The aim of this note is not to provide an exhaustive listing of books that Ruskin read or consulted in his youth. Information about Ruskinʼs reading and its influences is available throughout ERM, in the apparatuses and glosses of works containing specific allusions to and borrowings from publications to which he was exposed. Especially influential authors and published sources, moreover, are discussed in notes of their own. This information can be accessed using the archiveʼs Search. A portion of this note does attempt, however, to convey the scope of Ruskinʼs childhood and youthful reading through a descriptive (but not exhaustive) Chronology as well as to summarize The Ruskinsʼ Program of Age‐Appropriate Reading for John. These resources remain open to development.
Among the main purposes of this note is to centralize some Resources for researching the Ruskin family reading during Ruskinʼs youth by extending and enhancing existing research sources. Included are Lists of Annual Book Purchases by the Ruskin Family, Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Youth, and Untraced Books. These resources build on the enumerative bibliographies compiled by Van Akin Burd in The Ruskin Family Letters (i.e., lists of annual book purchases drawn from John James Ruskinʼs Account Book, RF MS 28 [1827–45]) and by James S. Dearden in The Library of John Ruskin. These published print sources remain the starting point for all investigations of the Ruskin family reading, whereas the lists here propose some additions and extensions. Not listed here are proposed corrections of specific entries in these print bibliographies. These corrections are found elsewhere in the archive in context of relevant evidence.
The note is divided sequentially into the following sections:
As a preliminary to supplementing Burdʼs and Deardenʼs bibliographies, some caveats merit discussion about what we are able to determine about Ruskinʼs reading in his youth.
Assuming that an item of childrenʼs literature can be traced to Brantwood, Ruskinʼs final home, its presence in his adult library is only a starting point for extending the itemʼs provenance to Herne Hill, his boyhood home. For example, among a collection of books held by the Beinecke Library supposed to have belonged to Ruskin in boyhood, there are two bound assemblages of separately published works, which were acquired by the collector, F. J. Sharp. The responsibility for these bindings is unknown. While some of the individual items contained therein bear marginalia recognizably in Ruskinʼs mature hand, the evidence for associating each of the items therein with his boyhood is variable, in some cases amounting to little more than the publication date falling within the relevant range. As an example of problematic items among the Beinecke holdings, a copy of Evenings at Home by John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, which is undated on the title page, very likely is not the edition Ruskin used in boyhood. While a bookplate authenticates the copy as a Brantwood book, and it contains some annotations in Ruskinʼs mature hand, other bibliographical details place its acquisition after his boyhood absorption in Evenings at Home—perhaps long after (see Beinecke no. 4). As in any case for provenance, one can only weigh the evidence, and one purpose of Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Boyhood and Youth is to compile what is known.
A unique boon for tracing the provenance of books to Ruskinʼs boyhood and youth is the record of book and periodical purchases contained in John James Ruskinʼs ledger of household accounts, the Account Book. These brief entries, which John James included under the heading “Sundries” for each year, and which he notated usually with an identification of author and/or title along with the cost, are compiled by Van Akin Burd in the Ruskin Family Letters, collected by year of acquisition and placed among the explanatory notes. John Jamesʼs sketchy identifications include no publication details, and some entries can be difficult even to distinguish as books from other kinds of “sundries”. Burd helpfully links some of John Jamesʼs costs to prices in publisherʼs listings. The researcher should therefore start with Burdʼs annotated lists, while what is gathered in Lists of Annual Book Purchases by the Ruskin Family are possible additional items found in the Account Book.
A limitation of the Account Book as an indicator of Ruskinʼs early reading is that it begins in 1827, omitting records of book purchases prior to his eighth year. This was the period when Ruskinʼs parents would have acquired many of the publications most commonly associated with Romantic‐era and early Victorian writing for children, from fairy tales to moral and scientific dialogues. The gap in the evidence of John Jamesʼs accounts shifts all the more significance onto the provenance of physical books alleged to have survived from Ruskinʼs boyhood library.
Other sources of evidence about the familyʼs commerce in juvenile literature prior to 1827 (and afterward) are found in remarks about books in the family letters, along with literary allusions detectable in Ruskinʼs juvenilia. While some of these allusions and passing references can be cross‐referenced to bibliographical details known from another source or even to a physical copy, other references in the letters reveal only a title, which is discussed as an Untraced Book. For example, in a letter dated 1823, when Ruskin was four years old, Margaret suggested books to John James that would make acceptable gifts for John: “if you bring any thing for him let it be the history of the children of the wood or Sinbad the Sailor—since he has been ill he has had so much medicine to take that I have been obliged to buy I donʼt know how many books and you might perhaps bring him some he has already[.] You can bring nothing he will be so well pleased with as a book” (11 March 1823, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 126–27). Since no evidence survives attesting whether these books were ever acquired, or, if purchased, in what edition, the titles are relegated to the list of Untraced Books accompanied by discussion of the significance of that choice of text.
