A PRELIMINARY DESCRIPTIVE AND ANALYTICAL OVERVIEW OF THE JUVENILIA
Earliest Writing and Edgeworthian Education
	Ruskin’s earliest extant juvenilia dates from 1826, about age seven, aside from probably earlier childish scrawls, simple drawings, and practice writing of his name on the flyleaves of his books. Most of the writing from 1826, when Ruskin was seven, through about 1831 is contained in the “Red Books” (MSS I, III, IIIA, IV, IVA, IVB, IVC), a uniform set of seven store-bought notebooks with reddish-brown, flexible leather covers (described as roan in Sotheby Cat. 1930), each approximately ten by fifteen centimeters. Red Books was Ruskin’s own term, used both in childhood, when referring to them in letters to his father (e.g., RFL 192), and in later years, when reoccupying his old nursery rooms atop the Herne Hill house and meditating on his childhood for Fors and Praeterita (Ruskin’s Camberwell, 13–14). Perhaps it was on one of the latter occasions that he wrote Red Book and an assigned number inside some of these.
	Contemporaneous and in conformity with the Red Books, there also survive three handmade pamphlets (MSS IB, II, and one containing no. 57 now cut apart and its leaves tipped into MS V; MS IB was later professionally bound). Ruskin constructed these from plain paper cut to about the size of the Red Books, folded once and sewed. One pamphlet (see no. 57) was covered with pinkish violet paper, perhaps to make its color uniform with the Red Books. Another (MS II) bears the heading “Vol I,” connecting it with what he called his series of “works” (RFL, 187).
	These early “works” might be described as bookmaking as much as writing. From the start in MS I, although Ruskin’s pencil printing is still fairly crude, he thinks to “justify” the margins, enclose his illustrations in frames and number them as “plates,” and provide title pages and even colophons. In contents, the Red Books imitate a range of genres, from children’s verse and didactic tales to such adult forms as travel narrative and topographic verse. In this imitative bookmaking, Ruskin was probably not unusual among Victorian and Edwardian children. Less famous childhoods also left behind scientific “monographs,” derivative “histories,” and diaries that include illustrated poetry. Some families even privately circulated “magazines,” with elaborate nursery pretenses to real-life editorship. For example, a handmade magazine, “The Beresford Spy,” was produced by the children of Reverend Edward Andrews, Ruskin’s tutor, to take the place of Andrews’s erstwhile professional magazine, the Spiritual Times, which had printed the writing of the Andrews brood, as well as Ruskin’s poetry. Childhood authorship is encouraged in the stories of Maria Edgeworth, which contains stories within stories ostensibly written by child characters. The distinction setting apart Ruskin’s Red Books from this common Victorian childhood pastime lay in the ambitious scope he set for himself, and the genius and almost incredible pace and flexibility by which he was able to live up to his ambitions. 
	Ruskin’s earliest writing bears the stamp of the progressive methods of education advocated by Richard and Maria Edgeworth. Famously, three of Ruskin’s Red Books (MSS I, III, IIIA, and partial draft in MS II) were initially used between 1826 and 1829 to contain fair copies of “Harry and Lucy,” his adaptations of Maria Edgeworth’s series of tales Early Lessons, separately titled The Parent’s Assistant, Harry and Lucy, Frank, Rosamond, and Harry and Lucy Concluded. Activities and experiments drawn from Edgeworth’s stories and from Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues (1807; see nos. 3, 20) are blended with the Ruskin family’s actual travels and experiences. In his first two volumes of “Harry and Lucy” (MSS I, III [1826–28]), Ruskin probably identified with either or both characters Harry and Lucy, although in the portions set at his aunt’s home in Perth, Scotland, he may have associated “Lucy” with his cousins Jessie and Mary Richardson. In the third volume (MS IIIA, 1828), Ruskin concentrates less on travel adventures and more on the family’s domestic activities at Herne Hill. Having written this volume after his cousin Mary Richardson had come to live with the family, Ruskin appears to identify more exclusively with Harry, who takes a decidedly preceptorial role over Lucy, identified with Mary. Less impulsive than in the two first volumes, and even priggishly strict with Lucy, Harry determines the daily round as teaching Lucy the constellations before breakfast, lessons after breakfast, drawing maps until dinner, correcting Virgil “for his papa” and more mapmaking in the afternoon, and listening to papa read Don Quixote until bed (no. 32).
