THE DESIGN OF THIS EDITION
	The edition is divided in two parts. Part 1 presents a revised and comprehensive chronology of all known individual prose and poetry pieces—published or unpublished, extant or lost—contained in the major early manuscripts, preserved on stray sheets elsewhere, or known at least by title. Next, the whereabouts and publication (if any) of each item is identified. Each item is then followed by a note justifying its dating, and discussing its sources and compositional history—more or less lengthily, depending on the complexity of the work. Part 1 also selectively prints texts of works that are either previously unpublished or published with such invasive emendations by earlier editors as to justify a new text. Where silent editorial emendations in existing printed texts are localized or minor, a textual note summarizing the differences between the manuscript and printed text is deemed sufficient.
	Part 2 presents a revised and comprehensive descriptive bibliography. For each known major manuscript of juvenilia, I supply its physical characteristics and provenance, enumerate its contents, and attempt to reconstruct the order and circumstances of its composition—that is, the compositional history of the major manuscript, as opposed to that of an individual title contained therein, which is presented in part 1.
	Throughout this edition, MS followed by a roman numeral refers to the manuscripts described in part 2; no. followed by an arabic numeral refers to individual items in part 1.
	I do not attempt to list Ruskin’s drawings, better left to the expertise of art historians. In part 2, I do include, however, descriptions of Ruskin’s first two sketchbooks (MSS VIIIA, VIIIB), dating from 1831–32, since the logic of the edition demands that they be included in part 2 as major early manuscripts. Their inclusion is necessitated, moreover, by the prose writings contained in one of them.
	In part 1, I also omit the letters published in RFL, which the reader may easily compare against the chronology. I do, on a few occasions in part 1 in connection with other items, dispute Burd’s dating of a letter; and, in part 2, where MS XI is described, which contains letters, I have been able to supply portions of some letters for the first time, portions that were omitted from RFL. All the poems printed in RFL, as a matter of course, will be found listed in the chronology, part 1.
	My editorial principles governing the various segments of parts 1 and 2 are explained in greater detail below. First, a broad survey of Ruskin’s early writing will help to orient the reader.

THE DESIGN OF PART 1,
“COMPLETE CHRONOLOGY AND SELECTED TEXTS
OF RUSKIN’S WRITINGS, 1826–38”
	Much can be learned from the proper ordering of the notebooks’ contents, so long as one remains aware that a given notebook may include several sequences from differing times and that the overall, day-to-day sequence of Ruskin’s activities must be reconstructed from his simultaneous use of several notebooks. For these reasons, Cook and Wedderburn were wise to pair Collingwood’s descriptive bibliography of the major manuscripts with the “Chronology” of the individual poems that the manuscripts contain. Accordingly, I have gratefully adopted their fundamental design, by pairing a complete chronology of the individual items of juvenilia (part 1) with a descriptive bibliography of the major manuscripts (part 2). I have revised and expanded the chronology beyond a merely enumerative list of poetry titles like Cook and Wedderburn’s, to comprise the nearly three hundred items of poetry as well as prose through 1838, each item annotated by a justification of its position in the sequence.
	 The manuscript notebooks by themselves give a perplexing impression of Ruskin’s activities, since he wrote in a given notebook at many different times, spread in some cases over years, and he worked with more than one notebook simultaneously. One’s head reels in leafing through the manuscript notebooks, trying to discern a sequence in Ruskin’s interests and developing literary activity. Notebooks starting with his careful but childish pencil print lettering, used for his “Harry and Lucy” and earliest poems of 1826–28, might also contain ink and pencil script used for drafts of sermons and mineralogical “articles” of a considerably later time. A range of one to eight years is possible for his use of any single notebook. Even wider parameters characterize MSS IA, X, and XI, which are not notebooks already bound when Ruskin first used them but collections of loose manuscripts compiled and bound in later years by Alexander Wedderburn.
	What is more confusing, the notebooks’ contents are not always sequential. Although Ruskin seems usually to have placed his initial entry in a notebook’s first pages, frequently even providing a title page, he at various times copied groups of poems in the middle, and returned years later and drafted new projects starting at the opposite end from, and upside down to, the text at the beginning. The texts coming from opposite ends often meet, and in some cases the new text extends over top of the old—Ruskin either erasing part of the old text to accommodate the new, or running the new text into whatever marginal spaces were left over. Other available gaps here and there were filled at almost any time. In another procedure, causing a conundrum that Dearden successfully unraveled in the 1830 diary (TLC, 10–14), Ruskin would leave gaps to fill in later, but, discovering he had allowed insufficient space, he would fill the gap and continue the inserted text elsewhere in the notebook.
	The task of ordering the notebooks’ contents involves an exacting and elaborate game of cross-referencing. Each poem or prose item takes its place on a conceptual grid, its position fixed by vectors converging from various determinations—Ruskin’s own dates when available, the item’s placement in a notebook vis-à-vis other datable pieces, references to it in datable family letters, and its source in books the family is known to have bought or read at a certain time. With these items fixed, a story gradually emerges of how and when an entire notebook was used, and this story can in turn inform us both about individual items that cannot be dated by any other method and about the simultaneous evolution of other notebooks. Fortunately, substantial sections of some notebooks were composed more or less sequentially—most importantly, those like MSS II, VI, and VIII, in which Ruskin entered rough drafts of his work and which therefore preserve a successive record of his compositions. The sequences in the rough-draft notebooks also became convoluted in certain places, however—extremely so, in MS VIII—requiring meticulous interpretation provided in parts 1 and 2.
	In part 1, each entry begins with an item’s title, followed by its most precise known date, its manuscript source, publication history, and a note discussing the evidence for dating, compositional history, and sources. Texts follow for those poems and prose works I have chosen to publish.

