Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth

Books Used by Ruskin in His Youth

The aim of this note is not to provide an exhaustive listing of books that Ruskin read or consulted in his youth. Information about Ruskinʼs reading and its influences is available throughout ERM, in the apparatuses and glosses of works containing specific allusions to and borrowings from publications to which he was exposed. Especially influential authors and published sources, moreover, are discussed in notes of their own. This information can be accessed using the archiveʼs Search. A portion of this note does attempt, however, to convey the scope of Ruskinʼs childhood and youthful reading through a descriptive (but not exhaustive) Chronology as well as to summarize The Ruskinsʼ Program of Age‐Appropriate Reading for John. These resources remain open to development.
Among the main purposes of this note is to centralize some Resources for researching the Ruskin family reading during Ruskinʼs youth by extending and enhancing existing research sources. Included are Lists of Annual Book Purchases by the Ruskin Family, Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Youth, and Untraced Books. These resources build on the enumerative bibliographies compiled by Van Akin Burd in The Ruskin Family Letters (i.e., lists of annual book purchases drawn from John James Ruskinʼs Account Book, RF MS 28 [1827–45]) and by James S. Dearden in The Library of John Ruskin. These published print sources remain the starting point for all investigations of the Ruskin family reading, whereas the lists here propose some additions and extensions. Not listed here are proposed corrections of specific entries in these print bibliographies. These corrections are found elsewhere in the archive in context of relevant evidence.
The note is divided sequentially into the following sections:
On the Evidence of Ruskinʼs Reading in His Youth
As a preliminary to supplementing Burdʼs and Deardenʼs bibliographies, some caveats merit discussion about what we are able to determine about Ruskinʼs reading in his youth.
Provenance
Assuming that an item of childrenʼs literature can be traced to Brantwood, Ruskinʼs final home, its presence in his adult library is only a starting point for extending the itemʼs provenance to Herne Hill, his boyhood home. For example, among a collection of books held by the Beinecke Library supposed to have belonged to Ruskin in boyhood, there are two bound assemblages of separately published works, which were acquired by the collector, F. J. Sharp. The responsibility for these bindings is unknown. While some of the individual items contained therein bear marginalia recognizably in Ruskinʼs mature hand, the evidence for associating each of the items therein with his boyhood is variable, in some cases amounting to little more than the publication date falling within the relevant range. As an example of problematic items among the Beinecke holdings, a copy of Evenings at Home by John Aikin and Anna Laetitia Barbauld, which is undated on the title page, very likely is not the edition Ruskin used in boyhood. While a bookplate authenticates the copy as a Brantwood book, and it contains some annotations in Ruskinʼs mature hand, other bibliographical details place its acquisition after his boyhood absorption in Evenings at Home—perhaps long after (see Beinecke no. 4). As in any case for provenance, one can only weigh the evidence, and one purpose of Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Boyhood and Youth is to compile what is known.
A unique boon for tracing the provenance of books to Ruskinʼs boyhood and youth is the record of book and periodical purchases contained in John James Ruskinʼs ledger of household accounts, the Account Book. These brief entries, which John James included under the heading “Sundries” for each year, and which he notated usually with an identification of author and/or title along with the cost, are compiled by Van Akin Burd in the Ruskin Family Letters, collected by year of acquisition and placed among the explanatory notes. John Jamesʼs sketchy identifications include no publication details, and some entries can be difficult even to distinguish as books from other kinds of “sundries”. Burd helpfully links some of John Jamesʼs costs to prices in publisherʼs listings. The researcher should therefore start with Burdʼs annotated lists, while what is gathered in Lists of Annual Book Purchases by the Ruskin Family are possible additional items found in the Account Book.
A limitation of the Account Book as an indicator of Ruskinʼs early reading is that it begins in 1827, omitting records of book purchases prior to his eighth year. This was the period when Ruskinʼs parents would have acquired many of the publications most commonly associated with Romantic‐era and early Victorian writing for children, from fairy tales to moral and scientific dialogues. The gap in the evidence of John Jamesʼs accounts shifts all the more significance onto the provenance of physical books alleged to have survived from Ruskinʼs boyhood library.
