Editorial and Encoding Rationale and Methodology

The first editors of Ruskinʼs early manuscripts divided the archive by genre, poetry from prose. The precedent for this division was set by Ruskinʼs father and his friend, W. H. Harrison (ca. 1792–1878), when they collected Ruskinʼs early verse publications in the anthology Poems (1850) by “J.R.” For them, the anthology commemorated Ruskinʼs erstwhile vocation as a poet, an ambition that they had devotedly supported as editors and promoters, but that Ruskin himself had decisively abandoned. Nearly a half‐century later, the decision to separate the poetry from the prose was maintained by W. G. Collingwood (1854–1932) in his edition, Poems (1891). His choice arguably was driven or at least intensified by the cachet that, by the end of the century, had come to surround Poems (1850) as a scarce collectorʼs item. The heated rare‐book market for the 1850 volume had already resulted in a pirated American edition of the poems—one of many piracies that threatened Ruskinʼs income from his books (see Poems (1891): The Provocation of American Literary Piracy). Animating all of this interest in the poems was the charm of Ruskinʼs autobiographical narrative in Praeterita about his youthful career as a poet manqué.

Collingwood planned a complementary edition of prose, documenting Ruskinʼs turn from poetry to criticism. This edition was never realized under Collingwoodʼs editorship. Ultimately, the project was hurriedly and inadequately compiled as the first volume, Early Prose, of the Library Edition, under the supervision of E. T. Cook (1857–1919) and Alexander Wedderburn (1854–1931). To a great extent, that volume merely collected recent editions of early prose works that George Allen (1832–1907). had revived, more with a view to producing handsome volumes for the collectorsʼ market and thwarting sales of American piracies, than with a serious scholarly purpose (see Collecting of Modern Authors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries).

While these editorial decisions were influenced by the market, the editions did not lack scholarly effort, but their bibliographical underpinnings were flawed by the segregation of poetry from prose. Collingwood, who had access to Ruskinʼs study in his home, Brantwood, was the first to undertake a descriptive and analytic bibliography of the early verse manuscripts—earlier bibliographers had described the youthful verse publications—and he published his findings as the “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems”, appended to volume 1 of the Poems (1891) (Poems [4^o, 1891],1:261–67; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:262–68). Whatever bibliographical attention Collingwood may have given to the prose manuscripts in his preparations, the “Preliminary Note” was rendered incomplete and lacking in evidence, owing to arbitrarily omitting entire manuscripts that contain solely prose. Even on its own terms as a bibliography of the poetry manuscripts, the “Preliminary Note” is problematic in neglecting to describe or explain prose works present in several of the manuscripts that the note does describe—or even to describe prose included as part of works largely in verse.

In the Library Edition, Cook and Wedderburn only imperfectly addressed the problems raised by this division. The editors maintained Collingwoodʼs scheme of housing works separately by genre in the Early Prose and Poems (volumes 1 and 2, respectively), but in the prose volume they did not attempt to match Collingwoodʼs “Preliminary Note” for the poetry with a corresponding bibliographical description of the prose manuscripts. Rather, in Early Prose they hastily repackaged existing republications of early prose writings made in the 1890s by George Allen. In Poems, volume 2 of the Library Edition, the editors reprinted Collingwoodʼs “Preliminary Note”, expanding it only with brief descriptions of some additional verse manuscripts, and with lists by title of the individual verse works contained in the manuscripts—a useful enough enhancement, so far as it went, but failing to question the fundamental logic or serviceability of separating the poetry manuscripts from the prose in the first place (Ruskin, Works, 2:529–41).

As Cook and Wedderburn organized the manuscripts that they found at Brantwood during preparation of the Library Edition, their curatorship of the early manuscripts was based on the same arbitrary distinction. They separately bound some that contained texts of early prose exclusively, while gathering stray poems (including, inconsistently, some early prose) in MS IA. They relegated description of the prose manuscripts (or some of them) to volume 38, the Bibliography volume of the Library Edition, classifying these descriptions as “Juvenilia”—leaving open the question of what should be comprised under this term, if not also the early poetry manuscripts listed separately in the “Preliminary Note”. Thus, Collingwoodʼs editorial scheme—which, if flawed in its logic, he had at least carried out consistently and reasonably accurately—was now also confused by inconsistency and unevenness of bibliographical description and editorial procedure in the Library Edition.

In ERM, rather than perpetuating the late nineteenth‐century conceptualization of the early manuscripts in terms of a vocational watershed between poetry and prose, our ambition is to organize the archive around a creatively dynamic tension perceivable throughout the early writing—a tension, not so much between poetry and prose, but between a unitary work, whether in verse or prose, and its potential to join and alter a larger anthology or collection, and also a dynamism between traditional genres and their potential to join with others to form a composite. In the manuscripts of the 1820s known to the Ruskin family as the Red Books, Ruskin projected his prose compositions as “volumes” of “Harry and Lucy Concluded”, intended as an ongoing multi‐volume series, while filling out each of these “volumes” with poems collected into small anthologies. Later, he advanced beyond volumes that compiled multiple genres to design unitary works as multi‐genre anthologies in themselves, as in the Account of a Tour on the Continent (1833–34)—a work initially composed as a travelogue solely in verse, and then re‐conceived as a composite‐genre travelogue in verse, prose, and picture. Thus, in his youth, while Ruskin learned to observe conventional generic boundaries in many of his poetic, scientific, and theological manuscripts, he was also constantly intrigued by their dynamic interrelatedness. To represent this dynamism of container and contained, we exploit the 〈teiCorpus〉 element of the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) markup, which can describe Ruskinʼs nested structures, albeit somewhat imperfectly (see 〈teiCorpus〉 Markup and the Tension between Works and Corpora).

