Collecting of Modern Authors, Including Their Juvenilia:
The “Sentimental Element” in Late Nineteenth-Century Book Collecting
	Interest in the earlier Ruskin can be understood as a development of a larger interrelated set of projects in the last quarter of the century: book collectors were increasingly building collections based on modern authors in place of the traditional taste for incunabula and fine typography and illustration; author societies, such as those dedicated to Ruskin, Browning, Shelley, and Wordsworth, organized study of every aspect of their authors’ lives and works; and—supporting consumption by these collectors and societies, and as part of the more general expanse in the book trade at the end of the century—industrious bibliographers, editors, publishers, and booksellers produced limited editions of favored authors’ works, including suppressed or scarce early work. Notoriously, literary forgers and pirates also capitalized on this robust consumption.
	In the final quarter of the nineteenth century, book collectors turned with increasing eagerness to acquiring modern authors. The phenomenon is neatly summarized in Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting: 
There was already a keen school of collectors of Dickens and Thackeray, overlapping, but beginning to be distinguishable from, the more numerous collectors of Cruikshank, Phiz and other illustrators, who could not wholly ignore the authors attached to their favourites. Ruskin Societies were springing up all over England, and Browning Societies too. . . . Wordsworth and Shelley Societies were founded in London. And this close, enthusiastic study of contemporary or nearly contemporary authors’ lives and works engendered an atmosphere in which anyone prone to book-collecting or already a collector of something else passed very easily from study of the author to the search for his original editions. (22)
Thus, according to this account, collecting gave rise to an important development in modern bibliography—the systematic account of “first editions” of modern authors’ works. The relish for first editions—which, as Carter remarks, has since become for the layman synonymous with book collecting—had not necessarily preoccupied earlier Victorian collectors (20). Insofar as they cared about modern authors at all, earlier collectors had been more drawn to later editions for the sake of their sound editing or lavish production rather than to “firsts” for their own sake. When that taste did emerge as part of systematically collecting moderns, the taste brought with it, according to Carter, a “sentimental element” in collecting.
	That sentiment included an interest in modern authors’ juvenilia. Continuing his narrative in Taste and Technique, Carter quotes himself from Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets, which he co-authored with Graham Pollard in 1934, regarding the causes of the sentimental element in collecting:
As the distance in time between collectors and the object of their enthusiasm lessened, their interest took on a more personal colour, and the sentimental element became gradually stronger. Collectors . . . paid more attention to minor productions; they visualised the arrival of the first copies on the author’s breakfast-table—a powerful influence in the creation of a taste for “original condition.” The main emphasis was on the poets, and though Ruskin’s prose works were collected as reverently, if not as expensively, as his verse, it was not George Eliot’s Adam Bede so much as a copy of Brother and Sister [a forgery] or of Jubal and Other Poems on special paper which would excite her devotees. Tennyson, Ruskin and Swinburne were perhaps the reigning favourites. (23)
As indicated by his references to authors’ “minor productions,” such as Ruskin’s verse—for example, the prized, rare Poems (1850), or the Poems (1891), especially in the expensively bound octavo printings—for Carter the epitome of “sentimental” collecting lay in the interest in juvenilia.
	Before Carter and Pollard proposed this string of causation, the case for sentiment as a motive in modern collecting had been made earlier, but less derogatorily, in Slater, Early Editions. This 1894 book was singled out by Carter and Pollard, Enquiry (103), as the “revolutionary primer” of modern first-edition collecting. In it, Slater gave particular attention to early works by modern authors, which, he pointed out, were likely to have been neglected or destroyed before the authors’ fame could bestow special interest on them. Thus, when “these first-fruits, crude though they generally are,” come to light along with the rising fame of their author, their scarcity compounds their interest:
the fact that many people want the few copies that have escaped the wrack of neglect, makes them objects of unusual interest. The inevitable reprint comes at last, but it is not the same; sentiment still hangs around the shabby volume of years ago, with all its errors. . . . (vii)
Slater notices what Carter would later mark as both a danger and a boon to modern bibliography: the chief goals of book collecting, as now extended to modern authors, were comprehensiveness—everything an author had ever published, starting with juvenilia—and in the original condition.
	Ruskin was among the moderns most signally collected in these terms, and many late-century collectors built their reputations in part on the comprehensiveness of their Ruskin holdings. In Glasgow, for example, among a large number of Scottish collectors who aspired to Ruskin firsts and rarities, Bernard Macgeorge was the chief; and, significantly, his collection was described in terms of its scope: “probably as large as any in existence, numbering altogether over two hundred volumes and pamphlets,” including “nearly everything that Mr. Ruskin has written . . . , not only in the original editions but in subsequent ones.” The description highlighted prized early Ruskin in the collection, including “one great folio contain[ing] a large number of original pencil drawings signed and dated, done by Ruskin in his youth” (Mason, Public and Private Libraries of Glasgow  293–94). In England, collectors with comprehensive Ruskin holdings included Thomas J. Wise, the most influential advocate of collecting modern firsts in their original form. By setting an example for others in this kind of collecting, Wise was able to capitalize on the taste he helped to create, forging first-edition pamphlets of modern authors’ minor works, including juvenilia—pamphlets which never existed, but for which he could fabricate a credible publication history (see forgery and piracy). <Cross-reference American collectors here? Other collectors who should be mentioned?>

George Allen’s Editions of Ruskin’s Early Works
<Argue for Allen as catering to this collecting trend.>

Condemnation of the “Sentimental Element”
	Despite exploitation by forgers, who operated undetected until 1934, when Carter and Pollard published their Enquiry, collecting of modern authors proved a boon to modern bibliography, in that attention was given to description and preservation of the original condition of publications that earlier Victorian collectors treated as negligible. Adequate bibliographic description, and understanding of its implications, formed only slowly, as Sadleir, “Development of Bibliographical Study,” has shown; nonetheless, these trends gained the respect of early twentieth-century bibliographers as the basis of modern bibliography. Reserve about the “sentimental element” did not relax, however, and the skepticism was posed against a strong current of interest in the early work and apprenticeship of modern authors.