Other sources of evidence about the familyʼs commerce in juvenile literature prior to 1827 (and afterward) are found in remarks about books in the family letters, along with literary allusions detectable in Ruskinʼs juvenilia. While some of these allusions and passing references can be cross‐referenced to bibliographical details known from another source or even to a physical copy, other references in the letters reveal only a title, which is discussed as an Untraced Book. For example, in a letter dated 1823, when Ruskin was four years old, Margaret suggested books to John James that would make acceptable gifts for John: “if you bring any thing for him let it be the history of the children of the wood or Sinbad the Sailor—since he has been ill he has had so much medicine to take that I have been obliged to buy I donʼt know how many books and you might perhaps bring him some he has already[.] You can bring nothing he will be so well pleased with as a book” (11 March 1823, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 126–27). Since no evidence survives attesting whether these books were ever acquired, or, if purchased, in what edition, the titles are relegated to the list of Untraced Books accompanied by discussion of the significance of that choice of text.
Another caveat concerning John Jamesʼs purchases of books and other sundries recorded in his Account Book is that he rarely indicated the intended recipient. It is possible that some book titles, especially of childrenʼs literature, may have been meant for Ruskinʼs cousins, particularly Mary Richardson (1815–49), who lived with the Ruskin family from 1828 until her marriage in 1848. While Dearden comments about the family library that “the books owned by all three Ruskins must be considered to be part of ‘Ruskinʼs Library’ because he ultimately inherited his parentsʼ possessions, as well as having the use of them during their lifetimes” (Library of John Ruskin, xv, xxiv), one wonders how far the availability, much less the inheritance, extended in the case of Maryʼs books. To what extent did John and Mary share books? Similar speculation surrounds duplicate copies found in John Jamesʼs accounts, such as his purchase of a Robinson Crusoe in 1835, long after he presented John with an edition in 1826 that cost two guineas (Ruskin Family Letters, 301 n. 12; Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 91 [no. 694]). Alternatively, rather than indicating books purchased for others outside the immediate family, duplicate titles might refer to additional, compact editions to be taken on travels. Such usage would apply particularly to a work like Robinson Crusoe, which was deemed permissible reading on Sundays, and therefore counted as a necessary travel item, just as Margaret packed a copy of Bunyanʼs Grace Abounding for Johnʼs first journey to Italy without his parents, in 1845 (Ruskin in Italy, ed. Bradley, 000).
As a final caveat about provenance, evidence is incomplete about the respective influence of Margaret and John James over the direction of Ruskinʼs reading. John James appears to have been the steadiest purchaser of books. As revealed by Margaretʼs comment quoted above from an 1823 letter, however, she also was an occasional purchaser. The kinds of texts Margaret mentions were available as booklets with engravings for sixpence or a shilling, a cost that presumably could be absorbed within her household budget. As one source for recommended titles, she may have consulted the Evangelical Magazine for lists of recently published childrenʼs books. These 1823 book purchases occurred before John Jamesʼs extant Account Book begins, but it is unclear whether any future purchases of books by Margaret would have been listed in John Jamesʼs accounts. The annual lists of “Sundries” in the Account Book, which is the category where he placed book purchases, does not attribute specific items to their buyers. While a different annual column, “House Expenses & paid Mrs R.”, is reserved for Margaretʼs purchases, these expenses are comprised solely of household staples. The miscellaneous items comprised by “Sundries”, from dessert forks to Walter Scott novels, may have all been paid by John James, but it seems unlikely that he would have done all the shopping himself. Would John James have personally arranged, for example, for a “dress for my sister [Janet Richardson]” ()?
Examples of inexpensive publications aimed at young readers, which Margaret might have acquired, are included in Beinecke no. 1 and Beinecke no. 2. She may also have obtained some titles by loan rather than purchase (see Loaned Books). By comparison with chapbook prices within reach of her household budget, Margaret sounds aghast at John Jamesʼs “spending two guineas on” an edition of Robinson Crusoe for John. She wonders “what he [John] can do to make return” for such extravagance beyond making a “cave” which he had “almost finished”—referring possibly to a physical project like “Robinson Crusoeʼs island” undertaken by Maria Edgeworthʼs Frank and his cousin Mary, which included appropriating the housekeeperʼs parrot (Margaret Ruskin to John James Ruskin, 25 May 1826, in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 149; Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, 1:71–72; and for the edition of Robinson Crusoe, see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 91 [no. 693]). While these examples suggest some differences of opinion between Margaret and John James respecting the priorities they set for Johnʼs reading, the choice of books was a matter of earnestly shared discussion between the couple, as when Margaret declared to her husband that it was time John be given John Foxeʼs Book of Martyrs: “you shall hear all my reasons for wishing him to have it”, Margaret promised (15 May 1827, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 166).