W. G. Collingwoodʼs editorial procedure in Poems (1891) can be characterized as aesthetic in method, in the sense described by Peter Shillingsburg in Scholarly Editing in the Computer Age: “The choice of copy‐text and the emendations made”, from this standpoint, “result from an aesthetic preference for forms found in various documents over forms with historical integrity derived from the fact that they are contained in a single document” (as preferred in a documentary orientation) (Shillingsburg, Scholarly Editing, 20). In fact, many of Collingwoodʼs choices appear to have resulted, not from systematic emendation at all, but from the vagaries of his personal taste.

The nineteenth‐century editors of the Ruskin juvenilia apparently took for granted that readers would benefit by an editorial approach that was almost the opposite of documenting an artifact. From John James Ruskin and W. H. Harrison to Collingwood, and to Cook and Wedderburn, the first editors of Ruskinʼs early writing freely and without acknowledgment regularized punctuation, invented titles, rewrote lines and reorganized stanzas of poetry, and joined fragments that are unrelated in the manuscripts to form texts that Ruskin never wrote (see History of the Bibliography and Editing of the Early Ruskin Manuscripts). In ERM, these heavily edited texts are themselves treated diplomatically as witnesses to this earlier conception of Ruskinʼs youthful writing, bearing evidentiary value for how editors of the 1830s believed the boy should be “brought forward” as an author, and for how editors of the 1880s and 1890s perpetuated the mythology of boyhood that, by that time, Ruskin had formed in his autobiographical writing.

The archive aims to include all extant works and manuscripts dateable from 1826 through 1842, exclusive of the Diary Notebook, 1835, which is available online as part of the John Ruskin Digital Archive, in the Victorian Lives and Letters Consortium; and the letters as edited by Van Akin Burd, The Ruskin Family Letters.

Professor Burd granted permission for this edition to be incorporated into ERM, so long as his editionʼs is maintained in exact integrity (Burd to David C. Hanson, 28 August 2008). At present, The Ruskin Family Letters remains widely available in paper form, and thanks to the extraordinary quality of Burdʼs editing, there is no call at present for a new transcription of the letters. ERM does, however, make available facsimiles of letters containing works (such as poems or parts of poems), since these witnesses are necessary to the editing of these works. Facsimiles of other family letters are also included, as available. ERM thoroughly re‐edits poems that Burd included in The Ruskin Family Letters on the grounds of their epistolary presentation, such as Ruskinʼs copies of New Yearʼs Poems and birthday odes for his father. Burd printed only the presentation versions of those works, without attempting comparison or collation with drafts and other fair copies.

Another previously published edition of an early Ruskin manuscript is A Tour to the Lakes in Cumberland, the account of the joint travel diary by Ruskin and his cousin, Mary Richardson, edited by James S. Dearden and Van Akin Burd. Burd and Dearden stipulate that any use of their editorial work is to be copied “as it stands, introducing comments or variants as an addendum” (Van Akin Burd to David C. Hanson, 14 August 2003; James S. Dearden to David C. Hanson, 3 September 2003). Since this 1830 manuscript provides important evidence about such matters as collaborative writing in the Ruskin family, and the developing relation for Ruskin between travel and writing, the manuscript evidence will be discussed in ERM, while referring the reader to Burdʼs and Deardenʼs edition.

James Deardenʼs 1969 edition of Ruskinʼs 1830 Lake District tour poem, Iteriad, or Three Weeks among the Lakes, relies for its copytext on the transcript of Ruskinʼs fair copy that Cook and Wedderburn prepared for use in the Library Edition. Although adequate for Deardenʼs audience at the time, intended as nonspecialist readers interested in the history of tourism in the Lake District, the transcript taken for the Library Edition has limited scholarly interest. Dearden has given permission, however, to quote with attribution from his lively and informed notes for the edition.

ERM references Helen Gill Viljoenʼs unpublished scholarly attention to the juvenilia, included as draft and notes for her unfinished biography of Ruskin and for her unpublished edition of the so‐called Sermons on the Pentateuch, which are found among the Helen Gill Viljoen Papers at the Pierpont Morgan Library. For the biography, see the account by James L. Spates in “John Ruskinʼs Dark Star”); and for the edition of the sermons, see the summary by Van Akin Burd in “Ruskinʼs Testament of His Boyhood Faith”. While working in archives, Viljoen transcribed numerous early texts by Ruskin; and at an early stage of research for ERM, the editor benefited from consulting these typescript transcriptions, whether as entrusted to him directly by Van Akin Burd or as later deposited at the Pierpont Morgan Library. None of these transcriptions are used as copytext in ERM, since they are limited in their usefulness owing to mistakes arising from the speed with which Viljoen had to cover an extensive territory. Viljoenʼs unpublished critical papers on the early writing do remain useful, however, and are cited in ERMʼs commentary as appropriate.

