Hand
	MS I is written entirely in large penciled print, more childish than that in any other Red Book; nonetheless, Ruskin was already carefully imitating published books by justifying the margins; devising a title page, frontispiece, and colophon; labeling his drawings as “plates”; and filling out the volume with the MS I poetry anthology, which he entitled “Poetry.”

Composition and Sources
	MS I shows more uniform control over the entirety of its contents than tended to be the case in later Red Books, which grew more miscellaneous with successive uses at different times. For example, the title page appears more nearly to serve for the entire Red Book than is the case in MS III and MS IIIA, Red Books that likewise begin with volumes of “Harry and Lucy,” but that also contain much else altogether unrelated to the Edgeworthian narrative. In the case of MS I, although Ruskin filled out the end of the volume with the MS I poetry anthology, his choices for the miscellany do not appear entirely haphazard. The first of these poems, “When furious up from mines the water pours,” which condenses a portion of The Botanic Garden by Erasmus Darwin, can be viewed as a continuing the Enlightenment spirit of the immediately preceding “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1,” which imitates works by Maria Edgeworth and Jeremiah Joyce. The last of the poems in the anthology, “On the Rainbow: In Blank Verse,” complements a drawing featuring “a rainbow” at the start of MS I (see Drawing, “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1”: frontispiece). The rainbow drawing, moreover, could refer to Harry’s vision of the Witch of the Alps at the end of “Harry and Lucy . . . vol. 1.” (Of course, the rainbow could have been added to the “frontispiece” as an afterthought. We cannot know for certain which rainbow suggested the other or in what order, but it is at least reasonable to suggest that Ruskin crafted the contents in order to frame the book with the theme of the rainbow as both promise and closure.)
	Another sign of control over the entirety of the contents appears at the end of the Red Book, on p. 106, where Ruskin placed a colophon: “The end / hernhill / fountain street / <end of the poems> / juvenile library fountain street.” The colophon is followed by Drawing, Miscellaneous: The Heights of Wisdom and Depths of Folly—the concave shape of the narrow valley appearing to answer to the convex form of the rainbow in the frontispiece. No other Red Book has a colophon or frontispiece, although MS III and MS IIIA feature title pages for “Harry and Lucy” similar to that in MS I.
	The deletion within the colophon (<end of the poems>) may point to how attempts at symmetry and closure were ongoing decisions. Ruskin may have written “end of the poems” and then deleted the phrase to make way for the book’s colophon; or he may have included the phrase as part of the colophon but deleted it as erroneous or misleading (since the colophon ends the entire book, not just the poems). It is also possible, however, that the deletion was made by someone else.
Domestic Scene
	MS I is also the only Red Book to locate its imaginary publisher, the “juvenile library,” in “hernhill / fountain street,” other Red Books mentioning simply Herne Hill. Could Ruskin be referring to what Praeterita records as an early memory, the water carts being filled in front of the house (Ruskin, Works 35:21)? In Praeterita, Ruskin leaves unclear whether he observed the carts from the windows of Herne Hill or of the Hunter Street house—where the family lived prior to Herne Hill, until March 1823 (see Dearden, Ruskin's Camberwell, 1). By the time he first wrote about this memory (in Fors?) in 18??, Ruskin might well have confused memories of the two locations; or the colophon itself might have suggested such a memory to him, when he doubtless reviewed his juvenilia for those later autobiographical writings. Unfortunately, attempts have been unsuccessful to gain information about either a Fountain Street or water mains in the vicinities of the two houses.