“mamma said Lucy papa has gone out to town” (MS I)—Lucy is speaking; i.e., “‘Mamma’, said Lucy, ‘Papa has gone out to town’”. Note that Ruskinʼs first story begins with the fatherʼs absence. For the transportation that John James Ruskin probably used to commute to his business in London, see Camberwell: London Commuter Transport.

“to go to town and then into the city and then to the docks” (MS I)—For the business center of London that had come to be called “the City”, where John James Ruskinʼs counting house was located, see City of London: Billiter Street and the Premises of Ruskin, Telford, and Domecq. By going “to town” as opposed to “into the city”, Mamma probably means crossing the Thames and entering the environs of London, and not merely walking down the hill from their home, Herne Hill, into the village of Camberwell. Later, in chapter 2, Harryʼs father takes him “into town” to view “the apparatus for making ice”, definitely referring to London. For the docks, see City of London: The London Docks.

“my dear” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded and Frank: A Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons, this term of endearment is used constantly by the siblings Harry and Lucy and the cousins Frank and Mary for one another, and by the parents for the children. In volume 1 of Ruskinʼs “Harry and Lucy”, the epithet occurs six times—five occurrences by Mamma and Papa for the children, which are clustered early in the dialogue, and only one occurrence by Harry for Lucy, falling later in the dialogue.

“and how many in number . . . eleven” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy, Part II, Being the Second Part of Early Lessons (1801), everyday experiences are exploited for arithmetical exercises, such as when Harry and Lucy count the strawberries they gather for dessert, and then learn the meaning of the suffixes teen and ty (Butler, ed., The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, 12:102–3).

“discourse” (MS I)—This comparatively sophisticated word choice, which Ruskin uses nonidiomatically (i.e., he writes, to “get” the discourse “of silkworms”, perhaps omitting the word to as in “get to the discourse”), occurs only twice in Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded; the word occurs more frequently in Barbauld, Evenings at Home.

“your silkworms . . . How are they getting on . . . Yes said Lucy so we will” (MS I)—In Frank: A Sequel, Frank and Mary are surprised to learn from Lewis, the good‐natured and intelligent son of the engineer, that the boys at Lewisʼs school raise silkworms. He describes how they feed the caterpillars with mulberry leaves and collect the silk from the cocoons: “‘I have wound a great deal of it myself’”, Lewis exclaims, and shows Frank and Mary the yellow silk wound on cards. Mary wishes she could raise silkworms too, but Lewis advises against it, since they emit a “disagreeable smell . . . and sometimes eat till they burst” (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 2:275–76).

Despite this discouragement in Edgeworthʼs fiction, the Boyʼs Own Book for 1828 presents practical instructions for raising silkworms, using accessible materials such as homemade paper trays, although it advises purchasing Tunbridge‐ware reels “if you have a large stock” of breeding moths. Detailed directions are provided for hatching the eggs; feeding the caterpillars; caring for the caterpillars through their stages of development; segregating the caterpillars when they begin to spin their silk cocoons for their chrysalis stage; and removing and caring for the chrysalis, while winding the silk from the cocoon onto cards (Boyʼs Own Book [1828], 163–66). In Edgeworthʼs Rosamond, Part I, . . . Being the Third Part of Early Lessons, the title character learns to occupy herself industriously instead of dwelling on the slow passing of time by using “silk‐winders” in order “to wind that skein of red silk . . . , which you [her mother] desired me to wind before night” (Butler, ed., The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, 12:124). At Herne Hill, the Ruskins may not have raised silkworms but their back garden did enclose an old mulberry tree (Dearden, John Ruskinʼs Camberwell, 1).

“mamma when we were at the sea‐side we were told that the thread of the silk worms was two or three miles in length. Yes said her mother and is not that a good length. . . . Well said Lucy how thin is the thinnest of the threads which silkworms spin. . . . what is the size of the thickest thread as thin as a spiders” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, while on their way to the seaside (not when arrived), Lucy challenges Harry to guess “‘what length . . . the silk‐worm can spin without breaking’”. Harry, thinking to provoke Lucy with an exaggerated answer, suggests a quarter‐mile. “‘A quarter of a mile! . . . ‘that is a good large guess; but you must know, that a silk‐worm can spin without breaking as much as when unwound is six miles long!’” This information arises from a discussion of spiders (prompted by sighting their webs glistening with dew, as they travel)—in particular, the “‘silk spider, who spins silk, which is almost as fine, some say finer, than that of the silk‐worm’”.

All this is prelude to “‘the grand thing’” that Harry looks forward to seeing in Lancashire—a working steam engine in a cotton mill. After examining the machinery, they learn that the produce, a skein of cotton yarn, “‘if stretched out, would make a thread one hundred and sixty‐seven miles in length’”. This achievement, the children decide, puts their spiders and silkworms in the shade, but their father remarks “that the proper object of comparison between rival spinners is, not the length of the thread, but the fineness. ‘And I apprehend’, said he, ‘that either a silk‐worm or spidersʼ thread, is as fine as one fibre of cotton wool; and the finest thread of cotton must be composed of many fibres’ So that, notwithstanding Lucyʼs exultation in the superiority of men and women spinners over worms and spiders, Harry was compelled to give judgment in favour of the animals” (Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1:205–6, 203, 230–31).

“Yes I will Lucy answered her father” (MS I)—The father is speaking: i.e., “‘Yes, I will, Lucy’, answered her father”.

“Lucy said her lesson very well and after that her mother said” (MS I)—This sentence, despite its closing with a quotation mark, is the first instance of third‐person narration in Ruskinʼs “Harry and Lucy”, which up until this point is composed entirely of dialogue. This brief tag of narration is answered by a second passage of third‐person narration (likewise punctuated with a closing quotation mark), in which a narrator addresses the reader (“we shall . . . attend to”). The two passages of narration frame an exchange in the voices of the parents, who knowingly confide in one another about Lucyʼs maneuver: the “cause” that “made Lucy not come to say her lesson to me”, Mamma implies, is that Lucy has extracted a promise from her father to hear her lesson, despite Papaʼs pressing lack of “time”. With the father snared into the narrative, the speaker declares that “we shall have time to attend to harry”, and the narrative shifts to his “story”.

In Maria Edgeworthʼs Frank: A Sequel to Frank in Early Lessons, rather than the child choosing the parental auditor and commanding the auditorʼs time, as Ruskinʼs Lucy does, Frank is ordered by his father to recite his Latin lesson when the father reserves the time to hear him. Edgeworthʼs father is impatient of time—“‘I cannot stand here talking or listening to you, my dear, all day’”—and Frank is assured by a family friend, the ominously named Colonel Birch, that “‘there are very few fathers who would shorten their morningʼs ride for the sake of hearing their sonʼs Latin lesson’” (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 1:52, 78). When the time comes to recite his lesson, Frank is disgraced, because he has procrastinated, distracted by play outdoors and by the more entertaining reading that occupies his sister, Mary. Amid these distractions, Frank has studied only fitfully, trying “the patience of a mother” who has more time to hear his imperfectly memorized lesson. When even his mother limits the number of recitals she will entertain, Frank turns to his compliant sister. Although untrained in Latin, Mary reads well enough to warn him to be more exact (1:58, 75).

Unlike the successful manipulation of auditors by Ruskinʼs Lucy, which leaves her parents with no option but bemused compliance, Edgeworthʼs episode poses a test of Frankʼs resolve to memorize his lesson efficiently and on time, that he may “early learn habits of attention and application” (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 1:89). His failure leads the adults to confer among themselves, as do the parents in Ruskinʼs version, but the discussion between Edgeworthʼs adults is solemn, reflecting the bookʼs thesis, which is set forth in the authorʼs preface: parents should instill habits of self‐control in their sons before sending them to public school. If parents neglect to train their sons in self‐command, the boys will succumb to their schoolfellowsʼ reckless challenges to prove their “manliness” in foolish and damaging ways. The argument is not that proper manliness is to be instilled by corporal punishment: Frankʼs response to his disgrace ultimately disproves Colonel Birchʼs contention that a boy will learn his Latin only if its rules are “flogged” into him by schoolmasters. Rather, as Frank demonstrates, self‐control must be mastered by the boy himself. Recovering from his sobs, Frank retires to gain control over himself and his get his lesson by heart. Then, in the scene that Ruskin adapts to his own purposes, Frank “march[es] up” to Colonel Birch to say his lesson perfectly (just as Ruskinʼs Lucy “marched up” to her father to command his time, but without disgracing herself like Harry). In Edgeworthʼs tale, Frank proves over the following weeks that he can be relied on, and his father rescinds his decision to send Frank to school earlier than originally planned (see Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 1:86–96).