Chronologically, a starting point for the scope of works edited in ERM would appear easily determined by the earliest available manuscripts in Ruskinʼs hand. However, the elusiveness of determining beginnings of a Ruskin archive is suggested by the decisions of Helen Gill Viljoen, whose interest in Ruskinʼs early writings drove her farther back in time to his “Scottish heritage” in order to understand Ruskinʼs parents. The personalities and influence of John James Ruskin and Margaret Ruskin, Viljoen believed, were foundational to an understanding of Ruskin as a writer (see Viljoen, Ruskinʼs Scottish Heritage). Similarly, Van Akin Burdʼs Ruskin Family Letters begins with the courtship correspondence between Ruskinʼs parents, along with their exchanges with their parents. ERM is not meant to duplicate either Viljoenʼs biographical research or Van Akin Burdʼs annotation of the family correspondence, but to complement these resources, gratefully referencing them through commentary. ERM seeks also to contribute a standard of documentary editing in digital format for Ruskinʼs boyhood and youthful writing. Accordingly, the logical terminus a quo for the chronological inclusion of manuscripits is with Ruskinʼs earliest extant poem, which we argue to be “The Needless Alarm”, fair‐copied in 1826. Possibly earlier markings by Ruskin that survive inside of printed books owned by the family are discussed in the commentary.

As a terminus ad quem for Ruskinʼs early writing, the editors of the Library Edition chose the publication of Modern Painters I, since the emerging biographical consensus followed Ruskinʼs autobiography in perceiving 1843 as the debut of his destined professional role as a critic. Van Akin Burd likewise chose to close The Ruskin Family Letters in June 1843, when the first volume of Modern Painters appeared. ERM follows suit, but the aim respecting questions of scope should not be settled by precedent without also interrogating the basis of those precedents.

Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster call nineteenth‐century juvenilia by major British writers “almost a genre” (Alexander and McMaster, “Introduction”, 3). In an ideal form, the scope of the contents of ERM should advance an understanding of how this is so—how the manuscript corpus of Ruskinʼs early writing suggests a putative genre shared by other child writers of the period. (The caveat ideal takes account of the limitation that what is practically available for digitization and editing as part of the archive may never prove fully coterminous with what scholarship demands, whether because other claims are made on some objects or because some objects are no longer extant.)

Paradoxically, in the case of juvenilia, attempts to define and circumscribe the scope of a body of early writing can undermine the perceived value of the editorial project. As Alexander and McMaster comment, establishing an end‐point of an authorʼs “apprentice” work tends to reflect backward on the early writing in negative terms, owing to pejorative connotations of the terms used to characterize the writing, including the term juvenilia itself. For example, the separation between the Brontë sistersʼ early writing and the novels has often been approached as a “problem” in a derogatory sense, with the juvenile understood to persist as a kind of lingering debilitation into the later work. Branwell Brontë (1817–48) has been held up as exemplifying what happens if the source of weakness is never rejected by the author, leading critics to categorize the entirety of his creative work as “juvenilia”, despite his having produced creative writing continuously until his death at age thirty‐one (Alexander and McMaster, “Introduction”, 2; Alexander, “Defining and Representing Literary Juvenilia”, 71–72).

While nineteenth‐century writers may themselves seem to sanction this moralistic assessment of early writing by characterizing their transition away from juvenilia as a rite of passage, Kate E. Brown has revealed considerable complexity in this imaginary, by re‐examining how Charlotte Brontë (1816–55) thought about her transition from juvenilia to the novel The Professor (composed ca. 1844–46; published 1857). By characterizing this novel in its preface as a “little book”, Brontë emphasized its material form (she contended for a single‐volume publication, contrary to publishersʼ three‐volume standard). By dwelling on the novelʼs smallness, Brontëʼs preface works to connect The Professor with the juvenilia—distinctively, a collection of little books in their material form—more than the preface disassociates the novel from early writing. As Brontë writes: “A first attempt it [the novel] certainly was not, as the pen which wrote it had been previously worn a good deal in a practice of some years”—an assertion of the continuity of the writing life that is again figured in terms of material associations, the worn pen. At the same time, Brontë falls into the defensive reflex of denigrating the value of the juvenilia, by erasing its existence as quickly as she invokes it, claiming to have “destroyed almost as soon as” she created these earlier “crude effort[s]”. (Untrue, but at the time of the ca. 1851 preface, the miniature Brontë juvenilia were unknown outside the family; and as Brown remarks, Charlotte had grown secretive about the little books and the sagas they contained, wary even of mentioning them to close friends. The miniature manuscripts came to light publicly after Charlotteʼs death, when her husband briefly entrusted a “packet” of the manuscripts to Elizabeth Gaskell, who then described them in her 1857 Life of Charlotte Brontë.) Brown links the secrecy in which Charlotte enshrouded the juvenile manuscripts, along with their distinctive materiality, with the episode in Villette (1853) in which Lucy Snowe preserves letters from John Bretton by sealing and burying them beneath the roots of the “nunʼs tree”. Such actions invest the written artifacts with significance as “beloved objects”, which, Brown argues, are not repudiated but disavowed. “Repudiation seeks to obviate a loss by claiming it as oneʼs own desire, rejecting the lost object of love in an effort to restore self‐esteem. . . . [D]isavowal offers more contradictory satisfactions: it both denies and accedes to loss so as to perpetuate grief”, allowing “for two mutually exclusive responses to coexist”—namely, responding to loss by “at once memorializing a lost love” in the beloved object and by “denying its loss” (Brontë, The Professor, ed. Smith and Rosengarten, 3 [preface]; Brown, “Beloved Objects”, 397–98, 417 n. 11; Gaskell, Life of Charlotte Brontë, ed. Jay, 62 [chap. 5]).

