Hand
	MS I is written entirely in large penciled print, more childish than that in any other Red Book; nonetheless, Ruskin was already carefully imitating published books by justifying the margins; devising a title page, frontispiece, and colophon; labeling his drawings as “plates”; and filling out the volume with the MS I Poetry Anthology, which he entitled “Poetry.”
Composition and Sources
	MS I shows more uniform control over the entirety of its contents than tended to be the case in later Red Books, which grew more miscellaneous with successive uses at different times. For example, the title page appears more nearly to serve for the entire Red Book than is the case in MS III and MS IIIA, which likewise begin with volumes of “Harry and Lucy,” but which also contain much else that is altogether unrelated to the Edgeworthian narrative. By comparison, the MS I Poetry Anthology, which fills out MS I, is not an entirely haphazard miscellany. The first of these poems, “When furious up from mines the water pours” [“The Steam Engine”], condenses a portion of The Botanic Garden by Erasmus Darwin, thus sustaining the Enlightenment, entrepreneurial spirit of the immediately preceding “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 1, which imitates works by Maria Edgeworth and Jeremiah Joyce.
	As a visual artifact, MS I imitates the appearance of books Ruskin would have known: the title page is modeled directly on Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded; and the “plates” imitated any number of books in the Ruskin family library (Edgeworth’s volumes were not illustrated). Most of Ruskin’s “plates” bear no apparent relation with the text, but the frontispiece, “Frontispiece” [Plate] “1” [“Harry and Lucy” Vol 1], which features “a rainbow,” may be complemented by the last of the poems in the anthology, “On the Rainbow: In Blank Verse.” The rainbow drawing, moreover, could refer to Harry’s vision of the Witch of the Alps at the end of “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 1. (Ruskin could have added the rainbow to the frontispiece as an afterthought: we cannot know for certain whether the textual rainbow suggested the graphic one, or vice versa, or whether the two are definitely related at all. But it seems likely that he arranged the contents in order to frame the book with the theme of the rainbow as both promise and closure.)
	Another sign of control over the entirety of the contents appears at the end of the Red Book, on p. 106, where Ruskin placed a colophon: “The end / hernhill / fountain street / end of the poems[strikethrough] / juvenile library fountain street.” The colophon is followed by “Heights of Wisdom, Depth of Fools” [Miscellaneous Drawing, MS I], in which the concave shape of the narrow valley appears to answer to the convex form of the rainbow in the frontispiece. The colophon could be based on Maria Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, which concludes in the fourth volume with “THE END.” and, below that, “LONDON: / PRINTED BY CHARLES WOOD, / Poppin’s Court, Fleet Street.”
	The colophon evidently unifies “Harry and Lucy,” Vol. 1, and the MS I Poetry Anthology, but the deletion within the colophon (end of the poems[strikethrough]) may point to how attempts at symmetry and closure were ongoing decisions. Since the final two poems of the MS I Poetry Anthology fall after Margaret’s annotation dating the whole of MS I, Ruskin could have added them after he had already written “end of the poems” on p. 106, deleting the phrase as he added the poems on pp. 103–6. Or the phrase may have formed an original colophon, deleted as he elaborated the revised colophon (reading, in effect, “The end / hernhill / fountain street / juvenile library fountain street”). Or he may have originally included the phrase as part of the colophon but deleted it as erroneous or misleading, since the colophon ends the entire book, not just the poems. (It is also possible, of course, that the deletion was made by someone else.)
Domestic Scene
	MS I is the only Red Book to locate its imaginary publisher, the “juvenile library,” in “hernhill / fountain street,” other Red Books mentioning simply Herne Hill. Could Ruskin be referring to what Praeterita records as an early memory, the water carts being filled in front of the house (Ruskin, Works, 35:21)? In Praeterita, Ruskin leaves unclear whether he observed the carts from the windows of Herne Hill or of the Hunter Street house—where the family lived prior to Herne Hill, until March 1823 (see Dearden, Ruskin’s Camberwell, 1). By the time Ruskin first wrote about this memory in 1871 (in Fors Clavigera [Ruskin, Works, 27:169]), he might well have confused memories of the two locations; or the colophon itself might have suggested such a memory to him, when he doubtless reviewed his juvenilia for those later autobiographical writings. Unfortunately, attempts have been unsuccessful to gain information about either a Fountain Street or water mains in the vicinities of the two houses.