of Joyce’s Dialogues available to me, the plates provide only schematics of apparatus, and such technical drawings exceeded Ruskin’s skill at this time. A year later, in his second volume of “Harry and Lucy,” he would attempt to copy only the simplest of Joyce’s diagrams (see “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 2,” <link>chap. ?, n. 1</link>).
	For the second volume of “Harry and Lucy” in MS III, Ruskin may have drawn plates well before producing text to wrap around them physically on the page, much less explain them their content (see MS III drawing, untitled no. 1; MS III drawing, untitled no. 2; and MS III drawing, untitled no. 3). So here, in <nolink>MS I</nolink>, a loose relation between plates and text suggest that Ruskin may have composed them somewhat independently of each other. “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1,” plate 3, relates, not to its surrounding text but to a discussion seventeen pages earlier; other plates reveal at best a conjectural relation to the text, wherever located in the story.
	A case might be made for Ruskin’s effort to unify the frontispiece with the final poem in MS I, but even this decision could have been made on the fly (see <link>“Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1,” plate 1, discussion</link> and <link>MS I, discussion</link>).
Travel
	In the second half of <nolink>“Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1,”</nolink> the characters visit the seaside at Hastings for a week, apparently recording an actual summer journey (see <link>date</link>). Ruskin keeps his characters at Hastings from the end of the narrative through the start “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 2,” dovetailing the two volumes’ adventures, although the second volume was not begun until fall or winter 1827.