Presumably, a terminus a quo for composition is established by the familyʼs departure for the Continent shortly after John James Ruskinʼs 10 May 1833 birthday, and it is possible that Ruskin began composition no earlier than following their return home in late September 1833. Neither of these possible termini a quo can be ruled out by the physical evidence of what is likely the earliest extant manuscript, MS IA, g.1. This manuscript, which is written in the hands of both father and son, conceivably could date even from the journey itself (see Composition and Publication).

If one chooses the return home to Herne Hill as the terminus a quo for MS IA, g.1, that date would fall a few days after 19 September 1833, which was the date when the family reached Boulogne, according to John Jamesʼs travel diary (Diary of John James Ruskin, 1833–46, 74). A few more days would have been required in order to transact business and cross the Channel at Calais.

Strong evidence in MS VIII shows that Ruskin labored on both draft and fair copy of the “Account” through the first third of 1834, the period when he normally prepared anniversary poetry for his fatherʼs May birthday—the poems, namely, “The Address” and “The Vintage”, along with another poem, “The Crystal Hunter”, which he mentions in a 22 February 1834 letter to his father as having been “brought to a standstill, else should be sent” (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 280; and see MS VIII: Contents, b.2).

Ruskin probably started the important stint of draft contained in MS VIII around the time of his 8 February 1834 birthday, when he received certain books that can be associated with the onset of this draft (see Benchmark Acquisition of Influential Illustrated Travel Publications). The draft consists of sole extant witnesses of poems and prose relating to the Alpine and Italian stages of the tour, intermixed with draft witnesses of prose that Ruskin was simultaneously folding into the MS IX fair copy along with the essaysʼ corresponding poems (composed earlier) on the French, Belgian, and German stages of the tour. This stage of composition can be dated approximately between his fifteenth birthday on 8 February and his fatherʼs forty‐ninth birthday on 10 May (see also Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue (MS VII, MS VIII, MS XI).

The evidence of overlap between Ruskinʼs activities of drafting in MS VIII and fair‐copying in MS IX yields somewhat narrower dating. In the MS VIII draft, the fact that the fifteenth and seventeenth items in the sequence form draft of the prose essay, “Brussels” suggests that by this point Ruskin had fair‐copied in MS IX the full composite sections of verse, prose, and drawings for “Calais”, “Cassel”, and “Lille” (no drafts of the prose essays for the latter two sections are extant; see Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS VII, VIII, XI]). These first sixteen pages of MS IX fair copy and inserted drawings, while a complex undertaking, do not represent an enormous labor, so it is conceivable that Ruskin started work on the MS IX fair copy very near the onset of the MS VIII draft.

Some very tenuous evidence exists that Ruskin extended work on this stage of simultaneous drafting and fair‐copying until much later into the year, past September 1834. In the prose section of “Brussels”, Ruskinʼs description of a distant view of the city resembles features in an engraved view of the subject based on a drawing by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), an engraving that Ruskin could not have seen prior to its publication in September 1834 (see the gloss on Ruskinʼs description of the cathedral towers in “Part of Brussels” [part 1]). However, the similarity between Ruskinʼs and Turnerʼs prospects could be coincidental, whereas the evidence for dating the draft of this prose section of “Brussels”, which occurs in MS VIII, weighs heavily in favor of an earlier date, between February and May 1834.

The MS VIII stint of draft terminates physically where it runs up against a recto page containing draft of Ruskinʼs ekphrastic and topographical poem, “Saltzburg”, commissioned for Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV. Because W. G. Collingwood dated this poem from toward the end (October‐December) of the Ruskinsʼ 1835 tour of the Continent, he argued that Ruskin must have inserted its draft on a page of MS VIII that he had left blank following the draft of the “Account”. As argued below in Composition and Publication, however, the draft of “Saltzburg” falls physically in a logical place in MS VIII, if the poem is properly dated as 1834. Its placement at the point where the MS VIII “Account” draft abruptly ends indicates that the commission for Friendshipʼs Offering—of “Saltzburg” along with a poem drawn directly from the “Account”, “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”—deflected Ruskin from his illustrated tour poem, and that he probably never returned to the project with sustained energy.

The latest possible date when the editor of Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), could have accepted revised contributions and corrected proofs was August 1834. It likely that Ruskin turned his attention to this exciting commission some months earlier than Pringleʼs absolute deadline; and given the overlap in MS VIII of the final extant draft for the “Account” with draft of poetry for John Jamesʼs 10 May 1834 birthday, it is reasonable to place Ruskinʼs abandonment of the compositional process around April 1834. As an additional confirmation of these dates with the physical evidence, this final cluster of draft in MS VIII includes pieces intended for “Heidelberg”—the section of the “Account” that Ruskin left incomplete when he broke off fair‐copying altogether in MS IX.

Thus, if the versions of the first five poems of the “Account” in MS IA, g.1, can be assigned a terminus a quo of composition in the last quarter of 1833, and the draft of “Saltzburg” in MS VIII (no witness survives of Ruskinʼs draft revision of “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”), can be assigned a terminus ad quem in August 1834—but with corroborating evidence moving back the terminus ad quem to May 1834—we are left with about October 1833–April 1834 for Ruskinʼs evolving conception, draft, and fair‐copying of the “Account”.

Starting at about the point at which Ruskin broke off drafting and fair‐copying, he turned to the back endpapers of MS VIII to list Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”. In the first of two lists, Ruskin details in sequential order the remaining place‐name, composite sections he intended to complete, starting with the last three he did complete in fair copy—“Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar”—followed by the section he left incomplete in fair copy, “Heidelberg”. Ruskin must therefore have begun compiling this list at about the point when he broke off to revise the poems “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” for for “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”, probably about April 1834. A more definite date can be attached to the second list, in which he details the illustrations that he planned to copy from published sources for each of the planned sections in the first list. Since this second list begins with “Heidelberg”, it is logical to suppose that he started compiling the list after he had left off fair‐copying that section in MS IX, with the poem completed but only a few lines of the prose essay copied. The “Heidelberg” sectionʼs layout leaves spaces to be filled by illustrations, which are described in the second list as gothic scenes that Ruskin almost certainly planned to copy from The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer‐Lytton, a book that John James Ruskin purchased in June 1834, according to his Account Book (John James Ruskin, Account Book [1827–45], 34v; and see List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”—Illustrations [“Heidelberg”]).

A benchmark that Ruskin associated with his composition of the “Account” is his acquisition of the 1830 illustrated edition of the topographical poem Italy by Samuel Rogers (1763–1855). According to his story in the autobiography, Praeterita, it was the gift of this book for Ruskinʼs thirteenth birthday in February 1832 along with the familyʼs acquisition by subscription a year later, in April 1833, of Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany by Samuel Prout (1783–1852) that prompted the Tour of 1833 (Ruskin, Works, 35:79). The Ruskins did bring home Proutʼs folio in April 1833, but it is absurd to imagine that it prompted Margaretʼs suggestion that the family “should . . . go and see some of [the wonderful places] in reality”, and that forthwith “there were two or three weeks of entirely rapturous and amazed preparation” for such a journey. As John Dixon Hunt points out, a letter by Ruskin from 21 March 1831 indicates that the Ruskins had been planning their “Switzerlandish outlandish tour to Italy” for at least two years (Ruskin, Works, 35:79; Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 286 n. 1, 253; and Hunt, The Wider Sea, 48).

The more elusive date is when the Ruskins acquired the 1830 edition of Italy. The question is of some interest, since, as argued in Composition and Publication and Discussion: Sources and Influences, Ruskinʼs “Account” underwent a development similar to that of Rogersʼs Italy—evolving from an all‐verse to a composite‐genre work. In the autobiography, Ruskin admits that he has “told this story so often” about the influence of Rogerʼs book and its revelation of Turnerʼs art, “that I begin to doubt its time”. In Praeteritaʼs typically dramatizing fashion, Ruskin declares that “the main tenor of my life” was set on 8 February 1832 by the birthday gift from his fatherʼs business partner, Henry Telford (d. 1859). “It is curiously tiresome that Mr. Telford did not himself write my name in the book, and my father, who writes in it, ‘The gift of Henry Telford, Esq.,’ still more curiously, for him, puts no date: if it was a year later [i.e., 8 February 1833], no matter” (Ruskin, Works, 35:79).

In fact, the date range for acquaintance with Rogersʼs Italy is even wider. In a non‐illustrated edition, Rogersʼs poem had been in the Ruskin household since 1828 at the latest (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 188 n. 4). This happens to be the year when Rogers published “Part the Second” of the poem; and growing disgusted over the workʼs tepid reception, he bought out remaining copies of both that volume and “Part the First”, and destroyed them (Rogers, Italy [1828]; Rogers, Italy [1823]; and see Samuel Rogers [1763–1855]). Thus, even before Rogersʼs poem achieved popularity in the illustrated edition, the Ruskins could count themselves among the select number of appreciative readers of the work in its original form; and it is possible that Telfordʼs gift of the 1830 edition contributed to the familyʼs travel plans even earlier than Ruskin remembered. The first mention of “our Switzerlandish outlandish tour to Italy” occurs in the family letters for March 1831, a month after Ruskinʼs twelfth birthday (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 253).

More significant than the year when Rogersʼs work first helped to shape expectations for the journey, however, is a confirmation of its special influence immediately following the familyʼs return from the Continent. According to Van Akin Burd, John James purchased a copy of Italy in October 1833, notably soon after the familyʼs September return home (Ruskin Family Letters, 286 n. 1). Actually, the October entry in John Jamesʼs personal accounts ledger records a purchase that was germane specifically to the “Account” rather than to the Continental tour generally. The entry reads “Plates Italy 28/6” (John James Ruskin, Account Book [1827–45], 29v); and although the lack of Rogersʼs name renders identification uncertain, the term plates suggests a portfolio of its plates alone. As Jan Piggott explains, “the publishers of almost all the books illustrated with Turner vignettes made the engravings better known and made more profit by selling portfolios of prints from the plates. These were available in ranks of quality and price: engraverʼs proofs; on India paper; before and after lettering; and on varying sizes of paper—even on the absurdly large Colombier folio—to satisfy the competitiveness of connoissures” (Turnerʼs Vignettes, 24). While Rogersʼs strictly poetic influence on the “Account” was certainly considerable (see Sources and Influences—Rogersʼs Poetry), it was the ekphrastic influence of book illustration by Turner, Stothard, Prout, and others, and the materiality of the print culture conveying their artistry, that particularly inspired Ruskinʼs project, especially its expansion into a composite‐genre, illustrated version—an expansion that mimics Rogersʼs own reconception of his work (see Samuel Rogers [1763–1855]).

(John Jamesʼs expenditure of 28/6 leaves in doubt what sort of object he acquired. The price of separate proofs, according to Rawlinson, ranged from £2/12/6 for Imperial 4^o to £3/13/6–4/4/0 for Colombier with or without lettering. The cost of a copy of the 1830 Italy ranged 25/–30/ depending on binding—comparable to John Jamesʼs outlay. Notably, he used the term plates, not proofs, perhaps indicating something less than a collectorʼs item. Whatever the quality of this item, it must have served as Ruskinʼs source for the titles of the vignettes, since Italy was published without a list of illustrations: only the artistsʼ and engraversʼ names, lettered on the engravings themselves, identify the illustrations. For Ruskinʼs probable adoption of one of Turnerʼs titles, see “Passing the Alps” and its contextual glosses; and see also Rawlinson, Engraved Work of J. M. W. Turner, 2:232, 1:lxxviii–lxxxi; Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 187–88; and Herrmann, Turner Prints, 183.)

A few illustrated travel publications influenced the composition of the “Account” when it was already underway. On his 8 February 1834 birthday, Ruskin received two books, Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps (1828–29) by William Brockedon (1787–1854), and Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96) by Horace‐Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99) (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 278, 280 n. 1). Brockedon had an immediate impact on Ruskinʼs Alpine descriptions, especially in his plan for illustrating the Swiss sections of the work (see List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”—Illustrations [Table 2]). Another influence at a later stage of composition—again, most directly on the planned illustrations—was The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer‐Lytton (1803–73), acquired by John James Ruskin in June 1834, just in time to provide Ruskin with ideas for illustrating “Heidelberg” (John James Ruskin, Account Book [1827–45], 34v). Also referenced in the List of Proposed Additional Contents—Illustrations is Samuel Rogersʼs 1834 illustrated edition of Poems, which the publisher released in December 1833 (Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries, 2:84–86).

The first known stage of composition is represented by a manuscript, consisting of two sheets, which is designated in ERM as MS IA, g.1. The manuscript was bound in MS IA, in the course of preparing the Library Edition (see also The Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS IA, g.2]; and for a full physical description, see MS IA: Contents, section g).

Apparently reflecting a collaboration, the manuscript is in the hands of both John and John James Ruskin, and contains a fair copy, with corrections, of five poems, which sequentially narrate the familyʼs first stage of their journey, taking them through northern France and Belgium. Each poem is entitled by a significant destination along this route: “Calais”, [“Cassel”] (untitled in this manuscript, but titled as such in a later fair copy), “Lille”, “Brussels”, and “The Meuse”. No title identifies the sequence as an entity.

The case for this manuscript as the earliest extant piece of the “Account” project is based on the fact that its in‐line and interlinear insertions, deletions, substitutions, transposition of lines, and other revisions are incorporated into the MS IX fair copies of these poems (see, e.g., the textual and contextual glosses attached to the transcripts of the five poems), and on the fact that Ruskinʼs sequence of drafting the prose essays that correspond to the five poems, as witnessed in the MS VIII draft, necessarily situates the MS IA, g.1 texts as existing prior to both the drafts and the fair copies of these essays (see Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS VII, VIII, XI]).

I interpret this manuscript as witnessing an all‐verse version of the travelogue, composed with some degree of collaboration by father and son. As discussed in Date of Composition, the manuscript is undated, and it remains an open question whether it was composed during the May–September 1833 journey itself, or following the familyʼs return home around 20 September.

The recto of sheet 1 of the manuscript begins with the poem, “Calais”, entitled as such, and in the hand of John James Ruskin. On the verso, John James continued with the poem, [“Cassel”] (untitled, and therefore identifiable as a new poem following “Calais” only on the grounds of the two poemsʼ separation in the MS IX fair copy). At line 19 of [“Cassel”], Johnʼs hand takes over (not Margaretʼs, whose terminal letters are typically formed differently than what prevails here). Ruskin carries the poem onto sheet 2 of the manuscript (evidence, along with their physical similarity, that the two sheets form a single manuscript), filling recto and verso with the continuation of [“Cassel”], “Lille”, “Brussels”, and “The Meuse”.

The physical manuscript bears the appearance of a self‐standing fair copy, which was later subjected to revision. No other extant manuscript belonging to the “Account” project consists solely of verse, and the arrangement of lines on the page indicates more care than in a draft. On sheet 1, John Jamesʼs large, eighteenth‐century hand takes up the full width of the paper for each line, and John sustained his fatherʼs single column, but in narrower scope and a smaller hand. On the verso of sheet 2, however, John stacked the lines in double columns, as if imitating printed verse (although he inserted the final poem in the sequence, “The Meuse”, sideways in space remaining on the recto of sheet 2, rather than starting a third sheet). The few substitutions—all apparently in Johnʼs hand, although not certainly so, especially in the case of overwriting—are mostly interlinear, made as strikethroughs with insertions above or below the line, with only a few instances as in‐line revisions, suggesting that these changes formed a distinct stage of this manuscriptʼs development, following its original purpose as a fair copy. Moreover, in the margins of both sheets, Ruskin numbered the lines of the poems sequentially and continuously (1–173); that is, he did not begin his line numbering anew with each poem, suggesting that he regarded the poems as forming a sequence.

It is possible that John James originally authored “Calais” and at least the first 18 lines of [“Cassel”], which are in his hand, and that John thereafter took over the composition, revising some of his fatherʼs lines in the process. This scenario cannot be absolutely proven, but neither can Cook and Wedderburnʼs assumption that sheet 1 of the manuscript bears witness to John Jamesʼs “copy” of his sonʼs original verse (Ruskin, Works, e.g. 2:341 n. 2). On the evidence of substitutions in Johnʼs hand, it is notable that in‐line revisions occur solely in lines written originally in his hand, whereas his revisions of lines written originally in John Jamesʼs hand occur solely as interlinear or overwriting, possibly suggesting that John had no part in a first stage of composing this sheet.

