INTRODUCTION
<head1>Plan of the Edition
<head2>Notes
Biographical, Place, 
<head3>Biographical, Place, Bibliographic

Need to have a discussion of relation of houses to writing. Ruskin's possibly self-conscious distinction between juvenilia and early professional writing are their respective orientations to the home and institutions beyond.

Notes on historical persons and places, if well documented in Ruskin scholarship, consist of brief accounts designed to give the nonspecialist a helpful orientation while pointing to titles in the bibliography for further information. There is no attempt to repeat work already well done elsewhere, and the notes include references to the bibliography for further reading. At the same time, much information about figures and places familiar in Ruskin scholarship will gain new lights from annotations throughout this edition. The notes, while not attempting to gather together all this commentary, orient the reader to the edition by slanting discussion toward the role of these places and people respecting the early manuscripts.

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

<audience>
Is Adele the first significant audience outside the family? And is that connected with publication?
</audience>

<editing>
<extract>
	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.
</extract>
</editing>
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.
	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.
	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.
	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.
	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.

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.

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.

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 System of Title Citation
	All titles in the chronology refer to poems unless a following parenthetical identification specifies prose—poetry forming, by far, the largest portion of the early writing. Prose and poem titles placed in quotation marks are Ruskin’s. Untitled poems are cited by their first lines, also in quotation marks, first lines being distinguishable from titles by conventions of capitalization.
	In his own titles, Ruskin adhered to conventions of capitalization irregularly, so many of his titles would read, if transcribed exactly, like first-line citations. Thus, to distinguish between Ruskin’s titles and my first-line citations for untitled works, I have found it convenient, for purposes of this chronology, to regularize conventions of spelling, capitalization, and punctuation in his titles. If any ambiguity can have resulted from my regularization of titles—for example, the questionable placement of apostrophes, which Ruskin frequently omitted, to form singular or plural possessives—I have striven to avoid misleading the reader by discussing the problem in the item’s note, often supplying Ruskin’s title in its original form.
	In some cases, main titles are followed by alternative titles placed in parentheses, and the alternative is discussed in the item’s note. Many titles in parentheses are merely first-line citations, added to distinguish between items to which Ruskin assigned the same or similar titles (e.g., “A Sermon” or “A Psalm”), these parenthetical first-line citations again being distinguishable from titles by conventions of capitalization. Other titles in parentheses refer to inventions by earlier editors—editorial titles, by which some works have come to be familiarly known and which therefore need to be available to the reader. In such cases, the reader should recognize that Ruskin’s own titles or first-line citations would be far preferable. Collingwood cherished a regrettable affection for sentimental titles, which at the very least can embarrass the actual tone of the work. For example, the prettiness of his title “Moonlight on the Mountains” for the originally untitled no. 147 proves to have been justified only by the editor’s deletion of the draft’s closing stanzas, which depict “a gloomy thing” that reverses the serene tone of the opening stanzas printed by Collingwood. Since such decisions belong to the late-century formation of the myth of Ruskin’s childhood, the editors of the Library Edition were not always careful to indicate where titles are editorial. Cook and Wedderburn generally enclosed Collingwood’s editorial titles in brackets, but their practice is inconsistent.
	When I have been forced myself to invent an editorial title for prose and poetry, I distinguish it from other kinds of titles by the omission of quotation marks. These titles are descriptive. Where possible, they are drawn from Ruskin’s own habitual way of referring to an item in his letters, although no title can be found inscribed on the manuscript itself, such as his Mineralogical Dictionary (no. 98). Descriptive titles prove necessary where first-line citation is impractical—for example, in cases where untitled long poems consist of multiple parts, each with its own title, such as the Account of a Tour on the Continent (no. 180); or in cases where the texts of poems have been all but obliterated, such as the Satirical Poem on Mr. Rowbotham (no. 145), so that no first-line citation is possible.

The System of Date Citation
	Dates were assigned to many pieces by Ruskin himself and occasionally by his parents. (Notice is taken of dates in other, clearly later hands—probably Wedderburn’s or Collingwood’s—where the researcher is liable to be distracted by such docketings.) In some cases, Ruskin’s own dates obviously specify, not when he wrote a poem, but when he fair-copied the piece for presentation or when he made the presentation itself. Hence, a New Year’s poem dated by Ruskin “January 1, 1828” may be placed at the head of the chronology for 1828, because that is the best date we have, but it should be regarded as having almost certainly been drafted in late 1827.
	In a few cases, dates were assigned by Ruskin that provide no clue—that, in fact, are almost certainly and even deliberately misleading—concerning the original compositional dates of the pieces in question. This is the case with Ruskin’s spate of fair-copying poems in MS III, all of which he dated 9 March 1829. Any such ambiguity is discussed in the note to a given entry.
	The compositional date is given and the piece is ordered according to that date only when a datable rough draft or some other hard evidence about its composition is available. Where only the fair copy remains, one may often assume only a few months, at most, to have elapsed between beginning composition and fair-copying. Parts of some longer poems such as “Eudosia” appear, in fact, to have been fair-copied almost as soon as Ruskin drafted them. Such assumptions are not uniformly safe, however.
	The composition of some large projects extended so long beyond the starting date assigned to their entries that, in part 1, cross-references are provided at the beginning of subsequent years, alerting the reader to carry forward those entries.