Loaned Books
Dearden remarks that Ruskin in adulthood “was essentially . . . a book‐buyer rather than a book borrower or library user” (Library of John Ruskin, xix). This practice was inherited from his father, who was generous with purchases of books for his familyʼs education and entertainment. Still, there is no way of knowing whether publications that left their influence on the early writings were borrowed or owned, if otherwise unrecorded as part of the family library in the 1820s–30s. For example, the poet Felicia Hemans was sufficiently admired for Ruskin to have transcribed her poem, “The Sound of the Sea” (1826) in MS IVB, probably based on the text as published in the New Monthly Magazine. He also adapted passages from Hemansʼs long poem, The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy, published by Murray in 1816, for use in his own poem, “Saltzburg”. Yet Mrs. Hemans is curiously absent from records of the Ruskinsʼ book ownership, apart from poems included in literary annuals that the Ruskins are known to have owned. How publications by Hemans passed through their hands—whether by purchase, borrowing, or casually encountering a periodical—remains unknown.
Borrowing could have provided a means for Margaret Ruskin to control what books entered the house. She appears to refer to borrowing, for example, when she writes to John James about the novel, The Fool of Quality (1766–72) by Henry Brooke (1703–83). Since she “did not like” the novel, she “got the first volume merely to read the History of the three little fishes to John”. In this instance, Margaretʼs renewed encounter with the novel led to “the Almighty open[ing] the understanding” on her part, and she proposed to “read it together” with John James. Perhaps only then was the work purchased for the household, possibly in the abridged form by John Wesley (Margaret to John James Ruskin, 15 May 1826, in Ruskin Family Letters 145; Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, 51 [no. 336]; and see Peace, “Sentimentality in the Service of Methodism”).
On travels, the Ruskins supplemented books they brought with them by tapping lending resources along the way. During the tour of Switzerland in 1833, for example, when John fell ill for a brief period, his father and his cousin Mary, cheered him up by finding “some English books from a library” along with “2 or 3 volumes of Gaglianiʼs Magazine”—that is, one of the periodicals issued by Librairie Galignani, the Paris‐based English‐language publisher, bookseller, and circulating library.
The Ruskinsʼ Program of Age‐Appropriate Reading
The Beinecke Library owns two bound collections of small books that, if they belonged to Ruskin at all, probably date from his earliest years of reading: one volume, “The Widow of Roseneath etc.”, collects didactic, moral, and relgious works; and the other volume, “Fairy Tales” contains fantasy stories. While the responsibility for the arrangement and binding of the two collections is unknown, the thematic division between the collections reflects what William McCarthy characterizes as the “Manichaean . . . need to dichotomize” the “story about the way childrenʼs literature developed” and “then to extol or damn its dichotomized terms” (McCarthy, “Mother of All Discourses”, 198). On one side, the collection “Fairy Tales” binds together works that Charles Lamb would have approved as akin to “old classics of the nursery”. According to Lambʼs well‐known tirade, “wild tales” of imagination inspired in the reader a “beautiful Interest” by making “the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child”. On the other side, the didactic works collected in “The Widow of Roseneath etc.” would have seemed to Lamb the product of “Mrs. B[arbauld]ʼs & Mrs. Trimmerʼs nonsense”, in which “Science . . . [had] succeeded to Poetry”, resulting in “Knowledge” made “insignificant & vapid”, suitable only to puff up a child “with conceit of his own powers”. “”, Lamb anathematized; “I mean the cursed Barbauld Crew, those Blights & Blasts of all that is Human in man & child” (Lamb to S. T. Coleridge, 23 October 1802, in Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, 2:81–82).
While the separately bound collections preserved at the Beinecke appear to reflect this division, Ruskinʼs parents evidently took no part in this contest between the Romantics and the educationists, if they were even aware of it. Recent scholarship has shown how “Science” and “Poetry” or concepts of reason and imagination were more entangled in education and childrenʼs literature of the long eighteenth century than Lamb cared to admit; and critics have revolutionized our understanding of how women educationists such as Letitia Barbauld and Sarah Trimmer contributed an alternative sociability and sense of self to Romanticism. Moreover, where Lamb saw a uniform pedagogy in the educationistsʼ “nonsense”, scholars have discerned distinct politics in Barbauldʼs Dissenter progressivism and in Trimmerʼs Anglican conservatism. The Ruskins must have been able to distinguish these differences, as well, yet the evidence points to catholicity in their choices of childrenʼs literature. They shared neither the Romanticsʼ hostility toward progressive instructional works such as the Edgeworthsʼ practical education nor Trimmerʼs suspicions of imaginative works such as fairy tales, whether new or traditional.