Further research is required to gauge the extent and nature of father and sonʼs collaboration. It is at least evident that the material witness of this manuscript indicates some degree of poetic collaboration by father and son, and it is noteworthy that this collaboration took place within the frame of the Augustan verse travelogues that prevailed in John Jamesʼs youth, rather than the manner of Rogers, Scott, Byron, Dickens, and the jobbing prose writers that dominated the scene during Johnʼs first decade as an author. In effect, this sequence of five poems stands vis‐à‐vis the composite‐genre work that the “Account” became, as does the classical verse of Samuel Rogersʼs Italy vis‐à‐vis that workʼs repackaging in 1830 as an up‐to‐date, illustrated travelogue featuring the newly invented steel engraving (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”).

In a second stage of composition, Ruskin reconceptualized and elaborated the work as a composite‐genre rather than as a solely verse travelogue. This stage is epitomized in brief by a folded sheet, designated in ERM as MS IA, g.2. Like MS IA, g.1, the manuscript was bound as part of MS IA in the course of preparing the Library Edition (see The Verse Travelogue [MS IA, g.1]; and for a full physical description, see MS IA: Contents, section g).

The manuscript appears to be a semi‐fair copy, with corrections, and it is entirely in Ruskinʼs hand. The contents, unlike those of MS IA, g.1, are non‐sequential relative to the actual tour, but they do appear selected to represent the major regions into which the tourʼs itinerary was broadly divided. The contents also mix genres, introducing a prose essay, which is placed first in the group: “Calais”. With this essay representing the tourʼs point of entry to the Continent (as does the essayʼs verse counterpart in MS IA, g.1), there follow four poems, which seem to form two geographically related pairs: “Passing the Alps” and “Milan Cathedral”, representing the southern and Alpine regions that occupied the second half of the tour; and “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, representing the Rhine journey that occupied the first half. It is not clear why the manuscript positions the two pairs in a topographical order that is the reverse of the familyʼs encounter with these places, as they journeyed down the Rhine to the Black Forest, and then crossed the Alps and descended to the Italian lakes and Milan.

This suggestion of an organizational feature is conjectural, as no title identifies the five pieces as an entity, and the purpose of the manuscript is unclear. The manuscript is undated, but it must have pre‐dated the MS IX fair copy, which incorporates its corrections and substitutions in the prose essay, “Calais”, and in the poems “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”. The manuscript is the sole surviving witness for the other two poems, “Passing the Alps” and “Milan Cathedral”, the MS IX fair copy having been abandoned toward the end of sections describing the Rhine journey, before the sequence could arrive at the crossing of the Alps. The manuscriptʼs place in the evolution of the “Account” appears to be a transitional one between the all‐verse and the fully developed composite‐genre versions, since it contains a mix of genres (albeit no graphic illustrations) as well as a selection of works about destinations that seems strategically chosen. The audience and occasion of the manuscript will, however, probably always remain obscure.

In the ongoing process of composition of the “Account”, MS IA, g.2 must have been a precursor not only to the fair copy in MS IX (which incorporates the prose essay, “Calais”, in its opening section), but also to the drafts of other poems and essays found in MS VIII. The early occurrence of the two pairs of poems in MS IA, g.2 suggests that these works served as imaginative and compositional cruxes for Ruskin. The pairing of the poems “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” was formed around a contrast of gothic sublime and domestic beauty, respectively, that Ruskin carried forward to the MS IX fair copy (in which he elaborated the pairing with a third, middle section, “Ehrenbreitstein”, designed to bridge the contrasting modes using a geographical analogy of a confluence of two rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle). Ultimately, he refined the pairing for publication under the title, “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” (see Publication: Friendshipʼs Offering (November 1834)). In the pairing of “Passing the Alps” and “Milan Cathedral”, Ruskin established another figure important to the development of the “Account”, that of crossing a divide between natural and supernatural phenomena. The figure of a crossing that is humanly transformative appears to have been suggested to him by Samuel Rogersʼs poem, “The Alps”, in Italy (see Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS VII, VIII, XI]; and see also the contextual glosses attached to “Passing the Alps”).

The two pairs of poems presented imaginative cruxes also in the process of drafting and fair‐copying. In the MS IX fair copy, the trio of composite‐genre sections, “Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar”, were the last texts that Ruskin completed, before abandoning the fair copy in the middle of their following section, “Heidelberg”. Oppositely, in MS VIII, the corresponding prose essays, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, occur very near the onset of this manuscriptʼs extensive stint of draft for the “Account”, even though the labor of assembling and fair‐copying these particular sections lay far ahead in the process (given that, in the sequence of MS VIII draft, these prose essays are succeeded by other draft essays that would first have to incorporated into the fair copy, well before reaching these points on the lower Rhine; see Detailed Lists of Witnesses: MS VIII). Then, in another compositional crux, immediately after composing the prose essays “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” near the start of MS VIII draft, Ruskin turned from the figure of contrasting aesthetic modes to develop the trope of mountain crossing in drafts relating to the Alps—i.e., “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], “Via Mala”, “Splugen”, “The Summit”, and “The Descent” (see Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS VII, VIII, XI]; see also MS VIII: Contents, section b, list b.1).

In the MS IX fair copy, Ruskin fully assembled verse and prose text along with graphic illustration. Drawing on verse and prose draft in the two MS IA manuscripts and in MS VIII, Ruskin formed topographical sub‐sections describing major destinations along the familyʼs tour. Each section typically consists of a poem in the picturesque mode, followed by a prose piece in a comic or anecdotal mode. The texts are encased between vignette illustrations at the head and the tail of the section—typically, just as in Rogersʼs Italy, a landscape vignette at the head, and a figure vignette at the tail—and in some sections additional illustrations internally separate the verse and prose blocks of text. The illustrations, which Ruskin drew on separate slips and pasted into blank spaces left to accommodate them between text blocks, mimic the appearance of engravings or lithographs that he found in published models. The work as a whole is untitled and undated in MS IX. For a physical description of the ledger that Ruskin adapted to this purpose, see MS IX.

Ruskinʼs selection of places for the completed travelogue from among all those that the family visited can be viewed in the Chronology and Map (to come) of the 1833 tour, which plots the route through all the places mentioned in the 1833 travel diary kept by Ruskinʼs cousin, Mary Richardson (1784–1848), and in the 1833 diary kept by John James Ruskin. See also the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”, which Ruskin listed on the back endpapers of MS VIII as destinations he intended to describe in the travelogue, had he carried on with the work.

Ruskinʼs aim in the composite‐genre project clearly was to imitate the print culture of travel literature of his day. For the text, he used a cursive “copperplate” hand, justified left and right; and for the page layout, he adopted the plan of the 1830 edition of Samuel Rogersʼs (1763–1855) Italy, with a vignette‐style illustration placed at the top of the first page of each section, followed by the place‐name header (imitating even Rogersʼs choice of typeface and font), which serves to identify the sectionʼs verse, prose, and additional illustrations—all lacking titles of their own. In several instances, he drew illustrations in the manner of steel‐engravings, a new technology featured in Rogersʼs Italy (1830) and Poems (1834) as well as in the more recent literary annuals.

Specifically, he followed Rogers in heading sections with vignettes of landscape subjects, adapted directly or drawn after the manner of J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), and in concluding sections with vignettes of figure subjects, drawn in the manner of Thomas Stothard (1755–1834). Ruskin also copied illustrations directly from Samuel Proutʼs (1783–1852) lithographs for the Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany (1833), and in at least one instance he attempted to capture the watery appearance of lithography in contrast to the stipled pen strokes he used to imitate engraving (Liège). In some headpiece vignettes, Proutʼs influence competed with Turnerʼs, Ruskin choosing architectural subjects over landscapes, and drawing these with Proutʼs crumbly lines in contrast to the atmospheric effects of the Turneresque vignettes (e.g., Aachen Cathedral). Overall, in its graphic and “typographic” effects, the MS IX fair copy is much more varied and playful in its response to print culture than has usually been acknowledged. As both a work and an artifact, the fair copy represents an advance over the earlier manuscript instantiations of the “Account” by exploring ekphrasis and topographical description as principles both of expansion and interrelation. (See Discussion: Sources and Influences; and Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”).

As a direct result of this deliberate, curious, and playful course of self‐training in the print culture of his decade, the 1830s, Ruskin debuted as J.R., supported personally by some of the professionals whom he imitated in the “Account” (see Discussion: Mentors). It was likely because he was distracted by the opportunity to publish in Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, and not because he merely neglected or grew bored with his project, that Ruskin abandoned the fair‐copying, leaving the MS IX version incomplete (see Abandonment of the Project). As physical evidence of this cause for Ruskinʼs ceasing fair‐copying, the MS VIII draft of the “Account” abruptly terminates where it runs up against draft for “Saltzburg”, one of the two poems that Ruskin prepared for publication in Friendshipʼs Offering. This evidence was misinterpreted and misdated by W. G. Collingwood, who thereby obscured the important causal link between the “Account” as Ruskinʼs self‐apprenticeship in the print culture of illustratred accounts of travel and his debut as a writer in this genre.

While no evidence identifies precisely when Ruskin began the MS IX fair copy, the manuscript must postdate MS IA, g.1, and MS IA, g.2, since the fair copy incorporates his revisions to those manuscripts; and he likely commenced fair‐copying not long before February 1834, when he started the stint of draft in MS VIII—the sequence of that draft gradually converging with the pace of the fair‐copying (see Initiation of the Project).

The interruption in the fair‐copying in MS IX accorded with the termination of the draft in MS VIII because, by that time, the two compositional processes were closely in sync. In MS IX, the text breaks off in mid‐sentence near the start of the prose essay on “Heidelberg”. In MS VIII, the draft of this prose piece occurs intermittently in the section mingling draft of the “Account” with droft of poems for John Jamesʼs 1834 birthday (i.e., MS VIII: Contents, b.2; see the drafts, “Cont. Heidelberg” [“Heidelberg” prose, part 1], and “All has yielded to it from time immemorial” [“Heidelberg” prose, part 2]). Just so, Ruskinʼs draft of the poem, “Heidelberg”, the last of the completed fair‐copied texts in MS IX, occurs intermittently toward the end of the section of of MS VIII that is devoted solely to draft of the “Account” (i.e., MS VIII: Contents, b.1, which precedes the section that mingles draft of the “Account” with poetry in the making for John Jamesʼs birthday; see the drafts, “Smiling from those bright rays kiss” [“Heidelberg” poem, part 1], and “Continuation Heidelberg” [“Heidelberg” poem, part 2]. In this same section of MS VIII, Contents, b.1, Ruskin was also composing the poem, “Ehrenbreitstein”, along with the poem, “Heidelberg”, indicating that at that point he was readying materials for fair‐copying the trio of sections that precede the “Heidelberg“ section—“Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar”.

In the current state of MS IX, several gaps separate blocks of text, indicating where Ruskin intended to paste illustrations. In most cases, it is now largely impossible to determine which of these gaps were left blank because Ruskin never made a drawing to fill them, and which are empty because, as he commented in 1885 in Praeterita, “many [drawings] have since been taken out” (Ruskin, Works, 35:81). Drawings could also have been lost (or, for that matter, restored) between 1885 and 1903, when Cook and Wedderburn described the manuscript for the Library Edition.

Following the recto (48r) of MS IX containing the incomplete fragment of the prose essay, “Heidelberg”, seven successive rectos (49r–55r) exhibit a gallery of eight drawings of mountain and lake scenes, as described in Ruskin, Works, 2:364 n. 1. Since the blank versos facing each of these seven pages obviously would have been inadequate to contain verse and prose of the length that fills the earlier, fully fair‐copied sections of the “Account”, it is clear that Ruskin did not place these drawings with the intention of flowing text around them. Rather, he or someone else at some time prior to 1903 decided that no more fair‐copying would be forthcoming, and that the remaining blank pages may as well be used in part to assemble this gallery. The drawings are untitled, but a case for their subjects and intended placement, had Ruskin completed the work, is proposed as part of the ERM corrected and completed version of the “Account”.

According to W. G. Collingwood in his “Catalogue of Drawings by Mr. Ruskin (1829–1859)”, there existed “twenty‐eight original vignettes on white paper in imitation of Turnerʼs vignettes in Rogersʼ Poems; of which The Jungfrau, published in Poems, 1891, is a specimen; with others from Prout and Turner” (Collingwood, Life and Work of John Ruskin, 1:238). Twenty‐eight is an accurate count of the drawings presently in place in MS IX, if the gallery of eight unidentified vignettes is included. Given that Collingwood published his catalogue as an appendix to his Life and Work of John Ruskin in 1900, his count pushes back to that year the terminus ad quem (prior to the publication in 1903 of the second volume, Poems, of the Library Edition) for any drawings having been removed from MS IX. Twenty‐eight cannot, however, be the total drawings that Ruskin prepared to illustrate the “Account”, whether additional drawings were ever affixed in MS IX or not. For example, Collingwood mentions The Jungfrau, which is not included in this count: its current location is unknown, but it must have been either originally separate or removed from MS IX in order to be photogravured for Collingwoodʼs Poems (1891). Another vignette, a “miniature” copy of the Hôtel de Ville, Brussels, as lithographed by Samuel Prout is documented in the catalogue of the Ruskin Exhibition held in Coniston, 21 July–8 September 1900 (Collingwood, Ruskin Exhibition, no. 10; see Drawings from the Tour of 1833). The location of this vignette is also unknown, but it would have been in addition to the twenty‐eight.

As explained in Information Lost about the “Account” owing to Curatorial Treatment of Manuscripts, between 1891 (when Collingwood published a description of MS IX) and 1900 (which we can now establish as the terminus ad quem), supposedly “blank” pages were removed from the manuscript. Prior to this treatment, the vignette The Jungfrau may have been pasted onto a leaf where Ruskin had calculated that the section would fall (“The Jungfrau”), which he intended the vignette to illustrate. (The same may have been the case for the eight drawings now formed into a gallery, which may originally have been placed throughout the ledger awaiting the surrounding text.) There is also a possible case of a drawing having been affixed to a page where it does not belong (see Vignette, Mountain Prospect Drawing [Heiligenberg?]).

In the current state of the manuscript, the gap most likely to have originally held a vignette, which has since been removed, is the space left for a vertical drawing above the section title of “Brussels”. We have Ruskinʼs own testimony that he completed a “copy from Proutʼs wonderful drawing . . . to ‘illustrate’ my diary of that first Continental Travel”, as he explained in his “Notes on My Own Drawings and Engravings” when he exhibited this drawing as part of the 1878 exhibition of his collection of Turner drawings at the Fine Art Society (Ruskin, Works, 13:505). Even with this record of provenance, however, ambiguity surrounds the identity of this drawing, the location of which is unknown (see “miniature” copy of Proutʼs Hotel de Ville, Brussels). Another gap in MS IX that might once have been filled is the vertical blank space above the section heading of “Cologne”. Ruskin may have intended to fill this space with a reduction of the travel sketch, “Church at Cologne” (see Drawings from the Tour of 1833). Unlike the vignette for “Brussels”, however, no vignette version of this image is recorded. As a reverse case, a vignette does exist in MS IX, Cassel Hôtel de Ville and Market Square, which Ruskin may have based on the tour sketch, “Hotel de Ville, Cassel”.

To identify lost or unidentified drawings, and make a case for Ruskinʼs intended placement of drawings, the starting place is the Lists of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account” (Table 2, Illustrations), where Ruskin listed the drawings he proposed either to invent himself or to copy from a printed source. The list of proposed illustrations begins, however, with the section “Heidelberg” and provides no evidence about gaps left in already fair‐copied sections in MS IX (see The Plan for Completion of the Work—The Lists of Proposed Additional Contents for Account of a Tour on the Continent).

In the Proposed Additional Contents, Ruskin refers to drawings of his own invention not by the title of the vignette illustration—since he did not entitle his vignettes—but often by the title of an 1833 tour sketch on which he planned to base the illustration. The known tour sketches are listed in Drawings from the Tour of 1833. A representative example of such drawings survives in a sheet of pen‐and‐ink drawings made by Ruskin in connection with the 1833 journey, now held by the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and catalogued as Six Swiss and Italian Views. The sheet contains five landscape views (plus an architectural subject on the verso), each of which Ruskin captioned according to their respective locales. These captions, which are inscribed in a cursive hand, and which follow the curve of the base of a sketch as if forming a part of it, closely resemble the caption used to entitle another drawing from the 1833 tour, “Ancient Fortress and Rocky peak. / Above the vale of Balstall [i.e., Balsthal], Jura”, which is held by the Ruskin Library, Lancaster, and reproduced in Walton, Drawings of John Ruskin (p. 15). The caption feature, along with some other consistencies of style peculiar to the 1833 sketches, is revealing, since Ruskin reworked “Ancient Fortress and Rocky Peak” to form a readily identifiable vignette among those included in the gallery at the end of MS IX, Vignette after “Ancient Fortress and Rocky peak / Above the vale of Balstall”. The latter version, like all of Ruskinʼs vignettes, lacks a caption, since he recognized that the vignette form seeks a more integrated and imaginative relation with text than the distinctness of an illustrative plate with its lettering of title, artist, and engraver (a stage of production separate from the engraving of the image itself). Thus, we are provided with a basis for distinguishing tour sketches, like those in the Boston sheet, from drawings that Ruskin intended specifically to insert into the fair‐copy “Account”—even though as Walton remarks, the tour sketches themselves resemble “school copies rather than records of things seen, and . . . were probably elaborated in hotel rooms or at home” (p. 14).