	Seen whole, the earlier juvenilia reveals how extensively the Ruskins invested in the Edgeworths’ program. Ruskin’s first extant poem and slightly later works (nos. 1, ??) are drawn from Evenings at Home (1792–96), by Anna Laetitia Barbauld and her brother Dr. John Aiken. Mrs. Barbauld’s hymns and narratives were recommended by Richard Edgeworth as a child’s first books, because the pleasurable tales animate children with the desire to learn to read for themselves. Another Edgeworth recommendation, Thomas Day’s Sandford and Merton (1783–89) is declared Harry’s “favourite history” in one of Ruskin’s narratives (no. 20). Day was a close friend and associate of the Edgeworths, although a more theoretical and committed Rousseauist than they believed prudent.
	In another of Ruskin’s very first poems (no. 5), he imitates Erasmus Darwin, the poet of the Lunar Society. This was the circle of scientists, inventors, and industrialists, who stimulated the Edgeworths’ intellectual life. Darwin’s heroic couplets in The Botanic Garden (1789–91) may also lie behind Ruskin’s catalog of plants in his “Eudosia, or a Poem on the Universe” (no. 27), but the title is taken from a production by Capell Lofft (1781), another poet of the scientific enlightenment. Ruskin’s introduction to these poets probably came through their frequent quotation in Jeremiah Joyce’s Scientific Dialogues, a systematic course in mechanics, astronomy, hydrostatics, pneumatics, optics, and electricity. Joyce’s prose is ornamented with extracts from this learned verse, just as Darwin’s poem is annotated with extensive scientific notes. Ruskin adopts this elegant manner, after his fashion, in his “Harry and Lucy.” After imitating Joyce’s experiments—indeed, often copying them verbatim—he caps the prose with poems on natural history and the industrial sublime (MS I).
	Ruskin also imitates the conversational mode favored by the Edgeworths and by Jeremiah Joyce, who, on his title page, attributes his “dialogue” manner to the Edgeworths’ recommendations in Practical Education (1798–1801). Dialogue promotes the fundamental premise of the Edgeworth system, that appeals should be made to children’s reason, and that they should be encouraged to think for themselves. Ruskin’s Harry and Lucy, much like Edgeworth’s Frank and the much beleaguered Rosamond, are quizzed by Mamma, who treats ordinary events as opportunities to admonish self-discipline or to practice multiplication tables. Papa, in both Ruskin and Edgeworth, is less prone to these Pumblechookian methods, and is reserved for more exciting and brilliant experiments and excursions.
	If the boy was following approved Enlightenment models, the elder Ruskin was nonetheless correct in Praeterita to detect gestures characteristically his own, when, for example, at the close of his first “Harry and Lucy” (no. 3) he combines an electrical experiment from Joyce, not just with elegant scientific verse, but with a haunting image from Lord Byron. In part, the romance in Ruskin’s early writing shows merely that he possessed the materials to temper the Edgeworth’s hostility to “inflaming the imagination, or exciting a restless spirit of adventure, by exhibiting false views of life, and creating hopes which, in the ordinary course of things, cannot be realized” (preface to Parent’s Assistant). It is better for Rosamond to tour a cotton factory, even though she is too young to understand the machinery, than to dream over imaginary things (Edgeworth, Rosamond, part 3, 149). That Ruskin was untroubled by the fancy and fact dichotomy does not seem surprising in a family that regularly read Scott and Byron. The more important division indicated by Ruskin’s departures from Edgeworthian discipline is a temperamental one between him and his mother.
	As Michael Brooks has remarked, the Edgeworths’ educational program may have been more congenial temperamentally to Margaret Ruskin than to her son. The Edgeworths provided a system, and method must have appealed to a woman, whose nearly first words in Ruskin’s portrayal of her are to “do one thing at once” (no. 3).