While they were not doctrinaire in their tastes, the elder Ruskins did adhere to a program of graduated and progressive age‐appropriate reading for children that had been introduced at the end of the previous century by Mrs. Barbauld and developed by the Edgeworths, and they proceeded according to a plan. Precise dates are elusive for when John first engaged with many of the works he is known or believed to have read in his youth, but distinct phases of readings can be discerned. These phases can be correlated to developments in his own writing, which reflect his reading both in content and in the materiality of typography and illustration. The age‐appropriate layers of reading are permeable, however, as over time Ruskin retained his affection for re‐reading some works for children even into adulthood. The periods of age‐appropriate reading into which the following Chronology is divided are therefore approximate but not arbitrary, being based both on available documentation about Ruskinʼs books and on his response to books in his writing.
Chronology [under development]
Circa 1823–25
The period starting with Ruskinʼs fourth birthday is marked by his earliest dateable signature, which concludes what has been called his “first letter” (15 March 1823, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 127–28; and see Hanson, “Materiality in John Ruskinʼs Early Letters and Dialogues”, 5–7) and by his parentsʼ earliest documented comments on book‐buying for him (11 March 1823, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, and see above, Provenance). From this point, reading and writing advanced together, Margaret remarking on 15 March that “he is beginning to copy from his books and will soon learn himself to write I think”. A key childrenʼs book of this period, which served Ruskin in this process of instructing himself by copying, was The History of Little Jack by Thomas Day (Books held by the The Ruskin no. 1; see also The Ruskin Family Handwriting). Since Ruskin seems to have been introduced to reading and writing prior to March 1823, his mother initially have lead him through works designed for very young children such as Mrs. Barbauldʼs Lessons for Children.
On 11 March, Margaretʼs recommendation that John James acquire The Children in the Wood and/or Sinbad the Sailor curiously juxtaposes a traditional tale of childhood vulnerability and death with a tale from the Arabian Nights presenting the magical strength and good fortune that Lamb meant by making “the child a man, while all the time he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child”. “Sinbad” is representative of the “wild tales” preferred by the Romantic opponents to the “cursed Barbauld Crew” (Provenance, above). As Janet Bottoms defines this taste, Romantics like Lamb and Coleridge tended to look backward nostalgically to their own childhoods for examples of imaginative engagement. For them, traditional tales escaped the confines of “the social limits and moral laws of the familiar world”—the boundaries within which the educationists aimed to socialize the child subject. The old “wild” tales, rather, “developed in unpredictable ways, rewarding hero or heroine with honours and wealth”; and instead of “foregrounding actual children” as subjects, encouraged identification with (in Coleridgeʼs description) “excessive smallness combined with great power”, thus “exhibiting, through the working of the imagination, the idea of power in the will”. Such tales as the Arabian Nights, Coleridge emphasizes, “cause no deep feeling of a moral kind—whether of religion or love; but an impulse of motion is communicated to the mind without excitement, and this is the reason of their being so generally read and admired” (Bottoms, “The Battle of the (Childrenʼs) Books”, 215; Coleridge, Lectures on the Principles of Judgement, Culture, and European Literature [1818], lecture 11, 191; and see Untraced Books no. 2).
“The Children in the Wood” (or “Babes in the Wood”), while not seemingly a work that empowered the child reader, was likewise looked back upon as a powerfully imaginative tale by Lamb and Wordsworth. In the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth cites lines from the original ballad, “These pretty babes with hand in hand / Went wandering up and down” j as an example of plain language that “can excite thought or feeling in the Reader”, suggestive of Coleridgeʼs “impulse of motion . . . communicated to the mind” (Wordsworth, Prose Works . . .). As Patricia Crain remarks, however, the tale is also invoked by Wordsworth (and by Lamb in “Dream Children”) as doing the work of providing “adult consciousness of childhood as a privileged time and space thatʼs been lost, thatʼs died, and that yet remains infinitely accessible to adult memory and imagination”. Through this approach to traditional tales, Crain argues, Romantics such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Lamb converted the “newly privileged (and newly imagined) childrenʼs innocence” that developed in the eighteenth century “into an envied source of power and knowledge” for the adult personae of the “Immortality Ode” and essays in Elia (Crain, Forgotten Children, 53, 49).