The sheet containing the Balsthal and Mont Blanc drawings is 8 1/2 × 5 inches, as compared with the Boston sheet at 9 1/16 × 11 9/16 inches, but the former contains two mountain scenes stacked vertically, whereas the latter holds five mountain sketches (plus a smaller undeveloped architectural subject) arranged horizontally. One can imagine Ruskin cutting the five smaller drawings into separate slips and inserting them directly as vignettes into MS IX, but the presence of a caption seems to be decisive in distinguishing these 1833 tour sketches from vignettes intended for the “Account”, as well as differences in size and style. For the approximately 8 × 6 1/2–inch MS IX ledger (see MS IX: Description), many of the tour drawings would have required a full page or exceeded its limits. While Ruskin did use full or nearly full page spaces in MS IX for his imitations of Prout lithographs, thereby registering the much larger dimensions of the originals relative to the exquisite steel‐engraved vignettes after Turner that he imitated from Rogersʼs Italy (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”), he considerably scaled down “Ancient Fortress and Rocky Peak” for its vignette version. There are also distinct differences in drawing style between the tour sketches and the vignettes. Walton characterizes the tour sketches as “composed with schematic distinctions of tone and form from plane to plane in an eighteenth‐century manner that probably derived from [Charles] Runciman” (p. 14). The vignettes—at least the later, recognizably Turner‐influenced vignettes, as exemplifed by the transformation of “Ancient Fortress and Rocky Peak” into Vignette after “Ancient Fortress and Rocky peak / Above the vale of Balstall”—omit the dark foreground rocks and vegetation that frames the sketches; and they use Turneresque lighting effects to suffuse and lend drama to the orderly, restrained planar logic of the sketches.

MS VIII is a notebook that Ruskin had used for rough copy of imaginative writing, largely poetry, since 1831, and that he would continue to use for drafting verse and prose through 1836, and possibly as late as 1838. The draft relevant to the “Account” includes verse and prose intended for the composite‐genre version, which Ruskin must already have had underway in MS IX. The draft in MS VIII pertains mainly to the Rhine journey, the first sighting and crossing of the Alps, the tour in northern Italy, and the tour of Switzerland. The draft is notably homogeneous compared to the miscellaneous contents that precede it in the notebook, the “Account” draft being interrupted by and becoming jumbled with other works only after Ruskin had composed approximately twenty‐five items related to the tour. Toward the end of the stint, the draft becomes intermingled with poems related to John Jamesʼs upcoming 10 May 1834 birthday (see MS VIII: Contents, Section b.2, and compare the preceding Section b.1).

Since Ruskin did not entitle the draft in MS VIII (or anywhere else) as belonging to the “Account”, a starting point cannot be definitively ascertained. Following the ode for John Jamesʼs 1833 birthday, “My Fatherʼs Birthday: The Month of May”, there occurs the verse, “Oh are there spirits, can there be”, which contains no place names connecting the poem to the topographical content of the “Account”. However, the next piece in the notebookʼs sequence—a prose draft that Ruskin entitled here as “Source of the Arveron”—can be securely anchored in the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”, which includes that title. In ERM, “Oh are there spirits” is treated as belonging to the “Account” project, on the grounds that its positioning in the MS VIII can be persuasively read as announcing a major theme connected with “Source of the Arveron”—Ruskinʼs spiritual associations with the Alps in general and with the Chamonix valley in particular. (In the overall plan for the “Account”, this theme culminates in an invocation of spiritual beings in the poem “Chamouni” and in the essay “Chamouni”. As further evidence tying “Oh are there spirits” to the “Account” draft following it, the poem is included in the system of Line Numbering for the project. It is unclear, however, where the poem should be situated in the “Account”, or whether Ruskin had a specific destination in mind when he drafted it.)

It is logical that the draft sequence related to the “Account” commences following draft of the 10 May 1833 birthday ode for John James Ruskin, “My Fatherʼs Birthday: The Month of May”, since the family set off on the Tour of 1833 following that anniversary. (According to the 1833 diary of Ruskinʼs cousin, Mary Richardson, they departed for Dover at “half past nine” on May 14 [p. 1].) W. G. Collingwood was incorrect to suggest, however, that “the prose and verse description of . . . [the 1833 tour] was begun” in this manuscript notebook (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:264; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:265). While the MS VIII sequence does represent the most extensive development of the composite‐genre version to survive in draft, Collingwood neglected to analyze how this manuscript must have been preceded by MS IA, g.1 and MS IA, g.2 in the genetic development of the work, even though he was familiar with these other manuscripts. Yet Ruskin did not, it is true, simply pick up in MS VIII where he had left off composing verse and prose for the composite‐genre version in previous extant manuscripts. By starting the draft in MS VIII with the “Source of the Arveron”, Ruskin was casting forward to a projected conclusion of the “Account”—a complement to beginning MS IA, g.2 with a prose essay, “Calais” about the onset of the tour.

The prose essay headed by the title “Source of the Arveron” describes an episode that occurred at the end of the Ruskinsʼ tour, during their stay in Chamonix. Ruskin probably meant the title to apply also to the untitled poem following the essay, “I woke to hear the lullaby” [“The Arve at Chamouni”]. As Collingwood correctly indicates by his invented title, “The Arve at Chamouni”, the poem describes the Arve River flowing through the valley of Chamonix. In other words, Ruskin intended this opening title of the “Account” draft as a section heading for prose and verse—a unit in the already fully developed composite version of the work. This increased complexity in composition at the start of the MS VIII draft is significant, not only as additional proof that Ruskin initiated this stint at a stage when he had already conceived of the “Account” as a composite‐genre work, but also as an indication of the design and thematic coherence he imagined for the work—albeit a plan that he never completed the fair copy.

The hike to the glacier source of the Arveron River was a popular activity for tourists in Chamonix. In Ruskinʼs telling, the excursion suggests a quest for poetic origins: led by local children acting as guides, the walk to the “source” reveals a Hippocrene‐like, spiritual place of inspiration. In this notion of a spiritual poetic source, Ruskin drew together multiple ideas, including the trope of crossing mountains into a sacred bourne, a theme that he had already broached in draft of “Passing the Alps”, based on Samuel Rogersʼs “The Alps” in Italy. Moreover, as explained in Discussion: Sources and Influences and Mentors, Ruskinʼs recent correspondence in mid‐February 1834 with the writer James Hogg (ca. 1770–1835), who had invited the youth to his farm in the Yarrow Valley of the Scottish Borders as an act of poetic mentoring, prompted in Ruskin a pastoral “reverie” about poetry and place. It is owing to this spiritualization of the journey at the start of the MS VIII draft that a thematic case can be made for counting “Oh are there spirits, can there be”, with its suggestions of liminal spaces between nature and the supernatural, as part of the “Account”.

The convergence of these themes suggests a date of mid‐ to late‐February 1834 for the start of the MS VIII draft, since Ruskin replied to Hoggʼs invitation to Scotland on 13 February. Moreover, on his 8 February birthday, he received two books that influenced his Alpine descriptions—Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps (1828–29) by William Brockedon (1787–1854), and Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96) by Horace‐Bénédict de Saussure (1740–99) (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 278, 280 n. 1; and see Benchmark Acquisitions of Influential Illustrated Travel Publications). Immediately following draft of the composite prose essay and poem, “Source of the Arveron”, Ruskin drafted the prose essays, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, thus dovetailing the start of composition in MS VIII with MS IA, g.2, which contains the corresponding pair of Rhine journey poems as well as the pair of poems introducing the trope of mountain crossing, “Passing the Alps” and “Milan Cathedral”. (At this stage, however, fair‐copying in MS IX would have lagged well behind the Rhine sections of the “Account”; see below, and also Initiation of the Project.)

Ruskin carried on in MS VIII to develop the trope of mountain crossing in a cluster of poems describing the entry to Italy via the Splügen Pass, a cluster that, according to the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”, was meant to be introduced in fair copy by the poem, “Passing the Alps”. It appears that Ruskin intended “Passing the Alps” to serve as a fulcrum between a cluster of pieces about the approach to the Alps from Schaffhausen, and a cluster about the crossing at Splügen. The latter cluster was to consist of pieces or composite sections entitled “The Via Mala”, “Splugen”, “The Summit”, and “The Descent”, all of which are represented by poems in the MS VIII draft (see ERM Revised and Completed Sequence of [Account of a Tour on the Continent]). Rogers situates “The Alps” as a retrospective reflection on the experience of crossing, rather than a prospective one as Ruskin planned, but it is clear that the younger poet modeled his sequence on Rogersʼs approach to the mountains. (In Italy, the approach plays out topographically coming from the west, in the poems “The Great St. Bernard” and “The Descent”, rather than coming from the north as the Ruskins did.) Ruskinʼs poems lack the pedantic historical references with which Rogers labors his verse; instead, the youth (who was in any case inadequately learned to make such allusions) allowed the verse to unfold by tracing the landscape itself, coupling the description, if with anything, with a reverential topic, such as the sabbath setting of “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”].

Along with drafting these pieces in MS VIII to frame large‐scale conceptions of form and theme, Ruskin carried on with additional draft of prose sections to match with poems already composed about places in France, Belgium, and Germany. After the drafts of the prose essays, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, the next prose sections to appear are those for “The Meuse”, “Cologne”, “Brussels” (“Part of Brussels” [part 1] and “Part of Brussels” [part 2]), and “Aix la Chapelle”, suggesting that, by this point of composition in MS VIII, Ruskin had fair‐copied in MS IX the entire composite sections of verse, prose, and drawings for “Calais”, “Cassel”, and “Lille”. (Draft versions of the prose essays for “Cassel” and “Lille” are not extant.)

The probable mid‐ to late‐February 1834 date for Ruskinʼs commencement of the “Account” draft in MS VIII accords well with a trajectory of this writing toward a terminus ad quem among the drafts of poetry preparing for his fatherʼs 10 May 1834 birthday. As the sequence of “Account” draft proceeds from poems about mountain crossings to poems about Italy, the ongoing intermixing of draft relating to points in northern Europe suggests that Ruskinʼs drafting was gradually converging with his fair‐copying in MS IX. Growing prominent toward the end of the main stint of draft for the “Account” (MS VIII: Contents, section b, list b.1) and throughout the stint of draft mixed with birthday writing (MS VIII: Contents, section b, list b.2) are draft pieces related to the break‐off point of the fair copy in MS IX—“Heidelberg”, and “Ehrenbreitstein” (the latter being the section that, in MS IX, bridges “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”).

At some points in the text, one can detect the traces of Ruskin pivoting between draft and fair copy. On page 62r of MS VIII, three‐quarters of the way down the page, Ruskin started the prose essay, “Brussels”, entitling it “Part of Brussels” [part 1]. This draft extends halfway through 62v, where it stops in mid‐sentence, with the word “circumnavigating” substituted for traversing. At this point, Ruskin stopped to compose a poem, “Oh softly blew the mounting breeze” [“Chiavenna”]; and then, at the top of the next recto, 63r, he completed the prose essay, “Part of Brussels” [part 2], which he took up in mid‐sentence, with the phrase “perambulating . . . tread on it softly”. In the fair copy of this prose passage, a line of text ends with the break‐point in the draft of “Part of Brussels” [part 1], “circumnavigating for”—with the “for” jammed against the justified right margin. The next line resumes as in “Part of Brussels” [part 2]: “perambulating.—Oh woe to the weather”. One might infer, then, that Ruskin fair‐copied “Part of Brussels” [part 1] in MS IX as far as he had drafted the prose in MS VIII (62v); crossed out the last word in MS VIII draft on 62v (“traversing”), since he could not fit that word on the line in the fair copy (hence, the tightly fitted, almost run‐together “circumnavigating, for”); then perhaps stopped fair‐copying the prose in MS IX, in order to compose the poem about Chiavenna that falls next in draft; and finally resumed drafting prose with “Part of Brussels” [part 2], only changing his mind about the next word (making it “perambulating” rather than “traversing”).

Perhaps close to the time when composing and fair‐copying converged, Ruskin turned to the back endpapers of MS VIII to begin the first of two lists constituting the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”—the list of the remaining place‐name sections yet to be drafted and/or fair‐copied for the completed work (see The Plan for Completion of the Work). At the start of this first list, he identified sections connected with points along the lower Rhine, places about which he had perhaps recently drafted, or was in process of drafting, verse and prose. The list is headed by “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, which were nothing new, but they are now separated by “Ehrenbreitstein”, which Ruskin conceived, apparently belatedly, to act as a bridge between the complementary sections. Then, after deleting a proposed section about Frankfurt (“Francfurt”), Ruskin listed “Heidelberg”, and “Schaffhausen”, both of which emerge comparatively late in the MS VIII draft.

In the first list, several other proposed place‐name sections correspond to verse and prose pieces drafted in MS VIII—pieces describing, for example, the Alpine border between Germany and Italy, and places in Italy and Switzerland. Many of these draft pieces were edited for inclusion in the two earliest published versions of the “Account” that claimed to represent the work comprehensively—Poems, ed. Collingwood (1891) and Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn (1903)—but the editors neglected to explain what guidance, if any, they took from Ruskinʼs List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”. The first published version to schematize these surviving draft pieces explicitly and fully according to Ruskinʼs plan is the ERM Revised and Completed Sequence of [Account of a Tour on the Continent].

Finally, respecting the fugitive pieces of writing contained in MS VII and MS XI that were originally intended for the “Account”, little can be inferred about their respective draft stages, since no earlier witnesses are extant. The texts are unique and fair‐copied in an unidentified hand (see The Ruskin Family Handwriting: Unidentified Hands—MS VII, XI Fair Copy of the “Account”). That the hand is probably not Ruskinʼs, and that the fair copies were made without his involvement, can be inferred from some bizarre instances of diction and punctuation that seem most logically explained as errors in transcription (see textual glosses for the poems “The Rhine” and “Chamouni”, and for the prose essay “Chamouni”). The fair copies may have been made long after Ruskin drafted the original texts, and after he had abandoned the “Account” as a project, since the copies are found among a group of texts—all transcribed in the same unidentified hand, which worked from the opposite end of the original use of MS VII—which includes items originally dating from 1836. The purpose of transcribing these disparate texts together and at the same time is unknown, but the copyist signified his or her awareness of the textsʼ respective provenances by adding the dateline “1833” at the bottom of two poems originating with the Tour of 1833—“The Rhine” and “Chamouni”.

The dateline added to the prose essay, “Chamouni”—“J.R. / fragment from a Journal / 1833“—is not in the hand of the unidentified copyist responsible for the transcription, but in the hand of John James Ruskin, who added this attribution in a different ink than that used for the text. The identification refers to the collective title “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” given to the extracts from the “Account” published in late 1834 in Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, suggesting that this essay may once have been considered for publication in the annual (see Friendshipʼs Offering (November 1834). More likely, however, the attribution refers to the title given by John James to the extract that he edited and published in Poems by J. R. (1850).

Additional information that possibly can be used to draw inferences about Ruskinʼs composition of the “Account” is available in his line numbering, which runs throughout verse portions of the work in MS IA, g.1, MS IA, g.2, and the MS VIII draft sequence. (The line numbering is listed, poem by poem, in .) In none of these manuscripts does the numbering give the appearance of having been added at a time later than composition. Overall, the numbering system appears mechanical, reinforcing the suggestion of Ruskinʼs regular, uncrowded pace of composition in the manuscripts, despite the sometimes helter‐skelter of leaping around the map in the topographical sequence of subjects in draft for the “Account”.

