Discussion
Sources
	(Not revised and no notes on persons or books yet.)This little tale about a mouse and a dog suggests the influence of Anna Laetitia Barbauld. . . . the more elementary children’s books believed to have been in the Ruskin family library, such as John Aiken and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Evenings at Home (Ruskin’s copy). 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 these 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’s lessons, hymns, and narratives were recommended by Richard Edgeworth, in his “Address to Mothers,” which prefaced later editions of Early Lessons, as accessible and entertaining reading for younger children. Reading that Edgeworth recommends for older children, Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, definitely influences a poem, “When furious up from mines the water pours,” placed before “The Needless Alarm” in the group closing MS I. If the Ruskins followed Edgeworth’s advice strictly, therefore, “The Needless Alarm” likely represents an earlier stage of Ruskin’s reading than the scientific interests reflected in no. 5 (see Edgeworth, Frank, 7-9; Joyce himself suggests that his readers learn Evenings at Home before tackling his own lessons [Joyce, Dialogues, 9]).