Although rationalist mentors may have posed fundamental challenges to Margaret Ruskin’s evangelicalism—just as Enlightenment and Rousseauist approaches to education provoked Mrs. Sherwood, Ruskin’s favorite evangelical children’s writer—the Edgeworths were pragmatic enough that Margaret, like Mrs. Sherwood, was able to take what she wanted from their stories, while disputing the Rousseauist premises. What she wanted was system, reflected, as Brooks points out, in Margaret’s constant and painstaking commitment to her child’s education and her emphasis on children learning to reflect on his own thought processes. These progressive aims, however, could be detached from Rousseau’s fundamental conviction that the natural child should be granted his birthright of freedom. Instead, the Edgeworthian system of children thinking for themselves could be urged toward thinking about themselves—Protestant self-reflection. In that way, the sinful, natural child would be curbed and made obedient to Christian, parental authority.

	What at times appears characteristic of Ruskin’s response to these instructors, whether Edgeworthian or evangelical, are his wily dodges. Joyce’s Dialogues are carefully arranged for the methodical acquisition of concepts, but Ruskin, in no. 3, begins in the middle of Joyce’s course, with pneumatics, and then works backwards even within that series of experiments. . . .
	Ruskin’s obedience or resistence to specific forms of training were probably complex. When Ruskin declares in Fors Clavigera and Praeterita that he “went on to amuse myself, in my own way, learnt whole words at a time, as I did patterns” (28:274; 35:23), he may be remembering the stress on acquisition of vocabulary in Joyce’s Dialogues and in Harry and Lucy, both of which contain long glossaries and insist on a systematic accumulation of terms. Ruskin’s memory of solitary learning seems to counter the Edgeworthians’ contention that vocabulary, like all subjects, “should be made a subject of conversation”; however, Edgeworth also respected the child’s pleasure as the best arbiter of what and how much should be read, and above all trained the child’s “habit of thinking for yourself” (Edgeworth, Frank, 80, 104)....
	Questions of how Edgeworthian or any other system of education was adopted by the elder Ruskins and how it was received cannot be considered apart from the family’s psychology....

	The “Harry and Lucy” books bear comparison with that other celebrated body of Victorian juvenilia, the Brontë children’s handmade books, in that both simulate in miniature the appearance of printed works. In content also, Ruskin’s “Harry and Lucy” narratives are comparable to the Brontë “sagas,” in that the authors project themselves as semireal, semifictional characters into fictive worlds modeled on their reading. The Brontë children interact as “little queens” and “little king” with characters derived from Blackwood’s and other fiction and with current historical heroes such as the Duke of Wellington. Similarly, Ruskin enters imaginatively into the educational activities of Maria and Richard Edgeworth’s Harry and Lucy.
	Unlike the Brontë sagas, Ruskin’s juvenilia did not continue to develop a complex, ongoing fictive world. Charlotte Brontë lingered so long in her childhood’s imaginative world that her first efforts at mature fiction suffered from embroilment in the earlier sagas. Ruskin, on the other hand, began his “mature” work in childhood. While the earlier “Harry and Lucy” books show charming (and extraordinarily talented) imitations of children’s stories and verse, within a few years the juvenilia so elaborately copies an adult library that the pieces appear more to be a child’s offering in miniature of adult productions beyond his years. In reading the Brontë sagas, one feels oneself trespassing deeper and deeper into an arcane wonderland wrought by the authors for their private adventuring—an effect that would be heightened, I assume, by the privilege of poring over Charlotte’s microscopic handwriting and preciously tiny booklets. Ruskin’s hand and booklets, too, are small enough to make reading uncomfortable at times, but they do not begin to approach Charlotte’s feats. In reading the early Ruskin, rather, one is invited to survey a public spectacle—from his paired epics “Iteriad” and “Athens” to his “Poem on the Universe” called “Eudosia”—and to admire the mere child who is showing off to his parents “how well he could do it” (Works, 35:72). At the same time, the more one studies the early Ruskin especially of the rough-draft notebooks (MSS VI, VIII), the more one is struck by how, behind the public performances and spilling into them, Ruskin reveals secrets, fantasies, and emotional turmoil. Ruskin encoded these secrets in various ways, perhaps concealing turmoil even from himself, but the emotions nonetheless continue to trouble his characteristically ebullient voice.