Another caveat concerning John Jamesʼs purchases of books and other sundries recorded in his Account Book is that he rarely indicated the intended recipient. It is possible that some book titles, especially of childrenʼs literature, may have been meant for Ruskinʼs cousins, particularly Mary Richardson (1815–49), who lived with the Ruskin family from 1828 until her marriage in 1848. While Dearden comments about the family library that “the books owned by all three Ruskins must be considered to be part of ‘Ruskinʼs Library’ because he ultimately inherited his parentsʼ possessions, as well as having the use of them during their lifetimes” (Library of John Ruskin, xv, xxiv), one wonders how far the availability, much less the inheritance, extended in the case of Maryʼs books. To what extent did John and Mary share books? Similar speculation surrounds duplicate copies found in John Jamesʼs accounts, such as his purchase of a Robinson Crusoe in 1835, long after he presented John with an edition in 1826 that cost two guineas (Ruskin Family Letters, 301 n. 12; Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 91 [no. 694]). Alternatively, rather than indicating books purchased for others outside the immediate family, duplicate titles might refer to additional, compact editions to be taken on travels. Such usage would apply particularly to a work like Robinson Crusoe, which was deemed permissible reading on Sundays, and therefore counted as a necessary travel item, just as Margaret packed a copy of Bunyanʼs Grace Abounding for Johnʼs first journey to Italy without his parents, in 1845 (Ruskin in Italy, ed. Bradley, 000).
As a final caveat about provenance, evidence is incomplete about the respective influence of Margaret and John James over the direction of Ruskinʼs reading. John James appears to have been the steadiest purchaser of books. As revealed by Margaretʼs comment quoted above from an 1823 letter, however, she also was an occasional purchaser. The kinds of texts Margaret mentions were available as booklets with engravings for sixpence or a shilling, a cost that presumably could be absorbed within her household budget. As one source for recommended titles, she may have consulted the Evangelical Magazine for lists of recently published childrenʼs books. These 1823 book purchases occurred before John Jamesʼs extant Account Book begins, but it is unclear whether any future purchases of books by Margaret would have been listed in John Jamesʼs accounts. The annual lists of “Sundries” in the Account Book, which is the category where he placed book purchases, does not attribute specific items to their buyers. While a different annual column, “House Expenses & paid Mrs R.”, is reserved for Margaretʼs purchases, these expenses are comprised solely of household staples. The miscellaneous items comprised by “Sundries”, from dessert forks to Walter Scott novels, may have all been paid by John James, but it seems unlikely that he would have done all the shopping himself. Would John James have personally arranged, for example, for a “dress for my sister [Janet Richardson]” ()?
Examples of inexpensive publications aimed at young readers, which Margaret might have acquired, are included in Beinecke no. 1 and Beinecke no. 2. She may also have obtained some titles by loan rather than purchase (see Loaned Books). By comparison with chapbook prices within reach of her household budget, Margaret sounds aghast at John Jamesʼs “spending two guineas on” an edition of Robinson Crusoe for John. She wonders “what he [John] can do to make return” for such extravagance beyond making a “cave” which he had “almost finished”—referring possibly to a physical project like “Robinson Crusoeʼs island” undertaken by Maria Edgeworthʼs Frank and his cousin Mary, which included appropriating the housekeeperʼs parrot (Margaret Ruskin to John James Ruskin, 25 May 1826, in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 149; Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 1:71–72; and for the edition of Robinson Crusoe, see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 91 [no. 693]). While these examples suggest some differences of opinion between Margaret and John James respecting the priorities they set for Johnʼs reading, the choice of books was a matter of earnestly shared discussion between the couple, as when Margaret declared to her husband that it was time John be given John Foxeʼs Book of Martyrs: “you shall hear all my reasons for wishing him to have it”, Margaret promised (15 May 1827, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 166).