Publication Information
	A great many of Ruskin’s early works must be designated as previously unpublished. For those that have been published, readers are urged to attend to my cautions in this introduction concerning earlier editors’ heavy-handed interventions in Ruskin’s texts.
	Publications are cited in their order of appearance, starting with those in Ruskin’s lifetime, if any, such as poems in gift annuals or in the 1850 Poems by “J.R.” I do not cite press notices of the annuals, some of which liberally quoted from Ruskin’s poems. My lists continue with the major subsequent editions—Collingwood’s edition of the poetry (PJR) and the Library Edition (Works). Pagination differs somewhat in the editions of PJR—the large edition, which features reproductions of Ruskin’s drawings and manuscripts, and the more commonly available small edition, which omits the plates and replaces the facsimiles of manuscripts with transcriptions in the notes. For researchers’ convenience, I cite separately the large, quarto edition as “PJR (4o)” and the small, octavo edition as “PJR (8o),” where paginations differ; and I cite them together as “PJR (4o, 8o),” where paginations match. (See List of Abbreviations.)
	The major early Ruskin bibliographies, such as those by Axon and by Smart and Wise, are also cited, when these quoted liberally from the poems. 
	Only quotations from previously unpublished works are cited from Collingwood’s Life of Ruskin, ignoring quotations in the Life from works that the editor had already printed in his PJR. The same policy holds for Cook, Life. Collingwood’s Life was first published in 1893, but extensively rewritten in 1900, so it is necessary to cite both editions. Moreover, as with PJR, pagination varies even among different editions of both the 1893 and the 1900 versions. For the 1893 version I cite large (1893a) and small (1893b) editions, and for the 1900 version I cite [information to come]. (See List of Abbreviations.)
	Other earlier editions, such as James Osborne Wright’s 1882 and 1884 American publications of Poems by John Ruskin, are cited as an indication of the availability of Ruskin’s early writings prior or in addition to the major editions, PJR and Works. Most of these collections of Ruskin’s poems published toward the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth centuries, such as those edited by J. R. Tutin and by G. K. Chesterton, contain the same poems in the same order, and probably pirated from one another. Omitted are reprintings of Ruskin’s poems in later anthologies, which rely on the pioneering editions for their texts.
	In more recent times, brief quotations from unpublished works have occasionally appeared in critical and biographical studies that draw on archival research, such as Emerson’s RGI, Finley’s NC, and Hunt’s WS, and these are documented. Of course, acknowledgment is also given for the recent and textually more accurate editions of the early writings, those edited by Van Akin Burd and James Dearden. I have made extensive efforts to capture any first publication or quotation of a work, and I apologize in advance for oversights.

Editorial Notes on the Chronology Entries
	My aim has been to establish a comprehensive and accurate chronology; accordingly, the information supplied in the notes to the entries is mainly devoted to justifying the dating of each item and, especially for the longer works, to discussing sources and compositional history. Researchers should still consult PJR, Works, RFL, TLC, and other editions for textual and explanatory notes.
	Besides the obviously necessary revisions in earlier editors’ erroneous datings, this edition attempts a precision that Collingwood might have considered pointless or even pernicious under the ban of “instructions which have been given him.” My chronology makes available, as near as possible, the day-by-day plotting of Ruskin’s composing process, including all known minor works, finished or unfinished, and the detailed compositional histories of longer works, finished or unfinished. For example, it is revealing to learn what we can about the production of the frequently quoted, so-called Account of a Tour on the Continent (no. 180)—to learn about the order in which Ruskin drafted its various sections, about what he planned to draft but never executed, about the order in which he fair-copied and illustrated the sections, and about the point at which he abandoned fair-copying. Whatever conclusions critics choose to draw from such a reconstruction, its effects on interpretation ought to differ considerably from the misleading impression of polished arrangement that has come down to us through the Library Edition printing of the Account. Who has noticed, since the Library Edition and PJR fail to inform us, that even the title is not Ruskin’s, but a paraphrase of a remark of Ruskin’s about the manuscript in Praeterita? This is only a minor correction from manuscript evidence of considerable interest, including previously unpublished poetry for the Account.
	Detailed compositional histories become especially useful when compared against the family history available in RFL. My correcting the accepted date of a poem by a few months, or even by a year, may at first seem of little consequence to manuscripts that, in any event, are juvenile productions; however, the consequences can prove revolutionary when the revised dates and sequence of Ruskin’s early literary works are correctly dovetailed with the sequence of the family letters. Thereby, the process of Ruskin’s early writing can be seen in terms of an ongoing response to his parents and teachers and of their responses to him. Thus, revised and precise chronology opens up the socio- and psychodynamics of writing in this remarkable Victorian family, to an extent never previously available. One important phenomenon already mentioned, Ruskin’s angry response to Margaret’s efforts to “stop his rhyming,” has previously been obscured by the erroneous dates and textual omissions in the older editions.
	Of course, significant portions of Collingwood’s, Cook and Wedderburn’s, and Viljoen’s work are correct (and, in a few cases of subsequently lost or destroyed items, the only evidence we have). What is reliable in their work has been fully incorporated into mine—and, I hope, adequately and gratefully acknowledged—relieving the reader of having to juggle multiple bibliographies and chronologies.
	Where possible, the editorial notes identify Ruskin’s sources, which often help confirm the dating. The interest in Ruskin’s early literary influences—a topic that initially drew editors and biographers to the juvenilia—is refreshed by the unpublished work. “Athens” presents the earliest direct evidence of Ruskin’s interest in Wordsworth’s narrative poetry, such as The Excursion, an influence that critics have attached to “Iteriad” by inference alone. Byron proves the overwhelming influence on the earlier poetry, including Ruskin’s unexpected engagement with Manfred in a series of songs and fragments (nos. 123–27, 134a). The known Byronic influences—Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage and Don Juan, for example—emerge more prominently than ever.
	Sources for The King of the Golden River are usually identified in Ruskin’s early reading, especially Grimm’s fairy tales—or, in the form he read them, the German Popular Stories of 1823, illustrated by Cruikshank. The unpublished poetry shows not only that he read those tales but also how he read them. Critics have identified major Ruskinian themes in his copies and versifications of Cruikshank’s illustrations, the partially published “Puppet Show” (no. 35). The verses accompanying these drawings are often very slight; other unpublished poems, such as “Life” (no. 116), extend Ruskin’s fascination with the tales themselves. In numerous narrative fragments, “kelpies,” “brownies,” “water spirits,” and the like, stalk the verse. In these, Ruskin adapts Grimm to his own interests, usually sacrificing an incipient narrative to description and mood setting, which become the poem’s objective. These gothic poems also point to Ruskin’s knowledge of Scottish folklore.
	Scott, of course, is a constant presence. Battle scenes from the Waverley novels provide a frequent source of topics. Scholars also need full access to Ruskin’s imaginative engagement with the White Lady of The Monastery or the Maiden of the Mist in Anne of Geierstein. Although these nebulous and ambiguously threatening yet guiding female figures would haunt Ruskin’s imagination throughout his life, the poems containing them have previously been published, if at all, only as brief quotations (e.g., no. 46).
	Besides the influence of major writers, the unpublished Ruskin also reflects minor poets and fiction writers, not to mention obscure natural science magazine articles, geology primers, travel narratives, sensational tales in gift annuals, and the like. Occasionally, I have been able to dig up a forgotten source, such as the Reverend George Croly’s Tales of the Great St. Bernard, which gave Ruskin his idea for the “Chronicles of St. Bernard” (no. 216). A great help to me in identifying scientific sources has been Viljoen’s unpublished papers on the juvenilia.

