Juvenilia and the Exhaustive Bibliographer
	Before T. J. Wise collaborated with James P. Smart to compile the Complete Bibliography of . . . Ruskin (1889–93), in which Wise inserted descriptions of the forged pamphlets that he and Forman would later leak into the market, R. H. Shepherd assembled the Bibliography of Ruskin (1878–81). Shepherd also prepared bibliographies of several other modern authors. A precursor to H. Buxton Forman in pioneering scholarly bibliography of modern authors, Shepherd is credited with prescience of the new collecting by Carter,Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting (24). Shepherd also industriously sought out and edited early writing by modern authors, as well as their writing for children. He unearthed and edited juvenilia and youthful work by Blake, Tennyson, Barrett Browning, Longfellow, and Thackeray, as well as then little known writing about and for children by Blake and Lamb (see Richard Herne Shepherd).
	Shepherd’s juvenilia editing can be viewed as probable outgrowth of the new taste for collecting moderns: he was an exhaustive bibliographer who also supplied reprints to console collectors unable to find those rare early volumes. For Carter, such thorough bibliography was a laudable development, providing “a target of completeness at which previously desultory collectors would be encouraged to aim”; again, however, Carter the professional is suspicious of describing “the most trifling pamphlet . . . as carefully and as impressively as its author’s masterpiece,” and he sees an opening for the later forgeries (23?, 28). Certainly, Shepherd relished the chase for minutiae, as witnessed by his extraordinary keenness in ferreting out early Ruskin for the bibliography, or by his triumphant find of Charles Lamb’s lost Poetry for Children (Shepherd, “Discovery”).
	... Writing of the paradox of the childless siblings, Charles and Mary Lamb, as writers for children, Shepherd...
Although exonerated by later scholars from the charge of forgery that Wise attempted to shift onto him, Shepherd, an intriguingly ambiguous personality, appears an early key figure in the intersection of Ruskin bibliography, editing and collecting modern authors, and the interest in childhood and juvenilia.
John James and Margaret Ruskin treasured virtually everything that they and their son, John Ruskin, wrote during his youth. Robert Browning, whose boyhood shared so many influences with Ruskin’s in the semirural lanes and evangelical chapels of Camberwell, destroyed nearly everything of importance in connection with his early writing. As a result, Ruskin’s early literary development has been as admired and extensively documented and studied as that of the Brontës, while Browning’s biographers have been forced to rely on more indirect sources. Yet, whereas Browning, having disposed of the evidence, proved surprisingly insouciant in the ultimate testamentary arrangements for his literary estate, Ruskin and his later circle of editors and secretaries at Brantwood were as cautious as Browning, if not as destructive, about the impression posterity would form of his early writing. Their measures persist through the still standard editions, W. G. Collingwood’s 1891 edition of the Poems, and E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn’s 1903–12 Library Edition of Ruskin’s Works; and, despite monumental corrective editing by Helen Gill Viljoen (much of which remains unpublished), James S. Dearden, and Van Akin Burd, the earlier bibliographies and editions continue profoundly to influence how the early Ruskin has been read. Fortunately, it is characteristic of Ruskin that, while he and his circle guarded how his writing should be approached, apparently nothing of the early writing—unlike the later correspondence with Rose LaTouche—was deliberately committed to flame. The purpose of this edition is to compile the first comprehensive and reliable descriptive bibliography and chronology of the early Ruskin manuscripts and to publish what Ruskin’s first editors excluded from their editions.

	Even now, the dispersal of the early manuscripts forces reliance on the earlier editions, with all their bibliographic errors and questionable editorial policies by Collingwood and Cook and Wedderburn. More recent scholars, such as Burd and Dearden, have overcome the early editors’ influence to compile reliable editions of selected portions of the early writing. Until now, however, no comprehensive bibliographic reconsideration of the entirety of the early manuscripts has been made available. Only by means of a comprehensively revised chronology and descriptive bibliography, which form the foundation of this edition, can we at last fully understand the later mythologizing of Ruskin’s childhood and, behind that, the actual youthful writing in all the complexity of its genius.