Overall, a chronological order of composition is indicated by the sequential line numbering from manuscript to manuscript, despite unexplained gaps in the numbering, which supports the textual history proposed here for the evolution of the “Account” project. The numbering advances sequentially from 1–173 in MS IA, g.1, to 360–429 in MS IA, g.2, to 506–1484 in MS VIII. In the two sheets comprising MS IA, g.1, the lines of the five poems are numbered continuously, 1–173, without breaks between the separate poems. In MS IA, g.2, the line numbering begins following the prose essay, “Calais”, starting with the first line of “Passing the Alps” as line 360, and running continuously from poem to poem, to line 429. Since the poems in this manuscript, unlike those in MS IA, g.1, could never have been conceived as sequentially ordered in a topographical sense for fair copy, this instance shows that Ruskin did not employ the system in the course of composition to keep track of a topographical ordering of sections. Nonetheless, the numbering may have been useful to him when transferring draft to fair copy in MS IX.

In the MS VIII draft sequence, the line numbering takes up with line 506, applied to “Oh are there spirits, can there be”; and the numbering carries relentlessly and mechanically forward through the verse draft in MS VIII: Contents, Section b, albeit with occasional gaps or overlapping numbering. Where poetry encounters prose on the page, the line numbering halts, and then resumes sequentially following the interruption. As in MS IA, g.2, the line numbering in MS VIII bears no relation to the topographical sequence, which is jumbled, with poems drafted in no particular geographical order (except for the occasional topographical cluster), and with some poems such as “Heidelberg” and “Genoa” divided into parts separated by several pages with no effect on the numbering sequence. Thus, in MS VIII as well, Ruskinʼs numbering the lines of poetry seems mechanical. Doubtless, he needed a line count in order to estimate the space needed to fair‐copy lines; however, the system would not have helped him estimate space for prose, and the presence of the numbering in MS IA, g.1 suggests that he initiated the numbering scheme before he even conceived the composite‐genre version represented by the fair copy.

Nonetheless, the line numbering can be used to corroborate other evidence in drawing conclusions about the “Account”. For example, the onset of the numbering in MS VIII with line 506 seems strong evidence for treating the poem “Oh are there spirits, can there be” as a part of the work, especially since this evidence supports the thematic relevance of the poem. At the opposite end of the “Account” draft in MS VIII, the continuous line numbering ends at line 1484, the final line of the poem “Villa Pliniana”; and on the following recto, Ruskin started line numbering anew with line 1 for the start of “Saltzburg”. The latter poem, as argued in Publication: Friendshipʼs Offering (November 1834), marks his departure from the “Account” per se, to prepare for publication in Friendshipʼs Offering.

The line numbering does not, however, supply foolproof evidence that poems comprised within the MS VIII sequence belong to the “Account”. In MS VIII: Contents, b.2, while Ruskin wrapped his line numbering system for the “Account” around verse clearly meant for another purpose, such as “The Address” for John Jamesʼs birthday, which he left unnumbered, he did carry the numbering through “The Crystal Hunter”. This poem is simultaneously numbered starting with line 1, using the column on the opposite side of the page from the “Account” numbering, suggesting either that the poem bears a tangential relation to the “Account”, or that the line numbering system served an additional purpose to counting lines for the “Account”, or that Ruskin sometimes numbered the ruled lines on the page ahead of composing and was merely careless about using those pre‐numbered lines for other kinds of poetry.

Irregularities occur within the numbering, some of which are probably mere mistakes. It is possible, however, that some irregularities can be used as evidence in unraveling a more complex compositional history than what usually appears to have been a straightforwardly linear production of text. These cases are discussed in the textual glosses appended to individual texts.

On the back endpapers of MS VIII, the witness Lists of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account” consists of two lists. List 1 details the place‐names Ruskin intended to constitute the entirety of the “Account”, a list that he began with “Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar” as items numbered 1–3. Thus, it appears that Ruskin began the list roughly at the point when his fair‐copying of these pieces in MS IX converged with the pace of his drafting remaining portions of those sections in MS VIII (see Drafting the Composite‐Genre Travelogue [MS VII, MS VIII, MS XI]). This inference tends to be confirmed by the deletion of number 4 in the list, a proposed entry for “Francfurt”, which Ruskin must have reconsidered while both the MS VIII draft and MS IX fair copy were in process, since the fair copy proceeds from “St. Goar” to “Heidelberg”, number 5 in the list, with no fair copy of a section about Frankfurt. (Also no draft related to Frankfurt is found in MS VIII—or. at least, no draft that is recognizable as such. A draft might have existed elsewhere that did not survive. Frankfurt was nonetheless a major destination along the route, where the family stopped June 1–3, between St. Goar and castle ruins along the Rhine on May 30 and the woodland ride to Heidelberg on June 4. The Ruskins visited with an unidentified family named Koch, who entertained them in the evening and took them sight‐seeing during the day [Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833, 24–31]. See the annotated transcription of the Lists for other deletions.)

List 2 arranges place‐names correspondingly to the first, and associates with each place‐name a set of illustrations that Ruskin intended to copy from published sources or work up from his own drawings made during the tour. He began this list with “Heidelberg”, the section he left incomplete when abandoning fair copy in MS IX. Ruskin therefore began this second list somewhat later than the first, which he evidently started before he had completed drafting and/or fair‐copying “Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar”. He might have begun list 2 either at the time he stopped fair‐copying or any time afterward, but a terminus a quo is established by the source of the illustrations planned for “Heidelberg”, which can be identified with near certainty as The Pilgrims of the Rhine by Edward Bulwer‐Lytton (1803–73), a book that John James Ruskin acquired in June 1834 (see Abandonment of the Project). Otherwise, the list of illustrations is dominated by references to William Brockedonʼs Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps, which Ruskin received for his fifteenth birthday, on 8 February 1834. Other proposed drawings are keyed to illustrations in Samuel Proutʼs Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany, Samuel Rogersʼs Italy, and other published sources, as well to drawings of “my own”.

In the transcription of Lists of Proposed Additional Contents, list 1 is transcribed as Table 1, consisting of three columns.

• Column 1.a records a metatextual mark of uncertain origin or purpose, but it is perhaps a tick made by Ruskin to signify that he had completed or at least composed material relating to the place‐name next to the mark. No mark appears next to “Ehrenbreitstein” or “Heidelberg”, suggesting that Ruskin abandoned this usage before he composed draft for those sections in MS VIII.



• Column 1.b transcribes Ruskinʼs sequential numbering, which presumably signified the order in which he intended to fair‐copy the place‐name sections when resuming MS IX.



• Column 1.c transcribes Ruskinʼs proposed titles. For place‐names in the list represented by no extant draft, contextual glosses provide information about the Ruskinsʼ experiences in these places, based on information in the 1833 travel diaries by Ruskinʼs cousin, Mary Richardson, and by his father, John James Ruskin. Thereby the skeleton of Ruskinʼs plan for completion is substantiated with some sense of what he might have written about.
  
  Ruskin gives no indication whether these place‐name titles represent composite sections of verse, prose, and illustration or individual poems, essays, and drawings. Some individual poems in MS IA and MS VIII do carry titles in draft that correspond to place‐names in column 1.c (e.g., “Passing the Alps”, “The Via Mala”, “Splugen”, “The Summit”, and “The Descent”), but these draft poems can be viewed as germs of fully developed sections. The fact that most of the place‐names in list 1 correspond to multiple proposed illustrations in list 2 indicates that Ruskin intended a large composite unit for each place‐name. At the same time, these lists constituted a work‐in‐progress, as shown by “Strasburg” and “The Swiss Cottages, which are listed separately in list 1 but evidently combined in list 2. In ERM, it is assumed that Ruskin meant the place‐name titles in lists 1 and 2 to be in keeping with the existing composite sections in the MS IX fair copy.

In the transcription of Lists of Proposed Additional Contents, list 2 is transcribed as Table 2, consisting of four columns.

• Column 2.a carries Ruskinʼs own column header, the term “wanted”. This header is followed by a column of numbers, a digit for each section. But what specifically did Ruskin mean to enumerate as wanting? If the number pertains to his list of proposed figures for each section (column 2.c), then perhaps it signifies how many more sources or ideas for illustrations he believed he required, if any, in order to enhance each section adequately. (The minimum would have been two—a header and a footer for each section—and the maximum typically four: using the fair‐copied “Calais” as a standard for a section, the poem and the essay could each have its own header and footer, for a total of four, although the limit was truly bounded only by Ruskinʼs imagination and ambition.) Alternatively, the number of items wanting might refer to how many of the ideas in column 2.c remained to be actually carried out with drawings.
  
  Unfortunately, since some drawings he did complete may no longer be extant, any conclusion based on the numbers in column 2.a is checked by uncertainty owing not only to the current state of MS IX, but also to the point at which he happened to note the number, since he could have produced a drawing subsequently (see also Information about the “Account” Lost owing to Curatorial Treatment of Manuscripts). An example of these ambiguities is the zero in column 2.a next to “Heidelberg” (List of Proposed Additional Contents [Table 2, Illustrations]), which might indicate that no more ideas for illustrations were wanted than the five listed. Indeed, five would surely have sufficed, but what are we to make of the drawing already in place in MS IX as the header of that section (Vignette, Mountain Prospect Drawing [Heiligenberg?])? Does that drawing make a sixth? It does not correspond to any of the topics that Ruskin lists here, least of all a “Tournament” picture with which he was to “begin”, according to this entry. But does begin refer to the section itself or to Ruskinʼs work plan, which would have resumed with “Heidelberg”? Could the existing drawing in MS IX be merely misplaced? (The relation to Heidelberg to the landscape it depicts is in fact questionable; see the figure caption for Vignette, Mountain Prospect Drawing [Heiligenberg?].) Thus, any speculation based on the numbers in this column must entail some doubt. A degree of assurance may be achieved, however, by working out a possible relation between the numbers in this column and those in column 2.d.



• Column 2.b transcribes Ruskinʼs proposed titles, which for the most part match those in column 1.c. As in the case of “Strasburg” and “The Swiss Cottages (see column 1.c), a difference between the two lists can indicate a change of mind.



• Column 2.c transcribes Ruskinʼs proposed illustrations for each section. Contextual notes attached to the entries attempt to identify the sources of the proposed illustrations.



• Column 2.d transcribes another set of numbers, which Ruskin attached to some lists of proposed illustrations. Again, the meaning of these numbers requires interpretation, but presumably they stand in some relation to those in column 2.a. One possibility may be that, if the numbers in column 2.a give a total of proposed illustrations “wanted”, these in column 2.d indicate the number of illustrations completed.

There seems no sure way to tell whether Ruskin compiled the two lists all at once in a short time or developed them over a lengthy duration. The physical arrangement of the columns on the endpapers indicates that list 1 must have existed prior to list 2, as borne out by the evidence already noted of the later, June 1834 terminus a quo for the start of list 2. (Both lists appear to have wrapped around the pen‐and‐ink drawing of mountains on the verso, whereas the position of the box on the recto, containing a note concerning a “Birthday poem”, might have been added at any time.) One clue about the development of list 1 may lie in the checkmarks to the left of some place‐names, which appear to designate that those places were already represented by individual poems in the MS VIII and MS IA, g.2 draft. Notably, two items in the list that are not checked are “Cadenabbia” and “Villa Pliniana”—the final two poetry drafts that Ruskin composed in MS VIII before he interrupted work on the “Account” with draft of “Saltzburg”. Thus, if Ruskin included these two destinations in list 1 prior to drafting their respective poems, he must have compiled the list in a fairly brief period between when he completed and fair‐copied the sections at the start of the list (“Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar”) and when he stopped all draft along with fair‐copying “Heidelberg” in order to take up his commission for Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV.

Sometime after the beginning of February 1834, Ruskin, or perhaps his father, or the editor Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), drew on existing texts of the “Account” to select the poems “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” to be revised and published under the collective title “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” in Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV (pp. 317–19). The poem is signed “J.R.”, the first appearance of this persona, which was destined to appear frequently in the annuals during the second half of the 1830s and first half of the 1840s.

The poemsʼ new title asks the reader to imagine a whole, a “metrical journal”, which, if it ever existed, hearkened back to the version of the “Account” represented by MS IA, g.1. That version had by this time been superseded, since the earliest extant texts of the poems “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” were already coupled with a prose essay (“Calais”) in the MS IA, g.2 manuscript, indicating that the composite‐genre version was underway—the poems shortly to be complemented with drafts of the prose essays “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” in MS VIII. For whatever reason, it was decided that the title “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” would pose a fiction.

The composite nature of the final version of the “Account” is suggested by another poem by J.R. in the same volume of Friendshipʼs Offering, but the connection with the “Account” would have been apparent only to the few who knew how to look for it. Ruskinʼs other poem in the volume, “Saltzburg” (pp. 37–38), is ekphrastic as well as topographical, but the poem carries no reference to a larger, encompassing project; and indeed “Saltzburg” formed no part of the “Account”, since the Ruskins did not visit that city in 1833. Rather, Ruskin drew on his self‐instruction in the materiality of illustrated travel publications for the “Account” in order to compose a poem based on an engraving entitled Saltzburg, printed facing the first page of Ruskinʼs poem. The poem, as well as the picture by the artist, William Purser (ca. 1790–1852), presumably were commissioned by the editor, Thomas Pringle, for publication along with the “Fragments” in Friendshipʼs Offering.

W. G. Collingwood misdated the publication of “Saltzburg” as a year later, in December 1835, following the Ruskin familyʼs first visit to the city of Salzburg, which occurred during their Continental Tour of 1835 (see Date of Publication). Collingwood assumed that Ruskin could not have written about a place he had never seen, but J.R. was not yet Kata Phusin or the Graduate of Oxford, devoted to nature. In his own drawings for the “Account”, Ruskin was as absorbed by the technology of graphic reproduction as by its landscape subjects. Collingwood was probably confused by the imprint date of Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV, forgetting what consumers knew earlier in the century, during the heyday of the annuals, that a volume “for” 1835 would have been published in October or November 1834, in time for the holiday season of Christmas and New Yearʼs, 1834–35.

Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath, as the annual was called at this time, was published by Smith, Elder, and the volume “for MDCCCXXXV” was the last to be edited by Pringle, who died at the end of 1834, having edited the series since the volume for 1828. Pringle and the firmʼs proprietors, George Smith (1789–1846) and Alexander Elder (1790–1876), were Scots, like the Ruskins, and known to them personally. While some correspondence by Pringle exists to attest to his personal acquaintance with the Ruskins (Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 188), I am aware of no correspondence by the editor or by the Ruskin family that comments on Johnʼs writing for this volume of Friendshipʼs Offering. (Extant correspondence with Pringleʼs successor, the editor W. H. Harrison [ca. 1792–1878], starts in 1837 and refers to Ruskinʼs poetry published in the volume for 1838.) The completed texts of Ruskinʼs two poems for the 1835 volume must have been completed no later than 1 August 1834, when Pringleʼs compilation for the volume was due to the printer in time for publication in November 1834 (see Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 244).

A draft of “Saltzburg” is extant in MS VIII, terminating the section, MS VIII: Contents, b.2, in which draft of the “Account” combines with draft of poetry for John Jamesʼs 10 May 1834 birthday (see Line Numbering in the Draft [MS IA, MS VIII]). Collingwood interpreted the occurrence of the draft of “Saltzburg” here, in the notebook MS VIII, because Ruskin had “abandoned” the “1833 ‘Tour’” and “followed [it] on p. 106 by some poems descriptive of a new Tour—that of 1835” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:264–65; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:266). He was correct in his interpretation of the physical evidence except in assuming that a year lapsed between the “1833 ‘Tour’” poem and “Saltzburg”, which was in fact a direct outcome of the “Account” project, although not a part of the tour poem itself.

No known draft reflects the revision of poetry in the “Account” to construct “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”. To form the two “fragments”, the texts of “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” were considerably revised from their original forms in MS IA, g.2 and MS IX.

To work out a timeline for revision of “Fragments” and composition of “Saltzburg”, one can perhaps assume that no definite arrangements for either poem had been made with Pringle by 22 January 1834, when John James wrote to James Hogg for advice about cultivating Johnʼs poetic talents. In this letter, in which John James mentions that, as an epitome of the boyʼs precocious abilities, he has “sketched in verse or prose, or picture,” “every scene” of the familyʼs tour of “four months in Switzerland and Italy”, the proud father at least pretends to misgivings about exposing their prodigy to the public. In the timing of this appeal, John James was renewing contact with Hogg following a lengthy hiatus in the familyʼs slight acquaintance with the famed Scottish writer. Thus, the abrupt suggests indicates that John James and Margaret were weighing the merits of publication with greater seriousness than they evidently regarded their sonʼs actual first appearance in print as a poet, with “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water”, which is never mentioned in surviving family correspondence. It is possible that the renewed contact with Hogg was urged by Pringle, who was a longtime friend of the writer—or conversely, that Hogg, on receipt of John Jamesʼs letter, nudged Pringle and the publisher, Alexander Elder (mentioned in John Jamesʼs letter, by way of introduction), to consider Ruskin as a contributor to Friendshipʼs Offering, a publication that had benefited by Hoggʼs own contributions (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 273–75; see also James Hogg [1770–1835], and Discussion).