According to Edgeworthʼs Frank: A Sequel, the cultural cause of parental laxness in instilling boysʼ self‐discipline is not neglect of education, but a parentsʼ preoccupation with and excessive intervention in learning. The “fault of the present day”, according to the authorʼs preface, is the phenomenon of “anxious private education”. While the danger to a home‐schooled boy is effeminacy, the undermining of manliness is caused only in part by living too much at home “‘with gentle girls and women’”. In contemporary home education, both fathers and mothers can be at fault for “too much anxiety concerning details. Parents and private tutors are not only too eager to adopt every new receipt for teaching much in a short time, but are also too easily alarmed by every deficiency which they perceive in their pupils, and draw too readily evil auguries from every trifle. They are so anxious to make their pupils go on, and go right, and go straight, every instant, that they deprive them of the power of acting, thinking, feeling for themselves. Thus they turn them either into helpless puppets, who must cease to move, or fall when the guiding strings are no longer pulled; or, if they be not reduced to this automaton state, they become restive, wilful creatures, who, the instant they are at liberty, set off in a contrary direction to that in which they have been forced” (1:54, xvi–xvii).

To reward Frank for disciplining himself in his lessons, his father allows him “what I know will be agreeable”, teaching him to ride—and not “the old pony; or, as Frank would call it, the tame pony”, but a “spirited” horse. When his mother demurs, his father explains: “Boys, who have been carefully brought up at home, have often something effeminate or precise about them; perhaps they do not know how to leap, or to run, or to ride; for this they are laughed at by their school‐fellows, and they often get into mischief, merely to show that they are manly” (1:97, 98, 100). The earliest reference in the family letters to Ruskin riding his Shetland pony, Shagram, is January 1829, about two years after composing his “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I” (John to John James Ruskin, 19 January 1829 [Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 172]).

“harrys father said he would take him into town to see the apparatus for making ice . . . he did not see that part of the apparatus which made the ice” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, the childrenʼs father promises that, “‘when we go to London, I will show you Mr. Careyʼs apparatus for making ice’”. Using a portable air pump, their father has been conducting an experiment to demonstrate “that sudden evaporation produces cold sufficient to freeze in a vacuum”; and Harry hopes to adapt this experiment to prove to Lucy that the air pump is not limited to scientific uses, but good also for practical applications, such as helping to make ice cream. That part of their experiment using cream and sweetmeat fails; and their father explains “that, for this purpose, much larger air pumps than they had ever seen would be necessary” (1:151, 145, 150, and see 2:252). (Mr. Carey and his ice‐making apparatus in London are unidentified.)

When Edgeworthʼs Lucy refuses at first to believe Harryʼs assertion that “‘the air pump can make ice’”, he assigns her reading in Conversations on Chemistry (1:140–41). John James Ruskin owned this book by Jane Marcet (1769–1858), the popular writer on science and childrenʼs book author, who first published the book in 1805 for the edification of women. (The mother in Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded claims to know personally the mother in Conversations, who holds dialogues on the principles of chemistry with her two daughters.) In Conversation IV on the properties of specific and latent heat, the same experiment is performed as that undertaken by Harry and Lucyʼs father, but explained in theoretical terms rather than with the practical emphasis in Harry and Lucy Concluded (Marcet, Conversations on Chemistry, 1:141–42, 144). In a note, Marcet credits the originator of the experiment, Sir John Leslie (1766–1832), who in 1810, with the aid of an air pump, first demonstrated the phenomenon of falling temperature produced by evaporation in 1810. In a widely publicized case concerning this experiment, an imputation of plagiarism among other accusations by Blackwoods Magazine provoked Leslie to take the editors to court for libel in 1822 (Napier, “Memoir of Sir John Leslie”, 23–26).

On John James Ruskinʼs ownership of Conversations on Chemistry, see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 187 (no. 1433). Dearden misattributes the book to Jeremiah Joyce (1763–1816), confusing it with Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues (1807). Joyce did write a book entitled Dialogues in Chemistry, Intended for the Instruction and Entertainment of Young People (0000).

“Lucy . . . wished harry would go on with science” (MS I)—Lucyʼs wish, expressed shortly after the appearance of a narratorʼs voice prompting “young readers” to “recollect” events from “the last volumes of harry and Lucy”, echoes the aspirations of Edgeworthʼs Lucy at the beginning of Harry and Lucy Concluded: Lucy sighs because “‘I do not go on with Harry as I used to do’” because they “‘do not suit each other quite so well as we did’”. Harry, she complains, “‘has grown so excessively fond of mechanics, and of all those scientific things, which he is always learning from my uncle and papa’”. Her mother points out that she has been “‘learning other things, which it is more necessary for a girl to know’”. She encourages Lucy, however, to seek her brotherʼs teaching in science, and in turn to share her “stories and poetry” and drawing: “‘You each know different things, which you can learn from one another, and in which you can be of mutual assistance. This is just as it should be between friends’” (Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1:1, 2–3, 4, 5).

In subsequent lessons, Edgeworthʼs pair learn to forbear with one another, as Harryʼs methodical efficiency is tested by Lucyʼs impulsiveness, and he learns to understand wit and appreciate poetry while she learns go slowly and methodically in scientific learning—their opposite abilites made complementary by a loving relationship (in Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, see, e.g., the preface, and the lesson about hygrometers, 1:xiii–xiv, 38–86). In Ruskinʼs dialogue, the brief exchange between Harry and Lucy concerning whether he will “go on with science” with her now or tomorrow glancingly reflects these contests in Edgeworth between Harryʼs humorless exactingness and Lucyʼs volatility and “nonsense”. Ruskinʼs dialogue does not directly reflect what is, in Edgeworth, at stake for Lucy as girl, learning how women become “agreeable companions to . . . sensible men” by preparing themselves with a “‘taste for literature, and some acquaintance with scientific subjects’” without acquiring the stigma attached to “scientific ladies” (1:7–11).

“their father took a little balloon filled it with gunpowder and hung it up at a pole in the room. . . . I understand you perfectly said Lucy” (MS I)—Unless he was drawing directly on an unidentified source, Ruskin appears to have devised his own fictional experiment based on Conversation XI, “Of Sound”, in volume 4, “Of Pneumatics”, in Scientific Dialogues by Jeremiah Joyce.

In the conversation by Joyce, the father conducts no experiments of his own involving sound, but describes experiments by others and poses hypothetical illustrations—embellished with lines from Capel Lofftʼs Eudosia—in order to explain phenomena of sound to his children, Charles and Emma. Ruskinʼs invented experiment, in which gunpowder is exploded in balloons positioned at different heights, although improbable, does demonstrate the point of a scenario that Joyceʼs Father bids his young listeners to imagine: “‘You see in a dark night the flash of a gun, but, being at a considerable distance from it, you hear no report. If, however, you knew that the light was occasioned by the inflammation of gunpowder in a musket or pistol, you would conclude that it was attended with sound, though it was not sufficiently strong to reach the place where you are.’” Charles shows that he gets the point by recalling an actual experience of the same kind: “‘As we were walking last summer towards Hampstead, we saw a party of soldiers firing at a mark near Chalk Farm, and you desired Emma and me to take notice as we approached the spot, how much sooner the report was heard after we saw the flash, than it was when we first got into the fields’”. His father ties together the past experience and the present conversation: “‘My intention [at that time] was, that you should know, from actual experiment, that sound is not conveyed instantaneously, but takes a certain time to travel over a given space”’ (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:102, 103–4; Chalk Farm, near Primrose Hill in Hampstead, was known as a remote place for dueling in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries [Wheatley, London Past and Present, 1:344–45]).