APPROACHES TO BIBLIOGRAPHY AND EDITING OF THE EARLY MANUSCRIPTS
	Errors have beset bibliography of the early manuscripts from the start. The first known attempt, by Ruskin’s father, John James Ruskin, begins with a startling oversight. In the late 1840s, John James was planning a collection of his son’s poems for private circulation, the rare Poems by “J.R.” (1850). To compile a list of his son’s published poems, John James used blank pages in one of the treasured “Red Books” of Ruskin’s youth—MS IV, devoted primarily to the long 1828–30 catalog poem “Eudosia.” John James’s first entry reads “on Skiddaw & Derwent Water / page 72 Spiritual Times / Feby 1830 age 11 years.” That this entry is scored through in pencil perhaps indicates that John James realized a mistake, but this slight clue was not enough to prevent the erroneous belief, held by generations of scholars, that “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” was Ruskin’s first publication. Only as recently as 1994 did James S. Dearden publish his discovery that Ruskin’s actual debut in print occurred, not in the February 1830 issue of the Spiritual Times, but in the August 1829 issue and, not with “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water,” but with the forgotten “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland.”
	Only a few years prior to this announcement, Dearden, along with Van Akin Burd, had pointed out another major error in the bibliography of Ruskin’s so-called first published poem, the belief that “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” was first drafted in 1828 (TLC, 7, 20 n. 20). In fact, “description of skiddaw & lake derwent,” as Ruskin entitled the draft and the fair copy of his poem (MSS II, V), was composed between late February or early March and May 1829 for his father’s birthday. Then, within a few months—not a few years, as always believed—a part of the “description” was published. That part became the “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland” in the August 1829 Spiritual Times, a journal owned and edited by Ruskin’s tutor, the Reverend Edward Andrews. In the following February, 1830, the remaining portion of the original “description” appeared as “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water.”
	Cook and Wedderburn must be given credit for correcting at least part of the story about Ruskin’s first publication, since, by their time, the mythologized transmission of Ruskin’s early writing had already begun, influencing its treatment by the first bibliographers and editors. In the 1870s, in his Catalogue of the Rudimentary Series of drawings at the Oxford schools, and in Deucalion, Ruskin confidently—even with colorful supporting anecdotes—attributed his first appearance in print to prose publications, his two 1834 papers for Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History (Works, 21:243, 26:275; nos. 190–91). In the 1870s, in context of his writing on drawing, botany, and geology, Ruskin very likely wanted to believe his first publications to have been scientific and factual, rather than poetic, in nature. Ruskin’s faulty memory or wishful thinking soon became “fact,” however, when his first major bibliographers, Shepherd (9) and Wise (1:302–3, 2:111), depended on Ruskin’s remarks to award the distinction of his debut to the 1834 papers for Loudon’s Magazine. So settled became the prejudice that even Collingwood—who ought to have known better, since he discovered John James’s entry in MS IV on the Spiritual Times publication and even printed it, without comment, in 1891 (PJR, 1:264)—persisted in heading a chronological list of Ruskin’s publications with the Magazine of Natural History papers. In his 1893 Life of Ruskin, Collingwood maintained that Ruskin “began his literary career” as the “analytic John Ruskin . . . already an enfant terrible” of prose argument (1:233, 49–50).
