See Provenance: Sharp. In one of his few remarks about provenance in his notes on his collection (PML MA 3451), F. L. Sharp comments that Joan Severn paid £105 for MS IB at Sotheby’s. This is somewhat inaccurate, according to Dearden, [private communication, but also book on Whitehouse collection?]. At the time of Margaret Ruskin’s death in 1871, Ruskin gave MS IB to his valet, F. Crawley, and it passed in turn to Crawley’s son-in-law. It next emerged in a Sotheby’s sale catalog for 3–8 December 1900 (lot 1015) but was bought privately, prior to the sale, by Arthur Severn, for £105, thus returning MS IB to Brantwood. These circumstances account for the comment in the Library Edition that “the existence of [MS IB] was not known at Brantwood till after Ruskin’s death,” and therefore was omitted from Poems (1891) (Ruskin, Works, 2:530 n. 2).
	MS IB differs from the other manuscripts possessed by Joan Severn—MS VII, MS IX, MS X, and MS XA—which contain the major tour poems, and which were given directly to her by Ruskin. The manuscript’s charm is sufficient justification, and Joan may have known about its association with Grimm’s German Popular Stories, illustrated by Cruikshank: in 1869, Ruskin published a preface to a new edition of this book (Ruskin, Works, 19:231–39), and Joan owned a copy inscribed by Ruskin (Dearden, “Haddon C. Adams Bequest”???, 315–16). Beyond this, there was an effort to gather in all manuscripts and letters at Brantwood for the Library Edition, and Joan may have particularly bridled at a former servant’s family putting a personal gift by Ruskin up for public auction. The price of £105 is notable, compared to the £260 paid for twelve juvenile notebooks in 1930.
	Subsequently, the manuscript was not included in the Sotheby’s sales of 1930–31, so either it was sold before or during the Brantwood dispersal sale to a local dealer and then to Sharp, or it was acquired by Sharp directly from Brantwood or from Violet Severn.
	The more intriguing story, which we can probably no longer recover, is Ruskin’s thinking in giving this boyhood production to his valet in memory of his mother. From the start, Margaret must have liked “The Puppet Show,” as, in 1831, anxious to “stop his rhyming,” she  “begged him to turn to something else to take exercise[,] copy Crookshanks [sic] &c &c” (Ruskin Family Letters, 224). (It is noteworthy that the handmade book had been preserved with a professional binding sometime prior to the sales; see Description.) Ruskin’s feelings may have been mixed, however, since the manuscript also therefore represented Margaret’s preference for his obsessive copying of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for German Popular Stories over his original poetic invention.