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Defining the corpus ought to be the first thing.
Major manuscript
Red Book
definitions → juvenilia vs professional → cross writing

The only extensive loss of the earlier Ruskin family writing that can now be determined, besides gaps in the family letters, is half of a rough-draft notebook of Ruskin’s poetry, called MS VI, and this destruction occurred in the course of the notebook’s composition in 1830–31 and probably by Ruskin himself. The only member of the family ever to express reservations about the value of writing was Margaret, who on at least three occasions, in 1829 and 1831, and 1833, attempted to “stop [John’s] rhyming” or at least control its direction (RFL 224, 187), and who repeatedly deprecated her own letters: “Never my Dearest [husband] judge of my feelings by my letters. . . . I cannot bear to write nor that you should have the trouble of reading much of such scrawls as I must fill my paper with if I were filling it” (RFL 186). Margaret did not prevail. Ruskin’s response to his mother’s attempts to check his rhyming was stubbornly to persist in writing poetry—poems that hotly record his feelings about her interference, that with psychological insight explore the motives of his mother’s reservations, and that raise protests against the conventional evangelicalism she embraced. These poem fragments were saved—if often only in draft form and not in Ruskin’s exquisite fair-copy notebooks, from which such angry and sarcastic poems were usually (but not always) excluded. Despite the careful preservation even of such painful writing, these were among the kind of poems that were banned from the earlier editions and that, until now, remain largely unpublished. They give substance to the shadowy dissonances struck in Ruskin’s attempt to make peace with his parents, Praeterita—his protests “that I had nothing to love,” “that, when affection did come, it came with violence utterly rampant and unmanageable,” and that “the ceaseless authority exercised over my youth left me, when cast out at last into the world, unable for some time to do more than drift with its vortices.” Although, in the manuscripts, these “calamities” are “equally dominant” with the “blessings” that Praeterita on the whole tends to uphold (Works, 35:43–46), in the selections chosen for the first editions of the youthful writing, the blessings of childhood were made to outweigh its difficulties.
	Margaret’s letters, too, despite her self-deprecation, were as carefully preserved by the family as John and John James’s productions, although the later provenance of her manuscripts sometimes formed a special case. In the late 1880s and afterward, when the manuscripts at Brantwood were arranged and bound with the aid of Alexander Wedderburn, Margaret’s earlier letters were not necessarily treated differently than John James’s (Bem L 1–4; see RBB 60, and Sotheby Cat. 1931, 9 [lots 41, 43]); however, the handsome blue-morocco and gilt volumes housing Ruskin’s letters naturally identified his early writing most closely with his father (MS XI). In the subsequent manuscript sales of the 1930s, Ruskin’s letters to his father went to Yale’s Beinecke Library, while his parents’ letters went to the Ruskin Galleries at Bembridge, Isle of Wight—with Margaret’s later letters taking a more circuitous path than other family manuscripts (Bem B VI; see RBB 126–29). The juvenilia and youthful writing, Ruskin’s notebooks and other manuscripts apart from the letters, have ended up divided among collections primarily at Yale, Princeton, and the Pierpont Morgan libraries, and to a lesser extent at the Coniston Museum and the Lancaster University Ruskin Library (the latter formerly the Bembridge Galleries collection), the Huntington Library, and the Ruskin Library in Tokyo. The wide dispersal and consequent availability of the early Ruskin family manuscripts have proved consequential for scholarship. It was at least partly owing to Helen Gill Viljoen’s inability to gain access to Margaret’s letters, for example, that her insights into the relationship between father and son have proved more memorable than her analysis of Margaret’s character (RSH 243 n. 27; RBB 180–81), while her intensive study of the juvenilia was aided by so many of those manuscripts having been acquired by American libraries.
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