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 My objective has been to publish all of Ruskin’s previously unpublished poems or poem fragments; poems that have previously appeared only in brief quotation, such as “The Monastery”; and significant unpublished prose. As remarked at the start of this introduction, this edition cannot print all of the unpublished early Ruskin.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 (..).