One can only speculate, further, whether publication in Friendshipʼs Offering might have been sponsored by Pringleʼs introduction of Ruskin to Samuel Rogers—a prodigious event, concerning which no contemporary evidence is known. It seems likelier that Ruskin would have paid his respects to the great man only after he had been published as “J.R.”, but by that time, so late in 1834, Pringle was in poor health and nearing his death, which occurred on 5 December 1834 (Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 247; and see Thomas Pringle [1789–1834]; Samuel Rogers [1763–1855]; and Discussion).

In the family correspondence for this period, the only mention of a publication occurs in a 10 March 1834 verse epistle by Ruskin to his father, “But this day week”, which excitedly anticipates, not the Friendshipʼs Offering commissions, but observations on natural history to be forwarded to the editor, John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), to be considered for publication in the Magazine of Natural History (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 285). It seems surprising that Ruskin would have failed to add a couplet or two celebrating his submissions to another editor, Thomas Pringle, if an understanding had been reached.

This evidence of temporizing earlier in the year conforms with the position of the “Saltzburg” in MS VIII following the draft of the “Account” that is combined with draft of poetry for John Jamesʼs 10 May 1834 birthday (MS VIII: Contents, b.2)—draft that presumably dates from about April or early May 1834. One cannot assume that the revision of “Fragments” preceded the composition of “Saltzburg”, for, although it may seem logical that revision of existing text would have predated invention of new, one can imagine as an equally likely scenario that Pringle offered Ruskin the “Saltzburg” commission first, on the strength of his clever imitation of illustrated travel literature in MS IX. That the two commissions came close together is suggested, moreover, by the probable timing of Ruskinʼs fair‐copying of the “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” sections in MS IX. Since the fair‐copy texts of the poems for these sections remain largely unchanged from their first instantiation in MS IA, g.2, presumably their revision for “Fragments” had not yet been undertaken. This fair‐copying, as proposed in The Composite‐Genre Illustrated Travelogue (MS IX), cannot have occurred earlier than the drafting of “Ehrenbreitstein”, the section that, in MS IX, bridges the “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” sections—again, setting a terminus a quo for the Friendshipʼs Offering commissions little earlier than April or May 1834. Ruskin could have set to work as late as June and still have met Pringleʼs deadline of 1 August 1834 for delivering the completed volume of Friendshipʼs Offering to the printer.

In 1850, another verse selection from the “Account” was privately published as “Ehrenbreitstein: Fragment from a Metrical Journal” (Ætat 16) in the “collected” edition of Ruskinʼs poetry, Poems by J.R. (pp. 8–12). John James Ruskin and Ruskinʼs editor, W. H. Harrison, selected this poem from among the extensive verse for the “Account” that, at that time, remained unpublished.

The editorsʼ title consciously references “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”, published sixteen years earlier, and it is the only poem from the “Account” project to be included in the 1850 collection. Surprisingly, the editors did not include “Fragments” itself, which is, as it were, represented by “Ehrenbreitstein: Fragment from a Metrical Journal”. Nor did the editors include “Saltzburg” from Ruskinʼs debut volume of the annual, Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV.

To understand the editorsʼ choice and subtitling of “Ehrenbreitstein”, the reader requires inside knowledge, which could be expected only of the audience for a privately published volume like the 1850 Poems, distributed solely to family and personal friends. In the MS IX fair copy of the “Account”, which in 1850 could be viewed only as the familyʼs personal possession, the section “Ehrenbreitstein” works as a bridge between the gothic mode in the section “Andernacht” and the domestic mode in the section “St. Goar”. The bridge is formed within the poem by linking landscapes in these contrasted modes, using the figure of confluence, as represented by the meeting of the rivers, the Rhine and the Moselle, at Koblenz, overlooked by the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”). Only readers originally presented with copies of the 1850 Poems, and perhaps only a very few of those readers, could have understood that the poem “Ehrenbreitstein” formed part of an intricately interconnected trio of sections in MS IX, and that this link had been broken when the poem was omitted as a component of the revised “Fragments”—a work that is itself absent from the volume.

In 1891 and 1903, respectively, there appeared two editions of the “Account” that attempted to represent the work in a reasonably complete state, the former prepared by W. G. Collingwood (1854–1932) for the Poems (1891), and the latter by E. T. Cook (ca. 1857–1919) and Alexander Wedderburn (ca. 1854–1931) for the second volume, Poems (1903), of the Library Edition (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:119–63, 281–83; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:119–63, 282–85; Ruskin, Works, 2:340–87). Collingwood was aware that, in Praeterita, Ruskin had declared the work an “unfinished folly” (Ruskin, Works, 35:81). Publishing the “Account” therefore violated the general “instructions”, which Collingwood relayed in his “Editorʼs Introduction” without specifying their exact source, that he “omit such poems and passages as were . . . incomplete or inadequately representative of the authorʼs attainments and style at the time”. In his notes to the “Account”, Collingwood implicitly palliates violation of these terms by crediting his discovery of the scope of writing that was never fair‐copied: “The ‘folly’ I understand to refer, not to the literary quality of the verse, but to the miscalculation and miscarriage of an ambitious project. . . . [Nonetheless,] I am pretty certain that . . . [Ruskin] was not aware of the amount of material [for the “Account”] existing in rough copies at the back of his book‐shelves” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:xxv, 265–66; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:xii, 266–67).

While Collingwood acknowledges that Ruskinʼs plan called for “about 150 pieces of prose and poetry, and at least as many drawings!”, the editorʼs reconstruction of the “Account” based on forgotten draft appears more complete and polished than the manuscripts warrant (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:266; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:267). Collingwoodʼs version misrepresents the work by limiting the selections to verse extracts, excluding prose and illustrations. An all‐verse “Account” was in keeping with the editorʼs prior decision to divide publication of Ruskinʼs early works between separate anthologies of poetry and of prose, but that decision in itself uncritically maintained a privileged status for poetry in the then‐current narrative about Ruskinʼs literary development—a status that, in the instance of the “Account”, was promulgated by the fiction that the “Fragments” published in Friendshipʼs Offering; and Winterʼs Wreath . . . for MDCCCXXXV originated in a “Metrical Journal”. While we do not know who was responsible for that title, we do know that Ruskinʼs father was responsible for collecting the 1850 Poems, an item that became intensely coveted by collectors in the final quarter of the century, creating in turn a market for the 1891 edition. Thus, Collingwoodʼs version of the “Account” reflects in miniature the mythologizing of Ruskinʼs literary development. (See Editorial and Encoding Rationale and Methodology: Defining Works and Manuscripts; History of the Bibliography and Editing of the Early Manuscripts; and Collecting of Modern Authors in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries.)

Collingwood was not misled about the composite‐genre nature of the “Account”. In his “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS of the Poems”, he describes the portion of MS IX containing the “Account” as devoted mainly to “prose and verse in a good ‘copperplate’ hand, and with inserted drawings illustrating his tour of the year before”; and in revealing the existence of additional draft material in MS VIII, he refers to the “prose and verse description of the tour”, including the “list at the end” of the notebook, which showed that Ruskin “had intended this volume [the fair copy in MS IX] to contain . . . prose and poetry, and . . . drawings” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:265, 264, 266; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:266–67, 265, 267). In nonetheless excluding prose, without comment, from his reconstruction of the “Account”, Collingwood was influenced not only by the unexamined biographical myths that resulted in the market conditions favoring his edition; he also passed along Ruskinʼs own habit in later life of referring to the “Account” as his “rhymed history of the tour”. In Praeteritaʼs tale about the workʼs genesis, which Collingwood quotes both as an epigraph at the head his reconstruction, and as an explanation of the origin of the work in the “Preliminary Note”, Ruskin characterizes the work as a “poetical account of our tour, in imitation of Rogersʼs Italy” (Ruskin, Works, 35:81; Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:119, 265; and Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:119, 267).

Whether Collingwood planned to include the prose sections of the “Account” in the volume of prose that he projected as a companion to Poems is unknown. Perhaps he would have excerpted selections in an introduction, following his manner of confining the earliest juvenile verse to the “Editorʼs Introduction” in the edition of the poems. One suspects that Collingwood would have attached little importance to these prose pieces, in which Ruskin imitates the style of letterpress writers for the illustrated travel literature of his youth, sometimes adopting the wryly ironic, tendentious tone favored by the livelier of these writers, other times mocking the false pedantry of jobbing writers who worked up their subject with no experience of the places they described. While Collingwood did not suppress writing that opened up the youthʼs sense of fun, he felt obliged to present Ruskinʼs “juvenile productions” as consistent with the mature authorʼs mission to elevate “the public taste in poetry as well as art”; and it was in his poems, according to the editor, that, “although [Ruskin] thrust them aside for prose”, the youth “could better put the complicated feelings, thoughts, and facts which he had to tell”. The poems, therefore, constituted “the best introduction to his later and greater books” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:xx–xxi; and Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:vi–vii).

Another misrepresentation lay in Collingwoodʼs omission of Ruskinʼs illustrations for the “Account”; and while this omission might be ascribed to limits on the cost of reproduction—the plates that reproduce Ruskinʼs drawings were confined to enhancing the deluxe collectorʼs edition of Poems, while only a few figures that facsimiled his fair‐copy printing were retained for the common edition—Collingwood passed over Ruskinʼs illustrations drawn specifically for the “Account” in MS IX. His purpose, according to the “Prefatory Notes on the Plates” (printed in the deluxe edition only), was “to show Mr. Ruskinʼs hand at different periods, in different materials, and in different styles”—an ambition that had recently come within reach with the perfection of photogravure in the 1880s, which could “render the very marks of the pencil and strokes of the pen”. Thus, to accompany the “Account”, Collingwood selected the drawing Watch‐tower at Andernach (1833) “as an example of the careful, though untaught, work of a boy of fourteen”; the plate reproduces “in actual size part of a larger drawing in pen on warm grey paper done in the manner which the young artist evolved for himself out of copying Cruikshank”. As a second accompaniment, The Jungfrau from Interlachen (1833) represented “one of [Ruskinʼs] attempts to imitate the Rogers vignettes”, an attempt deemed “artificially composed—not without skill, though with less regard than he afterwards paid to truth of mountain‐drawing”. Besides contributing to the larger goal of documenting Ruskinʼs developing drawing style, however, these plates reveal another intention, less prominently stated but significant for Collingwoodʼs approach to editing the “Account”. The editor says that, to illustrate “the ‘Tours’ of 1833 and 1835”, he chose “drawings made at the time and for the purpose”, but it is evident that the “purpose” meant, for Collingwood, attentiveness to scenic experiences of touring, and not Ruskinʼs interest in the technology of printed images. That is, Collingwood was engaged by the “Account” less as a work in itself than as biographical record of family travel (Poems [4^o, 1891], vi–vii, and see 1:128 opp., 140 opp.; on photogravure, see Benson, The Printed Picture, 230).

Had Collingwood been alert to Ruskinʼs purposes in MS IX, he would have more representatively selected one of the manuscriptʼs several direct copies from Proutʼs Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany, and a vignette in the manner of Stothardʼs figure subjects for Rogers, just as he selected The Jungfrau from Interlachen to illustrate what Ruskin wrote about the “Account” in Praeterita—that he drew “vignettes for the decoration of the . . . poetical account of our tour, in imitation of Rogersʼs Italy” (Ruskin, Works, 35:81). (The latter choice of vignette is representative of MS IX only indirectly, in that Ruskin may have intended it for the manuscript, but never used it: Cook and Wedderburn do not record it as part of the manuscript in their time, and its current location is unknown. In list 2 of the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”, itemizing the proposed illustrations for each section of the “Account”, Ruskin assigned “My own” to the planned section “The Jungfrau”—meaning his own drawing, as opposed to reproducing another artistʼs published depiction, and possibly referring to the drawing reproduced by Collingwood.)

For copytext of the poems making up his version, Collingwoodʼs first choice was to use texts as published in Ruskinʼs lifetime, a condition that in the case of the “Account” applies to three poems: “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, revised for and published together as “Fragments from a Metrical Journal” in 1834; and “Ehrenbreitstein”, slightly revised and published as “Ehrenbreitstein: Fragment from a Metrical Journal” in 1850. Otherwise, where available, Collingwood used texts of poems as fair‐copied by Ruskin in MS IX; and in cases where only draft survives, he drew the texts from MS IA, g.2, and MS VIII. For all manuscript texts, fair‐copy and draft, Collingwood regularized punctuation and spelling, and he did not scruple to mend lines as he saw fit. (Details are given in the textual glosses attached to transcriptions.) For “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”, he additionally supplied the MS IX versions in notes.

Despite this pattern of giving authority to the latest revised and published or fair‐copied texts, Collingwood acted inconsistently in bestowing authority on an “original”, as he called it, if it took his fancy. In the case of the poem, “Calais”, Collingwood took main copytext from MS IA, g.1, in John Jamesʼs hand, which is the earliest version of this poem; and he even preferred a line as originally composed in that hand (line 5), although deleted in the manuscript and revised in Johnʼs hand—a revision that John carried to his fair copy in MS IX. And yet Collingwood scuttled John Jamesʼs authority in line 2 of this “original” version, which the editor pronounced “neither rhyme nor reason” and substituted a line of his own invention, deciding on no further evidence that John Jamesʼs line “must be a mis‐transcription of an insufficiently altered rough copy, now lost“ (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:280–81; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:282).

In this instance, Collingwood avows his responsibility—“the very few emendations I have presumed to make are marked by square brackets”—and while he tended to be much more casual than a twenty‐first‐century editor would be about what emendations needed flagging, we probably can safely assume that these aesthetic “emendations” were his, and not specifically authorized by the elderly Ruskin. In his notes and prefaces to the edition, Collingwood always refers to the authorʼs investment in the edition in the past tense, as having authorized the editorʼs judgments but resigned his own responsibility, consistent with Collingwoodʼs general statement that closes his “Prefatory Notes on the Plates”: “this publication is in no sense my own enterprise, . . . it had been long contemplated by Mr. Ruskin, and . . . it was put into my hands in default of better, with instructions which I have endeavoured to carry out faithfully. But as the selection and arrangement have been left entirely to me, it is only just to the author that I should avow the responsibility” (Poems [4^o, 1891], 1:281, xi; Poems [8^o, 1891], 1:282).

Regarding the “Account” in particular, it seems especially unlikely that Ruskin would have contributed directly to Collingwoodʼs editing, given the authorʼs disparaging remarks about the project in chapter 4 (1885) of Praeterita. Mythologizing the work primarily in terms of its association with his first exposure to Turner—“I had no sooner cast eyes on the Rogers vignettes than I took them for my only masters, and set myself to imitate them as far as I possibly could by fine pen shading”—Ruskin had forgotten or underplayed the significance of the “Account” in his artistic and professional development (Ruskin, Works, 35:79). In 1882, before he even started writing the autobiography, Ruskinʼs stake in editing the poems had been prompted by the American publisher, John Wiley & Sons, stealing a march on reprinting the poems first published in the annuals, causing him to raise the alarm to Alexander Wedderburn (7 February 1882 or 1883, in Ruskin, Letters to Alexander D. O. Wedderburn; see also History of Bibliography and Editing of the Early Manuscripts). It is interesting to speculate how that perceived theft might have helped to sponsor the idea of writing an autobiography, but once he had told his story in that book and in his own way about his creation of the “Account” and his subsequent publication in Friendshipʼs Offering—benchmarks that he fails to connect causally in Praeterita—Ruskin seems to have been content to turn over the labor of editing to his assistant.

The 1903 version of the “Account”, the first published version to convey the composite genre of the MS IX fair copy, was edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn for the second volume (1903) of the Library Edition (Ruskin, Works, 2:340–87). The editors adopted the verse framework of Collingwoodʼs version as a base text, but reunited the poems with their corresponding prose essays to form the composite sections with place‐name titles that Ruskin intended in his final version. Cook and Wedderburn also supplemented Collingwoodʼs framework by adding one prose essay, “Aix la Chapelle”, from the MS IX fair copy, which has no corresponding poem in draft or fair copy, and which was therefore ignored by the previous editor; two poems, “The Descent” and “Villa Pliniana”, from the MS VIII draft, which the previous editor either neglected or rejected; and an essay, “Chamouni”, from MS XI, which, as a prose piece, Collingwood would not have published even if he was aware of it. (The piece is not mentioned in Collingwoodʼs sketchy description of MS XI in “Preliminary Note on the Original MSS of the Poems”, nor is it mentioned even in Cook and Wedderburnʼs expanded description of the manuscript, which had been bound by their time, although they do ascribe the essay to MS XI in a footnote to the text [Poems (4^o, 1891), 266–67; Poems (8^o, 1891), 1:268; Ruskin, Works, 2:534, 380 n. 1].)

