Richard Herne Shepherd
	Compiler of the first bibliography of Ruskin, The Bibliography of Ruskin: A Bibliographical List Arranged in Chronological Order of the Published Writings in Prose and Verse of John Ruskin, M.A., which went through five editions: the first, “from 1834 to the Present Time (October 1878)”; the second . . . ; the third . . . ; the fourth, “revised and enlarged,” “from 1834 to 1879”; and the fifth, “revised and enlarged,” “from 1834 to 1881.” Only the fifth edition??? shows a publisher’s imprint (Elliot Stock, 62 Paternoster Row, London). This edition drops an August 1879 preface by the author along with a dedication to Henry Fleetwood Backhouse, “who first suggested to the compiler the idea of this little bibliography,” which had been included in the fourth (and all earlier?) editions. Presumably, therefore, earlier editions were supported by Backhouse??? According to Collins, “Shepherd,” some of his works were published by his brother, who ran a bookshop in Holborn under the name of Frank Hollings.
	Shepherd’s preface to the Ruskin bibliography declares: “the materials for [the bibliography’s] compilation have taken many years to collect, and much anxious labour has been spent on its preparation and arrangement. No entry has in any case been made at second-hand; but always with the actual book, pamphlet, magazine, or journal described lying before the compiler,” and the preface ends by thanking a long list individuals for supplying the compiler with publications (Shepherd, Bibliography of Ruskin . . . (from 1834 to 1879), p. vii; earlier eds.???).
	As discussed respecting bibliographic study of modern authors, including their juvenilia, and collecting of modern authors, including their juvenilia, Shepherd was among the early “far-sighted professionals” who, in John Carter’s estimation, helped steer the trend in modern-author collecting that emerged toward the end of the nineteenth century by compiling the first important bibliographies (Carter,Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting 23; and see Sadleir, “Development of Bibliographical Study” 149). In addition to the Ruskin list, he also compiled bibliographies of Dickens (1880), Thackeray (1881), Carlyle (1881), Swinburne (1887), Tennyson (1896), and Coleridge (1900) (the last two published posthumously). Although little more than hand lists, rather than descriptive or analytical bibliographies in a modern sense, they aspired to exhaustiveness, and Shepherd’s thoroughness led him to uncover early writing by Ruskin and others that was then little known.
	In addition to ferreting out modern authors’ early work for bibliographic description, Shepherd edited a wide range of juvenilia and youthful writing for publication. Of Tennyson, he published in 1866 and 1879 (2d ed.)Tennysoniana, which reprinted and commented on early work, starting with Poems by Two Brothers (1827), and moving through the Cambridge prize poem, and into the poetry associated with Arthur Hallam; and in 1870, he printed the poet’s suppressed, early The Lover’s Tale. In 1872 (new ed., 1878), he reconstructed Charles and Mary Lamb’s Poetry for Children, and, in 1878, Earlier Poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The latter is a typographic reproduction of Barrett’s girlhood volume, An Essay on Mind with Other Poems (1826), and it is filled out with the miscellaneous poems from Barrett’s Prometheus Bound volume of 1833. In this same busy year, 1878, he collected The Early Poems of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and he included Moore’s juvenilia along with a number of later fugitive pieces in Prose and Verse . . . by Thomas Moore. In 1887 came Thackeray’s turn, with Sultan Stork and other early sketches, along with a republication of Shepherd’s bibliography of the novelist.
	Likewise pertinent to Shepherd’s interest in youthful writing are his editions of Blake: Songs of Innocence and of Experience (1866, 1868), the early Poetical Sketches (1868), and an edition of 1874 combining the previous editions. In part, the Blake editions must be considered as reflecting the tradition of their publisher, Basil Montagu Pickering, as much as the taste of their editor. Pickering’s father was the influential publisher, William Pickering, who published the first regular typography edition of Blake’s Songs (Keynes, William Pickering 35). At the same time, the editions were published in the spirit of Victorian sentiment for childhood, as Shepherd’s preface to the Songs makes clear:
[The Songs] will be cherished by children for their purity and simplicity, and by grown-up men and women for the deeper meanings which always underlie the most simple of them:--
“Thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears.” 
	There is something sublime in the spirit of childlike innocence and Christian rebuke of worldliness and hardheartedness that pervades these productions. [Blake] sums up all the commandments under the precept, “Little children, love one another. For love is the fulfilling of the law. He that loveth not, knoweth not God; for God is love.” (Blake, Songs [1866], xi; Blake, Songs [1868], xi)
That Shepherd thought of the Songs as a child’s text, and as text for drawing adults closer to childhood, is proven, moreover, by his own poems. HisTranslations from Charles Baudelaire, with a Few Original Poems includes a lyric that evidently accompanied his presentation of his edition to a little girl, “To Florence at Haslemere, with Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’”:
	Accept, dear child, these songs of one whose Muse
For happy children piped her sweetest lays, 
Nor deem’d their suffrages her lightest praise
Who hold Heaven’s kingdom as their proper dues.
And wilt thou with the lyric gift refuse
His thanks, whose drooping spirits thou couldst raise
By airy gestures, graceful as a fay’s
Dancing at eve in shady avenues?