	Before the last decades of the century, when Ruskin and his editors summoned faulty bibliography in support of a desired story about the young natural scientist, John James, in the middle of the century, told his own story through selection for the Poems by “J.R.” The pencil scoring through John James’s mistaken entry in MS IV may indicate, not that somebody in the family spotted its inaccuracy, but that the father had decided, curiously, not to include his son’s very first publications—not even the 1830 “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water,” which John James certainly remembered. Instead, he opened the volume with “Song” (“I weary for the torrent leaping,” no. 176), a previously unpublished poem of 1833 (misdated 1832 by Collingwood). Why did John James choose this manuscript poem, and not the printed “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water,” when an otherwise pervasive principle of selection in the 1850 Poems was to reprint poems that had already been published? We may never know, since the fifty copies of the 1850 Poems constituted a private and very personal enterprise by John James, limited to circulation among family and friends; however, a suggestive fact about the 1833 poem has emerged from the revised chronology. This is one of the few poems Ruskin wrote in early 1833, when Margaret finally prevailed in enforcing a ban on the boy’s poetic composition (“My harp is sunk to rest,” the poem laments), and in redirecting his energies into the Sermon Books (see nos. 176, 170)—a verdict to which the father, probably reluctantly, assented. Two decades later, in retrieving this poem to open his collection, was John James belatedly repealing the old prohibition, tenderly restoring the silenced harp to his son? Ruskin, in Venice at the time and engaged in repudiating his adolescent Byronism, no longer wanted the harp. The additional ironies revealed by the revised dating and circumstances of the 1833 poem tend to reinforce the view that, in compiling the Poems of 1850, John James was living in the past; however, the facts also point unexpectedly to the father’s solicitude for his son’s feelings and resentments—if ironically and irrelevantly outdated ones.
	A more public story that John James certainly helped to promote by his selections for the Poems of 1850—which were taken mainly from the publications in sentimental gift annuals, such as Friendship’s Offering, of 1835 and afterward—was that Ruskin’s greatest power as a poet was realized through his adolescent and unrequited first love, for Adèle Domecq. Putting aside the merits of this view purely as a critical judgment, the story was initially served by noncritical suggestions. Besides the spice added by Ruskin’s self-mocking account in Praeterita of how he wooed Adèle with Byronic melodrama, the texts themselves became enhanced by collectors’ acquisitiveness. By the end of the century, the Poems of 1850 had become an almost legendary “Rara Avis of Ruskin literature,” commanding higher prices than any other editions of Ruskin’s work (Wise, 1:17; “Ruskin’s Poems 1850,” 153). T. J. Wise capitalized on the situation, choosing as the first of his Ruskin forgeries an “1868” (i.e., ca. 1889–90) reprinting of the 1835–36 Byronic tale Leoni (“Wise and Ruskin II,” 170–71). Wise cleverly exploited the circumstances of Ruskin, in Praeterita, having singled out Leoni as an example of his blandishments to Adèle, and of the market having bestowed such expensive rarity and an aura of romance on the 1850 Poems (which contained a song from Leoni) (see Wise, 1:147–48; Works, 35:180). Two years later, Wise continued to encourage and profit by the story of Ruskin as lovesick poet by forging an “1849” Scythian Guest (“Wise and Ruskin II,” 176–78).
	Critics continue to be influenced by the story of how the child’s garden at Herne Hill fell with Adèle’s invasion, and how Ruskin was expelled from paradise to embark on a Shelleyan quest of unobtainable love. While there is some truth to the romance, the poems excluded from Collingwood’s 1891 Poems and the Library Edition reveal that imagery commonly associated with the Adèle poems first arose much earlier, in poetry probing Ruskin’s anxious and problematic love for his mother. Figures of drowning in a maternal ocean, drawn from Byron, occur obsessively in the poetry of 1831–33, long before Ruskin caused weird cries to issue from shadowy waters in writing about Adèle. However one chooses to interpret the fact, Ruskin’s romance of Venice must be approached as rooted at least as profoundly in these earlier fragments about drowning in a maternal “ocean’s breast” as in the poems probing Adèle’s betrayal and loss.
	This and other corrections to prevailing myths have been prevented by the pervasive errors and questionable decisions in the bibliography and textual transmission of Ruskin’s early writing. The first attempt at a comprehensive bibliography specifically of the early writing was Collingwood’s descriptive bibliography compiled for his 1891 edition of Ruskin’s Poems (PJR). Collingwood’s “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems” (PJR, 1:262–68) described many of the major manuscripts of the juvenilia, namely, the notebooks in which Ruskin drafted and fair-copied his first poems. Courageous in undertaking the description of very complicated manuscripts, and correct in many of his interpretations, Collingwood nonetheless misdated the entirety of one notebook (MS II) and many sections of others; misinterpreted the compositional sequences within several notebooks; and, since he was interested only in the poetry, omitted description of most of the prose manuscripts.