	The “Harry and Lucy” books are filled out with short poems. In MS I, the verses are based partly on what he found in children’s books, although some of these poems, such as the previously unpublished “On Papa’s Leaving Home” (no. 8), already display a highly inventive and interesting emotional response to his father’s departures on business trips; other poems, such as “On Scotland” (no. 6) may already show Ruskin responding to family deaths. Loss, whether by death or absence, is a prominent theme in the suppressed fragments; both “The Monastery” (no. 46) and “Athens” (no. 135) break off with the despondent farewells or the absences of older males.
	By 1827, in MS III, Ruskin is imitating adult polite verse in a section named “poetry discriptive” (sic), although, again, these poems already reveal an individualistic acuity in perception of visual relationships, as Emerson has remarked. Another verse grouping, also in MS III but dating from 1829, includes the versification of the opening of Scott’s The Monastery, Ruskin’s project for “a novel” (RFL, 185). Also from 1829, the handmade booklet “Battle of Waterloo . . . with Other Small Poems” imitates the verse drama publications of the period. At about the same time, beginning in 1828, Ruskin exhibits a fine Augustan confidence in surveying the creation by devoting a Red Book (MS IV) to “Eudosia; or, a Poem on the Universe.”
	Of the remainder of the earlier juvenilia, one Red Book was used in 1827 for Ruskin’s first Latin exercises, prior to Andrews’s instruction (MS IVA). Another Red Book (MS IVB) was begun as a personalized guidebook and itinerary for the family’s English tour of 1828. Additionally, besides all these notebook productions, Ruskin celebrated his father’s birthdays, New Year’s, and sometimes his own birthday, by presenting John James with fancy copies of odes composed to commemorate the occasions, along with other kinds of poems. For these he used the most elaborate print or script that he could muster at the time—either his most careful early print in imitation of typeface or a “double” print that, as a “Harry and Lucy” episode records, cost him so much time that he rarely again attempted it. Later, he employed a more rapid “copperplate” hand, sometimes decorated with flourishes drawn an arithmetic and orthography primer (see RFL, 259, 261 n. 17). The presentation poems were copied on sheets folded vertically as a folio; then the folios were sometimes folded twice horizontally, like a letter, and a superscription added to the outside—typically, “To My Father” and a date. Many of these were bound later by Wedderburn in MSS IA and XI along with other miscellaneous poems and letters.
	“Eudosia” eventually faltered in 1830, with only one volume on “Botany” (containing book 1 and part of book 2) carried from flowers through a catalog of trees. From here, Ruskin went on undaunted to “Iteriad” (MS VII), a four-book verse account of the family tour to the Lakes in 1830, on which he worked until 1832. When, in 1831, he had finished drafting (but not fair-copying) “Iteriad,” he began “Athens,” a verse narrative of Xerxes’ great march climaxing the Persian Wars. Since Ruskin was translating the Iliad at the time, he no doubt was inspired to attempt the ultimate epic achievement: to pair an epic on travel adventure—his own Odyssey in “Iteriad,” as it were—with an epic on battle, his Iliad in “Athens.” Unlike “Iteriad,” however, “Athens” was never finished, in its draft or its fair copy. Meanwhile, between 1829 and 1832, Ruskin was using a smaller notebook (MS V, not a Red Book) entitled “Miscellaneous Poetry” to gather together fair copies of the shorter poems—a sort of collected minor poems.
	A change is noticeable from about 1831, age twelve, when Ruskin was engaged in fair-copying “Iteriad” and in drafting “Athens,” and when his home studies were extended to include modern languages, mathematics, more advanced Latin and Greek, and drawing tutelage. Now the Red Books were set aside for grander notebooks in half-calf or half-roan and marbled boards. As he would boast in early 1833, he required “additional space” for “greater freedom & play of cogitation” (RFL, 274). In MS VII, he fair-copied his “Iteriad” between 1831 and 1832 and started fair-copying “Athens.” During the same period, 1831–32, he kept his first separate sketchbooks, earlier drawings appearing mainly as “plates” in the Red Books. The two sketchbooks exhibit picturesque sketches taken during tours of the southeast of England. Later, in 1833–34, the remarkable Account of a Tour on the Continent (MS IX) imitates with astonishing fidelity the engraved plates and letterpress of Samuel Rogers’s Italy and of the professional gift annuals to which Ruskin would soon be contributing verse.