A construction of childhood innocence functions similarly in Ruskinʼs 1868 essay, “Fairy Stories” (Works, 19:000–00), but there is no evidence that, ca. 1823–25, traditional tales like “The Children in the Wood” were segregated in Ruskinʼs reading from the more modern fairy tales preserved in “Fairy Tales” or from the the “cautionary stories”, moral tales “founded on facts”, or the catechistic Hymns in Prose | for | Children by Mrs. Barbauld, collected in “The Widow of Roseneath etc.”. Regarding traditional tales, we also do not know in what form Ruskin experienced them, if at all. In the early nineteenth century, “The Children in the Wood” was rewritten in forms ranging from a prose version that preserved the plot outline and characters of the original ballad to reconceptions that rescued the babes from death to become paragons of virtue and industry (see Crain, Forgotten Children, 51; and Untraced Books no. 1).
Circa 1826–29.
This period, from ages seven to ten, extends from Ruskinʼs first extant juvenilia (MS I) to his first letters that he composed and sent to his father independently of his motherʼs supervision (February–March 1829; see Hanson, “Materiality in John Ruskinʼs Early Letters and Dialogues”). This period is distinctly Edgeworthian, the dialogues in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I” revealing the influence of Barbauld and Aikinʼs Evenings at Home, Maria Edgeworthʼs Frank: A Sequel and Harry and Lucy Concluded, and Jeremiah Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues. or, in 1827, The Book of Martyrs by John Foxe, provide context for the bound collection of strictly instructive or “true” narratives, (Margaret Ruskin to John James Ruskin, 15 May 1827, Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 166; see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 120 [no. 941]).
Finally, questions of the provenance of publications for children in the Ruskin library are preliminary to the more complex question of what counted for the Ruskins as childrenʼs literature. In the first decade of Johnʼs reading, the elder Ruskinsʼ acquisition of books by Letitia Barbauld and Maria Edgeworth reflect their familiarity with the concept of age‐appropriate texts, even though John read above the age recommended for certain texts. At the same time, his parents chose, or he appropriated, texts that were not conceived for a child audience but contained features that appealed to Ruskinʼs imagination—for example, Byronʼs Manfred and Scottʼs The Monastery and The Abbot.
Yet evidence shows that Ruskin both read above his age category (and not always with comprehension) and ranged beyond the kinds of texts typically thought appropriate for children (e.g., Joyceʼs Scientific Dialogues, which he copied verbatim in “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I”, but which are too advanced for that context). Moreover, . . .
Resources
Annual Book Purchases, 1827–45, as recorded by John James Ruskin in His Account Book
From 1827 through 1845, John James Ruskin kept a family budget in RF MS 28, known as the Account Book, held by The Ruskin. For each year, he exactingly and exhaustively recorded expenditures, divided by categories of expenditure, and maintained these categories consistently from year to year. The category entitled “Sundries” included books along with many other miscellaneous household items. In The Ruskin Family Letters, Van Akin Burd sifted the book purchases from among the other items in “Sundries” and collected the titles in summary notes, which he divided by year of purchase and distributed throughout the edition, typically hanging the note from the mention of a book acquisition in one of the letters. The following list expands on Burdʼs brief identifications, by adding context drawn from book advertisements and book reviews, thus situating John Jamesʼs acquisitions in the burgeoning period of innovative book production of the 1820s–40s (The year 1830 is itemized for the first time, Burd having omitted a list of book purchases for that year from Ruskin Family Letters, presumably because no letters are extant from that year, thus allowing no occasion for annotation.)
Burd was shrewd in matching John Jamesʼs notations of expenditures with the prices of specific editions available at the time, but he did not document the source of his information, and he omitted bibliographical details. James Dearden folded Burdʼs lists into the alphabetized entries in The Library of John Ruskin, adding a layer of provenance information based on surviving catalogues of the family library. Dearden also supplied bibliographical information drawn from surviving copies of Ruskinʼs books. In the absence of a surviving copy, Dearden defaulted to Burdʼs identification or to a first edition. The following lists collate and cross‐reference John Jamesʼs entries with Burdʼs notes in Ruskin Family Letters, and with Deardenʼs entries in The Library of John Ruskin, but with the additional aims of specifying John Jamesʼs acquisitions more precisely and contextualizing the purchases in the contemporaneous publishing and the book market.