Late in life, when Ruskin returned to his early writing he tended to handle manuscripts like the Red Books as talismanic objects (see, e.g., Hanson, “Dark Waters of Praeterita”, 66–68). Earlier, at the point when he consciously distanced himself from the juvenilia—in 1845, during his first study‐trip to Italy on his own, when he announced to his parents (to his father particularly) his intention to abandon writing poetry—that kind of composition was inextricable from the materiality of its presentaton in the gift book trade. While regrets about severing ties to annuals and gift books would have been more deeply felt by his father than by Ruskin, disavowal outweighs repudiation in Ruskinʼs repeated invocations of Wordsworthʼs “Intimations Ode”, which allowed for ambivalence and misgivings. Granted, a strain of repudiation also courses through his letters as he discovers, not only that he has lost his feeling for the picturesque, but that such longings are displaced by an urgent mission to preserve the monuments of Italy from the destruction of “preservation” efforts. Nonetheless, grieving for beloved objects is evident in the 1845 letters in the form of displacement—his fetishizing of the stone effigy of a child, Ilaria del Carretto by Jacopo della Quercia. Ruskinʼs festishization of this statue was rooted in his identity as a writer first formulated in the juvenilia (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”, 151–54).

Going forward, Ruskin perhaps remained permanently at war with himself whether the strident demands of social duty would prevail in repudiating a boyhood identity, which he increasingly identified with landscape feeling as a phase of history to be critiqued, or whether the pull of memory would would lead him back to a more ambivalent disavowal mixed with regret, which he expressed in hypnotic autobiographical treatments of childhood. Ruskin shared this struggle between repudiation and disavowal with mid‐Victorian poets who rejected the dialogue of the mind with itself in favor of communal effort, only to seek ways to preserve the self they disavowed—from Tennysonʼs union with a mystically embodied Arthur Hallam, to D. G. Rossettiʼs enbalming of the all‐but‐disintegrated self in art itself, the sonnet as monument to dead love (Helsinger, “Ruskin and the Poets”, 143–58; Riede, Dante Gabriel Rossetti Revisited, 118–42). Often these ambivalent quests are accompanied by a reassessment of Wordsworthʼs paradigm of the child of nature, which in Ruskinʼs case led to a particularly fraught series of reappraisals of the poet (Knoepflmacher, “Mutations of the Wordsworthian Child of Nature”, 407–14). Perhaps it is in these genre‐forming Victorian quests (and Romantic genre de‐forming) that juvenilia could take shape as “almost a genre” reflexively, particularly in the material instantiation of juvenilia as a thing to be disavowed, but the major male Victorian poets were aggressively reactionary in repudiating attempts by others to re‐embody their juvenilia in print. Ruskin, by comparison, was willing to risk a charge of unmanliness by making public a re‐embodying of his juvenilia in facsimile (, 794–802).

A more decisive act of disavowal is evident in the reaction by John James Ruskin to his sonʼs abandonment of poetry. John Jamesʼs response was to stake considerable labor and expense in selecting, editing, and printing a beloved object, Poems (1850) by J.R., which was only the most elaborate in a series of such objects—collections of his sonʼs poems, which John James carried with him on his travels. (A surviving representative of these collections—not in John Jamesʼs hand, and therefore not identifiable as necessarily having belonged to him, but clearly belonging to the class of such objects—is “Poems | J. Ruskin”.) The private distribution of that volume among family and friends attests to its status as a beloved object. As the first poem in the collection, John James and his colleague W. H. Harrison selected from among Ruskinʼs boyhood verse the previously unpublished “Song” (“My muse is on the mountain sleeping”), which works both as an elegy for Ruskinʼs poetic persona “J.R.”, and as a Wordsworthian remembrance of first mountain sightings, that “thrill of strange delight / . . . / When blue hills rise upon the sight” (J.R., Poems [1850], 3–4; and see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”, 155–56).

the modifier early is based on a precedent set by the Library Edition. Not that those editors were particularly thoughtful about their terminology. “By ‘early’ writings,” they wrote, “is meant such as were composed previously to the first volume of Modern Painters”, and they tended to use this term interchangeably with juvenilia (Ruskin, Works, 1:xxiii). Rather, early is adopted for the relative neutrality of the term, tending to leave open questions about the historical nature of nineteenth‐century juvenilia. ERM has been launched at a time when juvenilia studies have been drawing greater curiosity than perhaps ever before; nevertheless, pejorative views of major authorsʼ childhood writing have a deep history, not least among the authors themselves in their maturity, and one aim of the archive is not just to combat these prejudices, but to examine the prejudice as a critical problem.

