MS V is the earliest major manuscript that was originally neither a Red Book nor a homemade booklet. Another new development that Ruskin starts with MS V is the practice of keeping one notebook for carefully copied presentation of his poetry, while drafting his poems in other notebooks—MS VI and MS VIII, especially. Some evidence suggests that he took both sorts of notebooks along with him on journeys (see “The Day of Judgement”), entering the fair copies in MS V on Sundays or other days when the family paused from traveling. Just so, the Diary of 1830 was “written up” from notes during a lengthened stop.
	Ruskin did compile poetry anthologies prior to MS V, but they were comparatively brief and served to fill out Red Books whose main feature was the ongoing “Harry and Lucy” narrative: see MS I Poetry Anthology, Poetry Descriptive, MS III Second Poetry Anthology, and MS III Poetry Anthology.
	While no apparent logic governs completion of the anthology other than filling the notebook, it appears from John James Ruskin’s open-ended record of his son’s age as the boy entered successive fair copies (see Description) that the father at least may have looked for completion on those terms. Ruskin, however, left over thirty pages blank at the end of the manuscript (see Contents); and the likeliest explanation for this neglect may be that he was drawn to a grander project—the fair copy in MS VII of “Iteriad” and “Athens.” Selections from these epic-length poems appear toward the end of MS V, suggesting that Ruskin grew dissatisfied with their constrained appearance in Miscellaneous Poetry and abandoned the anthology for grander presentation in MS VII. (Since Ruskin did not complete fair-copying “Athens” in MS VII, however, it is also possible that he returned to MS V to enter 17 stanzas of that poem on a less ambitious scale than that begun in MS VII.)
	On p. 167—a verso, facing the first of the three blank final leaves (see Description)—Ruskin wrote in ink, but then erased,  MISCELLANEOUS POETRY / HELVELLYN.  This is how the notebook begins on p. 1, so the reason for the erasure is not apparent. Since the erased material is upside down to the text coming from the other direction, perhaps it represents a false start.
	On the back inside endpaper, Ruskin scribbled some numbers.