Dearden remarks that Ruskin in adulthood “was essentially . . . a book‐buyer rather than a book borrower or library user” (Library of John Ruskin, xix). This practice was inherited from his father, who was generous with purchases of books for his familyʼs education and entertainment. Still, there is no way of knowing whether publications that left their influence on the early writings were borrowed or owned, if otherwise unrecorded as part of the family library in the 1820s–30s. For example, the poet Felicia Hemans was sufficiently admired for Ruskin to have transcribed her poem, “The Sound of the Sea” (1826) in MS IVB, probably based on the text as published in the New Monthly Magazine. He also adapted passages from Hemansʼs long poem, The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy, published by Murray in 1816, for use in his own poem, “Saltzburg”. Yet Mrs. Hemans is curiously absent from records of the Ruskinsʼ book ownership, apart from poems included in literary annuals that the Ruskins are known to have owned. How publications by Hemans passed through their hands—whether by purchase, borrowing, or casually encountering a periodical—remains unknown.
Borrowing could have provided a means for Margaret Ruskin to control what books entered the house. She appears to refer to borrowing, for example, when she writes to John James about the novel, The Fool of Quality (1766–72) by Henry Brooke (1703–83). Since she “did not like” the novel, she “got the first volume merely to read the History of the three little fishes to John”. In this instance, Margaretʼs renewed encounter with the novel led to “the Almighty open[ing] the understanding” on her part, and she proposed to “read it together” with John James. Perhaps only then was the work purchased for the household, possibly in the abridged form by John Wesley (Margaret to John James Ruskin, 15 May 1826, in Ruskin Family Letters 145; Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, 51 [no. 336]; and see Peace, “Sentimentality in the Service of Methodism”).
On travels, the Ruskins supplemented books they brought with them by tapping lending resources along the way. During the tour of Switzerland in 1833, for example, when John fell ill for a brief period, his father and his cousin Mary, cheered him up by finding “some English books from a library” along with “2 or 3 volumes of Gaglianiʼs Magazine”—that is, one of the periodicals issued by Librairie Galignani, the Paris‐based English‐language publisher, bookseller, and circulating library.
The Beinecke Library owns two bound collections of small books that, if they belonged to Ruskin at all, probably date from his earliest years of reading: one volume, “The Widow of Roseneath etc.”, collects didactic, moral, and relgious works; and the other volume, “Fairy Tales” contains fantasy stories. While the responsibility for the arrangement and binding of the two collections is unknown, the thematic division between the collections reflects what William McCarthy characterizes as the “Manichaean . . . need to dichotomize” the “story about the way childrenʼs literature developed” and “then to extol or damn its dichotomized terms” (McCarthy, “Mother of All Discourses”, 198). On one side, the collection “Fairy Tales” binds together works that Charles Lamb would have approved as akin to “old classics of the nursery”. According to Lambʼs well‐known tirade, “wild tales” of imagination inspired in the reader a “beautiful Interest” by making “the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child”. On the other side, the didactic works collected in “The Widow of Roseneath etc.” would have seemed to Lamb the product of “Mrs. B[arbauld]ʼs & Mrs. Trimmerʼs nonsense”, in which “Science . . . [had] succeeded to Poetry”, resulting in “Knowledge” made “insignificant & vapid”, suitable only to puff up a child “with conceit of his own powers”. “Damn them”, Lamb anathematized; “I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man & child” (Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, 23 October 1802, in Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, 2:81–82).
While the separately bound collections preserved at the Beinecke appear to reflect this division, Ruskinʼs parents evidently took no part in this contest between the Romantics and the educationists, if they were even aware of it. Recent scholarship has shown how “Science” and “Poetry” or concepts of reason and imagination were more entangled in education and childrenʼs literature of the long eighteenth century than Lamb cared to admit; and critics have revolutionized our understanding of how women educationists such as Letitia Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer contributed an alternative sociability and sense of self to Romanticism. Moreover, where Lamb saw a uniform pedagogy in the educationistsʼ “nonsense”, scholars have discerned distinct politics in Barbauldʼs Dissenter progressivism and in Trimmerʼs Anglican conservatism. The Ruskins must have been able to distinguish these differences, as well, yet the evidence points to catholicity in their choices of childrenʼs literature. They shared neither the Romanticsʼ hostility toward progressive instructional works such as the Edgeworthsʼ practical education nor Trimmerʼs suspicions of imaginative works such as fairy tales, whether new or traditional.
While they were not doctrinaire in their tastes, the elder Ruskins did adhere to a program of graduated and progressive age‐appropriate reading for children that had been introduced at the end of the previous century by Mrs. Barbauld and developed by the Edgeworths, and they proceeded according to a plan. Precise dates are elusive for when John first engaged with many of the works he is known or believed to have read in his youth, but distinct phases of readings can be discerned. These phases can be correlated to developments in his own writing, which reflect his reading both in content and in the materiality of typography and illustration. The age‐appropriate layers of reading are permeable, however, as over time Ruskin retained his affection for re‐reading some works for children even into adulthood. The periods of age‐appropriate reading into which the following Chronology is divided are therefore approximate but not arbitrary, being based both on available documentation about Ruskinʼs books and on his response to books in his writing.