In Ruskinʼs devising his own imaginary experiment to measure near and distant sounds of exploding gunpowder, his lexical choices—the closer noise being “so much that it was near deafing harry and Lucy”, while the more distant “noise could not be heard” at all—suggest that he conflated two different sections of Joyceʼs dialogue. Ruskinʼs experiment encapsulates discussion of the speed of sound, but inaudible sounds in Joyce have more to do with showing that sound cannot travel in a vacuum: “‘I remember’”, says Charles, “‘being once in a room at the distance of but a few paces from the Tower guns when they fired [i.e., artillery in the Tower of London], and the noise was infinitely worse than any thunder that I ever heard’”. His father explains, “‘This was because you were near them: gunpowder, so tremendous as it is in air, when inflamed in a vacuum makes no . . . sound’” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:99).

“Now I will show you one other experiment. . . . This then proved that water is a good conductor” (MS I)—In this second, and even more alarming procedure, Ruskin appears again to have devised an imaginary experiment to demonstrate a point about pneumatics that the Father in Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues makes anecdotally: “‘Experiments have been instituted to ascertain how much water, as a conductor of sound, was better than land; and a person was heard to read very distinctly at the distance of 140 feet on the Thames, and on land he could not be heard farther than 76 feet’” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:103).

“harry . . . showed her a little canal he had made and a little boat with some blocks fastened together by wedges . . . Lucy now recollected a promise harry had made her to show her how ships were floated into docks to be repaired” (MS I)—Ruskin draws this account of how ships are repaired in dry dock from an exchange between brother and sister in Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded. His summary of the procedure for lifting and supporting a shipʼs keel, besides being slightly inaccurate, is difficult to follow, because Ruskin omits Harryʼs contextualizing.

Harry begins with more obvious and traditional means of raising a ship in dry dock: “‘Some time ago, the day my father took me into the dock‐yard, he showed me a ship lying in what is called a dock. The keel was to be repaired, and for this purpose it was necessary to raise up the ship, so that the workmen might get underneath. The question my father asked me was, ‘how the vessel could be raised?’ I was an hour puzzling about it, . . . but never [thought] of the easy way that was before my eyes—to let in the water from outside of the dock. The water, you know, would gradually float the vessel, and raise it up to the proper height, where it could be propped up, and the water let out again next tide.’”

Lucy inquires about a “different way of raising a ship” that she knows their father had described to Harry. Harry goes on: “‘You must first of all know, that when a vessel is floated into a dock to be repaired, she is allowed to settle down with her keel upon thick wooden blocks, along the middle of the dock: . . . formerly when she was to be raised up, for the people to get under the keel, two or three hundred shores, or props of timber, were placed all under her bottom, nearly upright; wedges were then just pointed under the lower end of each of these shores, and all the workmen from every part of the dock‐yard being summoned with their mauls, or huge hammers, and stationed one or two to each shore, the wedges were all struck at the same instant by word of command. A few blows from all the mauls was sufficient just to raise the ship from off the blocks, which were then taken away, and the ship was left hanging in the air, supported by the shores’”.

The new way, which has replaced this time‐ and labor‐intensive method, is what Ruskin summarizes: “‘The blocks on which the keel is to lie are not solid lumps of wood; they are composed of three pieces, two of which are wedges, and when these are knocked out, the centre piece of the block falls. The ship is floated into the dock as usual, and when the water subsides, the keel rests on the new‐fashioned blocks: the forest of shores are then firmly placed under all parts of the shipʼs bottom, in the same way as I described to you before, but without any wedges [pointed beneath the shores]. Now, Lucy, comes the beautiful contrivance—two or three men only are sufficient to do the rest: they give a few knocks on the sides of the wedges, of which the blocks are composed—out they fly—the blocks sink, and the ship hangs on the shores’”.

Lucy agrees that “‘it is such a pretty contrivance, that 1 should like very much to see it done. Suppose you make an experiment with your little boat in our canal”’ (Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, 4:234–37). Edgeworthʼs Harry temporizes, but Ruskin carries on to invent just such a scene for his fictional siblings in their garden, where they examine Harryʼs workmanship in constructing blocks and shores to lift a boat in his little canal.

“shores” (MS I)—Here, and in a previous occurrence on p. 17, Ruskin imitates the italic font used in Edgeworthʼs text to highlight this term.

“Harry now took a cane . . . broke the window” (MS I)—Ruskin may intend both Harryʼs cane experiment and its accidental outcome as proofs of the “attraction of cohesion”, a principle illustrated in Conversations III and IV of volume 1, “Of Mechanics,” of Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. Father explains: “That a piece of thin steel, or cane, recovers its usual form, after being bent, is owing to a certain power called elasticity; which may, perhaps, arise from the particles of those bodies, though disturbed, not being drawn out of each otherʼs attraction; therefore, as soon as the force upon them ceases to act, they restore themselves to their former position”. However, “the reverse of the attraction of cohesion” or “repulsion” prevails “if a glass or any hard substance be broken”, and “the parts cannot be made to cohere without first being moistened, because the repulsion is too great to admit of a reunion” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 1:37, 36).

“But we will not let our spirits go by this let us run and tell mamma” (MS I)—It is unclear whether both of these sentence are spoken by Harry. The first could be read as spoken by Lucy as a continuation of her preceding reply, “No it is not”. The second sentence must be spoken by Harry, however, since Lucy answers it by consenting to his urging to report the accident to their mother.

“We have broke the window” (MS I)—Both Harry and Lucy appear to be speaking, as suggested by the pronoun they in the preceding paragraph.

“No not in reward for breaking the window . . . but in reward for coming and telling me of it . . . that is it my dears” (MS I)—Rewards for honesty are frequent in Edgeworthʼs Early Lessons series. Frank, like Ruskinʼs Harry, is given two balls in reward for telling the truth about breaking a window. One of the balls is soft for more prudent play near glass. Unlike Ruskinʼs characters, however, Frank must also punish himself by throwing away the horse chestnut that had cracked the window (Edgeworth, Frank, 1:38–40).

“Now harry had a long while, been thinking” (MS I)—What Harry had been thinking is lost to us, torn away with a missing leaf containing pp. 30–31 (see MS I: Description). The missing leaf may have included a drawing, numbered as plate 4, since that number is skipped between extant plates 3 and 5. The latter, however, was renumbered from 4 to 5, a fact that only obscures the mystery of what pp. 30–31 contained. As shown by the frequently erased and overwritten page numbers, Ruskin had difficulty numbering sequences consistently.

In the next extant text, from the top of p. 32, Harry is in the process of posing riddles to Lucy. The missing page must have contained only the start of the first riddle, which Lucy solves on p. 32, since Lucy expresses surprise at Harryʼs posing only three riddles altogether—the second and third of which appear on pp. 32–33.

In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, Lucy diverts Harry with riddles while Harry is convalescing from the burns he suffered while rescuing an infant from a cottage that caught fire. As usual, Harryʼs rational and methodical mind trails behind Lucyʼs quick and imaginative wit in solving word games (Harry and Lucy Concluded, 4:195–203).

“a little book is made of paste” (MS I)—Harry, it seems, is speaking, as he has been putting all the riddles to Lucy. She, then, answers that “the side of a book is made of paste.” They then speak alternately, ending with Harry saying, “So we will.”

“Harry do you know we are going to the seaside again. Is this true cried harry” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Lucy likewise excites Harry with the news that their parents are looking for a house “‘a great way off, by the sea‐shore’”; and if a house is found large enough, Harry and Lucy shall accompany them. “‘You do not say so!’” cries Harry with joy (Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1:185). Ruskinʼs Lucy announces they “‘are going to the seaside again’”, since Ruskin had already accompanied his parents to the seaside resort at Sandgate in 1821, and he would have viewed the sea during the Tours of 1822–24, and seen the beaches at Dover and Calais during the familyʼs journey to Paris in the Tours of 1825 (see also The Ruskinsʼ Visits to Seaside Resorts and Spas).