The Selection and Transcription of Texts
	If revisionary criticism can be grounded in a fresh view of works as familiar (in edited form) as the Account of a Tour on the Continent, or in a more detailed compositional history of “Iteriad,” much more remains to be learned from works that Collingwood apparently deemed unpresentable because too fragmentary. My objective has been to publish all of Ruskin’s previously unpublished poems or poem fragments; poems that have previously appeared only in brief quotation, such as “The Monastery”; and significant unpublished prose. As remarked at the start of this introduction, this edition cannot print all of the unpublished early Ruskin. Perhaps I am prejudiced in favor of humanistic content, but I believe that Ruskin’s early sermons, for example, have earned pride of place, having supported important arguments by Viljoen (“Ruskin’s Testament”), Landow (ACTJR), and Finley (NC), all of whom studied the sermons in manuscript, whereas Ruskin’s mineral lists and discussions are less likely to reward the expense of publication. Ruskin himself, both in the 1830s and in later life, might well have disagreed with my priorities, and I do publish some of the more interesting mineralogical “articles.” In any case, for scholars who possess the requisite learning to discover gold where I can see only dull ore, I provide full descriptions, datings, and compositional histories of the mineral work, such as MSS IVC and IVD, and nos. 86, 98–99 and 118b, discussions that I trust will prove serviceable in the archives.
	This edition also on occasion republishes writing that was so invasively edited by Collingwood, Cook, and Wedderburn that the original texts remain unavailable in any acceptably scholarly sense. Here, too, principles of selection necessarily soften into judgment calls. In general, I have judged whether the elaboration of textual notes alone would fail to convey the sense of the original, without excessive labor on the reader’s part. It is clearer, for example, to print Ruskin’s rough-draft and fair-copy versions of his poem on Skiddaw and Lake Derwent, along with the Spiritual Times versions, than to attempt to describe how the previous editors altered those texts (no. 44). In some cases, however, a mere list of variants between manuscript and published versions does prove adequate, with no need to republish the work as a whole. Neither of these measures is necessary in respect to texts that have been published in later, more reliable texts, such as the poems in RFL or the 1830 diary in TLC.
	Where possible, I have resorted to summary textual remarks, such as “Ruskin’s version almost entirely unpunctuated”—i.e, as compared to the dense editorial punctuation given in PJR and Works. Summary remarks might leave the reader unable to determine whether a comma here or there belongs to editor or author. One wishes, of course, that Collingwood and the editors of the Library Edition had left Ruskin’s texts more to their own devices, obviating my need to weigh the value of summarizing editorial changes or listing them in detail. Since they did not, I have been forced to balance the costs of the reader’s patience and my own labor against the probable rewards of minutiae. I have continually reminded myself, however, that the early editors no doubt believed their procedures were reasonable, since it was not “worth while to treat these early verses with more importance than they possess,” and that they were spectacularly wrong. I have erred, therefore, on the side of thoroughness.
	Ruskin’s own variants between rough- and fair-copy versions are, of course, another matter, and I have listed these with care, resorting to summary textual remarks only when I can do so with clarity and accuracy.
	In cases of very long early works, such as “Iteriad” (no. 91) or the 1835 diary (no. 202), I have been forced to scale back my ambitions. For his informative and delightful 1969 edition of “Iteriad,” Dearden relied on Cook and Wedderburn’s full transcript of the poem prepared for the selections published in Works, and, therefore, he followed their interventions in punctuation and capitalization. In my own previous scholarship, I have preferred to quote Ruskin’s rough copy of the poem in MSS VI and VIII or his fair copy in MSS V and VII; however, I have not found sufficient cause to justify listing variants between the manuscript and published versions for 4,000 lines of verse! For such longer works, it is practical to supply only such details about compositional history as will guide researchers through these manuscripts in the archives.
	 In transcription of text, Burd recommends that editors faithfully reproduce Ruskin’s punctuation, since one can detect the pulse of thought in his handwriting. This holds true for the lack of punctuation in the early poems, which, Emerson remarks, opens up how Ruskin “bound his phrases each to each” and allowed “their movement [to jam] back and forth in the mind” (RGI 27). Open punctuation, which characterizes both the fair-copy and rough-draft writing, can be reproduced, but the studious lettering and fancy script governing the fair copies can be studied only in the original.
	Rough drafts present the usual problems of transcription. Conjectural readings are represented in square brackets and with a query mark: for example, W[ho(?)]. When I cannot make out a word at all, I supply simply the query [(?)]. Words that Ruskin crossed out are enclosed in angle brackets: for example, <through>. Double angle brackets << >> indicate letters or words written over by other letters or words, although I have more often found it clearer to write out such explanations in the textual notes. I prefer to let stand, often without comment, Ruskin’s remarkably rare misspellings and grammatical errors, supplying [sic] only when the problem might appear to be my error. One error I do consistently and silently correct is Ruskin’s doubled letters arising from dividing a word between lines, and doubled words occurring before and after page breaks. Except where noted otherwise, I retain Ruskin’s capitalizations, ampersands, and spaces in words like to day, every day, and every one. Omitted letters usually are meant to serve poetic meter, both in rough and fair copy; however, when a missing letter is clearly an error, as in the prose works, I supply it in braces { }.
	The prose works, such as “Harry and Lucy” and the sermons, present special problems in their accidental features, precisely because the fair copies are on such good behavior. I omit mention of Ruskin’s confusing end-line word divisions, since they were evidently determined by the scrupulous justification and by how much of a word happened to fit at the end of a line, with or without a hyphen. For the same reason, I ignore dots and fancy flourishes used to fill out and justify lines with the margin (unless, as in some cases, a flourish indicates the end of a paragraph) and other marks that serve only decorative or doodling purposes (e.g., a prominent dot raised above the line in the middle of a sentence where one would expect to find no punctuation, or stray horizontal lines that seem have occupied the writer in moments of abstraction). Where Ruskin omitted ending punctuation, I follow suit and supply extra space, as does Burd in RFL. I do indent paragraphs, although—whether to give the appearance of a solid block of text, or merely to save paper—Ruskin often indents only slightly or inserts a narrow extra line space at the end of a paragraph and brings the next one flush.
	A frequent oddity, perhaps related to Ruskin’s later idiosyncracy that Burd terms his “half-comma,” are periods in the place of commas in the middle of sentences. Conversely, commas often stand for periods at the end of sentences. This reversal is not consistent but occurs regularly enough that the modern reader should be made aware of it without having to translate the punctuation. My compromise is to substitute the customary punctuation in square brackets, so that the reader will understand that [,] means Ruskin used a period and that [.] means he used a comma. I substitute [.] for an ending comma, however, only when that punctuation is followed by a capital at the beginning of the following sentence; if independent clauses are strung together and divided by commas with no capitalization, I leave the commas.
	In years prior to using the period and comma reversal, Ruskin evidently has trouble writing commas on the baseline, and they float like apostrophes and quotation marks. These marks are regularly interpreted as commas.
	In the earliest writing, Ruskin appears to have developed some  punctuation peculiar to himself—as obscure, in some instances, as his later mineralogical code symbols. In the first “Harry and Lucy” (no. 3), Ruskin ends sentences with a mark that might be a question mark or might be an exclamation point, and that seems to serve both of those functions. I have interpreted this mark similarly to my treatment of Ruskin’s comma and period reversal, using [?] for the mark when the sense calls for a question, and [!] for the mark in other cases.
	As another system of his own in the earlier writing, especially in no. 3, Ruskin added closing quotation marks only to the ends of paragraphs, never paired with opening quotation marks. Not all the paragraphs with closing quotation marks are dialogue, and not all dialogue paragraphs have quotation marks. I suspect either that Ruskin misunderstood the symbol as indicating the end of a paragraph, or that he just liked the mark’s appearance. In either case, the mark would be best omitted altogether in transcription; however, I have retained it, since another reader might make better sense of it.
	Still more bizarre is Ruskin’s doubled period, which he uses in the second “Harry and Lucy” (no. 20) and still more frequently in “Eudosia” (no. 27). The mark certainly does not indicate an emphatic stop; the opposite is more likely, a two-point ellipsis suggesting a slight pause, in the way a dash would normally be used. Ruskin may have needed to invent his own sign to function as a dash, since he used dashes and hyphens for another purpose, namely, to fill out and “justify” lines. In nos. 20 and 27, a bracketed dash [—] is used in place of Ruskin’s double period (..).