	Even more momentously for the future understanding of Ruskin’s early compositional practices, Collingwood made an editorial decision—one that has gone entirely unnoticed, so far as I know, much less questioned—to print “only such [childhood] verses as are of sufficient completeness to stand alone.” He adds that this decision was governed by “the instructions which have been given him,” failing to specify the source (PJR, 1:270). We may never know whether those instructions were imparted by Ruskin or by someone close to him. Given Ruskin’s sardonic view in Praeterita of the “unfinished folly” of an early production, left “in Joanie [Severn]’s care, that none but friends may see it” (Works, 35:81), such a caveat would have been characteristic of the elderly writer, as well as of his circle. In Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880, 1881), Ruskin had attacked Wordsworth’s “disciples” for advancing the poet’s “unfinished verse, and uncorrected fancy . . . into places of authority.” According to Ruskin, such unauthorized printings of fragments were meant to “give countenance to the popular national prejudices from the infection of which . . . [the disciples] themselves sprang” (Works, 34:350). Whatever “national prejudices” Ruskin had in mind—and he rails against several “infections” of the modern literary market in Fiction, Fair and Foul—his animus may well have resulted in Collingwood’s “instructions.” The consequence was the exclusion of dozens of fragments from the early editions, especially those fragments that the editors considered “morbid” and “bloodthirsty” (Works, 2:279 n. 1). When recovered, correctly dated, and compared against events recounted in the family letters (RFL), many of these rejected poems will be found to contain Ruskin’s response to his mother’s attempts to “stop his rhyming” and to other psychological disturbances that the elder Ruskin probably preferred to forget. One impression that arises from reading the suppressed early Ruskin is of an occasionally more obstreperous, rebellious, and even manipulative youth than the obedient, if high-spirited, child of Praeterita.
	Nowadays, our prejudices, including my own—“infections,” Ruskin would call them—tend to favor fragmentation and perhaps even “morbidity.” For recent Ruskin criticism, completeness and closure would be considered precisely the most misleading criteria for selection. Critical focus has turned to Ruskin’s deliberately open-ended forms and the psychodynamics of incompletion in Fors Clavigera and Praeterita. It is ironic that, while recent criticism is shifting attention to the late work, away from the earlier Ruskin, the new approaches would find support in a more accurate and comprehensive scholarship of the early manuscripts. I would not want readers to take the poems in this edition, which tend to support more recent readings of Ruskin, as necessarily more representative of Ruskin’s youthful writing than the poems chosen for Collingwood’s Poems and the Library Edition. “Calamities,” as Ruskin said, were “equally dominant” with the “blessings.” But the earlier editors’ exclusions are unacceptable for objective bibliography and for editing, however interesting and worthy of debate their reasons for their suppressions may remain.
	Also unacceptable is Collingwood’s extension of the preference for completed verse to his editorial treatment of what he did select. Collingwood invariably imparted the appearance of greater polish and completion to the poetry than the manuscripts warrant. Through his extensive repunctuation, revision of diction, rearrangements and omissions of lines, retitling, even the patching together of unrelated fragments to invent whole poems that Ruskin never imagined, Collingwood imparted a seemliness that is only somewhat legitimized by Ruskin’s own scrupulous attention to fair-copy presentation in some of the original manuscripts. To return to the example of “Skiddaw and Derwent Water,” Collingwood departed from his usual policy and published the poem’s rough-copy (MS II) version in PJR, only because, I believe, the fair copy was unavailable to him at the time. He claims not to have “mended” the “childish and almost illegible scribble,” “except by omission of incomplete parts” (PJR, 1:270). Putting aside his disclaimer about emendation, which is simply false, just as his description of Ruskin’s illegibility is exaggerated, what most closely bears on editorial policy is the decision to omit “incomplete parts.” Here is a good example of Collingwood’s policy guiding even what he saw, much less how he acted on what he saw, for there are no incomplete parts in Ruskin’s draft. The draft was fair-copied substantially as Ruskin first wrote it, saving slight word changes. There are only parts that appeared to Collingwood insufficiently polished.