“Lucy prounounced [sic] the words as fast as she could that was the why that she forgot the part of speech — and —.” (MS I)—Perhaps the dropped conjunction and was meant to connect “dress yourself as fast as you can” and “be ready”. It is impossible to know whether, in light of the narratorʼs caveat, whether other errors in this passage should be taken as a deliberate joke or as faults also requiring special pleading—the misspelling, “prounounced”; the omission of the word reason in “that was the why”; the omission of noon from afternoon, needing to be inserted above the line; and later on the page, the superfluous e in “witheLucy”, as well as another dropped conjunction and following that phrase.

“Harry . . .was seated opposite to his father witheLucy [sic] away they went” (MS I)—Mammaʼs presence is not explicitly mentioned throughout the account of the visit to the seaside. It is also unclear, owing to the placement of the prepositional phrases, whether Harry and Lucy are seated together opposite to their father, or whether Lucy is seated along with her father opposite to Harry, Presumably the latter is intended since, in a traveling chariot or chaise such as the Ruskins used for long‐distance travel in the summer holiday, only a child could sit opposite the single seat for two adults—and that child‐seat had to be improvised, such as the packing box that served as young Ruskinʼs seat (see The Ruskinsʼ Traveling Carriages). Mamma may not be mentioned in part because, in this disposition, she could only be seated outside in the dickey at the rear, along with the nurse (who also is not mentioned).

“Presently they saw such a beautiful chain of mountains that they thought they had been made by mens hands” (MS I)—Ruskinʼs idea of incorporating a travel narrative into his version of Edgeworthian lesson was probably suggested by Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, in which Harry and Lucy travel to Bristol. Specifically, the observation of mountains by Ruskinʼs Harry and Lucy could be a borrowing from Edgeworth, not only because Edgeworthʼs characters travel to the West Country, but also because Edgeworthʼs Harry, from the moment he hears the prospect of going to the seaside, longs “‘to see mountains, and go up them with my portable barometer’” (1:186). This desire arises near the beginning of the book, when Harry proposes to measure the height of a mountain by comparing the difference between barometric pressures at sea level and at the top the mountain, and converting the difference in degrees to a scale in feet. Prior to their journey, Harry and his father carry out the experiment on a more limited scale by scaling a church tower with the portable barometer in hand, thereby working out the towerʼs height. Edgeworth uses this episode to prompt learning through several comparisons of a thematic kind, including tensions between Harryʼs bent for theorizing and Lucyʼs pragmatism, between Harryʼs solemn methodicalness and Lucyʼs mercurial imaginativeness, and between Harryʼs braving adventures to the point of imprudence and Lucyʼs voicing anxieties to the point of endangering others (see 1:19–38).

As announced on their arrival below, Harry and Lucy are traveling to Hastings on the southeast coast of England. This portion of Ruskinʼs narrative was taken by W. G. Collingwood to be “probably a bit of history” solely on the grounds, it seeems, that the adventures are “told with lively artlessness” (Collingwood, Life and Work of John Ruskin [1893], 1:25; Collingwood, Life of John Ruskin [1900], 21). But while Ruskin folds in at least one episode directly from Edgeworth (the exploding wagon), it does seem unlikely that he would wholly invent a journey taken in the opposite direction from Edgeworthʼs characters, unless his parents had actually taken him to Hastings—a place that, compared to Bristol and environs, had only recently begun promoting itself as a tourist destination. Tending to the confirm the basis in reality, the Ruskins are known to have visited Hastings on at least one other occasion, and probably more (see The Ruskinsʼ Visits to Seaside Resorts and Spas).

Here, in Ruskinʼs Harry and Lucy, the description of the road trip to Hastings seems only marginally credible, however, and one strains to match his details with a reality that Ruskin may have half‐remembered and half‐created. There are no mountains in Kent, for example, although there are hills that “Harry” may have decided to call “mountains”. The 1826 edition of the road book, Patersonʼs Roads, lists two routes for the sixty‐four‐mile journey to Hastings from London (measured from London Bridge)—one following the post road to Flimwell in Kent (roughly the present‐day A21) through Sevenoaks, Tonbridge, Lamberhurst, Hurst Green, Robertsbridge, and Battle; and another segueing at Tonbridge to Tunbridge Wells (roughly the present‐day A26 and A267), passing through Southborough, Tunbridge Wells, Frant, and Shoverʼs Green, to rejoin the post road to Flimwell at Ticehurst (Mogg, Patersonʼs Roads, 17–18). Harryʼs “mountains” could refer broadly to the Weald of Kent and Sussex viewed from these routes, or to a particular spot such as the resort, Tunbridge Wells. As an 1810 topograhical account describes the settlement, Tunbridge Wells lay in a valley and spread over “adjacent hills of a wild forest aspect, with rocks of considerable magnitude”. The villageʼs three hills—named Mount Sion, Mount Pleasant, and Mount Ephraim—might have been described as “made by mens hands” owing not only to their picturesque beauty but also to their settlement with villas. On the London Road beyond the spa, “the characteristic feature of the country” is hard sandstone, which forms “various considerable prominences” that can “assume the majestic character of rocks” (Amsinck, Tunbridge Wells and Its Neighbourhood, 2, 42).

“After a little while they came to a wood a league every way in size but so beautiful they quite wondered Next they came to a river and they were to ride along the side of it. It was beautiful the water curling so nice and dashing against rocks and now they got to the inn. The inn was close by the bank of the river to harry and Lucys joy but there was more joy for them they were to go to the sea now all in one stage only stopping to change horses” (MS I)—While it seems credible that Hastings could be reached from London with one change of horses, neither of the two main routes runs alongside a stream as considerable as a “river”. Only Tonbridge (then spelled Tunbridge), where the road divides into the two routes toward Tunbridge Wells and Lamberhurst, respectively, is situated on a river, the Medway. As the guidebooks liked to comment, the town was “built on a spot, intersected by five small branches of the river Medway; and from the bridges over these several streams it obtained its name, the Town of Bridges” (Amsinck, Tunbridge Wells and Its Neighbourhood, 97).

“Nonsense Mrs hic haee hoc” (MS I)—In Latin, the nominative singlur masculine, feminine, and neuter equivalents of the pronoun this. In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, Harryʼs usual mockery name for Lucy is Mrs. Quick‐Quick, referring to her tempermaent—quick in wit, perceiving connections and similarities that prompt her to think of poetic figures, but also impatient, leaping over distinctions that call for analysis—whereas Harryʼs temperament is methodical in analysis, searching for differences that draw him to solve a problem.

“a T as crooked as an o” (MS I)—Another nonsensical statement, perhaps, since an o cannot be crooked.

“harry seeing a ship launch” (MS I)—

“Tots nonsense” (MS I)—Tots is “short for total or Latin totum”, a colloquialism meaning “the total of an addition” (“tot, n.3”, Oxford English Dictionary Online); hence, the statement means “it adds up to nonsense”.

“Ha ha ha ha you will come to nonsense at last harry . . . So much the better said harry. So much the worse said Lucy” (MS I)—Harry begins this exchange by accusing Lucy of “nonsense”, but Lucy declares that Harry “will come to nonsense at last”, and he does so. In Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, Harry is typically the one to chide Lucy for her “nonsense”.

“Look look look father cried harry do you see that” (MS I)—Harry is speaking; i.e., “‘Look, look, look, father’, cried Harry, ‘do you see that?’”

“Look look look father cried harry . . . The fact was that harry had seen a waggon strike a spark from the road and that set fire to a tree . . . look the flames are fast quenching and now they are out” (MS I)—The corresponding episode in Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded entails only the threat of fire, and not an actual conflagration, but the episode also involves Harry in an interaction with strangers on the road.