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).

The Roman Numeral Designation of the Major Manuscripts
	In his “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems,” Collingwood assigned roman numerals to the major manuscripts. These no longer quite correctly represent, as he believed, the manuscripts’ chronological order. Since these roman numerals have been used by generations of scholars, however, I retain them to avoid confusion.
	In his “Preliminary Note,” Collingwood also omitted manuscripts that contain exclusively prose. For many manuscripts omitted by Collingwood, Cook and Wedderburn in their revision of the “Preliminary Note” and, later, Viljoen in her “Dating MSS. of Boyhood” adopted one of Collingwood’s roman numerals and added an arabic letter, thus fitting the manuscript into Collingwood’s framework according to a rough chronological order. I have retained these assignations also, again to avoid confusion. Finally, I have invented a few roman numeral designations of my own, to name major manuscripts not mentioned in any of the earlier bibliographies. A very rough chronology has thus been preserved, but the reader should never take a manuscript roman numeral as necessarily reflecting its place in the overall chronological scheme of the juvenilia. Only the arabic numerals in part 1 reliably reflect chronology.
	One manuscript at Yale has come to be known by two names. Collingwood’s MS XI, which he described as “an envelope containing collected loose papers, including poems,” was bound in 1889 (and rebound in 1924, with additions) to form the volume “Ruskin MS., Early Poems and Letters to His Father, 1827, 1844–51, 1859,” the first of the six blue morocco volumes of Ruskin family letters, now held by Yale. Collingwood’s designation of MS XI for this collection was retained by Cook and Wedderburn, although it had long since been bound by the time of the Library Edition (and had been bound even by the time PJR was released). This first volume of the bound letters, however, has also come to be known familiarly as RMS I (i.e., “Ruskin MS.,” vol. 1), the abbreviation used by Van Akin Burd in his edition of the RFL, where much of its contents is published (see RFL, lviii; Burd’s RMS II is the second volume of the bound letters). For consistency’s sake, I have chosen to use the earlier designation, MS XI, for RMS I.