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Plans for Library Edition (see Dearden, "Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin," 54-55). Prospectus (May 1902) for 30 volumes placed poems in vol. 1 or a later volume (???). (Vol. 1 is called in Prospectus "Early Writings.") "The Academy of 24 May 1902 [i.e., clarifying a confusion in the Prospectus????] explained that a separate volume would be devoted to the poems [i.e., separate from early prose?]. If they had been included in volume 1 as originally intended, that volume would have bulked to over 1000 pages" (ibid., 54).
	Were there tensions about where the poems would go and how treated because of Collingwood's disapproval of the Library Edition?
	In 1972, Dearden ("Library Edition," 7) reported on an India-paper set of the Library Edition that exhibited special treatment of the poems. At the time, the set was in the hands of C. C. Kohler, bookseller, 141 High Street, Dorking, Surrey, which he described as:
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"in the original sections, unsewn , preserved in original boxes." Of the boxes themselves he writes, "The boxes would appear to have been made for the set though there is one curious point. All of the boxes except that for Volume 2 have been made in blue paper covered board. The box for Volume 2 is made of green cloth covered boards, much more substantial. The labels on this box are exactly the same as all the other labels." There are two labels on each box. On the spine: Ruskin / -- / Library Edition / - / India-paper /Vol. / , and on the lid: The Works of  / John Ruskin / Library Edition / Volume   - India Paper / . The volume number has been entered by hand on each label.
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	In the next stage of editing the juvenilia, Collingwood’s policies were carried over to Cook and Wedderburn’s Library Edition, forcing those editors to strike an awkward and self-contradictory pose between the principle of exclusion they inherited from their precursor, on the one hand, and the principle of inclusion governing their own edition, on the other. “From a considerable quantity of unpublished pieces [of poetry] belonging to Ruskin’s childhood, scarcely anything further has been taken. At least as much as was desirable was published during his lifetime, and the scheme of the [Library] edition requires that all this should be reprinted. In some cases, however, where editorial excisions were made in the edition of 1891 [by Collingwood], passages have been restored from the MSS” (Works, 2:xvii, my emphasis). In their textual presentation, Cook and Wedderburn were somewhat more scrupulous than Collingwood in distinguishing between editor and author. “Emendations made by the editor [Collingwood] in 1891 have been retained where they are necessary for the sense; these are included in square brackets. Other emendations introduced in that edition have not been followed in the text, though they are mentioned in footnotes. It seemed desirable in this edition to let the text appear as the author wrote it.” Cook and Wedderburn stopped short, however, of providing “any critical apparatus of manuscript variants,” because they did not think it “worth while to treat these early verses with more importance than they possess” (Works, 2:xxxvi). While it is true that some of Ruskin’s juvenile writings insufficiently reward the labor of compiling textual variants, the editors’ dismissiveness has made it impossible to determine what textual variants do repay examination and interpretation.
	Moreover, Cook and Wedderburn’s tampering with the texts was far more invasive than they claim. For example, they did manage to overcome the prejudice favoring Ruskin’s supposed analytic and scientific beginnings, and located at least the 1830 Spiritual Times version of “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water.” This printing was used as their main copytext, relegating Ruskin’s original fair copy and its variants from Collingwood’s MS II rough-copy version to a note. Still, their printing contains no less than one-and-a-half dozen silent punctuation variants from the original Spiritual Times version and changes the wording of three lines. The other early poetry and prose in the first two volumes of the Library Edition were subjected to similar emendations, sometimes significant, sometimes probably not—but almost always silent and inaccessible to readers’ assessments.