Cook and Wedderburn reproduced Ruskinʼs drawings for the “Account” only to a very limited extent. As was typical in the Library Edition, plates were carried over from previous deluxe editions published by the George Allen firm; and therefore, Collingwoodʼs selections of Watch‐tower at Andernach and Jungfrau from Interlachen made a reappearance. (See Ruskin, Works, 2:354 opp., 380 opp.; see also 1891. As in Collingwoodʼs edition, the plate illustrating Andernach is situated with its corresponding poem and prose; however, whereas in Collingwoodʼs edition the Jungfrau plate appears opposite [“Entrance to Schaffhausen”] and [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], in the Library Edition it is placed opposite the poem “Passing the Alps” and the start of the composite section “Chamouni”.) In addition, however, the editors recognized the need of at least one facsimile to illustrate the often‐quoted description in Praeterita of the illustrated fair copy, so they reproduced a single page from MS IX—the title page, with Turneresque vignette drawing, of the “Ehrenbreitstein” section (Ruskin, Works, 2:356 opp.). Beyond this facsimile, the editors settled for describing Ruskinʼs illustrations in footnotes marking the place in the text where they occur.

The Cook and Wedderburn version, therefore, makes a much more convincing case than Collingwoodʼs as a comprehensive representation of Ruskinʼs final vision of the “Account”, if not a thorough representation. Besides the additions already mentioned, the Library Edition editors supplied lines for “The Summit” that are missing in Collingwoodʼs text; and while not thorough or even systematic, the editors noted other variant words and lines that Collingwood overlooked or omitted mentioning in his notes. Collingwood was content to provide only the “original” (i.e., MS IX) versions of the most extensively revised texts, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”.

For this edition of selected poems, published by the Juvenilia Press, the editors chose “Via Mala”, “Splugen”, and “The Summit”, edited from MS VIII, with the addition of “light punctuation” according to their regular practice (Breton, Becker, and Schurter, eds., From Seven to Seventeen, 51–59, xxii).

In the two earliest published versions of the “Account” that claimed to represent the work comprehensively—Poems, ed. Collingwood (1891), and Works, ed. Cook and Wedderburn (1903)—the editors neglected to explain what guidance, if any, they took from Ruskinʼs Plan for Completion of the Work—The List of Proposed Additional Contents for the Account of a Tour on the Continent. Collingwood in particular adopted a liberal approach to entitling and arranging the draft poems about the Alps, Italy, and Switzerland that Ruskin failed to fair‐copy in MS IX. The ERM Revised and Completed Sequence of [Account of a Tour on the Continent] is the first edited version to schematize surviving draft pieces according to Ruskinʼs plan in the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”. The version begins by adopting as copytext ERMʼs diplomatic transcriptions of Ruskinʼs fair‐copy texts in MS IX, along with figure descriptions of the manuscriptʼs illustrations; and the sequence continues by situating Ruskinʼs draft texts in his List of Proposed Additional Contents, using ERMʼs diplomatic transcriptions of manuscript texts in MS IA, g.1, MS IA, g.2, MS VII, MS VIII, and MS XI. This version also incorporates Ruskinʼs plan for illustrating each section in the List of Proposed Additional Contents.

Matching texts with section titles in Ruskinʼs Proposed Additional Contents is straightforward for texts with corresponding titles, but for untitled texts a case for their proper placement is made in their textual and contextual notes. Only two texts contain inadequate topographical clues to place them with reasonable assurance—“Oh are there spirits, can there be”, and “The lake smiled sweetly, and the boy”—texts that may have functioned in the compositional process more thematically or even psychologically than topographically (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”). For titles in the List of Proposed Additional Contents lacking any known corresponding textual witness, annotation is supplied based on the Diary of Mary Richardson, 1833 and the Diary of John James Ruskin, 1833, along with other sources, to suggest what these sections might have contained.

The most familiar description of the literary and artistic context surrounding both the actual journey of 1833 and Ruskinʼs composition of the “Account” is his story in the autobiography, Praeterita, in which he declares that “the main tenor of my life” was established by the gift of the 1830 illustrated edition of the topographical poem Italy by Samuel Rogers (1763–1855), with engraved vignettes after drawings by J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), Thomas Stothard (1755–1834), Samuel Prout (1783–1852), and others (Ruskin, Works, 39:79).

A second influence, according to Praeterita, was the familyʼs acquisition in April 1833 of Facsimiles of Sketches Made in Flanders and Germany by Samuel Prout (1783–1852): “I well remember going with my father into the shop where subscribers entered their names, and being referred to the specimen print, the turreted window over Moselle, at Coblentz. We got the book home to Herne Hill before the time of our usual annual tour” (Ruskin, Works, 39:79; and see Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 286 n. 1). This work, which was indeed published that spring with John James Ruskin among the printed list of subscribers, is credited by Ruskin, doubtless apocryphally, with having prompted the familyʼs tour spontaneously, whereas the journey must in fact have long been in planning: “as my mother watched my fatherʼs pleasure and mine in looking at the wonderful places, she said, why should we not go and see some of them in reality? My father hesitated a little, then with glittering eyes said—why not? And there were two or three weeks of entirely rapturous and amazed preparation” (Ruskin, Works, 39:79). Proutʼs lithographs cannot have inspired the Tour of 1833 so abruptly (see Benchmark Acquisitions of Influential Illustrated Travel Publications), but the portfolio probably did help imaginatively to orient the family to the north of Europe, just as Rogersʼs Italy provided a vision of the southern region of the Continent. Together, the two books can be viewed as representative not only of Ruskinʼs conceptualization of his familyʼs northern and southern destinations, but also of how those destinations were materially embodied in the illustrated travel writing and publication of the 1830s.

Proutʼs Facsimiles provides a pictorial tour through Belgium and Germany in fifty lithographic prints, featuring picturesque medieval and Renaissance architectural sites. The book contains no letterpress; the locales depicted are identified only by place names lettered directly onto the lithographic stone, as part of the image. The lithographs, then a new medium in Britain, would have struck the Ruskins by their dramatically large size (22 by 15 inches) and watercolor‐like texture. Proutʼs significance for British perceptions of northern Europe lay in the novelty of his representations of towns in northern France, Belgium, and Germany. For British travelers in the 1820s–30s, emergent developments in touristic experience were perhaps most vivid in new and less familiar routes opening up in northern Europe alongside the well‐worn paths of the Grand Tour to Italy. Whereas travel in the Pas‐de‐Calais and Flanders was at one time regarded as a route to be got over as quickly as possible on the way to Paris, the Grand Tour began to migrate north with the the post‐war attraction of Waterloo Field, along with the Romantic interest in Germany, highlighted by Byronʼs Rhine journey in Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage (stanzas 46–61, canto 3 [1816], in Byron, Complete Poetical Works, ed. McGann, 2:93–99). If Byron rushed readers down the Rhine in only twenty stanzas, however, Prout enabled viewers to dwell on this Romantic scenery in Illustrations of the Rhine, published 1822–26, based on an 1821 tour (see Lockett, Samuel Prout, 50–53). (Proutʼs volume documenting tours of southern Europe, Sketches Made in France, Switzerland, and Italy, was not published until 1839.) While such scenic representations grew more familiar in the later 1830s and 1840s from similar projects by T. M. Richardson (1784–1848), J. D. Harding (1797–1863), T. S. Boys (1803–74), Clarkson Stanfield (1793–1867), and Louis Haghe (1806–85), Prout was a foundational influence on artists seeking architectural picturesque subjects in these regions (Lockett, Samuel Prout, 76).

Since Prout had established his lead in depicting the market towns of the Low Countries and Germany since the 1820s, his Facsimiles of 1833 may well have served as a kind of guidebook for the Ruskins (although of course they could not take a folio volume with them). Proutʼs views would have persuaded them to adopt a more leisurely and attentive pace through these towns, on the first leg of their Continental tour. In fact, the route that the Ruskins traced through northern France and along the Rhine in Germany is strikingly similar to the actual path of Proutʼs sketching tour of 1821, although the sequence of the published lithographs in Facsimiles departs somewhat from the actual route, opening with a market scene occupying the square in front of the Hotel de Ville in Brussels (see Lockett, Samuel Prout, 50, 59; for Proutʼs itinerary and his place of his publications among others relating to travel in northern Europe during this period, see Tour of 1833).

In contrast, Rogersʼs Italy leads the reader on the more traditional Grand Tour through the Alps into the south. The linked series of topographical and narrative poems forms a more conventional work, less picturesque than historical and classically learned. Rogersʼs verse and taste were late‐eighteenth‐century in manner, and his Italy could not compete in popularity with Lord Byronʼs fourth part of Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage, which is set in Venice. While not entirely ignored, the work gained popular acclaim only when Rogers invested in the graphic enhancements that enabled him to repackage the poem as the 1830 illustrated edition, exploiting the up‐to‐date technologies of steel engraving and mass production that had sponsored the boom in Annuals and Other Illustrated Books (see Samuel Rogers [1763–1855]). The edition was innovative also in combining an intaglio process—its finely etched, steel‐engraved vignettes (2–3 inches by 3–4 inches) that illustrate Rogersʼs poems—with the relief printing of the poems on the same page. The exquisite vignettes (a more typical size for the engraved area of steel‐engraved book illustration was larger, 7 by 5 inches [Hunnisett, Steel‐Engraved Book Illustration in England, 35]) conveyed Turnerʼs atmospheric effects on a scale that harmonized with Rogersʼs modest poems; and the genre vignettes by Stothard—long a favorite artist of Rogersʼs—presented a benignly colorful peasant culture. For the Ruskins, both the contrasts and complements with Proutʼs imposing lithographic plates detailing busy town squares surrounding picturesque architectural monuments must have seemed dramatic.

As the compositional history of Ruskinʼs “Account” is interpreted in ERM, the project underwent a development parallel to that of Rogersʼs work, originating as a travelogue written solely in verse and in an eighteenth‐century manner of topographical poetry, and then being elaborated as an illustrated composite‐genre travel narrative typical of the steel‐engraved landscape annuals of the 1830s (see Composition and Publication). The Ruskin family was familiar with Italy in one of its earlier, non‐illustrated versions, which they owned, as well as with the 1830 illustrated version (although, as remarked in Benchmark Acquisitions of Influential Illustrated Travel Publications and in Date of Composition, there is some ambiguity concerning when the family acquired the illustrated version). Regardless of when this book entered the household, its influence is palpable from the start of Ruskinʼs MS IX fair copy of the “Account”. While critics have focused too exclusively on Rogersʼs Italy as Ruskinʼs model, at the cost of recognizing his imitations of Proutʼs Facsimiles (see, e.g., Spear, “Ruskinʼs Italy”), it is true that Rogersʼs book frames the foundational layout and conception of the composite‐genre “Account”. Ruskin modeled his section divisions on Rogersʼs layout, observing how text and illustration form a coherent unit. Like Rogers, he entitles his topographical sections so as to identify a landmark destination—“Calais”, “Cassel”, “Lille”, “Brussels”, “The Meuse”, “Aix la Chapelle”, “Cologne”, “Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, “St. Goar”, and “Heidelberg”—and for these section titles, he uses a lettering that imitates Rogersʼs restrained display type. (The “St. Goar” and “Heidelberg” sections are missing their headings, owing to the unfinished state of the fair copy.) Ruskinʼs placement of illustration vis‐à‐vis text likewise imitates Rogersʼs layout, by heading the first page of each section with a landscape vignette above the section title, in order to situate the reader in a distinct place, and by closing each section with a figure vignette as a tailpiece, in order to caption some portion of the narrative.

In this arrangement of text and image, Ruskin captured the 1830 Italyʼs notable innovation of combining the intaglio effects of the vignette on the same page with the relief type. Rogers probably based his layout on the admired designs by William Bulmer (1757–1830) for editions of English poets, published in the 1790s by his Shakspeare Press (Piggott, Turnerʼs Vignettes, 20). The editions were decorated with wood‐engraved vignettes by Thomas Bewick (1753–1828), set at the heads of title pages of the poems, and producing an elegant page layout, which was made possible by the conformity of the relief wood engraving with the relief type. That conformity was not possible in the new mass‐produced annuals, which relied on the durability of steel engraving to achieve unprecedented print runs for illustrated books. To solve this problem, and achieve the elegant effects of Bulmerʼs and Bewickʼs designs, and yet print the books on a massive scale, Rogersʼs printers innovated a technique, which was widely remarked in reviews of the 1830 Italy, whereby precise registration allowed the sheets to be run through the press twice, once for the engraving, and once for the type (Powell, “Turnerʼs Vignettes and the Making of Rogersʼ ‘Italy’”, 3). Ruskin was attentive to this up‐to‐date innovation.

In his drawings imitating steel engravings, Ruskin strives to harmonize his illustrations with text in the manner of Turnerʼs vignettes for Rogers. Turner exploited the potential of fine‐lined but durable steel engraving to allow indefinite borders of an engraving to melt into the white space of the paper, creating a world within the page (Piggott, Turnerʼs Vignettes, 14–16; and see Rosen and Zerner, Romanticism and Realism, 81). Ruskinʼs drawings emphasize how such frameless, soft‐edged rectangular, square, or oval designs harmonize with his left‐ and right‐justified blocks of text to make a unity of effect.

Ruskinʼs success in imitating Turnerʼs vignettes has drawn critical attention away from his attention to the contrasting textures of Proutʼs lithographs. The young artistʼs most ambitious study of Prout in the “Account” is Liège, a copy of the lithograph, Palais du Prince, Liège, which Ruskin places at the close of the section on “The Meuse”. Exacting as it is, the copy is not merely mechanical, but an exploration of the anecdotal, touristic world of the travelerʼs picturesque, and how this world is captured by the fluid and watercolor‐like texture of a lithograph, as compared with the fairy world of brilliant light and haunted shadow suggested by the exquisite intaglio of Turnerʼs vignettes. To indicate the relative size of Proutʼs lithograph, Ruskin drew the image full‐page and broadside in the MS IX notebook. Another copy after Prout depicts the Vignette, Cologne Bayenturm and Wharf, contained within the section “Cologne”. That section also begins far down on an otherwise blank page of MS IX, the gap probably having been intended to feature a large architectural drawing in the manner of Prout, like Aachen Cathedral that opens “Aix La Chapelle”.

Later, Ruskinʼs sources for illustration were augmented by Illustrations of the Passes of the Alps (1828–29) by William Brockedon, and Voyages dans les Alpes (1779–96) by Horace‐Bénédict de Saussure. Since he acquired these volumes for his February 1834 birthday, when the illustrated fair copy in MS IX was already underway (see Benchmark Acquisition of Influential Illustrated Travel Publications), their influence was mainly confined to Ruskinʼs plans for illustration in the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”, in which the entries for Switzerland are dominated by Brockedonʼs views taken along the routes through the major Alpine passes. Ruskin did realize at least one example of his proposed adaptations of Brockedonʼs views, however, one that survives among the gallery of untitled vignettes collected at the end of the fair‐copy “Account” in MS IX: his drawing, Entrance to Gondo Gorge, which he based on Brockedonʼs The Great Gallery near Gondo from the chapter, “The Pass of the Simplon”. Since this image originated in the form of a vignette, the headpiece for Brockedonʼs chapter, Ruskin easily adapted it to his purpose, which was to illustrate the proposed section “Farewell to Italy” concerning the passage across the Simplon between the Val dʼOssola on the Italian side and the Rhône valley on the Swiss side. For many of his planned but unrealized illustrations after Brockedon, however, Ruskin would have to decide how to adapt the original full‐page rectangular plates in this book, which like Saussureʼs Voyages belonged to a new genre—the illustrated scientific tour that defined itself against the picturesque tour familiar to Ruskin from Proutʼs, Turnerʼs, and othersʼ Continental tour annuals (Stafford, Voyage into Substance, 2–7).