Scholarly editing has always raised hackles over the “ownership”, literal or cultural, of canonical or semi‐canonical writing. In the 1960s, when Edmund Wilson (1895–1972) took up Lewis Mumfordʼs (1895–1990) fight against the CEAA academics for forcing lay readers to study Ralph Waldo Emersonʼs journals through the “barbed wire” of editorial apparatus, Wilson was goaded to a significant extent by his belief that these sophisticated editorial projects were funded at the expense of his own plan “for an American equivalent of the Pléiade series of Gallimard”—what became the Library of America series of standard works (Franklin, “The ‘Library of America’ and the Welter of American Books”, 182, 181). Similarly, from the 1860s through the 1890s, beliefs about what constituted a national literature, and about how it should be consumed, prompted negative reactions to the editing of juvenilia. Some opponents to the so‐called “first edition mania” were motivated by class snobbery against faddish enthusiasts and speculators who invaded rare book showrooms and caused prices for such “minor” works as juvenilia to balloon at the expense of valuing modern classics.

Some of the most intensely emotional resistance to editing juvenilia has issued from the authors themselves. Toward the end of the nineteenth century, a debate formed around the fin de siècle practice of collecting the juvenilia of “modern” (i.e., nineteenth‐century) authors, a practice that arose from the phenomenon of compiling collections of modern authors that aimed at comprehensiveness, including the acquisition of every “minor” publication such as juvenilia. The debate, which challenged the significance of what were deemed “minor” publications and deplored the effect of these items on the rare book market, spilled over into scholarly arguments about appropriate bibliographical approaches to these writersʼ canons. Much rancor arose over a perceived threat posed by this collecting, especially of juvenilia, to established literary authority and the control exercised over a literary corpus by an author or by the authorʼs family. Authors objected to the “resurrection” of their juvenile works by editors and bibliographers—the term resurrection referring to the illicit exhumation of bodies, and evoking the horror that authors and the literary establishment expressed regarding the “vampiric” ravages of editors who sought to reprint juvenilia (see Hanson, “Sentiment and Materiality in Late‐Victorian Book Collecting”; and The Collecting of Modern Authors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries).

Ruskin collecting held a singular position in this debate, for whereas many authors expressed embarrassment about their literary juvenilia, and reacted angrily to collectors seeking out early publications, and even prosecuted publishers and editors who supported this collecting fashion, Ruskin appeared to sanction this curiosity. As he wrote in The Queen of the Air (1869), Ruskin was willing to risk “whatever charge of folly may come on me” by printing the 1828 poem, “Glenfarg”, since “the weak little rhyme already” demonstrated “all that I ever could be, and all that I cannot be” (Ruskin, Works, 19:396). The claim was an exaggeration, as Ruskin surely knew; and like other writers, he reacted with skepticism when listings of his earliest published writing became the foundation of the Bibliography of Ruskin—one of the first comprehensive, single‐author bibliographies, which began appearing in the 1860s–70s as finding aids for rarities sought by collectors (see Bibliography of Ruskin (1878–81), and Richard Herne Shepherd (1840–95)). Nonetheless, whereas Alfred Tennyson and Robert Browning abused such collectorsʼ publications and hounded the editors and publishers who reprinted their early writings by threatening criminal prosecution for piracy, Ruskin trumped the excavations of “resurrection men” by hastening to reprint his own fugitive pieces, charging the editorial task to young men in his inner circle, such as W. G. Collingwood and Alexander Wedderburn.

Despite Ruskinʼs atypical openness in exposing his early writing, one can question the value of indulging his conceit. One argument in favor of the early writing is the significance that Ruskin himself bestowed on it. The poem “Glenfarg” may or may not be a “weak little rhyme” in itself, but the capacity of these writings is well established as having stirred “dark waters” as well as bright when Ruskin reviewed his juvenilia in preparation for writing his autobiography, Praeterita, (see Hanson, “The Dark Waters of Praeterita”). Moreover, the policies of other authors and editors to banish juvenilia can carry an agenda that proves at least as interesting historically as the allegedly minor writing that such policies disqualify for serious study. Viljoen believed that the scope of materials included in the Library Edition was determined by the guarded decorum of Ruskinʼs inner circle—a policy, namely, that “nothing should be made public which might reflect adversely, from [the editorsʼ] point of view, either upon Ruskin or upon any member of the family”; and also (and potentially contradictorily) that “all that Ruskin said autobiographically, especially in Praeterita, about his life and that of his parents should be given unqualified editorial support” (Viljoen, Ruskinʼs Scottish Heritage, 16–17; and see Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, xxviii). Presumably, it was in fear of adverse reflection that Collingwood limited his edition of Ruskinʼs early poems, Poems (1891), to “completed” works—a limitation imposed possibly by Ruskin himself; or by his caretakers, the Severns; or by his literary executors. Whatever the motivation, one effect of the ban on fragments was to suppress Ruskinʼs expressions of anger and frustration over parental attempts to rein in his writing—evidence of youthful psychological disturbance that the elderly Ruskin would not have wished to be revived and to disturb the tenor of his conciliatory autobiographical project (see Hanson, “Psychology of Fragmentation”; and Hanson, “Self and Revision in Ruskinʼs Revaluations of Romanticism”). What other unforeseen effects of nineteenth‐century policies of selectiveness and “correction” may have had on Ruskin studies will be discovered, it is hoped, with the aid of this archive.