The Provenance of the Major Manuscripts
	The provenance of most major manuscripts of the juvenilia is accounted for in the two Sotheby’s sales of Ruskin manuscripts removed from Brantwood, held on 24 July 1930 and 18 May 1931. Most remaining early manuscripts were probably sold during the final dispersal sale at Brantwood itself on 28, 30, and 31 July 1931. Other juvenile manuscripts took a more shadowy course to their present locations, both before and after the Sotheby’s and Brantwood estate sales. Since the provenances of most major manuscripts are interrelated, the main stories are told here; and, in part 2, the provenances of individual manuscripts are keyed to the following discussion by the shorthand terms, Sotheby’s 1930, Sotheby’s 1931, Viljoen, Sharp, and Huntington. Some particular manuscripts require further, specific details to explain their provenance, and these are relegated to their respective entries in part 2.
	Sotheby’s 1930.—The 24 July 1930 sale at Sotheby’s included several manuscripts of juvenilia as lot 112, items I–VI, each item contained in a blue-morocco covered slipcase. This lot ended up at the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, where the manuscripts remain in their original slipcases. At the same sale, Yale acquired lot 110, six blue morocco volumes of family letters (including MS XI, as remarked above in “The Roman Numeral Designation of the Major Manuscripts”). The two lots would have appeared to form a set in their matching blue morocco, as compared with the red buckram coverings that characterize bindings of other early manuscripts (see Sotheby’s 1931 below).
	The slipcases included in Sotheby’s lot 112 and their contents follow. The titles enclosed in quotation marks are stamped in gilt on the spines; the parenthetical identifications are mine.
“RUSKIN / MS. / *HARRY & LUCY / POEMS / &C*” (MSS I, II, III, IIIA, and IV).
“RUSKIN / MS. / JUVENILIA” (MSS IVA, IVB, and IVC).
“RUSKIN / MS. / POEMS / 1829–32 / 1902” (MS V).
“RUSKIN / MS. / ITERIAD / &c / 1902” (MS VII).
“RUSKIN / MS. / POEMS / ETC. / 1831–38.” (MS VIII).
“RUSKIN / MS. / POEMS / 1833.” (MS IX).
	In Collingwood’s time, forty years prior to the Sotheby’s sale, two of these, MSS VII and IX, were listed as “in the possession of Mrs. Arthur Severn” (PJR, 1:265, 266). Joan Severn also owned MS X (PJR, 1:267), which included the 1830 diary (MS XA), and which remained unbound until about 1901, when MSS X and XA were separately bound in red buckram (for their provenances, see Sotheby’s 1931 and Sharp, below). It can readily be seen that Ruskin set aside the major tour poems for Joan, since MS VII contains “Iteriad,” MS XA the 1830 diary—both of these describing the summer 1830 tour to the Lakes—and MSS IX and X the long poems describing the continental tours of 1833 and 1835. Joan must have possessed these since 1885, when Ruskin declared in Praeterita that he left “the unfinished folly [of MS IX] in Joanie’s care, that none but friends may see it” (Works, 35:81). (For another manuscript acquired later by Joan Severn, see part 2, MS IB, “Provenance.”)
	The blue morrocco bindings and slipcases and the arrangement of their contents were probably decided by Alexander Wedderburn, although one of the volumes of bound letters—one containing later letters, not MS XI—contains a notation raising the possibility that Ruskin himself had a hand in its arrangement (see part 2, MS XI, “Provenance” and “Description”). The choice of binding materials perhaps bears reference to the so-called “Ruskin calf,” the “purple calf, with gilt edges, tooled after an ecclesiastical fashion” that was used for the “Collected Works” edition, beginning in 1871 (Wise, 1:119), but this is my speculation. The volumes of letters were first bound in 1889 (for subsequent complications in their binding history, see part 2, MS XI, “Description”). Since the 1889 binding altered Collingwood’s description of MS XI (see Works, 2:534), Collingwood must have compiled his “Notes on the Original MSS. of the Poems” for PJR well before its publication in 1891.
	The slipcases containing the Red Books and notebooks do not bear dates for their construction. It seems likely that Wedderburn would have finished these arrangements, at least by the time Collingwood’s bibliographic “Note” was revised and expanded for the second volume of Works (1903). In fact, it seems likely that the blue morrocco slipcases were constructed much earlier, around 1889, along with the similar bindings for the letters, since Wedderburn is known to have used red buckram later, around the turn of the century (see, e.g., MS XA). At the very latest, the slipcases were finished by 1912, when the bibliography volume of Works identifies as “Juvenilia” the three Red Books that can still be found in the slipcase of that name (Works, 38:206).
	While there is no difficulty matching lots 110 and 112 as described in Sotheby Cat. 1930 with the manuscripts presently at Yale, conflicting clues obscure the manuscripts’ journey between London and New Haven. Lot 112, according to Charles Beecher Hogan, was “purchased by Mr. Charles Goodspeed,” the Boston book dealer, “and in turn purchased by Yale.” The volumes of letters, lot 110, Hogan goes on to remark, “were purchased by Yale at the Sotheby auction of July 24, 1930.” The latter comment suggests that Yale did not go through Goodspeed for the letters as they did for the juvenilia. Curiously, in his memoirs, while Goodspeed acknowledges acquiring the manuscripts of The King of the Golden River, Praeterita, and a portion of Fors Clavigera at the 1930 auction, he fails to mention the juvenilia. “Praeterita I kept myself,” from this sale; “the others I sold,” he summarizes (YB 267). If Hogan is correct, the “others” must have included lot 112 of the juvenilia, as well.
	Goodspeed may not have attended the sale himself, since, according to a handwritten notation in the copy of Sotheby Cat. 1930 at Yale, the sale of lot 112 (the juvenilia) was awarded to “Allen” for £260, and of lot 110 (the letters) to the same person for £520 (pp. 18, 20). “Allen,” as James Dearden has suggested to me, was probably Hugh Allen, a son of Ruskin’s publisher George Allen. Hugh Allen’s part in these sales can be gathered from a letter to J. H. Whitehouse, the collector, from Whitehouse’s agent, Ralph Brown, on the occasion of a later sale at Arthur Severn’s London home (15–16 July 1931, 9 Warwick Square): “we are having the benefit of the assistance of our friend Mr Hugh Allen, and his help has been invaluable,” as compared with “the lack of interest shown by the Severn family in all matters pertaining to Ruskin” (RBB, 87).
	If Hogan is correct that Goodspeed took some part in these transactions, his role must have been minimal, in comparison with Allen’s. The earliest report on Yale’s acquisitions from the July 1930 sale, published only five months later in January 1931, treats the juvenilia as a single “collection” along with the letters, which Allen purchased directly for Yale. One wonders, in fact, whether Hogan can be correct about Goodspeed’s involvement, for if Allen bid on lot 112 for Goodspeed, why did he not act for the Boston dealer also in acquiring the manuscripts of King, Fors, and Praeterita—the manuscripts that Goodspeed acknowledges in YB, and that Hogan lists as coming to Yale through Goodspeed and Sotheby (pp. 65, 68)? These, rather, were knocked down to “Stevens B. F.” (Sotheby Cat. 1930, annotated copy at Yale, pp. 21, 24, 25).	Somewhat confusingly, Hogan (67, n. 4) says that the Proserpina manuscript and studies “were sold at Sotheby’s on May 18, 1931, and came to Yale by purchase from Mr. Goodspeed.” To be more precise, the Proserpina studies and part of the manuscript were sold as lot 117 in 1930 (Sotheby Cat. 1930, 24), and the remainder of the Proserpina manuscript was sold to Goodspeed as part of lot 29 in 1931 (Sotheby Cat. 1931, 7); apparently, the two lots combined went to Yale. This is B. F. Stevens, Ralph Brown’s firm. It is quite possible that B. F. Stevens was able to represent Goodspeed at the sale, and not the firm’s rival customer Whitehouse, since Whitehouse himself attended and bid in his own name (RBB 49; Sotheby Cat. 1930, annotated copy at Yale, e.g., 19, 22, 24). To all appearances, however, Hugh Allen acted directly for Yale respecting both lots 110 and 112, and Hogan is mistaken about Goodspeed’s involvement. Without further documentation, the question must remain open.