The Scope of the Chronology
	The chronology begins with the earliest known compositions—those of 1826, putting aside possibly earlier drawings and “signatures” on the flyleaves of books, and Ruskin’s first “letter” of 1823. The chronology extends through 1838, thereby encompassing all the individual items contained in the major manuscripts. Items are grouped by year and, insofar as can be determined, arranged chronologically within the year, according to the earliest known date—that is, the date of an item’s draft, if known, rather than its fair copy or publication.
	The choice of inclusive dates to frame the chronology, 1826–38, has been governed by the contents of the major manuscript notebooks. It has proved prudent to extend the chronology from the earliest known compositions through the latest items contained in the major manuscripts, although by 1838 Ruskin had produced work certainly too mature to be regarded as juvenilia, such as The Poetry of Architecture (no. 255). Since Ruskin returned to his early notebooks long after their initial childhood use, appropriating available leaves to draft such comparatively sophisticated pieces as “Marcolini” (no. 241) and the “Essay on the Relative Dignity of the Studies of Painting and Music . . .” (no. 270), the evidence for dating these later items needs to be in place in part 1, in order to decode the manuscript notebooks comprehensively in part 2. As it has turned out, some work by the emerging critic and prose writer, such as the “Essay on . . . Painting and Music” and the “Chronicles of St. Bernard” (no. 216), is as problematic to date as work by the juvenile poet, although Cook and Wedderburn’s (and the elder Ruskin’s) dates for this youthful criticism have always been taken for granted.
	Some works are listed that have been lost altogether, but whose titles and dates remain recoverable, especially from MS VI. These deserve to be listed and annotated for what they can tell us about Ruskin’s interests and compositional habits.

THE DESIGN OF PART 2,
“DESCRIPTIVE BIBLIOGRAPHY
OF RUSKIN’S EARLY MANUSCRIPT NOTEBOOKS”
	In part 2, each major manuscript entry begins with its designation by roman numeral; its location (when appropriate, using the abbreviations listed at the front of this book), along with any specialized cataloging information; and its inclusive dates of composition. These opening identifications are followed by three discursive sections: (a) provenance; (b) physical description, and discusssion of any special circumstances that affected the manuscript’s composition or compilation; and (c) contents, listed in their sequential order (not necessarily the same as the contents’ compositional order, which is accounted for in part 1).