	Of course, in their treatment of “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water,” Cook and Wedderburn missed altogether the 1829 publication of “Lines Written at the Lakes in Cumberland,” an understandable oversight in view of the evidence available to them. They might have remarked, however, that significant revisions had been made to Ruskin’s original version in arriving at the Spiritual Times versions. A pious concluding couplet was added in the published “Lines,” and decorous revisions transformed the ending of the 1830 “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water,” as well. The sentiment in these revisions can be seen as contradictory to the spirit of Ruskin’s original version. The friction caused by his revising process (at the behest, I believe, of his parents and tutor) is probably reflected in debates over worldly beauty versus religious asceticism carried on in poems succeeding Ruskin’s MS II draft, “These worldly things are fair and beauteous too” and “We say that this world is unhappy” (nos. 58–59). The debate seems to culminate in “If such the beauties of an earthly shore” (no. 60). The latter, truly almost illegible and scrawled draft almost certainly represents Ruskin’s troubled attempt at revising his Lake District poem for August 1829 publication. But these poems, nos. 58–60, are fragments, and so they were excluded from the Library Edition, just as they had been banned from PJR. Again, throughout the poetry volume of the Library Edition, as in this case of “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” and its related fragments, Cook and Wedderburn rarely questioned Collingwood’s judgments about selection, just as they carried on the practice of molding and polishing the texts—policies that, by their time, perhaps no longer required explicit “instructions.”
	Cook and Wedderburn did make significant contributions. Although they reprinted Collingwood’s 1891 “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems” in their 1903 volume of Poems, they expanded Collingwood’s descriptions of the notebooks with sequential lists of the titles that the notebooks contain (Works, 2:529–34), and later, in the bibliography volume of the Library Edition, they added very slight descriptions of the prose juvenilia that Collingwood had omitted (Works, 38:205–6). Especially usefully, Cook and Wedderburn paired the descriptive bibliography with a chronological list of the individual poems contained in the notebooks, the “Chronology of Ruskin’s Juvenilia” (Works, 2:535–41). A separate chronology is essential since the specific dates of individual items in the notebooks can be gathered from Collingwood’s “Note”—even as expanded in the Library Edition—only with difficulty, if at all. The “Chronology” excludes prose, however—an unhelpful decision, since prose works such as Ruskin’s Mineralogical Dictionary, fictional tales, sermons, lesson exercises, and essays are integrally connected to his poems. Prose and poetry must be chronologically ordered together, since most of Ruskin’s early prose, like many of the poems, was not dated by him, and so the only means to date such important prose works as the childhood sermons—unless they chance to be mentioned in the family letters—is to draw inferences from their position in the notebooks relative to the poems.
	The most serious problem with the Library Edition “Chronology” is its perpetuation of Collingwood’s errors in dating. When Cook and Wedderburn ventured to dissent, they nearly always got it wrong, sometimes newly misdating a poem that Collingwood had dated accurately. Their dates for prose works, in the few cases where they hazarded them, were especially groundless, reliant on little more than biographical and anecdotal guesswork. For example, they seriously misdated the important Sermon Books on the basis of vague inferences drawn from Praeterita, as Burd remarks in an article relaying Viljoen’s work on the sermons (“Ruskin’s Testament,” 1–3); and their datings of the essays and tales of the later 1830s, dates that have always been taken for granted, turn out similarly to be based on Ruskin’s decidedly unreliable memories in the autobiography.
	The countless limitations of the Library Edition have been acknowledged, if not always heeded in critical practice, since the 1950s, when Helen Gill Viljoen inveighed against the competence of its editing (RSH, 1–35). Hers was the next major stage of editing the early Ruskin, although much of her bibliographic labor remained unpublished in her lifetime, and it is still available only in typescripts kept among the Helen Gill Viljoen Papers at the Pierpont Morgan Library. Viljoen was the first and only previous scholar to recognize the need for, and partially to undertake, a systematic revision of Collingwood’s and Cook and Wedderburn’s bibliographies and chronology of the early manuscripts.