For young Victorians, in particular, a rite of passage may have seemed culturally mandated, demanding a rejection of youthful writing, regardless of how messily a self‐transformation conformed with one's outward declarations of change. One can accept that a Carlylean break with Byronic romance was almost inevitable for promising young writers of the 1830s, without necessarily agreeing with Karen Chase that Charlotteʼs and Branwellʼs early Byronism presented only “eros without psyche”, in which “no Bildung” could occur, and that therefore the charactersʼ “personalties [in the early tales] do not develop; they merely intensify” (Chase, Eros and Psyche, 15, 14). In nineteenth‐century juvenilia, the genre of the farewell, as a self‐conscious parting of ways with the writing of oneʼs youth, must have seemed compulsory. This rite of passage is epitomized by Charlotte Brontëʼs “Farewell to Angria” (ca. 1839), in which Brontë takes leave fondly and reluctantly, but with some relief, of her fictional world of Angria, which she represents in this essay as a gallery of landscapes and portraits in varying seasons and moods (Alexander, ed., Brontës, Tales, 314, 557). Brontë was relinquishing her Byronism at a high pitch of intensity in her engagement with this poetic trend (Alexander, Early Writings of Charlotte Brontë, 192–200). Her break was deliberate in “Farewell to Angria”, exhibiting a self‐consciousness that perhaps makes this piece a rarity as a genre, as compared with a more gradual detachment manifested by other writers.

Ruskin likewise composed a Byronic romance in “Leoni”, but much of his poetic Byronism took the form, not of erotic tales and personae, but of landscape imagery, as if in realization of Charlotteʼs metaphor place as landscapes and portraits suffused with Byronism in “Farewell to Angria”. ERM contains several such fragmentary imitations of sublime landscapes that Ruskin populates with “spirits” drawn from Byronʼs Manfred as well as from Walter Scottʼs poems and tales, fragments in which Ruskinʼs purpose was perhaps merely redundantly to intensify an effect. In making available all of these previously unpublished fragments, the benefit of ERMʼs comprehensiveness prove only to demonstrate a boyish compulsion. If so, it is against these repetitious gothic landscape tropes that one may search for signs of Ruskinʼs break with Byronism—a change typically discussed in Ruskin studies in connection with Stones of Venice.

Amid these critical confusions, of which the slippery use of the term juvenilia is symptomatic, nineteenth‐century ideas of a writerʼs or artistʼs emergence need to be historically defined and situated, as Carol Bock has done for the concept that the early Victorians termed “coming forward” as an author (Bock, “Authorship, the Brontës, and Fraserʼs Magazine”). Arguably, Ruskin effected this transition in 1834, almost a decade prior to the publication of Modern Painters I, with the publication of two poems in the literary annual, Friendshipʼs Offering, “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” (see Account of a Tour on the Continent) and “Saltzburg”—although he made this transition less independently than did the Brontës, not with self‐help advice from Fraserʼs Magazine, but with the careful preparation and guidance of mentors including his father and several Scottish men of letters (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”).

For the kinds and arrangement of editorial commentary in ERM, see Plan of the Archive. The archive follows a tradition, which has prevailed in Ruskin studies since publication of the Library Edition, of supplying generous editorial commentary. In general, the principle guiding the scope of commentary in ERM is to inform professional scholars who are already knowledegable about Britain in the nineteenth century, but who are not necessarily specialists in Ruskin. The archive takes for granted a common ground with its audience of professional interest in the culture and century, and enters this critical conversation by helping to situate the reader in Ruskinʼs youthful engagement with his times.

Unless specified otherwise, all commentary is authored by the editor.

Ruskinʼs handwriting, like that of any youth, developed over the course of time in terms of manual skill; and because he was interested in the material presentation of his manuscripts, he adopted a range of copybook scripts from handwriting manuals, and he imitated various print typefaces, which he found in favorite books printed between the 1820s and 1830s. These developments are surveyed and contextualized in The Ruskin Family Handwriting, while discussion of the hand and other material qualities of specific manuscripts are discussed in the apparatuses for both works and manuscripts.

In the 〈handNote〉 of the TEI header for each holograph witness of a work, hands are classified by scribe (i.e., the member of the Ruskin family ressponsible), and assigned an xml:id, which, in the case of John Ruskinʼs hands, identifies a date range (usually a calendar year) along with any broad strokes that may be used to classify the holograph among a group of manuscripts sharing a peculiarity of hand. In the case of John James Ruskinʼs and Margaret Ruskinʼs hands, no attempt is made to use the xml:id to refine the classification of their hands, which retain a stable script throughout the holographs contained in ERM.

Within the 〈text〉 of the TEI document for each holograph witness, which may contain more than one hand, 〈handShift〉 is used to select the xml:id from 〈handNote〉 that identifies the hand responsible for a given range of text, until a different hand intervenes, at which point 〈handShift〉 toggles to identify the change with the appropriate xml:id. The 〈handShift〉 element also carries attributes of @script and @medium, which are assigned broad values—for @script, typically “print”, “cursive”, or an easily classifiable cursive such as “copperplate”; and for @medium, typically “pencil” and “ink”. These broad classifications are described in The Ruskin Family Handwriting, while the eccentricities of the hand used for any given manuscript are relegated to discussion in the apparatus for the work in question, rather than burdening markup values for @script and @medium with excessive refinements. However, where clusters of manuscripts manifest peculiarities of hand, which may be used to help date works and otherwise flag relationships among projects, these classes of handwriting are captured in the values assigned to @script and @medium and may also be coded along with the date range as part of the xml:id given in 〈handNote〉.