	Another item in the 1930 sale that falls within the scope of this edition is Ruskin’s 1835 diary, which formed part of lot 111, and which was acquired by Whitehouse. Dearden has sorted out the complicated identification of the diaries in RBB (49–50, 103).
	Throughout this edition, the provenance of all these manuscripts is noted in shorthand as Sotheby’s 1930.
	Sotheby’s 1931.—Much clearer documentation traces juvenilia included in lot 27 of the second Sotheby’s sale, 18 May 1931. Item I of lot 27 is MS VI; item II is MS IA; item III is MS X; item IV is MS XB; and item V is MS IVD (Sotheby Cat. 1931, 6). (A significant item formerly in MS X, the 1830 diary, had been separated prior to the sale. See TLC, 4; RBB, 49; and Sharp below.) In his memoirs, Goodspeed mentions purchasing the items in this lot (YB 267–68), and he later issued an undated catalog of Goodspeed’s Book Shop listing the entirety of lot 27 as “manuscripts 1825–1840” (Goodspeed, Cat., items 79–83, pp. 18–22). Goodspeed was a major bidder at the 18 May sale, buying not just “one or two more manuscripts” (RBB, 138) but at the very least lots 27–29 and 31, with each of these lots comprising numerous and varied manuscripts.
	Three of the early manuscripts that came into Goodspeed’s possession (MSS IVD, VI, XB) were sold in 1939 to the Princeton University Library, along with several other items that he had acquired at the 1931 sale—a quite ambitious purchase by the library.	The final item in Thorp’s description consists of six notebooks, including two containing studies for The Seven Lamps of Architecture. I have not been able to examine these, and they are difficult to trace in the published accounts. I find no such specific listing in Goodspeed, Cat., unless the six were included in item 40, sixteen “Sketch Books” (p. 11); however, only eight of the sixteen were known to have remained to Goodspeed in 1933, when the dealer offered them along with all his Ruskin drawings to Whitehouse, and Whitehouse is believed to have acquired this lot in 1936 (RBB 138–39). I am also unable to find a listing specifically matching the Princeton notebooks in the Sotheby’s catalogs. They might have formed part of lot 122, “Miscellaneous Note Books,” from the 1930 sale, of which Hogan lists only nine as coming to Yale through Goodspeed (pp. 67–68; and see n. 31, above). The notebooks might also have derived from the 20 May 1931 Sotheby’s sale of Ruskin drawings, at which Goodspeed was represented by Ralph Brown (RBB, 138; and see, e.g., Sotheby & Co., Catalogue of the Collection of Pictures and Drawings, formerly the property of the late Professor John Ruskin . . . , 20 May 1931, item 9). Prior to the Princeton purchase, Goodspeed had offered all his Ruskin drawings to Whitehouse, who finally agreed to a purchase in 1936 (RBB, 136–39). Although the correspondence suggests that Goodspeed sent all the drawings in his possession for Whitehouse’s approval and that Whitehouse retained the entire lot, in 1944 Goodspeed was still able to donate fourteen “drawings and paintings” to Yale, following the dealer’s 1941 fire.
	A decade after the Sotheby sale, the items remaining from lot 27 that were not sold to Princeton remained in Goodspeed’s house when it caught fire in February 1941 (Hogan, 69). Having rescued many books and manuscripts from the catastrophe, Goodspeed began making gifts of Ruskin manuscripts to Yale, starting in March 1941 with the manuscript of Praeterita. The items remaining from the 1931 purchase of juvenilia (MSS IA, X) were also fortunately rescued, and these were donated to Yale in 1942 and 1943. The contents of MSS IA and X had been disassembled from Wedderburn’s bindings, many individual items had been charred around the edges, and a few may have been destroyed completely.	These acquisition notices in YULG mention only one other manuscript, the Laws of Fiesole, of those that Goodspeed purchased in 1931 and that have not been otherwise accounted for in the preceding discussion (see also part 2, MS IA, “Description”). . . . [information to come] The reconstruction of the contents of MSS IA and X, before and after Goodspeed’s fire, requires detailed discussion, which is provided in part 2.
	Throughout this edition, the preceding discussion is designated in shorthand as Sotheby’s 1931.
	Viljoen.—The provenance of the so-called Sermon Books (MSS IIA–E) is not involved with the Sotheby sales, whose catalogs do not list the handmade booklets. Their provenance first emerges when the third of the five booklets was deposited in the Ruskin Museum in Coniston, the village across Coniston Lake from Brantwood. Presumably, the booklet was donated as part of the village museum’s core collection since the booklet was already there when W. G. Collingwood facsimilied one of its pages in 1903, only two years after the museum’s founding. Today, the museum copy has been replaced by a photocopy and the original moved for safekeeping to the Cumbria Record Office in Kendal.
	The remaining four Sermon Books came into the possession of J. S. Ladd-Thomas, a prominent Methodist churchman and dean of the School of Theology at Temple University, Philadelphia, from 1943 to his retirement in 1958. Ladd-Thomas collected manuscripts in religion, many of which he left to the School of Theology Library, an interest that probably attracted him to the Sermon Books. Welsh by birth, and educated at University College in London, Ladd-Thomas emigrated to America in 1897, but, according to his obituaries, he frequently returned to Europe to serve his church in various capacities. On one of these occasions, he must have made the visit to Brantwood that led to his acquisition of the Sermon Books.
	Remarks by Ladd-Thomas preserved among Helen Viljoen’s papers suggest that he obtained the manuscripts prior to the Sotheby auctions and the following 1931 dispersal sale at Brantwood. The remarks, however, raise more questions than they answer since Ladd-Thomas remembered only “that these mss. were sent him after he visited Coniston and met someone he describes as one of Ruskin’s neighbors—not Mr. Collingwood, though this neighbor lived about a mile down the road. Around 1930, this man sent Dean Thomas this material as a gift. Dean Thomas did not recall his name” (HGVP, file labeled “Ruskin’s Sermons as a Boy”). James Dearden has suggested to me that nearby neighbors likely to have had access to Ruskin manuscripts, other than the Collingwoods, might have been the Hilliard family. Mrs. J. C. Hilliard, a sister of Pauline Trevelyan and married to the Reverend J. C. Hilliard, became a “chief comfort” to Ruskin in his later years. She was given the penultimate manuscript of Modern Painters II, so it seems logical that Ruskin might also have made her a gift of the Sermon Books, which contained the doctrine of his youth supporting that volume. Mrs. Hilliard’s Modern Painters manuscripts was inherited by Frederick, the eldest son of the family (Works, 4:361), who also possessed other manuscripts relevant to religious topics or to reminiscence of Ruskin’s childhood—portions of St. Mark’s Rest, Deucalion, and Fiction, Fair and Foul (Works, 24:lviii, 26:xlvii, 34:xxxv).