The family is traveling in their carriage and conversing, when Harry interjects: “‘Father! pray look out of the window this instant! Do you see that streak of black powder in the track of the waggon, papa? I saw it dribbling from a barrel. Is it not gunpowder? May I get out and look?’” Harry and his father dismount and run to catch up with the vehicle, which is transporting goods and passengers, to warn the driver of the danger. The wagoner “had no clear idea of the danger he had run, till Harryʼs father told him, that he had some years before known a waggon to have been blown to pieces, and men and horses killed, by just such an accident. Some gunpowder had been shaken out of a barrel in the waggon, and had taken fire, as it is supposed, from a spark struck from a flint in the road. This communicating with the gunpowder had blown up the whole”. The wagoner is a “sulky fellow” and disbelieves the story until hearing the name of the hill where the accident occurred. The narrator observes: “So it is, that ignorant people believe or disbelieve, without any reasonable grounds”. The wagonʼs passengers, overhearing the explanation, express their gratitude, and the wagoner moderates his demeanor. Speaking in a country dialect, which Edgeworth imitates, he thanks Harry for doing them “‘a mortal good turn’” and offers him a service in return, “‘but the likes of I can do little for the likes of you gemʼmen’”. Harry assures the wagoner that he is sufficiently rewarded by the safety of the vehicle and its passengers. The lesson of the episode, as Harryʼs father summarizes it, is to “‘see how useful it is to observe what passes before your eyes, and to recollect what you know at the right time’”, for Harry had heard his father previously tell the story of the exploded wagon

“the sea Yes the sea a shout of joy followed” (MS I)—“‘The sea! the sea!’” exclaims Lucy, on her first sight of the ocean, in Harry and Lucy Concluded; however, she immediately is hushed in awe, like her brother (3:5).

“hastings” (MS I)—See The Ruskinsʼ Visits to Seaside Resorts and Spas: Hastings.

“Wheres hastings. . . . By this time they had got to the entrance of hastings” (MS I)—The entrance to Hastings from the London Road was considered a picturesque highlight, staged from two vantage points. When Harry asks, “‘What is that town’”, he is sighting Hastings from the first vantage, on the hill above the town, called Fairlight Down. An 1804 guidebook describes the view: “It opens on a smooth terrace from the Down, from whence is an extensive prospect of Pevensey Bay [where William the Conqueror is supposed to have landed], Beachy Head, Bourne Hills, and a wide range of sea; when through the turnpike gate, the Valley of Hastings appears, discovering the Upper Church, and the tops of houses”. When the narrator reports that “they had got to the entrance of hastings”, the guidebook is cued for the second vantage: “At the bottom of the hill you enter a pleasant shady lane, on each side of which are tall spreading trees, whose branches in the summer form an impenetrable arch, through which you enter to the town” (Hastings Guide [1804], 40–41). The guidebook features an engraving, View of the Entrance to Hastings by the London Road, which positions the viewer on the higher vantage, overlooking the town to the sea beyond, while the lower, tree‐lined town entrance is pictured in W. G. Mossʼs engraving, Entrance from the London Road, for his 1824 History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings (p. 123 opp.). (As a panoramic view from above, Moss presents a more novel viewpoint on Hastings in his frontispiece, View from the Minnis Rock.)

“went to a hotel where they had a full view of the sea” (MS I)—The Ruskins arrived in Hastings during a period marked by “the spirit of improvement, and increase of building”, according to W. G. Moss in 1824, which left but “few old habitations remaining in the town”, such as “those at the bottom of All Saintʼs‐street, which, having the long diagonal gable ends descending from their roofs”, were “characteristic of the houses of Elizabethʼs time, . . . which is stated to have been the prevailing style of architecture of . . . the whole town, forty or fifty years ago” (History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings, 124). The term improvement was used in the period to characterize the large‐scale city planning and imposition of a uniform style, such as John Nashʼs designs for Regentʼs Park in London, that could change the character of a city (Summerson, Georgian London, 198).

When the Ruskins visited in 1826, Pelham Place was under construction by excavating into the cliff fronting the beach. This terraced housing, reminiscent of the Regentʼs Park terraces in London, forms a crescent with a Greek Revival chapel in the center. It was designed by Joseph Kay (1775–1847), Hotels included the Castle, recently built when the Ruskins visited, which stood on Wellington Square, sheltered by the cliff, but looking out to “views of the surrounding country, [the chalk cliff] Beachy‐head, and the sea” (History and Antiquities of the Town and Port of Hastings, 146–47). Besides the Castle Hotel, other accommodations offering ocean views, according to P. M. Powellʼs Hastings Guide (ca. 1819), included the Royal Oak Inn “on the beach, in Castle Street”, and the Cutter Inn (pp. 29–31).

“harrys new road” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, Harry briefly mentions “‘finish[ing] the new road to my garden’” and begins “striking the stones of the new road with his pounder” (1:137–38). While the drawings in Ruskinʼs “Harry and Lucy” are not necessarily related to the surrounding text, Harryʼs cliff road may have been suggested by the landscape at Hastings

“their father took them out in a pleasure boat” (MS I)—“Pleasure Boats” are advertised in P. M. Powellʼs Hastings Guide (ca. 1819) as “neatly fitted up, and those who delight in aquatic excursions may confidently intrust themselves with the experienced sailors who have the management of them” (p. 36).

“Papa and he then went out for a walk and after having climbed a high hill they came on a sort of plain composed of a great many fields only separated by hedges and where they had a full view of the sea” (MS I)—Guidebooks highlight numerous walks affording sea views from the heights surrounding Hastings. From the fields near the village of Fairlight, a view across the Channel to the French coast would have interested the Ruskins for its Napoleonic landmarks, given the familyʼs recent Tour of 1825 to Paris, where they witnessed festivities celebrating the accession of Charles X. “From the top of the Down” near the village, a guidebook explains, “may be seen the British Channel, from the south Foreland to Beachy Head, being a distance of nearly eighty miles; the whole extent of the French coast, from Calais Cliffs to Boulogne; and the Napolean Tower, which stands on a lofty eminence about two miles from the town, and which was designed by the French army assembled at Boulogne, under the command of Buonaparte, (self‐styled the army of England,) to commemorate the projected conq[u]est of this country; it now remains the monument of the Usurperʼs folly. . . . In the nearer view may be distinguished the towns . . . and innumerable villages . . . of the counties of Sussex and Kent" (Powell, Hastings Guide, 73–74). In the 1820s, the triumphal column undertaken by the Armée dʼAngleterre at Boulogne—today known as the Colonne de la grande Armée (1804–41)—had already been altered “to commemorate the restoration of the House of Bourbon” (Starke, Travels in Europe between the Years 1824 and 1828, 4; and see Chandler, Napoleon, 59–60, for these events of 1803–4 connected with Britainʼs formation of the Third Coalition).

Other excursions to ocean views, which were within walking distance, but which less clearly fit Ruskinʼs description, were the walks to the Dripping Well, Fairlight Place, and the Loverʼs Seat (Hastings Guide, 75–76). One of these destinations may have been the second walk described in the text, below.

“after dinner Harry learned all his lessons” (MS I)—In Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded, as soon as the family has arrived at the seaside cottage where they will reside for two months, Harry resumes his daily lessons—to Lucyʼs surprise, who protests they “‘are not at home’”. The rash assumption brings a rebuke from her mother, and Lucy resumes her regular duties, proving to her parents that they can “‘trust to me’” (3:16–18).

“After dinner it being the longest day tea came in seemingly at three o‐clock when it was seven harry going to bed at nine had only two hours to play which he spent in drawing and went to bed” (MS I)—The “longest day” is the summer solstice, June 21, the day of the year when the sun appears highest in the sky and daylight extends the longest. Since on that day the sun would have set around seven, which was the regular hour for tea, the lingering light gives Harry the impression that tea is served “seemingly”l at three in the afternoon—referring not just to the light but probably more specifically to the expected hour for dinner. This schedule appears in keeping with the day as described at the beginning of chapter eight, with Harry coming inside loaded with shells from the beach, which he is “counting . . . over when . . . interrupted by dinner”, followed by lessons and drawing, and then tea, and bed afterward. Dinner may have fallen between lessons since, at the end of chapter ten, we are told that Harry “always went to his lessons at twelve”. See Daily Routines and Schedules at Herne Hill and on Family Travels.