	<here for Roberts/Wise debate? why does Roberts relent about Ruskin in particular when reprinting his part of the debate?>
	In the narrative that proved most influential—the chain of causes laid out in Carter and Pollard, Enquiry, whereby collecting moderns sponsored the sentimental element, which provided the opening for exploitation by forgers—it is no accident that chain of causes clearly identifies dupes and villains. According to this story, sentimentality meant susceptibility, and naive collectors were preyed upon, at best, by an inflated rare book market and by publication of artificially expensive new editions and, at worst, by forgery. The hero of the piece was the rigorous analytical bibliography used to expose the careless missteps of the forger. The genuine bibliographer was cast as one who, like Carter and Pollard, could wield such scientific techniques as testing the age of paper and spying certain tell-tale letters in type sets. By comparison, Thomas J. Wise, who once enjoyed the most formidable reputation in modern bibliography, could be dismissed as “not really a bibliographer at all” (Sadleir, “Development of Bibliographical Study” 151). He was tainted by filthy lurcre, acting as “both a collector and a dealer,” as compared with H. Buxton Forman—not yet exposed as Wise’s henchman—who was pronounced “both a scholar and collector” (Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting 24). A similar distinction between vulgarity and professionalism is advanced in Partington, Forging Ahead, the 1939 biography of Wise, which insists that antiquarian book dealers (like Partington himself) operate disinterestedly as compared with mere money-grubbers like Wise.
	Sadleir does show persuasively that Wise, as a collector/dealer operated according to “rule of thumb” in describing a perfect copy, an approach that was fallible (based, in brief, on what he happened to possess), and that Wise lacked “curiosity” about the “principal quality which distinguishes” the true bibliographer from the tradesman—interest in publishing history (“Development of Bibliographical Study” 152, 154, and see 154–57). The point here is that, in the ethos thus constructed, the genuine bibliographer tolerated no sentiment. Real bibliographers were disinterested and scientific, as opposed to a “collecting public” that had shown itself “eager, credulous and greedy” (Carter and Pollard, Enquiry 107). Real bibliographers were also men; women could be collectors, and even then they were relegated to gallant special chapters on the “formidable” female collector.
	What tends to be hidden by this self-congratulatory ethos of the hero bibliographer (scholarly, disinterested, male) versus the demonic forger (amateur, gain-seeking, male) and sentimental public (amateur, gain-seeking, feminized) is the ambiguous milieu of late-century collecting and publishing that, as Barker and Collins, A Sequel, have pointed out, allowed forgers like Wise and Forman to operate successfully. Legitimate editors and publishers produced facsimiles only a step away from “fakes.” Thus, to situate the “sentimental element” in a chain of events, whereby it could be pegged as an unfortunate excess of deluded, amateur collecting, one that led to evil exploitation but that had since been exposed and defeated by the conquering hero bibliographer, prevented questions about the culture enveloping all these collectors, dealers, and bibliographers.
	One place where the narrative breaks down is the earlier bibliographic study of modern authors, including their juvenilia. The phenomenon of seeking out, editing, and printing facsimiles or sumptuous illustrated editions of modern authors’ juvenilia and youthful work appears chronologically to have prepared for collecting moderns as much as it arose from that taste. When in 1894 Slater characterized “the inevitable reprint com[ing] at last” to slake, but not appease, the sentiment gathering “around the shabby [juvenile] volume of years ago, with all its errors,” he was probably referring to the productions of Richard Herne Shepherd, who had specialized in editing juvenilia, starting almost two decades earlier. Shepherd’s work well predated Wise and Forman’s forgeries—so much so, that, as shown in Paden, “Tennyson’s The Lover’s Tale, Shepherd, and Wise,” Wise almost succeeded in making a fall guy of the conveniently deceased Shepherd, by deflecting accusations of forgery onto him. Inevitably, “bibliography boys” reacted by dubbing Shepherd the maligned “professional” (Carter,Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting 23). Justly or unjustly, Shepherd in his own time had to devote considerable energy to defending his professional practices. More important for this edition than the question of Shepherd’s honesty, however, is the relation of discourse about juvenilia and authors’ childhoods to early bibliography of modern authors (see bibliographic study of modern authors, including their juvenilia).