	That the four Sermon Books had remained with the Hilliard family would explain why Cook and Wedderburn seem to have been aware of only the one booklet in the Coniston museum (see Works, 38:206). Possibly the Hilliards were responsible, too, for donating the one booklet to the Coniston Museum. The problem with this suggestion is that the dates do not chime with Ladd-Thomas’s account. Frederick lived with his sister Ethel at Tent Cottage, which does fit the description of a home “about a mile down the road” from Brantwood; however, Frederick cannot be the “man” of Ladd-Thomas’s acquaintance around 1930, since he died in 1913, and, in any case, he and his sister had vacated Tent Lodge in 1908. If the Hilliard family is credible as owners, one must imagine Ladd-Thomas striking an acquaintance earlier than 1930—a bond established on the strength of Ladd-Thomas’s church connections, Hilliard Sr. having been a clergyman—and Ladd-Thomas being sent the Sermon Books much later. (Ethel was still alive in 1930, at which time she moved from Ascot to Uxbridge.)
	If the Sermon Books did not come from Hilliards, suspicion points to Myles Wilkinson, the Brantwood factotum who is known to have made unauthorized gifts and sales of Ruskin materials (RBB, 48, 196). But Brantwood Lodge, where Wilkinson presumably lived with his aunt and uncle, cannot by any stretch be described as “a mile down the road.” The affair remains mysterious, above all that Ladd-Thomas would have forgotten the name of a person, who was on sufficiently familiar terms to make him a present of Ruskin manuscripts.
	The Sermon Books first gained serious scholarly scrutiny when Ladd-Thomas loaned them to Helen Viljoen, who later acquired them outright as the gift from Ladd-Thomas’s daughter, Mildred Durling, presumably following the dean’s death in 1959. When Viljoen received the booklets, they had been docketed as “Sermons Written by Ruskin as a Child” and, on an accompanying envelope, as “Reports of Sermons, written by John Ruskin as a child. One specimen is in the Coniston Museum.” Ruskin himself did not entitle the Sermon Books.
	Recognizing that the Sermon Books represented Ruskin’s first extended, mature religious exercise, Viljoen prepared an edition of the sermons, which she entitled as “Ruskin’s Sermons on the Pentateuch and His Religious Life.” The edition was intended to complement her Ruskin’s Scottish Heritage, and the two books together would provide a foundation for her full-scale biography of Ruskin. She was unable to publish the edition of the Sermons, however, so it awaited pairing with the biography, which itself never reached completion. On Viljoen’s death, the Sermon Books were donated as part of the Sharp Collection to the Pierpont Morgan Library. Her own papers were bequeathed to Van Akin Burd, who published her conclusions about the Sermons in an article-length summary account (“Ruskin’s Testament”). Burd has since passed on all the Viljoen papers to the Morgan Library.
	The provenance of manuscripts owned by Viljoen (but not originally owned by Sharp) is designated as Viljoen.
	Sharp.—The principal local Lake District dealer to profit directly from Brantwood, both before and during the final dispersal sales of late July 1931, was T. H. Telford of Grasmere; and the most important collector of the juvenilia to acquire from Telford, as well as from Brantwood directly and from other sources, was F. J. Sharp, a craftsman, teacher, and disciple of Ruskin’s socialist theories. Sharp’s career has been described most recently and extensively by Van Akin Burd in an article for the Book Collector, and the collector’s shrewdness and discernment have previously been established by such testimonials as Helen Viljoen’s catalog for her 1965 exhibition of the Sharp Collection at Queens College in New York. In RBB, Dearden tells the story of Sharp’s quarrel with Whitehouse and of the dispersal of the collection after Sharp’s death (182–86).
	As remarked earlier (“Approaches to Bibliography and Editing of the Early Manuscripts”), collecting Ruskin juvenilia seems to have been a peculiarly American preoccupation during the earlier decades of the century. The exceptions were Haddon Clifford Adams and, especially, F. J. Sharp. Sharp was the only English collector to acquire significantly in the early manuscripts and, it is worth noting, the major English collector to work apart from the inner circle of Ruskinians. For Viljoen, Sharp’s pride in concentrating on the juvenilia and his “recognition of their importance” provided a special “token of his insight.”
	Included in Sharp’s large collection were many of Ruskin’s childhood books, drawings, some stray juvenile manuscripts, and, most importantly, MSS IB and XA, and the 1830 diary formerly included in MS X (for this manuscript’s former association with Joan Severn, see above, Sotheby’s 1930; and part 2, MS IB, “Provenance”). Sharp bequeathed his collection of manuscripts to Helen Viljoen, and she was also given books and drawings from the collection. Viljoen supplemented and finally entrusted the larger portion of the Sharp collection, including the juvenile manuscripts, to the Pierpont Morgan Library. Viljoen gave the books owned by Ruskin, including his childhood books, to the Beinecke. The provenance of manuscripts originally owned by Sharp (as opposed to items, such as the Sermon Books, that Viljoen added to the Sharp Collection) is designated throughout this edition as Sharp.
	Huntington.—Only two early manuscripts are held by the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery in San Marino, California, the “Practical Geometry” (MS XIA) and the Fragment on the Expedition of Darius into Scythia (part 1, “Undatable,” no. C). A third, a group of autograph letters to Edward Clayton published in part as Letters Addressed to a College Friend, begin in 1839 and therefore lie just beyond the scope of this edition. Owing to the obscurity enshrouding the provenance of these and other manuscripts that form the core collection of Ruskin at the Huntington, a general introductory note proves more convenient than discussing the provenance of the two manuscripts separately.
	The earliest date when MS XIA can be definitely proved to have been in the Huntington Library—i.e., a date for which a record exists of the manuscript having been charged out—is 1955, at least twenty-five years after its presumed acquisition. In “A Checklist of Pre-Raphaelite Manuscripts in the Huntington Library,” Sara S. Hodson describes the provenance of MS XIA as “unknown, but acquired before 1930.” The basis for this upper limiting date is not specified, which Hodson assigns also to some other items in the Ruskin collection. In any case, given that limiting date, the following possibilities can be hazarded on the basis of what can be more definitely established about the provenance of the core collection of Ruskin at the Huntington.
	A centerpiece of the core collection is Ruskin’s 1872–87 correspondence with his Coniston neighbor, Susanna Beever, along with other letters and documents relating to the publication of that correspondence as Hortus Inclusus, edited by Albert Fleming. This collection cannot be proved to have any association with MS XIA. I have searched Ruskin’s letters to Beever in vain for clues that he might have given her the juvenile notebook. He does frequently mention loaning her other books, pictures, and manuscripts, however; and the filial, even infantile, stance that Ruskin adopted toward Beever suggests a greater likelihood that juvenilia was associated with this collection than with the library’s other pre–1930 acquisitions.