	Viljoen advanced exponentially what had already emerged as an almost peculiarly American interest in Ruskin’s childhood writing and early family history. The greatest of the English collectors, John Howard Whitehouse, restricted his interest in the earlier Ruskin to the drawings—one of Whitehouse’s earliest acquisitions being Ruskin’s “first” sketchbook. In 1935 Whitehouse was apparently offered only the remaining drawings, not the manuscripts, in the possession of the Boston dealer Charles E. Goodspeed, although Goodspeed certainly still held a great deal of Ruskin’s juvenilia from the 1931 Sotheby’s sale (RBB 38, 136–39). By comparison, American collectors took a notable interest in the Ruskin juvenilia from the earliest availability of those manuscripts. Henry Huntington in San Marino, Pierpont Morgan in New York, and William Bixby in St. Louis bought early Ruskin manuscripts in the first decades of the century (although those magnates, of course, focused primarily on the major manuscripts of Ruskin’s maturity). At the Sotheby sales of 1930–31, juvenilia was acquired for Yale directly; and the Yale collection eventually profited, as did the Princeton library, by Charles Goodspeed’s eager bidding for the juvenilia lots at Sotheby’s. Shortly before those sales, the important Sermon Books were given outright to an American collector (albeit Welsh-born) by a Coniston resident, who apparently had only a passing acquaintance with the collector (see “Provenance of the Major Manuscripts,” Viljoen). Helen Viljoen was also a modestly active buyer during the decades after the sales of 1930–31.
	One can only speculate why English collectors left the early writings to Americans. The trend is perplexing, since initial reports on the manuscript juvenilia by its new American owners often reflected the language and perspective of Collingwood’s Life and PJR, and Collingwood can surely be credited with first stirring interest in the juvenilia. As I argued above (see also my “Self and Revision”), strict control over the selection and editing of the early writings can be traced to the attitudes of Ruskin himself. Perhaps vestiges of these attitudes influenced English collecting. Whitehouse’s connections with the elder Ruskin’s inner circle might explain why he troubled to acquire only transcripts, and no originals, of the early manuscripts (RBB 143). The transcripts had been prepared by Cook and Wedderburn for the Library Edition, and perhaps Whitehouse regarded these to be as good as—or, in respect to editorial intervention, better than—the manuscripts themselves. Certainly, it is significant that the most outstanding exception to the English willingness to let go of the earlier manuscripts was F. J. Sharp, and Sharp worked entirely apart from the inner circle of English Ruskinians. Subsequently, Sharp’s appreciation of the earlier Ruskin helped to cement his association with Viljoen.
	With the dispersal of Ruskin’s manuscripts and library in the sales of the 1930s, Viljoen could no longer enjoy the benefit, as she had done years earlier in the Brantwood study, of working with so many of the manuscripts within easy reach. But with the major collections of the early Ruskin manuscripts now in America at Yale, Princeton, the Huntington, and the Pierpont Morgan libraries (and the Morgan’s holdings would later become more important with Viljoen’s own donations of Sharp’s and her own Ruskin manuscripts), she was able to attack the problem of the juvenilia, as English scholars could no longer so readily attempt. The resulting document, Viljoen’s “Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” was prepared as an appendix, first to her unpublished edition of Ruskin’s childhood sermons, the so-called Sermons on the Pentateuch, and then to her unfinished biography of Ruskin (HGVP, boxes D.V, E.IX).
	The “Dating MSS. of Boyhood” first revealed to me the necessity of undertaking a systematic and comprehensive revision of the earlier bibliographies. Viljoen’s scrupulous and often brilliant research has inestimably aided my own, and I hope I have acknowledged throughout this edition all the ways that my bibliographic arguments originated with her. I have also found an invaluable resource in Viljoen’s transcriptions of unpublished texts of juvenilia, included among her papers at the Morgan. Her transcriptions must be checked against the originals, for Viljoen was a surprisingly careless copyist; nonetheless, her notes provide an invaluable and convenient guide to widely dispersed manuscripts.