Ruskinʼs fair‐copy version of the “Account” extends beyond Rogersʼs model in Italy also by combining verse and illustration with prose. Rogers did include some prose in Italy—brief essays and a tale, in “Part the Second” (1828) of the work (“National Prejudices”, “Caius Cestius”, “Foreign Travel”, and “The Bag of Gold” in Rogers, Italy [1828], 35–40, 51–52, 62–71, 107–19); and he reprinted these prose pieces and added three more tales to the 1830 edition (“Marcolini”, “Montorio”, and “Marco Griffoni” in Rogers, Italy [1830], 85–87, 140–43, 230–32). But Rogers subtitled his work A Poem, and he dispersed the few prose pieces irregularly, with at most a pattern of loose association with their immediately surrounding poems, whereas Ruskin constructed each of his topographical sections (with one exception) using both verse and prose. Unlike Rogers, Ruskin did not independently title his prose pieces, but subordinated them to the topographical unit, typically separating prose from poem with a drawing, which serves as a hinge between the two kinds of writing and binds the parts into an associative, but still coherent unit. At the same time, while complementing the poems, Ruskinʼs prose pieces also contrast with his rather generalized, picturesque verse, by bringing the tone down to earth with first‐person, anecdotal and comedic commentary about specific locales. The prose is modeled on letterpress for landscape annuals, such as the travel writing by Leitch Ritchie for the Heathʼs Picturesque Annual series, illustrated by Clarkson Stanfield (e.g., Travelling Sketches in the North of Italy, the Tyrol, and on the Rhine [1831–32], and Travelling Sketches on the Rhine, and in Belgium and Holland [1832–33]) and by Thomas Roscoe for the Jenningsʼs Landscape Annual series, illustrated by Samuel Prout (e.g., The Tourist in Switzerland and Italy [1829–30], and The Tourist in Italy [1830–31]). (The lively tone of these prose models contrasts with the seriousness and pedantry of Samuel Rogersʼs copious prose notes to the poems in Italy, which were as important to the author as his meticulous verse; see Hale, introduction to The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 49–50).

Thus Ruskin amplified Rogersʼs uniform pattern of text and illustration, which in the 1830 Italy consists of a landscape vignette after a drawing by Turner serving as a header, placed above a poemʼs title; and following the poem, a figure vignette after a drawing by Stothard, serving as a tailpiece. (The prose pieces are not illustrated.) While in its present condition, the MS IX fair copy is missing many drawings (see The Composite‐Genre Illustrated Travelogue), the examples remaining in place indicate that Ruskin intended, at the least, to complement each poem with a prose piece, and to supply each poem and each prose piece with its own headpiece and tailpiece—four vignettes in total for each topographical unit. (In list 2 of the List of Proposed Additional Contents for the “Account”, three or four is the typical number itemizing the illustrations to be copied or created for each of the sections, although Ruskin runs out of ideas toward the end of the list; see The Plan for Completion of the Work.) And while Ruskin typically honors Rogersʼs pattern of using a landscape or cityscape as a headpiece, and a figure drawing as tailpiece, he varies the pattern somewhat (as does Rogers) by occasionally heading a section with a more anecdotal, narrative vignette.

Ruskin carries out his principle of amplification in the sister arts to its greatest elaboration in the sections “Andernacht”, “Ehrenbreitstein”, and “St. Goar”. With each section fully elaborated in itself as a composite of verse, prose, and illustration, the outer sections of the trio also work as contrasts to one another—the first, “Andernacht”, composed and illustrated in a gothic mode; and the third, “St. Goar”, in a domestic mode. Between them, “Ehrenbreitstein” both enacts and thematizes the topic of confluence, as the meeting point of dark gothic and sunny domesticity. Confluence is topographically represented by the meeting point of the Rhine River and the Moselle River at Koblenz, where the fortress of Ehrenbreitstein looms over the riversʼ juncture. Ruskinʼs landscape vignette for “Ehrenbreitstein” is copied after one of Turnerʼs renderings of the fortress, not from Italy, but from a full‐page steel engraving in an annual—Ruskin having appointed himself the exercise of reducing the bold scene to a small oval.

Evidence in MS VIII draft suggests that Ruskin began a similar amplification in describing the first sighting of the Alps from Schaffhausen. Two attempts at drafting poems about this experience suggest the contrasting registers of the sublime and domestic, as in “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”. The earlier composed of the two poems, “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”] (composed immediately after the “Andernacht” and “St. Goar” prose essays in MS VIII), builds up to its cry of discovery, “The Alps the Alps,—Full far away / The long successive ranges lay”, by imaginatively coursing the Rhine, whereas a later‐composed fragment, “Schaffhausen” (composed between the “Ehrenbreitstein” [poem] and “Ehrenbreitstein” [essay] in MS VIII), can be read as an alternate introduction to the scene, by tracing a stroll to the “summit of the hill” from whence presumably the mountains would be sighted, had Ruskin continued with the poem. Biographically, the climb up that hill occurred on the same Sabbath evening with which Ruskin opens his description of the Rhine in “There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], but the fragment, “Schaffhausen”, seems the start of a domestic complement to the sublimity of the earlier‐composed, longer piece with its description of the river driving toward the Rhine Falls, rendered in emphatically pounded dactylic lines, which stand out from the normal, amiable flow of iambic octosyllabic verse.

As a contrast with these large, amplified units of verse, prose, and picture, comprising contrasting genres, the section “Aix la Chapelle” in MS IX consists only of a prose text and a single illustration. The headpiece is an imposing rendering of the cityʼs cathedral, Aachen Cathedral, drawn in Proutʼs manner. Taking up nearly a full page like Ruskinʼs other ambitious copy after Prout, the lithograph‐like drawing of Liège, the large rectangular image of the cathedral is not a vignette, and was probably meant to imitate the comparatively large dimensions of Proutʼs portfolio. Beneath the drawing, Ruskin allowed just enough space for the section heading and a few lines of text, just as place names are lettered directly onto Proutʼs plates. Even here, however, where Ruskin pivots away from his grand multi‐genre and multi‐media amplifications of Rogersʼs design, to exhibit a large‐scale but unitary plate in the manner of Prout, he cannot resist varying the single prose essay by combining in it both comic and picturesque modes (the latter typically represented by verse in the “Account”). First, the narrator riffs on the Peace of Aix la Chapelle to mock the somnolent “peace treaties” governing the local postillions; then the speaker is rhapsodically taken by the sublimity of the cathedralʼs interior in moonlight, described in the manner of Scott; and finally, Ruskinʼs narrator parodies a guidebook writerʼs tour of antiquities inside the cathedral. As in the section “Ehrenbreitstein”, the condensation of multiple genres is thematically reflected in a geographical situation that bespeaks confluence. Aix la Chapelle lay at the juncture of the Netherlands, Germany, and the newly founded Belgium, and the city was historically distinctive for its imperial status.

In Ruskinʼs liveliness of response to the material world of art production and reproduction that guided early Victorian picturesque travel, his achievement in the “Account” is overlooked by interpretations that insist on the neurotic constraints of Ruskinʼs early self‐instruction in drawing. For example, Paul H. Walton sees Ruskinʼs adoption of Proutʼs “outline style” of depicting old architecture with “broken lines and dots” as one example of the youthʼs tendency “to revert to pen and ink in more factual studies of picturesque buildings and views”, owing to a misguided direction of “his earliest art activity . . . along lines strictly defined by adult standards and ideas of what was educationally desirable, so that he was not encouraged, nor did he have the time, to draw in a playful way the kinds of figure subjects in which a child imaginatively expresses and defines a conception of himself within a framework of human relationships”. As a contrast with this alleged “crippl[ing]” of Ruskinʼs imagination, which “had much to do with the tragedy of his personal life”, Walton points to “the happy, normal family life of a boy” like Ruskinʼs later sexual nemesis, John Everett Millais, whose youthful drawings included the kind of “subjects usually preferred by boy artists: soldiers, animals, machines, caricatures of family and friends”. As a consequence, even when a prospect of freedom opened up in Ruskinʼs youthful art teaching, such as when his first drawing master, Charles Runciman (1798–1864) challenged the boy “to imitate the free, controlled sweep of the pencil in . . . [the teacherʼs] models”, Ruskin, according to Walton, retreated to his more formal depictions of buildings in pen and ink (Walton, Drawings of John Ruskin, 13, 7, 8, 7, 6).

It is not true, however, that Ruskinʼs writing and drawings neglect subjects appropriate to “boy artists”; and in any case, Waltonʼs narrow conception of healthy gendered subjects shuts down inquiry into a more complex relation between Ruskinʼs creativity and emerging sexuality. Moreover, Waltonʼs division between precocious conventionalism and imitation and childlike creativity rules out how Ruskinʼs spontaneity and invention was prompted by the excitement of manipulating, not merely mechanically imitating, the material culture surrounding a youth of the 1830s. In the “Account”, Ruskin not only contrasts what he finds in print culture, such as the respective scales of Prout lithographs and Turner vignettes; he also amuses himself by manipulating that culture—for example, reconceptualizing Turnerʼs full‐page engraving, Ehrenbreitstein, as a vignette, or shrinking one of Proutʼs market square scenes to a Lilliputian vignette heading “Lille”, a section that in itself plays with the topic of recession and expansion through motion (the travelers receding “Farther and farther . . . / From Cassels insulated crest” to where “Lille upon us sudden broke” in its “rich irregularity” of “form and figure fair, / . . . moving, breathing, living there” [“Lille”, lines 11–12, 32, 38–40]).

Viewed in this way, the “Account” is far from the “unfinished folly” that Ruskin dismissed in Praeterita (Ruskin, Works, 35:81), much less evidence of neurosis. While Ruskin did leave the work unfinished, he had exhausted its potential, as the project propelled him forward to take his own place as a published author, “J.R.”, in the material culture of ekphrastic and topographical illustrated travel publication.

That the young Ruskin owed any debt at all to the poetry of Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) may seem surprising in light of Ruskinʼs later story about giving offense to the famous man of taste, “congratulating . . . [Rogers] with enthusiasm on the beauty of the engravings by which his poems were illustrated”, implying that the youth knew “more of the vignettes [in Italy] than the verses” (Ruskin, Works, 34:96). The anecdote, which must have originated from when Thomas Pringle [1789–1834] was editing Ruskinʼs first contributions to Friendshipʼs Offering and was accordingly motivated to arrange his introduction to St. James Place, may have been colored by later assessments of Rogersʼs writing (see Mentors). The “Account” nonetheless reveals that Ruskin did respond insightfully and creatively to the poetry in Italy, and not solely to the bookʼs illustrations and the materiality of its production. What Rogers might well have considered odd was Ruskinʼs investment in the poetry as a model for writing less about Italy than about mountains.

As C. Stephen Finley has noted, Ruskin alludes to Rogersʼs poem “The Alps” in the “Account” (Finley, Natureʼs Covenant, 117). Two tropes from this poem are used prominently by Ruskin. One, which occurs early in the workʼs development, in the Composite‐Genre Travelogue (MS IA, g.2), in the poem “Passing the Alps”, characterizes the Alps as “the barriers of a World” (Rogers, Italy [1830], 30). In Rogersʼs usage, the trope refers to historical clashes between cultures, such as Hannibal struggling to overcome the Alpine “barrier” that stood between his forces and Roman civilization. For Rogersʼs traveler‐persona and his readers, such examples resonated with Napoleonʼs invasion of Austrian‐controlled Italy in 1800 during the War of the Second Coalition, when the French commander led his army across the Great Saint Bernard Pass, events that Rogers mentions directly in the poems “The Great St. Bernard” and “The Descent”. Ruskin, in “Passing the Alps”, elaborates on Rogersʼs brief reference to Hannibalʼs crossing to develop a poem‐length spectacle, inspired probably not just by Rogersʼs lines but also by Turnerʼs vignette for “The Descent” in the 1830 edition of Italy, which depicts Hannibalʼs army filing with their elephants through the mountains. In his poem, Ruskin makes a corresponding effort at writing the sublime, adumbrating the catastrophe for Rome in the menacing turmoil of the surrounding landscape and atmosphere. The poem is to some degree an ekphrasis, based on Turnerʼs vignette (see “Passing the Alps” and associated contextual glosses).

Ruskin employs Rogersʼs term barrier (as well as related military metaphors such as fortress and battlement) to describe mountains as a cultural boundary in the poems “The Meuse”, “Passing the Alps”, and “Chamouni”; and he (or his father) also associates the term in this sense with the English Channel in the poem “Calais”. For the Ruskins in these poems, the “barrier” of the Alps additionally signifies a spiritual gulf between earth and heaven, as in a usage by the English Nonconformist clergyman Thomas Raffles (1788–1863), when first sighting Mont Blanc from a height in the French Jura: “But, oh! the amazing barrier that afar / Stayed my adventʼrous sight, and fixed my eyes / As in aerial regions betwixt earth and heaven. / I saw the Alps—the everlasting hills” (Raffles, Letters, 155). For British travelers on the Continent, bearing witness to this spiritual boundary seems to have combined with staking an implied political barrier (akin to Rogersʼs historical sense) between Protestant and Roman Catholic. This usage overlaps with the implications of the second trope that Ruskin drew from Rogersʼs “The Alps”.

The second trope borrowed from Rogersʼs poem is the experience of transformation brought about by the first sighting of the sublime mountains:

Ruskin alludes to these lines in his poem “There is a charmed peace that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], which invokes the title of Rogersʼs poem in the speakerʼs cry,

and which concludes with an echo of Rogersʼs paradoxical anticipation of future memory, “henceforward and forever”, by bidding the spectator to “look once on the Alps by the sunset quiver / And think on the moment thenceforward for ever”. These tropes live on in Praeterita, where Ruskin recollects his first sighting of the Alps from an eminence above Schaffhausen: “suddenly—behold—beyond! There was no thought in any of us for a moment of their being clouds. They were clear as crystal, sharp on the pure horizon sky, and already tinged with rose by the sinking sun. Infinitely beyond all that we had ever thought or dreamed,—the seen walls of lost Eden could not have been more beautiful to us; not more awful round heaven, the walls of sacred Death” (Ruskin, Works, 35:115).

Along with the tropes in Rogersʼs “The Alps” connected with the first sightings of the mountains, the speaker also claims a vantage from the mountaintop, where the catalogue of historical struggles against the Alpine barrier prompts comparison with the ease and pleasure of the modern tourist. Rogers entered Italy via the improved road over the Simplon Pass on both his major Continental tours—the first in 1814–15, during the temporary peace (during which he kept the journal providing the basis for poems in Italy), and the second in 1821–22 (during which he revised “Part the First” [1822] of Italy for press, with the editorial assistance of his sister Sarah at home in London). In “The Alps”, a version of which was included in “Part the First”, the speaker admires the modern carriage road over the mountain (ironically afforded by Napoleonʼs wartime engineering): “Like a silver zone / Flung about carelessly, it shines afar / . . . / Seen oʼer the wall by him who journies up”; the road seems “a fairy‐course . . . / Winning its easy way from clime to clime”. The poem, which was originally entitled “A Retrospect”, thus serves not only as a record of the sublime first sighting of the Alps but also as a temporal and geographical crux, looking backward and forward (Rogers, “The Alps”, in Italy [1830], 30–31; Rogers, VI [“The Alps”], in Italy [1823], 34–35 [a version that mentions the improved road over the Mont Cenis Pass as well as over the Simplon]; Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries, 311, 312, 317; and see The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, ed. Hale, 159–61, for the original observations about the Simplon Road). Ruskin adopted this strategy of the mountain poem serving as a crux, and planned to repeat such poems throughout the “Account”, as shown in both completed and proposed sections (see, e.g., in addition to the poems already discussed, the poem and essay “The sky was clear, the morn way gay” [“The Meuse”] [poem] and “How lightly the waves of the broad Meuse crisped” [“The Meuse”] [essay]; the poem “Genoa” [poem]; and other pivotal mountain writings listed in Proposed Additional Contents).

At the same time, whereas Rogers forms a crux with a single poem, “The Alps”, Ruskin tends to stretch this function across several poems, attenuating the accounts of first sightings and mountain crossings as lengthy linear sequences. According to the List of Proposed Additional Contents, the section “Heidelberg”—the last, incompletely fair‐copied section in MS IX—was to be followed by a group of titles that relate the first sighting of the distant Alps progressively and even repeatedly, along with observing the first exposure to “Swiss” character in the borderland between Germany and Switzerland. The sequence includes a section that shares the title of Rogersʼs pivotal poem, “The Alps”, but that evidently would have served as only one link the chain, not as a concentration of tropes:

• “Strasburg”
• “The swiss cottages”
• “Schaffhausen”
• “The Alps”
• “The Fall of the Rhine”
• “Constance”
• “Werdenberg”
• “Pfaffers”.