Where Ruskin imitates a special character in the style of a typeface, we highlight these using the 〈hi〉 element, with the @rend value keyed to such special usages as “doubleletter” and “doubleletter‐fill”.

As discussed in Expressing the Materiality of the Manuscripts, Ruskin invented a mark to justify right and left margins in fair‐copy prose, which saved him from having to adjust space between words in a line of text. To fill the gap to the margin, he inserted a horizontal mark of variable length (and sometimes of variable appearance, shaped like an equal sign or a tilde). Since it would misrepresent the markʼs purpose to encode it according to its appearance in length as a hyphen, en‐dash, or em‐dash, or some other symbol, we use a glyph element, assigning it a @type “justification” as follows:

〈g type=“justification”〉-〈/g〉.

Ruskin often indicated paragraph breaks as minimally as possible. Whether because he meant to use space on a page efficiently, or because he liked the appearance of a more solid block of text, he often failed to indent a word beginning a new paragraph. The intention of a paragraph break can be signaled, despite the lack of indentation, by a significant gap between the end of a preceding line and the right margin, with no justification mark used to take up the slack. Sometimes, however, he fills such spaces with stars, like asterisks, and the following line still seems meant as a new paragraph. Signals become especially confusing when Ruskin ends a block of text with a dash, which serves some rhetorical purpose such as an excited pause, and which would be indistinguishable from a justification mark apart from white space following it. In ERM, therefore, we insert paragraph breaks in a text when both sense and some definite scribal feature—such as significant space at the end of a preceding line, and/or a rare indentation at the start of the next line—seem to call for a new paragraph. If the manuscript evidence is ambiguous, the editorial decision is marked by a textual gloss.

We encode where line breaks fall in prose manuscripts, and we render these as breaks in the XSLT transformation, so that prose witnesses match their facsimiles. In poetry, if Ruskin wrote an extension of a line as a runover, the line‐break element 〈lb/〉 is inserted at the start of the runover text within the transcribed line, and the element is assigned a @type “runover”, thus:

〈lb type=“runover”/〉〈space quantity=“00” unit=“chars”/〉.

Here the 〈space〉 element quantifies the number of characters that the runover is indented from the left text margin. (In XSLT transformation, the runover also renders as an interlineation.)

In some cases of line runover in poetry, Ruskin also signaled the runover with a mark that, in some places, resembles an opening square bracket and, in others, a vertical bar. Usually, he placed this mark at the start of the indented runover line. One can find such a symbol in early nineteenth‐century periodicals using narrow columns, thus causing multiple runovers in printing of poetry; however, printers appear to have reserved this punctuation to identify a runover that they were obliged to set above its line, and therefore needed to punctuate in order to distinguish from other runovers in the same poem set as usual below the line, and without such a mark. Several examples can be found in the London Literary Gazette, and Journal of Belles Lettres, Arts, Sciences, &c., which uses the opening square bracket to mark a runover set above its line—typically, a line that simultaneously carries a runover appearing below the preceding line of verse, and therefore set without the mark (see, e.g., A.L., “A Motherʼs Morning Kiss to Her Child”). Ruskin does not necessarily reserve use of the mark for this specialized class of runovers, but may apply it indiscriminately to any runover. As an example, see the opening line of “The Defiance of War”, which is encoded as follows:

〈l〉War war thou art beating thy〈lb type=“runover”/〉〈space quantity=“28” unit=“chars”/〉〈g type=“runover”〉[〈/g〉drum〈l/〉.

Ruskin sometimes used a mark to indicate word division at the end of a line. Like his justification mark, he varied the word‐division sign in length from a mere dot to an em‐dash, and in appearance from a horizontal line to something resembling an equal sign. All of these marks are interpreted without comment and encoded as a hyphen, since the intention is obvious in both facsimile and transcript. Sometimes he divided a word without using any mark at all, if his justified right margin did allow the space; in these cases, no mark is encoded and the line break is represented without comment—the intention again being obvious in facsimile and transcript.

One word division mark does call for special treatment, since it appears confusingly redundant. In some cases, Ruskin uses not only a mark at the right justified margin to denote a break but also at the left justified margin on the line below. Typically, the latter takes a form resembling an equal sign. When this mark appears at the left margin and is clearly functioning to signal word division, we tag it as a glyph element, @type “word_division”:

〈g type=“word_division”〉=〈/g〉.
As an example of a runover using this mark, see the opening line of “Ehrenbreitstein” [prose]

In the earliest juvenilia, those dating from 1826–27, Ruskin had trouble writing commas and periods on the baseline, with the result that these marks float as if they were apostrophes or quotation marks. In some cases, Ruskin anchors these with an insertion caret (see Deletion and Addition), as in “On the Rainbow”. In transcription, these floating marks are interpreted as conventional punctuation on the baseline.