	Even the “Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” however, has proved in need of extensive revision and supplementation. First, Viljoen limited the “Dating MSS. of Boyhood” to emending Collingwood’s descriptive bibliography. Juggling her document with Collingwood’s “Note” and with Cook and Wedderburn’s revised “Note” and “Chronology” is impossibly awkward. Previous scholarship needs to be replaced by a single, comprehensive bibliography and chronology. Second, more serious limitations in Viljoen’s “Dating MSS. of Boyhood” arise from her having committed errors of her own in dating nearly all the major manuscripts that she chose to review. Third, while other papers among the materials for her Ruskin biography testify to her thorough study of the juvenilia, in “Dating MSS. of Boyhood” she deferred to Collingwood’s descriptions of several major manuscripts, which do in fact require reexamination, and she was altogether unacquainted with at least one manuscript. Several other manuscripts, which she deliberately omitted from her appendix, can be found transcribed in papers among her working notes on the juvenilia (HGVP, box F), but these manuscripts’ descriptions are entrusted to Collingwood as a “reliable . . . guide through the maze of juvenilia analyzed in his edition of the poems” (“Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” unnumbered cover page). Specifically, she does not discuss what Cook and Wedderburn called MS IA (she lists as her IA what Cook and Wedderburn label IB, but, since her general practice was to maintain earlier designations, I take this to be an unintentional error), and she let stand Collingwood’s descriptions of MSS V through XI. I find much to question, however, in what Viljoen accepts from Collingwood; and, of the manuscripts she does analyze in “Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” I have found it necessary to revise, at least in part, her datings of MSS IB (i.e., what she calls IA), II, IIA–E, III, IIIA, IVA, IVB, IVC, and IVD. Viljoen’s work is an inspiring and invaluable resource, but by no means infallible.
	Critical and biographical interest in Ruskin’s early writings and drawings started with Ruskin himself. He reprinted his earliest compositions in Queen of the Air, Fors Clavigera, and Praeterita to illustrate the lifelong consistency of his thought, pointing out to us the lasting importance of studying his early and later writing together. Ruskin also contributed to the myths and prohibitions that have misdirected, or at least skewed, how and what portions of the early writing should be read. As we approach the centenery of Ruskin’s death, many of those myths and misdirections have been overcome by the exemplary editorial standards set by Viljoen’s unpublished edition of the childhood sermons; Van Akin Burd’s Ruskin Family Letters; James Dearden’s editions of Iteriad and other juvenile poems, and Dearden’s many bibliographic articles; and Dearden and Burd’s edition of the 1830 diary (TLC). Among recent critics, Sheila Emerson (RGI), C. Stephen Finley (NC), and John Dixon Hunt (WS) stand out for their recognition that what meets the eye in the Library Edition should not be taken for granted, and for their important insights gained by returning to the archives. These achievements, however, have been limited to selected segments of the early Ruskin manuscripts. No bibliographic review of the early manuscripts has been attempted since Viljoen’s, and no review has been attempted comprehensively since Collingwood’s, and Cook and Wedderburn’s. Consequently, scholarship has remained haunted by the earlier editors’ errors, omissions, and suppressions, and this edition seeks to clear the way for a more thorough and accurate understanding of Ruskin.
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	Of the published poems, only a few exist in MS. Most of them have been transcribed by <Miss Allen> from <Mr. George Allen's> copy of <"Poems. J. R.">; privately printed, 1850; now excessively rare. "Salzburg," "Andernach," and "St. Goar" have been taken from "Friendship's Offering" (1835)--the copy inscribed "To John Ruskin from the Publishers." Full account of the published poems has been given by Mr. Thomas J. Wise in his "Bibliography of the Writings, &c., of John Ruskin," part <sc>I<sc>,  <i>Sept.</i>  1889 (printed for subscribers only); of which I have gladly availed myself.
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Is there meaning in the fact that Norton chose early poems to publish in the Atlantic Monthly, knowing he'd violate Wedderburn's attempted ban on publishing correspondence? (See Dearden, "Library Edition of the Works of John Ruskin," 59)