Bibliographically, this book corrects the earlier misdating of individual poems and prose pieces, and updates and corrects the description of all the known major manuscripts. As such, it serves as a comprehensive companion to all editions of the early Ruskin family writing. As itself an edition, this book makes available significant writing that was banned or merely ignored by the first editors. When appropriate, this edition also republishes writing that was so invasively edited by Collingwood, Cook, and Wedderburn that the original texts remain unavailable in any acceptably scholarly sense. Even still, this edition will not complete the printing of everything Ruskin wrote as a child and young man. Some works, such as Ruskin’s long catalogs and descriptive “dictionary” of his mineral collection, do not justify the labor and expense of publication. But scholars who examine these in the archives—and archival study, even of published manuscripts, will always reward researchers of Ruskin—will find here full descriptions, datings, and compositional histories of manuscripts that remain unpublished.