	With rapt delight I see you ponder long
The gentle words of one so pure of blame,
Who loved the right, who scorn’d and loathed the wrong— (Shepherd, Translations 89)
This and other poems concerning children’s reading and writing—another presentation to Florence, this time of Kingsley’s Water Babies; valentine poems; even a poem presenting one of his own juvenile poems to a friend who knew him as a boy—show that, in editing the juvenilia and youthful writing of modern authors, Shepherd was not motivated solely by the money to be made from rescuing and publishing orphaned materials.
	It is true that, to make his living Shepherd capitalized on the taste for collecting moderns. The publisher of his Blake, Lamb, and Longfellow editions, Basil Montagu, was among the first to cater to the growing taste for collecting modern authors, listing Tennyson first editions for sale as early as 1870 (Carter, Taste and Technique in Book-Collecting 22). Some of these publications qualified as piracies and got Shepherd into scrapes. Tennyson, who had been irritated by Shepherd’s Tennysoniana and expressed his wishes against publication, drew the line at The Lover’s Tale and, in1875–76, adopted legal proceedings to have the edition recalled (Paden, “Tennyson’s The Lover’s Tale, Shepherd, and Wise”). In 1878, an Athenaeum reviewer charged Shepherd with chicanery in connection with his edition of the Lambs’ Poetry for Children. This time, Shepherd exonerated himself, winning damages against the periodical (Collins, “Shepherd”), but the exchange between Shepherd and the reviewer suggests that the editor had at least been entangled in a deception by the printer (rev. of Poetry for Children; Shepherd, “Lamb’s Poetry for Children”).
	Evidence about Shepherd’s career and intentions is mixed. Scholarship has cleared him of the suggestions of forgery that, after Shepherd’s death, Thomas J. Wise sought to attach to his Tennyson piracies, in an attempt to set him up as a decoy for detection of Wise’s own forgeries (Paden, “Tennyson’s The Lover’s Tale, Shepherd, and Wise”). Partington remembers him as a drunkard but a dedicated scholar (Partington, Forging Ahead ??). His scholarship was not hackwork. Tennysoniana contained serious, if not profound, efforts at criticism, reaching beyond biographical commentary to examine subject matter, compare the poetic language of earlier and later works, point out patterns of revision, and research critical reception.
	<start>Clearly, Shepherd was an assiduous and thorough researcher. . . . (xref the bibliography discussion)
	One has to point to the ambiguities. . . .
	Close replication was evidently a desired feature in these editions. The Barrett volume could not be mistaken for forgery, since Shepherd’s preface explains the venture; and the miscellaneous poems are set consistent with the typography of the Essay, rather than with their original, separate state. But in every other respect, the printer took considerable trouble to replicate the original. Even the miscellaneous poems, while not set in their original type, maintain the same lines per page as in the original Prometheus volume. Replicationrep filled out with. 
; and he is, on the other hand, characterized by Collins and by Partington, Forging Ahead, as existing on the margins of conventionally respectable literary society. While the consensus among recent scholars has been to exonerate him from the charge of forgery that Thomas J. Wise strove to transfer to him, his near-facsimile editions of modern authors’ early works contributed to the ambiguous atmosphere in which, according to Barker and Collins, A Sequel, forgers like Wise and H. Buxton Forman could successfully work. Like them, too, he possessed a remarkable shrewdness for searching out obscure, long-forgotten publications.
	In the Browning edition, he cites journal and encyclopedia articles commending the early verse—sources that perhaps put him on the trail of such scarce early volumes in the first place. Similarly, in the Bibliography of Ruskin, entries on the early publications are sometimes annotated with quotations from Ruskin identifying or legitimating the piece. For example, no. 1 in the Bibliography—the two 1834 essays published in The Magazine of Natural History, “Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine,” and “Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc”—is glossed by a footnote from the so-called Instructions in Use of the Rudimentary Series for the Drawing Schools at Oxford (1872), remarking that “Mr. Loudon was the first literary patron who sent words of mine to be actually set up in print, in his Magazine of Natural History, when I was sixteen” (Works 21:243n). No. 5, The Poetry of Architecture (1839), extracts a nugget from Ruskin’s 1878 essay on W. H. Harrison, “My First Editor: An Autobiographical Reminiscence”: “the series of essays written about this time for the Architectural Magazine, under the signature of Kata Phusin, contain sentences nearly as well put together as any I have done since” (Works 34:97).
	What is remarkable about these annotations is the extent of sleuthing they indicate. In quoting from the Instructions, not only does Shepherd refer to an obscure footnote; the pamphlet itself must have been difficult to obtain, having never been issued for sale, but printed only for students of the Drawing Schools. The essay on Harrison, while familiar now to Ruskin scholars, and made widely available as reprinted in On the Old Road (1885), was accessible to Shepherd in 1878 only as a preface to Harrison’s reminiscences in the Dublin University Magazine.
	considering that in 1878 Praeterita had not begun publication, and a connected narrative of Ruskin’s early years existed only in portions of Fors. (But was the Adele story there? How did Shepherd know about the 1850 Poems?)