	Besides the epics and poetic travelogues of this period, Ruskin’s lessons are worked up as his own “published” textbooks. In place of the 1827 Latin vocabulary lists in a Red Book, his 1832 translation of the first few books of the Iliad is presented in an elegant double-column pamphlet. A “Practical Geometry” belonging to “Mastr Ruskin Jany 21st 1833”—so inscribed probably when it was started (MS XIA) and elaborately handlettered in Gothic and copperplate scripts—devotes each page to an elegant statement of a “problem” and its solution in a neatly ruled geometric figure.
	Whether owing to the accident of preservation or to Ruskin’s now regarding himself as a more workmanlike poet, there survive from this time two notebooks that serve for rough-drafting poetry before it was copied elsewhere (MSS VI, VIII). MS VIII, kept in continuous use between 1831 and 1836 or 1837, is the primary source for poetry, stories, and drama related to Ruskin’s tormented and unrequited first love affair, Adèle Domecq. Also starting about this time, the earlier Red Books are recycled as workbooks (perhaps at the behest of John James, who was economical with paper). Turned upside down and started anew from the end opposite to the earlier “Harry and Lucy” narratives, their remaining blank leaves and endboards exploited, or their newer entries even crossing the earlier material, the Red Books were now made to serve diverse interests—articles on mineralogy, algebra and geometry exercises, and sketches that turn up in finished form as “plates” in MS IX. The mineralogy notes and catalogs, which begin about 1830–31 with a Red Book devoted to the subject (MS IVC), evolve into the ambitious Mineralogical Dictionary (MS IVD [1831–36]), Ruskin’s own redaction of primers on geological identification and classification, such as Jameson’s System of Mineralogy or the geological articles in Loudon’s Magazine of Natural History, to which Ruskin himself would contribute brief scientific papers in 1834.
	By their appearance, the Sermon Books (MSS IIA–E) seem positioned between the earlier juvenile Red Books and the later aspirations of the young scholar. By their date also, the sermons’ composition belong to a transitional period, 1832–34. In some physical respects, the Sermon Books are similar to the earlier pamphlets constructed to conform with the Red Books. Handmade and miniature, the pamphlets measure only 9.5 by 15.5 centimeters, with a text space of only 7.5 by 15 centimeters, into which Ruskin packed roughly fifty lines and even seventy-five on some pages. By this time, however, the Red Books themselves were in their recycled stage of use, and in fact some of the Red Books were reused to draft the sermons. Moreover, the Sermon Books, despite their precious dimensions, appear more sober than the “Harry and Lucy” books, linking them to the formal textbook presentations of contemporaneous and later prose—the Iliad translation, the Mineralogical Dictionary, and, later, the first critical essays (MSS XB, no. 270; MS XIB). The ink script is studiously neat longhand, rather than the printing meant to imitate typeface that had been used for poetry before the “Iteriad.” Title headings follow a consistent pattern and, appropriate to the solemn contents, show minimal ornamentation. The margins are “justified” so rigorously that, rather than spoil the effect, words are divided according to how much fits on the line rather than by syllable; hyphens are omitted if space disallows; curlicues, commas, and dots are added to bring a short line to the margin (easily misread as punctuation by the unwary); and paragraphs are indicated with only the barest indentation or with only a slight line space.
	In content as well, the Sermon Books are especially interesting as reflecting both a self-conscious childishness and a rapidly maturing thought and learning. Although the persona most frequently impersonates an elder, learned divine expositing scripture to his congregation, the writer also speaks as a pious child when the occasion demands, such as when commenting on the Fifth Commandment. The boy’s perspective on the doctrine of his church is invaluable, especially as a source for understanding the foundations of Ruskin’s mature religious thought.