“Harry determined to go on with science and told Lucy he must begin with pneumatics” (MS I)—From this point in his text, Ruskin departs from his narrative about the family visit to Hastings and takes up a succession of experiments based closely on those described in Scientific Dialogues by Jeremiah Joyce as well as in Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded. (Near the end of the narrative, following this series of experiments, Ruskin briefly returns Harry to the beach, where he digs for shells.) While the writing abruptly becomes noticeably more derivative, which may suggest that Ruskin was merely filling the remaining space in his Red Book, his concentration on experiments may also be attributed his model. In the fourth and final volume of Harry and Lucy Concluded, Joyceʼs book is likewise treated as a close companion.

Toward the end of volume 3 and start of volume 4, Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy settle into the scientific workshop at Digby Castle, the residence of the landlord of their seaside cottage, Sir Rupert Digby. In volume 3, Sir Rupert invites the family for a long stay at the castle. The setting combines medievalism with scientific modernism, providing an extensively equipped workshop that “would be enough for Harry”, while supplying “an old garden and old hermitage for Lucy, to say nothing of a new conservatory, and a library for all, with books that were not locked up”. Admitted to this fantasy educational playground, Lucy is admonished at the end of volume 3 that she “may learn what you desire, but not all at once”—cautioned, as so often in the book, against seeking more knowledge than “what you . . . [can keep] steadily in your mind”, and she is supported by “Harryʼs help”, who is himself “‘assisted by his favourite book, ‘Scientific Dialogues’”. Ruskinʼs Harry seems to step into an analogous role, moving as it were from beach to workshop. Edgeworth does not repeat Joyceʼs experiments, instead referring the reader to his text (Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, 3:202, 319; 4:23). Ruskin does rehearse Joyceʼs and Edgeworthʼs texts, largely verbatim and often omitting the point of the experiments, but not without contributing his own innovation in some places.

“this science treated of the pressure and springiness of the air” (MS I)—It is “by the springiness of the air” or “what is called the elasticity of the air” that an air pump operates, just as it is the “springiness in the bladder when . . . full of air” that exerts resistence when one compresses a balloon, Edgeworthʼs Harry explains. He refers Lucy to “the description and illustrative plate of the air pump in Scientific Dialogues” (Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1:124–25).

“Remembering that Lucy wanted to see the guinea and feather fall with equal velocities . . . and the guinea and feather fell with equal velocities and no noise” (MS I)—The textual origin of this experiment resides in both Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded and Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. By supplementing one text with the other, supplying details about an experiment from Joyce that are missing from Edgeworthʼs text, Ruskin may be viewed as gratifying a desire that is left unfulfilled in the latter.

In Edgeworthʼs volume 1, Lucy expresses skepticism about the utility of the air pump as compared with the water pump, which has an obvious practical application. Harry defends the scientific instrument for its role in “‘many experiments in natural history . . . that could never have been tried, and discoveries that could never have been made without it’”. As an example, he cites the demonstration “‘that a guinea and a feather would fall to the ground in the same time, if there was no air to resist the fall of either of them’”. Lucy is incredulous, though she has read about the phenomenon, and remembers also that the guinea supposedly makes no noise when it falls. She wants Harry to show her the experiment, and explain why the guinea makes no noise, but Harry admits he neither understands the cause of the alleged noiselessness nor has he been able to replicate the effect with the instrument available to him. In his trials, “‘[t]he guinea fell on the metal plate here at the bottom [of the air pump], and this plate touches the outer air, and rings, makes a noise’”. Harry promises, however, that Lucy “‘shall see all this, and a great deal more in time’”.

This particular experiment is never taken up again in the book; instead, the point of mentioning the experiment appears to be to reinforce patience and method, and to caution against attempting to learn more than one can rationally absorb at a given time. In this instance, “Lucy said she was satisfied to wait; that it was best not to know everything at once, and pleasant to have something to look forward to” (Edgeworth, Harry and Lucy Concluded, 1:134–36). Thus, since Ruskin writes out the mechanism of the experiment that Edgeworthʼs Harry does not explain, Ruskin might be said to oblige the anticipation that Lucy expresses in Edgeworth. As Ruskinʼs Harry says, he was “[r]emembering that Lucy wanted to see” the experiment.

For the details of the experiment, Ruskin draws on Conversation 2, “Of the Air‐Pump”, in Joyceʼs volume on pneumatics. The explanation is keyed to diagrams at the end of the volume:

The explanation is followed by a relevant quotation from the poem Eudosia by Capel Lofft: “In perfect void / All substances with like velocity / Descend; nor the soft down outstrips the gold”. Joyce also quotes from The Botanic Garden by Erasmus Darwin on the silence within a vacuum: “Rare and more rare expands the fluid thin” as the air pump operates, “And silence dwells with vacancy within” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:19–20; see Lofft, Eudosia, 149 [bk. 6, ll. 349, 351–52]; and see Darwin, Poetical Works, 1:193 [“The Economy of Vegetation”, canto 4, ll. 139–40).

“Harry now said he would describe the airgun to Lucy. . . . the condensed air . . . will impel the bullet to a great distance” (MS I)—The change of topic from how a guinea and a feather fall in a vacuum to an explanation of how an air gun works is not as abrupt and disconnected as it seems. In Joyceʼs volume on pneumatics, the topic of soundlessness in a vacuum is first broached in Conversation 2, “Of the Air‐Pump”, which Ruskin summarizes previously, and then resumed in Conversation 10, “Of the Air‐gun, and Sound”, from which he takes the description of an air gun—in some passages nearly verbatim:

“What is the eolian harp. . . . It is a sort of harp that acts by air . . . and produces the sound” (MS I)—In Conversation 13, “Of the Echo”, of the volume on pneumatics in Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues, the Aeolian harp is used to explain how string instruments “depend on the vibrations which they make in the surrounding air”. Familiarity with the instrument is taken for granted, however, and nothing like Ruskinʼs description appears in the dialogue (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:135–36).

“What are the principal conductors of common sound. . . . No I could not for the air was pressing it firmly down to the bottom of the airpump” (MS I)—Ruskin rearranges portions of Conversation 10, “Of the Air‐Gun, and Sound”, from the “Pneumatics” volume of Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. The core is taken from an experiment showing, as the Father in Joyceʼs dialogue explains, “that air is the medium by which, in general, sound is communicated”. In Conversation 10, he places a bell inside the receiver (the glass dome of the air pump, from which air is withdrawn to create a vacuum) and exhausts the air, instructing Emma to “observe the clapper of the bell while I shake the apparatus”. Emma remarks that she can “see clearly that the clapper strikes the side of the bell”, but she cannot “hear the least noise”. When the Father readmits the air, Emma can “hear the sound plain enough”. Following this experiment, the conversation goes on to compare the conductors of sound, which Ruskin mentions at the beginning of his dialogue—air, water, and flannel.

The remaining point—about needing to shake the entire apparatus in order to move the bell clapper, rather than shaking just the receive—is Ruskinʼs interpolation and application of material from Conversation 2, “Of the Air‐Pump”. There the Father explains that, once the air inside is exhausted, “the receiver could never be moved out of its place”, since “it is pressed down with the weight of the atmosphere on the outside” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:92, 11, 12).

“Harry now determined to have another grand scheme . . . and when his mamma and papa saw this whenever they were at a loss for the situation of any country they went to harrys globe for satisfaction” (MS I)—In devising a homemade globe, Ruskinʼs Harry takes his place in a line of precocious boys, but his predecessors did not necessarily earn parental satisfaction with their projects. In Frank: A Sequel, Frank excitedly reads James Fergusonʼs (1710–76) autobiographical essay, in which the Scottish inventor describes how, as a boy, he formed a globe from a wooden ball by covering it with paper on which he drew the maps of the continents. The feat exemplifies the youthʼs aptitude, since he based his project solely on a description of a globe (without graphic illustrations) in a geography textbook. Yet, while the achievement was impressive given the youthʼs poverty and lack of formal schooling, Ferguson admits that such toys of self‐culture were “not likely to afford me bread” and “could be of no service” to his father who worked a rented smallholding (Ferguson, “A Short Account of the Life of the Author”, xii–xiii).