The period starting with Ruskinʼs fourth birthday is marked by his earliest dateable signature, which concludes what has been called his “first letter” (15 March 1823, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 127–28; and see Hanson, “Materiality in John Ruskinʼs Early Letters and Dialogues”, 5–7) and by his parentsʼ earliest documented comments on book‐buying for him (11 March 1823, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, and see above, Provenance). From this point, reading and writing advanced together, Margaret remarking on 15 March that “he is beginning to copy from his books and will soon learn himself to write I think”. A key childrenʼs book of this period, which served Ruskin in this process of instructing himself by copying, was The History of Little Jack by Thomas Day (Books held by the The Ruskin no. 1; see also The Ruskin Family Handwriting). Since Ruskin seems to have been introduced to reading and writing prior to March 1823, his mother initially have lead him through works designed for very young children such as Mrs. Barbauldʼs Lessons for Children.
On 11 March, Margaretʼs recommendation that John James acquire The Children in the Wood and/or Sinbad the Sailor curiously juxtaposes a traditional tale of childhood vulnerability and death with a tale from the Arabian Nights presenting the magical strength and good fortune that Lamb meant by making “the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child”. “Sinbad” is representative of the “wild tales” preferred by the Romantic opponents to the “cursed Barbauld Crew” (Provenance, above). As Janet Bottoms defines this taste, Romantics like Lamb and Coleridge tended to look backward nostalgically to their own childhoods for examples of imaginative engagement. For them, traditional tales escaped the confines of “the social limits and moral laws of the familiar world”—the boundaries within which the educationists aimed to socialize the child subject. The old “wild” tales, rather, “developed in unpredictable ways, rewarding hero or heroine with honours and wealth”; and instead of “foregrounding actual children” as subjects, encouraged identification with (in Coleridgeʼs description) “excessive smallness combined with great power”, thus “exhibiting, through the working of the imagination, the idea of power in the will”. Such tales as the Arabian Nights, Coleridge emphasizes, “cause no deep feeling of a moral kind—whether of religion or love; but an impulse of motion is communicated to the mind without excitement, and this is the reason of their being so generally read and admired” (Bottoms, “The Battle of the (Childrenʼs) Books”, 215; Coleridge, Lectures on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature [1818], lecture 11, 191; and see Untraced Books no. 2).
“The Children in the Wood” (or “Babes in the Wood”), while not seemingly a work that empowered the child reader, was likewise looked back upon as a powerfully imaginative tale by Lamb and Wordsworth. In the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth cites lines from the original ballad, “These pretty babes with hand in hand / Went wandering up and down” j as an example of plain language that “can excite thought or feeling in the Reader”, suggestive of Coleridgeʼs “impulse of motion . . . communicated to the mind” (Wordsworth, Prose Works . . .). As Patricia Crain remarks, however, the tale is also invoked by Wordsworth (and by Lamb in “Dream Children”) as doing the work of providing “adult consciousness of childhood as a privileged time and space thatʼs been lost, thatʼs died, and that yet remains infinitely accessible to adult memory and imagination”. Through this approach to traditional tales, Crain argues, Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb converted the “newly privileged (and newly imagined) childrenʼs innocence” that developed in the eighteenth century “into an envied source of power and knowledge” for the adult personae of the “Immortality Ode” and essays in Elia (Crain, Forgotten Children, 53, 49).
A construction of childhood innocence functions similarly in Ruskinʼs 1868 essay, “Fairy Stories” (Works, 19:000–00), but there is no evidence that, ca. 1823–25, traditional tales like “The Children in the Wood” were segregated in Ruskinʼs reading from the more modern fairy tales preserved in “Fairy Tales” or from the the “cautionary stories”, moral tales “founded on facts”, or the catechistic Hymns in Prose | for | Children by Mrs. Barbauld, collected in “The Widow of Roseneath etc.”. Regarding traditional tales, we also do not know in what form Ruskin experienced them, if at all. In the early nineteenth century, “The Children in the Wood” was rewritten in forms ranging from a prose version that preserved the plot outline and characters of the original ballad to reconceptions that rescued the babes from death to become paragons of virtue and industry (see Crain, Forgotten Children, 51; and Untraced Books no. 1).