The proposed sections “Schaffhausen” and “The Alps”, as suggested in Print Culture of Illustrated Travel and Topographical Literature and Art, were probably intended as a complementary pair, Ruskin designing these sections as respectively a sublime and a beautiful, domesticated rendering of the familyʼs first sighting of the Alps from Schaffhausen, on the pattern of the complementary pairing of the gothic and the domestic in the Rhine sections, “Andernacht” and “St. Goar”. (The Alpine pair is represented in extant draft by “There is a charmed peace, that aye” and “Schaffhausen”, respectively.) Ruskinʼs choice to multiply aesthetic registers for the same event unpacks Rogersʼs choice to multiply tropes and to layer anticipation and retrospection within a single pivotal poem.

Ruskinʼs string of sections about the approach to the mountains is succeeded by a series about crossing the mountains, which he also prolongs as a succession of real‐time descriptions. This sequence begins with a section featuring the earlier‐composed poem “Passing the Alps”, which draws on Rogersʼs trope of the Alpine barrier as a historical and cultural divide—the spectacle of Hannibalʼs crossing:

• “Passing the Alps”
• “Via Mala”
• “Splugen”
• “The Summit”
• “The Descent”
• “Italia, Italia”.

The sections stage a sequential progress across the mountain, each of which Ruskin managed to represent by a poem in draft: the sublime terror of the Via Mala (see “Via Mala”); a respite in the pastoral village of Splügen (see “Splugen”); the turning point achieved amid the bleak landscape of the summit, with its dire remembrances of fallen travelers (see “The Summit”); the breathtaking descent, winding among the precipitous cliffs, viewed first from above and then from below (see “The Descent”); and finally the arrival in Italy (a section corresponding to Rogersʼs poem “Italy”, and likely represented in Ruskinʼs draft by the poem “Oh softly blew the morning breeze”, which Collingwood entitled [“Chiavenna”]). Ruskin dissects Rogersʼs tropes and attenuates his structure, whereas Rogers is less concerned with tracing mountain crossing linearly than with contextualizing the journey in ancient and recent history. In Italy, “The Alps” is preceded by “The Great St. Bernard” and “The Descent”, thus illogically leading the reader across the Simplon after having descended from the Great Saint Bernard. Allegedly, the purpose of this apparent confusion was to throw readers off the trail of identifying Rogersʼs authorship (Clayden, Rogers and His Contemporaries, 342); but a more persuasive rationale lies in referring the reader first to Napoleonʼs exploits—remembered personally by the speakerʼs Alpine guide in “The Descent”—and then testifying in “The Alps” to the timeless effect of the mountains on both historical predecessors of Napoleon and his descendents in a remade Europe, the modern traveler: all feel the “sense, a feeling that he loses not, / A something that informs him ʼtis an hour, / Whence he may date henceforward and forever”.

If Ruskin multiplies and attenuates where Rogers condenses and layers, Ruskin nonetheless also acquired from Rogers a method for restrained digression. In Italy, between the two poems on the Great Saint Bernard and the poem on the Simplon, Rogers inserts a pair of verse narratives. The stories are balanced topographically and thematically—“Jorasse” relating a highland tale about an intrepid Alpine crystal hunter, which culminates in his marriage, complemented by “Marguerite de Tours” presenting a lowland tale about a girl who crosses from her wedded home in Martigny, on the Swiss side of the Saint Bernard, to her birthplace in the Val dʼAosta, on the Italian side, in order to attend to her dying father. Complementary contrast is an organizational feature noted throughout the development of the “Account”, for which Ruskin may not have been indebted solely to Rogers, but he was certainly deliberately imitating Rogersʼs digressive narrative poems in one of his few tales, the story from the English Lake District about the unfortunate traveler Charles Gough and his loyal dog, which Ruskin appended to “The Summit”. (For another instance of a narrative digression, but one that Ruskin left incomplete, see “The traditions of the Rhine have long been celebrated” [“The Rhine”].)

Another path by which Rogersʼs device of complementary contrast may have found its way to Ruskin was through the intermediary influence of Thomas Pringle, who perhaps helped to enshrine that structural principle in “Fragments from a Metrical Journal”. Pringle was a familiar guest at Rogersʼs famed St. James Place residence (Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 192), where Rogersʼs taste for symmetrical and complementary arrangement was on display in his art collection. Another visitor, the art historian Gustav Friedrich Waagen, commented in 1835 that “one knows not whether more to admire the diversity or the purity of [Rogersʼs] taste” in exhibiting his treasures; “[p]ictures of the most different schools, ancient and modern sculptures, Greek vases, alternately attract the eye, and are so arranged, with a judicious regard to their size, in proportion to the place assigned them, that every room is richly and picturesquely ornamented, without having the appearance of a magazine, from being over‐filled, as we often find” (Waagen,Works of Art and Artists in England, 2:132–33; and see Hale, introduction to The Italian Journal of Samuel Rogers, 26–27).

These literary influences on the taste, formal organization, and rhetorical tropes of the “Account” were ignored by W. G. Collingwood, the first editor to construct a version of the work with the appearance of completing Ruskinʼs abandoned fair copy. Whereas both the print culture of illustrated travel literature in general and the formal influences of Rogersʼs poetry in particular led Ruskin to adopt an aesthetic principle of expansion—the elaboration of an originally all‐verse work into a composite‐genre but artfully organized and illustrated work—Collingwood reversed the genetic history of the “Account” by confining his version to verse (Poems, ed. Collingwood [1891]); and while he did augment the fair‐copy poems (or preferentially, their previously published versions) about the northern itinerary with the draft poems about the southern and Swiss itinerary, Collingwood treated the sequence less as Ruskinʼs first major artistic project modeled on the sister‐arts practices of his day, than as a documentary appendage to the elder Ruskinʼs representation of the 1833 tour in Praeterita. The editorial approach is evident in the excerpts from the Praeterita narrative that Collingwood sprinkles as epigraphs throughout the sequence of poems and their notes (see, e.g., the epigraphs attached to the main title, “There is a charmed peace, that aye” [“The Alps from Schaffhausen”], and “Lago di Como”). The reverse orientation is more compelling: rather than editing the “Account” to document the autobiography, the work should be edited to reveal the cultural and literary influences contributing to the invention of Ruskinʼs first persona, J.R.

As an engagement with print culture, MS IX reflects an awareness of professional roles and public voices. Ruskin is aware that landscape artists like Prout and Turner traveled the Continent in search of subjects both for exhibition in watercolor or oil and for wider distribution in engraving and lithography. He is practicing the complementary, ekphrastic role of the letterpress writer, who provides on‐demand descriptive and historical verse or prose, in a voice that is variously authoritative or facetious, and that does not necessarily depend for its authority on a personal acquaintance with the place being described. He is exploring style not only as a resource for artistic self‐expression but also as a means of differentiation in the artistic market: he notices how stylistic differences accompany the roles assigned to Turner, Stothard, and Prout; and while his invariable model for verse remains the octosyllabic couplets of Walter Scottʼs narrative poems, he at least tries out strategies for ekphrastic and topographical description borrowed from Rogers (whose voice for learning and anecdote he cannot match).

In forming the persona J.R., Ruskin was influenced not only by literary and artistic sources, but also by living poets and artists whom he was fortunate to meet or correspond with during his conceptualization and composition of the “Account”. These contacts became especially important as Ruskin was “brought forward” as a professional contributor to Friendshipʼs Offering (see Hanson, “Ruskin in the 1830s”). Two of these men present a striking contrast with one another—Samuel Rogers (1763–1855) and James Hogg (ca. 1770–1835). Ruskin also had some contact at this time with John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843).

The personae of Hogg and Rogers each exhibited multiple and even contradictory sides, and the Ruskins must have been selective about what aspects of these public figures they hoped to cultivate in the patronage of their precocious son. Respecting Hogg, the Ruskins thought of him in his role as the Ettrick Shepherd, who was romantically imagined as having received his call to poetry when he was shepherd in Ettrick Forest in the Scottish Borders, and who still resided in georgic retirement on his farm in the Yarrow Valley. The Ruskins would have played down Hoggʼs colorful and risqué character in the “Noctes Ambrosianae” in Blackwoodʼs Edinburgh Magazine. This side of Hogg appealed to the Brontë siblings, who imitated the bravado and swagger of these dialogues in their own collaborative and competitive writing, but Ruskinʼs parents would hardly have considered such a persona as an appropriate model for Ruskinʼs solitary and decorous authorship.

When the Ruskins met Hogg personally in 1832, he was undertaking his first visit to the metropolis, where he was lionized by London society. Hoggʼs introduction to the Ruskins came by way of the community of expatriate Scottish literati in London who surrounded the publishing firms of John Murray and Smith, Elder. The latter, in particular, as the publisher of Friendshipʼs Offering, served as the hub for these connections: Hogg as a contributor to the annual; Thomas Pringle (1789–1834), as editor, and longtime friend of Hogg; and even Ruskinʼs cousin, Charles Thomas Richardson (1811–34), as a shopboy with the firm, who was the first to present Ruskin with a copy of Friendshipʼs Offering (probably the 1829 or 1830 volume, both of which contained contributions by Hogg).

Rogers, in sharp contrast with Hogg, was the urbane “man of taste,” whose townhouse in St. James Place was a showplace of exquisitely curated Regency neoclassicism, and the scene of his famous breakfasts at which Rogers acted the part of social arbiter of the current London artistic and literary scene. In his most positive light, Rogers might have appeared to the Ruskins as a splendid embodiment of John Jamesʼs tastes and aspirations. A former associate of Byron, and a habitué of at least the byways of fame, Rogers had earned a sound reputation for his poem, The Pleasures of Memory (1792), and, more recently, Italy. The latter may have paled in the popular glare of Childe Haroldʼs Pilgrimage, but the poem was respectably and approachably neoclassical, regular in its versification, and grounded in the tradition of the Grand Tour to Italy. Rogers was also, like John James, a successful businessman, having made his fortune in banking; and even though he lavished extravagant sums on artists, engravers, and printers in order to satisfy his perfectionism in crafting editions of his poetry, Rogers recouped his huge investment in his illustrated edition of Italy and profited handsomely by its unprecedented sales. The unattractive side of Rogers to the Ruskins would have been his notoriously acid wit and his worldliness at a time when middle‐class Evangelical earnestness was turning the tide on Regency profligacy.

The two writers also differed profoundly in taste. Rogers was so committed to his neoclassicism that Turner reined in his apocalyptic manner typical of his other works of the period in favor of a style that would harmonize with Rogersʼs restraint–for example, by using less dramatic perspective in his vignette designs for Italy (Holcomb, “Neglected Classical Phase of Turnerʼs Art”). The artist whom Hogg most admired and hoped to secure as illustrator for his grandest gift book, a deluxe edition of The Queenʼs Wake, was John Martin (1789–1854)—the artist who, far from restraining the apocalyptic sublime, made his career by carrying such subjects to unprecedented scale and histrionic theatricality. (All too typically for the hapless author, and despite generous subscription donations by John James Ruskin and others, Hoggʼs deluxe edition was never produced owing to disruptions in trade caused by Reform agitation in 1832; see OʼHalloran, “Illustrations to The Queenʼs Wake”, c–civ.)

Of the two relationships, the Ruskinsʼ contact with Hogg is the best documented (see James Hogg [ca. 1770–1835)]). John Jamesʼs evident preference for the Ettrick Shepherdʼs advice about Ruskinʼs future as a poet, at the time when the youth was laboring over the “Account”, may be no accident. Compared to Rogers, Hogg may have seemed hapless in his fortunes: his London venture ended in him foolishly mislaying his trust in an under‐financed publisher, who went bankrupt and squandered the opportunity to produce a collected edition worthy of the author, whereas Rogers boasted the means to encase his writing in increasing splendor. In 1834, when John James wrote to Hogg about Johnʼs “promise of very considerable talent,” Rogers followed up the success of his 1830 Italy with an edition of his collected Poems, likewise illustrated by Turner, Stothard, and others, which the Athenaeum declared to be a “volume which, for true elegance and pictorial fancy, is unequalled, in an age remarkable for its love of splendid books” (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 274; Piggott, Turnerʼs Vignettes, 39). Nonetheless, when writing to Hogg, John James sounds pointed in addressing Hogg as a man “of talent and of heart,” as compared with “the world at large,” which lacks “comprehen[sion] . . . patience . . . feeling . . . delicacy,” suggesting that he trusted the humble Scottish “shepherd” over the urbane man of taste (Garden, ed., Memorials of James Hogg, 274).

Despite John Jamesʼs sentiments, both Rogersʼs successes and Hoggʼs disappointments were endemic to a period of transition between publishing in the age of Scott and the more entrepreneurial and innovative, yet also volatile and confusing print culture in the age of Dickens. In a time when critical discourse commonly bemoaned the decline of poetry in unpropitious circumstances (see, e.g., Bristow, “Introduction,” Victorian Poet, 4–5), both Rogers and Hogg appreciated how poetry could gain new life from its relation with the visual arts—a relation that was rooted in tradition reaching back to the humanist dialogue or paragone between the sister arts, yet that was also undergoing renewal and transformation by mass‐market print technologies. Both men shrewdly exploited the changes in print technology that created new venues and audiences for literature and art, such as the annuals and other illustrated books. (On Hoggʼs enterprising approach to these venues during an otherwise depressed period in literary publishing, see Currie, introduction to Hogg, Contributions to Annuals and Gift‐Books, xix–xxxii; and on his appreciation of the fine arts—particularly modern painting, for its connection with literature and its accessibility to ordinary people—see Hughes, “Hogg, Art, and the Annuals”.)

Ruskinʼs introduction to Rogers is less helpfully documented. The sole anecdote to survive concerning the youthʼs audience with the poet can be read in terms of commonalities shared by these mentors in the literary and artistic culture of the 1830s. He was escorted into Rogersʼs presence under the wing of Thomas Pringle, who enjoyed regular entrée to St. James Place (see Vigne, Thomas Pringle, 192). Ruskinʼs later story about his supposed contretemps of “congratulating . . . [Rogers] with enthusiasm on the beauty of the engravings by which his poems were illustrated,” indicating that the youth knew “more of the vignettes [in Italy] than the verses,” and the consequent chiding by Pringle “that, in future, when . . . in the company of distinguished men, . . . [he] should listen more attentively to their conversation” evokes a bygone era that valued polite conversation and dilettantish collecting (Ruskin, Works, 34:96, 35:93). Yet, while Ruskin fits the anecdote into what he now regarded as his fatuous beginnings as a poet, his misplaced complements to the illustrator only proves him to have been a boy of his decade, who had so carefully studied the visual culture represented by Rogersʼs Italy. (While we do not know precisely when Ruskinʼs introduction to Rogers occurred—the visit must have been made prior to Pringleʼs illness and death in late 1834—it is a reasonable guess that Pringle secured an audience on the strength of the youthʼs precocious achievement in the MS IX fair copy of the “Account”.)

In the early mentoring of J.R., it is surprising that the only surviving mention by John himself of his productions pertains, not to Pringle or Rogers and Friendshipʼs Offering, but to John Claudius Loudon (1783–1843), the editor of botanical, landscaping, and other natural history publications. In a verse letter to his father dated 10 March 1834, Ruskin refers to Loudon as a “friend” of the family: “To Mr. Loudon, as a friend, / By way of some communication, / Some kind of little lucubration / On any sort of observation, / Among the Alps, you know, / On Micaslate, or any slates, / Granite, and gold, or toads and snakes, / I think that I shall make a show” (Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 285). Ruskin was alluding to his geological notes—dated March 1834, but published later that year—in Loudonʼs Magazine of Natural History, “Enquiries on the Causes of the Colour of the Water of the Rhine”, and “Facts and Considerations on the Strata of Mont Blanc, and on Some Instances of Twisted Strata Observable in Switzerland”. One is struck by the apparent anomaly that the one forthcoming publication to merit Ruskinʼs attention—if he was as yet apprised of his other firsts for this year, the poetry commissions for Friendshipʼs Offering—were these geological observations. Later in life, Ruskin would find it convenient to stress his keenness of factual observation at the expense of his poetic effusion. Again, however, from the perspective of the 1830s, one can perceive commonalities in these mentorships. Loudon, like Pringle and Hogg, was a Scot—a member of the extended “family” of Scottish literati in London who surrounded the boy wonder, many of whom visited Herne Hill. Loudonʼs publications also depended on the thriving visual culture of illustrated books and magazines during the period, and they were perhaps not too distant from the poetry anthologies in their communal appraoch, inviting amateurs to contribute to forums such as the Magazine of Natural History, and other “lucubrations” that did not necessarily expect its readers and contributors to be qualified by a professional status.