Even in Frankʼs well‐off family, the ambition to construct a globe is a sign of reaching beyond his sphere. Mamma has no time for Fergusonʼs story: “‘I should like to hear it very much, my dear. . . . But now I really have other things to do, and I must go.’” Mary attempts to assist in the globe‐making but cannot fit the covering on the ball without crinkling the paper. Finally, Frank gives up on the globe to take on an even greater “grand project of an orrery” (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 2:156–57, 166–67).

“spitzbergen novazembla” (MS I)—Now part of Norway, the Arctic island of Spitzbergen was known to young British readers from a story in The History of Sandford and Merton (1783–89) by Thomas Day (1748–89). Four Russian sailors are marooned on the cold, barren island and survive by means of their ingenuity for discovering and cultivating resources in the hostile environment. The narrative is used by the clergyman‐tutor Mr. Barlow to teach Tommy Merton that happiness lies in courage, health, and skill, rather than in the useless indulgences of the gentleman class to which Tommyʼs family belongs.

In Maria Edgeworthʼs Frank: A Sequel, appreciation of the story sets Frank apart from the pampered sons of gentlemen he finds himself among, one of whom “was so ignorant . . . he was found at a map searching for Spitzbergen somewhere near Spithead [between Portsmouth and the Isle of Wight], and afterward at Bergen‐op‐zoom [in the Netherlands]”. When made aware of his mistake, the youth declined “to be too accurate about names of places” as if “he had been the son of a surveyor or engineer”, whereas “his father would buy for him a fine set of maps . . . and then he would . . . take to geography, that is to say, as much as was necessary for a gentleman” (Day, History of Sandford and Merton, 61–74; Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 3:219, 227–28). Nova Zembla is another Arctic archipelago far to the east of Spitzbergen.

“Harry said he would show Lucy a very entertaining experiment . . . the air in the vessel forced the water through the jet to a great height” (MS I)—In Conversation 8, “Of the Compression of the Air”, of the “Pneumatics” volume of Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues, this apparatus demonstrates “the effects of condensed air, by means of an artificial fountain”. While Ruskinʼs text follows the original closely, his version is difficult to follow in the absence of Joyceʼs diagram of the apparatus (plate 2, fig. 19). The “copper vessel” is an enclosed sphere on a stand, with a tube inserted into the top of the sphere. The tube extends above the sphere, piercing a shallow basin that rests atop the sphere—the place where the fountain plays. In the dialogue, the Father forces air into the top of this tube, using a syringe: “With a syringe that screws to the pipe . . . I force a considerable quantity of air into the vessel, so that it is very much condensed. By turning the stop‐cock . . . [in the extension of the tube above the basin], while I take off the syringe, no water can escape [from the vessel]: and, instead of the syringe, I put on a jet; or very small tube, after which the stop‐cock is turned, and the pressure of the condensed air forces the water through the tube to a very great height” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:73–74).

“Harry then took a little square bottle and . . . and exhausted the air and the pressure of the atmosphere upon the glass broke it into a thousand pieces. . . . one of that shape would have sustained the pressure like an arch” (MS I)—Taken nearly verbatim from Conversation 5, “Of the Pressure of the Air”, “Pneumatics” volume of Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. The original makes it clearer that the pump drains the air from inside the bottle, so “that when there is no power within to support the pressure of the atmosphere from without”, the bottle implodes. The explanation for why the effect would be lost on a round bottle draws the further comment that, for the same reason, the “glass receiver” of the air pump is a dome (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:44–45).

“Harry then took a jar . . . forming a very pleasing spectacle” (MS I)—In the Scientific Dialogues, this and the next two experiments are among those gathered in Conversation 9, “Miscellaneous Experiments on the Air‐Pump”, “without any regard to the particular subjects under which they might be arranged”, as the Father explains. Joyceʼs purpose appears to be to allow Emma and Charles to explain the outcomes by applying previously instructed concepts, although Ruskin does not include the fictional childrenʼs explanations in his adaptation. In this first experiment copied from the miscellany, Ruskinʼs Harry should say that he forces out the air, not the water, from the minerals. The experiment is meant to prove “that substances in general contain a great deal of air”. Ruskin was evidently misled by the resemblance Father points out between the “globules” of air on the surfaces of the minerals and “the pearly dew‐drops on the blades of grass” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:79–80).

“After that Harry took a piece of cork and tied a piece of lead . . . the cork brought the lead up to the surface” (MS I)—The second experiment copied from Conversation 9, “Miscellaneous Experiments on the Air‐Pump”, in Scientific Dialogues. Joyceʼs Emma reasons that, “when the [air] pressure is taken off, the substance of the cork expands, and becomes specifically lighter than it was before” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:81). Specific gravity has been discussed in earlier chapters on hydrostatics, which Ruskin may not have read attentively, much less comprehended, with their fairly sophisticated mathematics.

“After that Harry took a piece of cork and a piece of lead . . . the cork was heavier than the lead” (MS I)—The third experiment copied from Conversation 9, “Miscellaneous Experiments on the Air‐Pump”, in Scientific Dialogues. The Father in Joyce explains: “In air each body lost a weight proportional to its bulk, but when the air is taken away, the weight lost will be restored; but [as] the lead lost least, it will now regain the least, consequently the cork will preponderate with the difference of the weights restored by taking away the air. Thus you see that in vacuo, a pound of cork, or feathers, would be heavier than a pound of lead”.

In the preceding quotation, the word as is supplied from an 1809 edition published by J. Johnson. In the 1818 edition that is quoted throughout these notes, that word appears to have been lost inadvertently across a page break; however, other variants also appear in the later text of this experiment, which must have been deliberate. The word regain replaces the earlier term retrieve; and more importantly, the later text extends beyond the Fatherʼs remarks in italics, which end Conversation 9 in the earlier edition. In the later text, Emma further pursues her Fatherʼs explanation of the paradoxical phenomenon:

“Harry then took a poker and tied a strip of flannel . . . a loud church bell was not to be compared with it” (MS I)—Ruskin returns to the end of Joyceʼs Conversation 10, “Of the Air‐Gun, and Sound”, the conversation from which he earlier adapted the experiments concerning conductors of sound and the absence of sound in a vacuum: “Take a long strip of flannel, and in the middle tie a common poker, which answers as well as any thing, leaving the ends at liberty; these ends must be rolled round the end of the first finger of each hand, and then stopping the ears with the ends of these fingers, strike the poker, thus suspended, against any body, as the edge of a steel fender; the depth of the tonę which the stroke will return is amazing; that made by the largest church bell is not to be compared with it. Thus it appears that flannel is an excellent conductor of sound” (Joyce, Scientific Dialogues, 4:96).

“After that Harry took a very shrivelled apple . . . admitting the air it was as shrivelled as ever” (MS I)—This experiment occurs in Conversation 7, “Of the Elasticity of Air”, in Scientific Dialogues. Ruskin condenses a conversation into a short description and omits Fatherʼs explanation of the phenomenon:

“Then harry took a marble . . . the line of incidence” (MS I)—In Conversation 13, “Of the Echo”, in Scientific Dialogues, these definitions and the analogy of the shooting marble are used to explain the action of sound waves in producing echoes:

“After that Harry took a new laid egg . . . forced all the contents of the egg out into the aleglass” (MS I)—This experiment concludes Conversation 7, “Of the Elasticity of Air”, of Scientific Dialogues. It follows a discussion of cupping, the operation of raising and scarifying the flesh by applying a cup in which the air has been rarified by heating. The implicit connection with the egg experiment is found in the Fatherʼs explanation of how cupping depends on the elasticity of air: the surgeon “tells you he draws up the flesh”, Father comments, “but if he were to speak correctly, he would say, he took away the external air from off a certain part of the body, and then the elastic force of the air within [the flesh] extends, and swells out the flesh ready for his lancets”. Just so, as the egg experiment is meant to demonstrate, the bubble of air inside an egg elastically expands when the outside air pressure is reduced:

“Then Harry took a small glass can filled with water . . . on removing the air they ascended to the top dragging the weights after them” (MS I)—In Conversation 7, “Of the Elasticity of Air”, of Scientific Dialogues, the floating images are explained as containing a small amount of air, which expands when surrounding air pressure is reduced:

“Lucy soon called him away and bid him observe a great black cloud . . . the negative clouds spread very much and dissolved in rain which presently cleared the sky” (MS I)—From Conversation 13, “On Atmospheric Electricity—Of Falling Stars—Of the Aurora Borealis—Of Water‐spouts and Whirlwinds—Of Earthquakes”, in volume six (“Of Electricity and Galvanism”) of Scientific Dialogues, Ruskin excerpts a passage about waterspouts “which . . . are supposed to arise from the power of electricity”. This causation surprises Charles, one of the youths in conversation with their tutor, since he has always assumed that “water‐spouts at sea, and whirlwinds and hurricanes by land, were produced solely by the force of the wind”. The Tutor agrees that wind is an element in the destructiveness of these atmospheric phenomena, but he illustrates underlying electrical causes with an occurrence said to be related by Benjamin Franklin (1706–90):

Joyceʼs source was not Franklin but Joseph Priestley (1733–1804), whose History and Present State of Electricity (1767; 3d ed., 1775) he cribbed nearly verbatim from a section entitled “The Attempts that have been made to explain some of the more unusual appearances in the earth and heaven by electricity” (Priestley, History and Present State of Electricity, 1:433–61 [vol. 1, sect. 12]). In that section, Priestley collects hypotheses about electrical causes of natural phenomena, especially observations by the Italian physicist Giambattista Beccaria (1716–81). Beccaria made his reputation as one of Europeʼs most fervent champions of Franklinʼs theories, positioning himself in opposition to the rival French school of electricians headed by Abbé Nollet (1700–1770). As one core difference, the French school had come to account for the phenomenon of electrical attraction and repulsion by theorizing two differing kinds of electrical “fluid”, whereas Franklin proposed a single fluid capable of two differing states—positive and negative, or plus and minus, which Franklin conceived as an excess or a deficiency of charge associated with a body, as compared with its neutral state. In this mathematical approach to theorizing the phenomenon, as opposed to Nolletʼs fixation on kind, Franklin understood a bodyʼs fluctuating states of charge in terms of influences acting on it, affecting what he called the bodyʼs surrounding “atmosphere” of charge (Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 362–72; Home, “Franklinʼs Electrical Atmospheres”, 131; Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down, 30–31, 38, 48). Amid these competing theories, Priestley wrote his account of the “present state” of electrical theory, already committed to support of Franklin (Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down, 72–73). Thus, in the section on electricity as an underlying cause of dramatic natural phenomena on earth and in the heavens, a commonality linking the observations that Priestley draws from Beccaria and others lies in the support their observations lend to Franklinʼs theories.

Priestleyʼs chapter is not merely partisan, however. As Michael Brian Schiffer remarks, although eighteenth‐century electricians exaggerated the role that electricity plays in causation of a multitude of natural phenomena, the ability to model massive natural forces in laboratory experiments and pose theoretical explanations confirmed the power and prestige of Enlightenment ideology (Draw the Lightning Down, 161). Ruskin seems to have been drawn to Joyceʼs conversation summarizing these atmospheric and terrestrial effects—the only chapter he extracts from the volume on electricity and magnetism in Scientific Dialogues—not only because it relates electricity to landscape, but also because he can join the explanatory power of science to the image‐making power of poetry, finding “something like” the experimentally observed interaction of positively and negatively charged rainclouds in Byronʼs Manfred. It is a theme in Edgeworthʼs Harry and Lucy Concluded that Harry “learnt from” Lucy some of her taste for poetry, “while she acquired from him some of his love of science” (1:133).

One can probably claim too much for Ruskinʼs understanding in this culminating extract from Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. The phenomenon that captures his fancy, in its original place in Priestleyʼs History, occurs among Franklinian explanations of “unusual” manifestations of electricity in nature—a chapter that follows a more systematic treatment of the progress of electrical theory. Ruskinʼs Harry exhibits no command of that sustained investigation; rather, Lucy‐like, he dips into a miscellany, which is reflected in Joyceʼs title enumerating the “unusual appearances” in Priestleyʼs original, a list of the electrical sublime—“On Atmospheric Electricity—Of Falling Stars—Of the Aurora Borealis—Of Water‐spouts and Whirlwinds—Of Earthquakes”. In Priestleyʼs History, these wonders pose challenges to grasping the electrical principles that pervade them. The aurora borealis is hypothesized as arising from “the flashing of electric fire from positive towards negative clouds at a great distance”, a phenomenon made possible when the upper atmosphere becomes heated. Just so, Priestley confirms, recent experiments with the mineral tourmaline reveal that it “will, without friction, both emit and absorb the electric fluid, only by the increase or diminution of its heat” (Priestley, History and Present State of Electricity, 1:436–37). Investigations of the electrical properties of tourmaline were conducted by the German physicist Franz Ulrich Theodosius Aepinus (1724–1802), who found that, by heating the mineral, a positive charge collects on one face of the crystal and a negative charge on the opposite face. This discovery, a historian explains, was interpreted as strongly favoring “the Franklinian doctrine that there were two contrary modes of electrification possible in nature—called by Franklin ‘plus’ and ‘minus’” (Home, “Aepinus, the Tourmaline Crystal, and the Theory of Electricity and Magnetism“, 24). Aepinusʼs Latin treatise on electricity and magnetism was circulated among British electricians, including Priestley (Home, “Aepinus and the British Electricians”); and herein lies the connection with Aepinusʼs student and fellow researcher, the Swedish physicist Johan Carl Wilcke (1732–96)—the “Mr. Wilke” (sic) credited in Joyceʼs dialogue for the cloud observations that caught Ruskinʼs fancy. In Priestleyʼs chapter, the origin of these observations is cited as Wilckeʼs translation of Franklinʼs letters on electricity, a commentary produced in the course of Wilckeʼs and Aepinusʼs dispassionate appraisal of the partisan battles over electrical theory. Their appraisal on balance awarded qualified support to Franklinʼs ideas (Heilbron, Electricity in the Seventeenth and Eighteenth Centuries, 384–90). In Priestleyʼs History, then, these various observations form a web of theory that Ruskin can scarcely have understood at age seven or eight. As Schiffer remarks, however, eighteenth‐century electriciansʼ curiosity about the electrical charges acquired by clouds remains a topic of investigation today; and my colleague, Mohammad Saadeh, Head of the Department of Industrial Engineering and Technology at Southeastern Louisiana University, pointed me to a recent article inquiring about the same atmospheric phenomenon that Wilcke observed in his rainclouds (Schiffer, Draw the Lightning Down, 172; Saunders, “Charge Separation Mechanism in Clouds”).

“he soon observed a rainbow and a rising mist under it . . . raised from them by takeing some water in the hand and throwing it into the air pronouncing some unintelligable words” (MS I)—In Conversation 13 of volume six of Scientific Dialogues, from which Ruskin derives the phenomenon of the water‐spout, Joyce has his interlocutors quote verse extracts describing the aurora borealis (from Winter in The Seasons [rev. 1744] by James Thomson [1700–1748]) and verses meditating on the will of providence amid natural catastrophe (from The Excursion [1728] by Thomsonʼs colleague, David Mallet [1701/2–65]). Ruskin turns to a more mystical, Romantic poem nearer his own time—Manfred (1816) by Byron.

Echoing Joyceʼs Charles who questions whether rain is “an electrical phenomenon”, Ruskinʼs Harry “wonder[s] how electricity could get where there was so much water”. In the referenced passage, Manfred is standing by an Alpine cataract and invoking the Witch of the Alps. If Manfredʼs imaginings are equally as apocalyptic as Malletʼs at first, the torrent with its rainbow makes a “sweet solitude”, and Manfred decides to summon the “Spirit of the place”: “Manfred takes some of the water into the palm of his hand, and flings it in the air, muttering the adjuration. After a pause, the Witch of the Alps rises beneath the arch of the sunbow of the torrent” (Manfred, act 2, scene 2, in Byron, Complete Poetical Works, 5:71). Ruskinʼs “frontispiece” for MS I, which depicts a rainbow, might refer to this episode, but no other details in the drawing seem very specific to the setting or the apparition in the sky (see MS I: Description).