	If we entertain a possible connection with the Ruskin/Beever collection, the acquisition of MS XIA may be pushed back even further than 1930. According to the Huntington’s earliest summary report of the Ruskin Collection, the 874 pieces in the Ruskin/Beever collection “have been in the Library since 1925. No source is known.” At a later, unspecified time, an unknown person scored through this remark and corrected, in ink, “Purchased from Goodspeed’s, September 1923.” This document makes no mention of MS XIA; “874 pieces” seems to refer only to letters. For that matter, however, the summary report fails to list any Ruskin manuscript besides the Ruskin/Beever correspondence as forming the “John Ruskin Collection,” even though the core collection is known to have included other manuscripts, such as several that were purchased from W. S. Allen in 1925 and from William Bixby in 1918. Thus, omissions from the earliest summary report prove only that the library’s Ruskin materials remained uncataloged for many years.	Thus, the Huntington’s summary report of the Ruskin collection proves only that cataloging proceeded very slowly. Other manuscripts besides the Ruskin/Beever correspondence must have been present in the library when the first two-page summary report was prepared, since Hodson lists, for example, several items that were purchased from W. S. Allen in 1925 (“Checklist,” 194–96 [items 390, 392, 398, 402, 404]). One suspects, in fact, that it was a confusion with the Allen lot that led the author of the original summary report to claim that the Ruskin/Beever letters “have been in the Library since 1925.”
	Regrettably, no record of a 1923 Goodspeed transaction can presently be found. In one respect, the year 1923 is surprising, since, in his autobiography, the Boston book dealer mentions no acquisitions of manuscripts prior to the Sotheby sales of 1930 and 1931. Goodspeed does remark, however, that, for many years during trips to England, he routinely stocked up on Ruskin first editions to supply a steady market in America (YB, 262). Perhaps during one of these expeditions, he was able to acquire the Ruskin/Beever collection. In another respect, September 1923 is not surprising as the date of acquisition, since Albert Fleming, the heir of Beever’s Ruskin correspondence and the editor of Hortus Inclusus, died on 21 March 1923 at his home in Skelwith Bridge near Ambleside.
	Prior to coming (putatively) into Goodspeed’s hands, the Ruskin/Beever correspondence is last known to have been owned by Fleming, who removed the letters from Beever’s home. Although letters and manuscripts related to Hortus have ended up widely scattered among collections in England and America, the Huntington obviously holds the main lode that belonged to Fleming, since it includes his own correspondence and other documents concerning the publication and revision of Hortus.	Fleming did turn over the letters to E. T. Cook for editing in the Library Edition, but, especially in view of his thorny relations with Cook and Wedderburn, it is highly unlikely that he would have relinquished ownership. In his introduction to the volumes of letters for the Library Edition, Cook is careful to specify that Beever “bequeathed her Ruskin letters” to Fleming, who “has some nine hundred of them” (Works 36:cviii).
	The Lake District connection with Fleming is highly suggestive for the provenance not only of these letters but also of Ruskin juvenilia that might have accompanied them in a sale. Another collector who depended largely on Lake District sources to amass his Ruskin collection, Haddon Clifford Adams, owned a holograph preface to Hortus Inclusus as well as some juvenilia (RBB 198, and see MS IC, “Provenance”). This is not to imply that Adams might have served as Goodspeed’s source for the Ruskin/Beever collection, for Adams would surely have kept such a find for himself. Rather, the intersection between the Adams collection and Goodspeed’s putative 1923 sale to the Huntington points to Lake District sources. These could include Fleming himself, who might have made arrangements for the collection before he died; an Ambleside dealer, Arnold Varty, who is definitely known to have offered Ruskin/Beever material—Beever’s sketchbook—although Dearden suggests that Varty would have acquired this sketchbook later than the time I am discussing, at the 1931 Brantwood sale (RBB 118–19); T. H. Telford, the Grasmere dealer, who did acquire materials from Brantwood prior to the sales of the 1930s, and who is known to have held at least a few Ruskin/Beever letters (RBB 212–13); and, at Brantwood itself, Violet Severn and the Wilkinson family, who sold items directly to collectors, including Adams, prior to the authorized auctions (see above, Viljoen and Sharp).
	If the Huntington’s Ruskin juvenilia did not come to the library along with the purchase through Goodspeed of the Ruskin/Beever/Fleming materials, it might have been connected with other sources of the Ruskin collection acquired “before 1930.” The most intriguing of these is one listed by Hodson as “William K. Bixby, 1918, through George D. Smith” (“Checklist,” 197, 198, 201 [items 406, 408, 421 442–43]). Bixby was a St. Louis industrialist and collector, who, probably in 1902, acquired from George Allen the important manuscripts of The Seven Lamps of Architecture; two essays of Unto This Last; and, most significant for our purposes, twenty-four autograph Ruskin letters to Edward Clayton, twenty-two of which were published in 1894 as Letters Addressed to a College Friend. These were sold as part of Bixby’s private collection to Henry Huntington in 1918.	Bixby’s ownership of these manuscripts is confirmed by the Library Edition, if sketchily, although here Bixby’s source is identified as George Allen, rather than as George D. Smith (of Smith, Elder, Ruskin’s publisher prior to Allen), named in the Huntington record. For the Clayton letters, Bixby is identified by name as the owner, while the seller is not identified, although Allen was the publisher of the 1894 volume (Works 1: 400; see also Sidney M. B. Coulling, “Two Unpublished Letters of John Ruskin to Edward Clayton,” Huntington Library Quarterly 27 [1963]: 87–92). The reverse is the case in the Library Edition volumes of Seven Lamps and Unto This Last, where the “American collector” is left anonymous, while Allen is identified as the seller (Works 8: 278, 17: cxiii). The editors attach a specific date of sale, 1902, only to the Seven Lamps manuscript.
	Bixby’s group of Clayton letters provides the nearest relative in the Ruskin collection to the prose translation from Herodotus, the Fragment on the Expedition of Darius into Scythia, whose provenance is otherwise “unknown; in library 1961” (Hodson, “Checklist,” 195 [item 395]). As discussed in the note on dating this manuscript in part 1 (“Undatable,” no. C), the fragment may have been written between 1837 and 1840 at Oxford, where Ruskin’s study of Herodotus inspired the composition of such poems as “The Tears of Psammenitus,” which he discusses in the Clayton letters (Works 1:434–44). The topics and dates of the fragment and the Clayton letters roughly correspond, although no documentation establishes a shared provenance.
	Other pre–1930 provenances of Ruskin material at the Huntington furnish no clues about early manuscripts. Most prominent is a 1925 lot acquired from William S. Allen. He had been disposing of his family’s Ruskin inheritance since the second decade of the century (RBB 34), and, were it not for the attribution of the Ruskin/Beever collection to Goodspeed, the Allens could be considered a logical source of that collection, since George Allen published Hortus Inclusus. The Allen sale to the Huntington, however, appears to be solidly established as consisting of manuscripts of the 1850s and afterwards, not letters or earlier manuscripts.

Descriptions of the Major Manuscripts
	The descriptions of manuscripts in part 2 are self-explanatory. Readers might first consult “A Preliminary Descriptive Overview of the Juvenilia,” above, for explanation of certain recurrent physical features, e.g., Red Book.