This period, from ages seven to ten, extends from Ruskinʼs first extant juvenilia (MS I) to his first letters that he composed and sent to his father independently of his motherʼs supervision (February–March 1829; see Hanson, “Materiality in John Ruskinʼs Early Letters and Dialogues”). This period is distinctly Edgeworthian, the dialogues in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I” revealing the influence of Barbauld and Aikinʼs Evenings at Home, Maria Edgeworthʼs Frank: A Sequel and Harry and Lucy Concluded, and Jeremiah Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. or, in 1827, The Book of Martyrs by John Foxe, provide context for the bound collection of strictly instructive or “true” narratives, (Margaret Ruskin to John James Ruskin, 15 May 1827, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 166; see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 120 [no. 941]).
Finally, questions of the provenance of publications for children in the Ruskin library are preliminary to the more complex question of what counted for the Ruskins as childrenʼs literature. In the first decade of Johnʼs reading, the elder Ruskinsʼ acquisition of books by Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth reflect their familiarity with the concept of age‐appropriate texts, even though John read above the age recommended for certain texts. At the same time, his parents chose, or he appropriated, texts that were not conceived for a child audience but contained features that appealed to Ruskinʼs imagination—for example, Byronʼs Manfred and Scottʼs The Monastery and The Abbot.
Yet evidence shows that Ruskin both read above his age category (and not always with comprehension) and ranged beyond the kinds of texts typically thought appropriate for children (e.g., Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues, which he copied verbatim in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I”, but which are too advanced for that context). Moreover, . . .
From 1827 through 1845, John James Ruskin kept a family budget in RF MS 28, known as the Account Book, held by The Ruskin. For each year, he exactingly and exhaustively recorded expenditures, divided by categories of expenditure, and maintained these categories consistently from year to year. The category entitled “Sundries” included books along with many other miscellaneous household items. In The Ruskin Family Letters, Van Akin Burd sifted the book purchases from among the other items in “Sundries” and collected the titles in summary notes, which he divided by year of purchase and distributed throughout the edition, typically hanging the note from the mention of a book acquisition in one of the letters. The following list expands on Burdʼs brief identifications, by adding context drawn from book advertisements and book reviews, thus situating John Jamesʼs acquisitions in the burgeoning period of innovative book production of the 1820s–40s (The year 1830 is itemized for the first time, Burd having omitted a list of book purchases for that year from Ruskin Family Letters, presumably because no letters are extant from that year, thus allowing no occasion for annotation.)
Burd was shrewd in matching John Jamesʼs notations of expenditures with the prices of specific editions available at the time, but he did not document the source of his information, and he omitted bibliographical details. James Dearden folded Burdʼs lists into the alphabetized entries in The Library of John Ruskin, adding a layer of provenance information based on surviving catalogues of the family library. Dearden also supplied bibliographical information drawn from surviving copies of Ruskinʼs books. In the absence of a surviving copy, Dearden defaulted to Burdʼs identification or to a first edition. The following lists collate and cross‐reference John Jamesʼs entries with Burdʼs notes in Ruskin Family Letters, and with Deardenʼs entries in The Library of John Ruskin, but with the additional aims of specifying John Jamesʼs acquisitions more precisely and contextualizing the purchases in the contemporaneous publishing and the book market.
For some books presumed to have belonged to the Ruskin family library prior to 1827, see Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Boyhood and Youth, along with Untraced Books, which primarily documents books mentioned in the family letters as having been acquired for Johnʼs use in his youth, but which are otherwise untraced. While not all the books itemized in John Jamesʼs Account Book were intended specifically for Johnʼs use, by 1827 the distinction was fading between his age‐appropriate reading and shared family reading. In areas such as classical literature, John Jamesʼs purchases suggest that he was anticipating Johnʼs tutoring in Latin and Greek. Acquisitions that seem above Johnʼs reading level may have chosen by John James for his own and Margaretʼs use, but he may also acquired such items with the thought of his sonʼs future education.
Some cautions are advisabe in interpreting John Jamesʼs listings under “Sundries”. Since his purpose in the Account Book was to record expenses, he categorized the items in “Sundries” by month of the year, not by the kinds of objects purchased. Accordingly, his abbreviated entries are frequently ambiguous or obscure, and educated guesswork is required to sort out authorsʼ names and titles of books from what may have been the name of a tradesman or a person employed by John James or even a now unfamiliar name for a household item. Another caveat about John Jamesʼs acquisitions is that we cannot know whether all the books he purchased were meant for Herne Hill. As cautioned in Provenance, some acquisitions could have been intended as gifts for relatives. Even purchases of childrenʼs literature could have been destined for Ruskinʼs cousins.
For transcription and contextualization of some other kinds of expenditures included in the Account Book, see Stage Entertainment and Exhibitions.)