In another idiosyncracy of punctuation, occurring throughout the early manuscripts and perhaps related to what Van Akin Burd has identified in Ruskinʼs mature hand as a half‐comma, Ruskin inscribed what look like periods in the middle of sentences, where syntax calls for commas; and conversely, he wrote what look like commas as terminal punctuation at the end of sentences. This reversal, while not consistent, occurs regularly enough that the marks can be treated as glyphs. Thus, the mark is transcribed as the period or comma that its scribal appearance suggests, but the mark is tagged as a glyph, @type “terminal‐comma” for what appears intended as terminal punctuation, and @type “pause‐period” for what appears meant to indicate a pause, not a terminus.

As found likewise in letters written by all three members of the family, Ruskin sometimes omits terminal punctuation and instead allows extra space between the end of one sentence and the start of the next. In these instances, the gap is encoded using the 〈space〉 element. However, if terminal punctuation is lacking, and no extra space is evident, we do not supply extra space where it does not exist, as Burd does in Ruskin Family Letters in order to aid the readerʼs eye.

If random flourishes and other marks in a manuscript appear to serve only decorative or doodling purposes, and no purpose of punctuation can be discerned, they are ignored in transcription and markup, apart from a textual note atesting to their presence.

In the ERMʼs Showcase display, deletions and additions are rendered as an approximation of a genetic text, such as that marked up (using typographical symbols) in Melville, Billy Budd, Sailor, ed. Hayford and Sealts (pp. 270‐425), albeit limited to the genetic development of a single witness. (A genetic reconstruction of a workʼs development using all available draft and fair‐copy witnesses is presented discursively in the workʼs apparatus.) In ERM Showcase, using the Transcription Toggle on the toolbar (the curved arrow), the reader can view at stage one (indicated on the toggle arrow by its first third being highlighted) the earliest textual state of a given witness, with text that Ruskin later deleted appearing gray. At stage two (indicated on the toggle arrow by two‐thirds being highlighted), the reader views the second state of text, with the added text replacing the deletion. In stage three (indicated by the toggle arrow being fully highlighted), the reader views deletions and additions simultaneously—that is, the final state of the manuscript witness, as it presently appears—with additions appearing above, below, or overlapping with the (grayed‐out) deletions, as the case may be.

In ERM, addition and deletion is not marked up as a single act, using the substitution element (〈subst〉), except in cases of overwriting, which cannot be otherwise interpreted. In many instances of deletion followed immediately by a word that makes sense of the passage, or with such a word placed above or below the line, no other scenario than an immediate substitution seems probable—particularly if the change is reflected in a subsequent fair copy. But we leave these inferences to the reader, relegating our own interpretations to a textual gloss or the apparatus.

In the earliest extant juvenilia, a form of erasure and substitution is to allow a mistaken character to stand (or to be erased imperfectly), but to follow that character with a heavily inscribed character, as if the latter were in boldface, in order to emphasize the substitution.

In 1833–34, in “Lille”, one of the poems for the MS IA, g.1, version of , Ruskin uses marginal symbols to instruct the transposition of two lines from one place in the draft to another place—a meaning for the symbols that is confirmed by his carrying out the transposition in a later fair copy of the poem. We encode Ruskinʼs symbol for the point of insertion, an asterisk, with the element 〈metamark〉, with its @function designated in this case as “insertion”; and we encode the lines to be transposed, which Ruskin brackets in the margin, as a span of text. This is a striking, early instance of Ruskin using symbols that function in the way defined by TEI P5 for 〈metamark〉 —to encode a scribal feature in a manuscript that does not form a part of the work, but that functions as a direction for how to read the text.

All metamarks require an editorial gloss to confirm or speculate about their meaning. In general, it seems, the earlier a possible metamark, the more ambiguous its intention, and Ruskin is more likely to use a word rather than a symbol. In 1827, in “The storm”, Ruskin inscribed a word, bad, which might be tagged as a 〈metamark〉, but its @function and @target could not be specified with certainty. That Ruskin intended the word as metadiscourse seems evident in its isolation, placed on the same line as a runover text without its forming a part of that runover in sense or grammar. We can speculate that he intended this negative judgment as a directive to reject the poem's strophe and replace it with another that follows; however, in this and any such ambiguous instance, we can only encode the word or symbol as a 〈metamark〉 without confidently supplying a @function or @target. Rather, we can only discuss a possible function and target in a textual gloss and/or (as in the case of “The storm”) propose a meaning that is worked out in the apparatus for the poem. Any such apparent metadiscursive interjection in a work, the function of which is unclear—such as the ejaculations, “Play” and “arretez Oh arretez,” in “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”—is is encoded with 〈metamark〉 and its @function assigned the value “unclear”; speculation about function and target is reserved for a textual gloss and/or apparatus.

The most widespread damage to Ruskinʼs manuscripts is scorching, caused by the fire in the house of Charles Goodspeed (1867–1950) (see also Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1930; and Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1931)

An affected area of the manuscript is encoded in transcript using the 〈damage〉 element with an @agent ascribed to fire or some other cause. If text in this area is legible but partially unclear, it is additionally tagged as 〈unclear〉; if visible but completely illegible, and able to be inferred from another source, text can be inserted and tagged as 〈supplied〉; and if completely illegible, and unable to be inferred confidently from another source, then the element 〈gap〉 is used, typically with the @extent given as “several characters”.