For some books presumed to have belonged to the Ruskin family library prior to 1827, see Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Boyhood and Youth, along with Untraced Books, which primarily documents books mentioned in the family letters as having been acquired for Johnʼs use in his youth, but which are otherwise untraced. While not all the books itemized in John Jamesʼs Account Book were intended specifically for Johnʼs use, by 1827 the distinction was fading between his age‐appropriate reading and shared family reading. In areas such as classical literature, John Jamesʼs purchases suggest that he was anticipating Johnʼs tutoring in Latin and Greek. Acquisitions that seem above Johnʼs reading level may have chosen by John James for his own and Margaretʼs use, but he may also acquired such items with the thought of his sonʼs future education.
Some cautions are advisabe in interpreting John Jamesʼs listings under “Sundries”. Since his purpose in the Account Book was to record expenses, he categorized the items in “Sundries” by month of the year, not by the kinds of objects purchased. Accordingly, his abbreviated entries are frequently ambiguous or obscure, and educated guesswork is required to sort out authorsʼ names and titles of books from what may have been the name of a tradesman or a person employed by John James or even a now unfamiliar name for a household item. Another caveat about John Jamesʼs acquisitions is that we cannot know whether all the books he purchased were meant for Herne Hill. As cautioned in Provenance, some acquisitions could have been intended as gifts for relatives. Even purchases of childrenʼs literature could have been destined for Ruskinʼs cousins.
For transcription and contextualization of some other kinds of expenditures included in the Account Book, see Stage Entertainment and Exhibitions.)
1827. Books purchased in 1827, as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book (RF MS 28, 1827–45), 2r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 168 n. 1.
  • January.
    • Four recent novels by Walter Scott, listed in the order, “Q[uenti]n Durward [1823], Peveril [of the Peak] [1822], [Fortunes of] Nigel [1822], Redgauntlet [1824]”. (Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin [hereafter, LJR], 307-10 [nos. 2429, 2425, 2401, 2430]). Each of the four titles is followed by two prices written as a column, 10/6 above 12/. The 10s 4d expenditure corresponds to a price advertised as “(31s 6d) 10s 6d”for a group of Scott novels, including Quentin Durward, available from the Edinburgh bookseller and publisher, William Tate (“Kenilworth, Fortunes of Nigel, [T]he Pirate, Quentin Durward, and St. Ronanʼs Well”). Perhaps the 12s cost listed additionally by John James was for binding each of the four worksv.

      In January 1827, exactly one year had elapsed since the financial crash that led Scottʼs publisher, Constable and Co., into bankruptcy along with their London associate, Hurst, Robinson and Co., saddling Scott with both his own debts and those of the printer, Ballantyne and Co. The partner in Constable and Co. who survived the crash, Robert Cadell, and who thenceforth became Scottʼs publisher, would not bring together his scheme for a mass‐market, uniform edition of the Waverley novels, the Magnum Opus, for more than another year. In June 1829, Cadell and Co. would begin issuing volumes of the Magnum Opus edition at five shillings per volume. Previous to the crash, the price for a three‐volume Waverley novel was a guinea and a half, and for a four‐volume work two guineas, although collected sets in octavo, 12mo, or 18mo could be acquired for less (Millgate, Scottʼs Last Edition, 1–13). In January 1827, halfway between the crash the emergence of the Magnum Opus, these four novels would have been available only with the Constable imprint, and Dearden has connected them with first editions, all sharing a provenance traceable from a catalogue of books at Denmark Hill to the 1930 Sothebyʼs sale.
    • “[Hugh] Blair Lectures [on Rhetoric] 14/”. Listed incorrectly for April in RFL. John James obtained this text probably because John was learning to write with pen‐and‐ink in 1827, a rite of passage (see The Ruskin Family Handwriting).
    • “[Samuel Richardson, Sir Charles] Grandison 20/”. Dearden (LJR, 275 [no. 2149]) cites by default the first edition (1754) of the novel, but at least two modern editions were available in 1827. A seven‐volume edition of the novel formed part of the fifty‐volume British Novels series, edited with prefaces on the novels by Letitia Barbauld. First published in 1810, the set was reissued by a consortium of publishers in 1824, when an advertisement made a point of offering Sir Charles Grandison separately from the set at 1£ 11s 6d (“British Novelists.—A New Edition”). This reissue was probably intended to compete against another set of novels, which completed publication in 1824, and which likewise included Richardsonʼs Grandison—the Novelistʼs Library (1821–24), edited with prefaces by Walter Scott, and sold by Hurst, Robinson and Co. Of the final volumes of this series, which were issued in 1824, three thick volumes (vols. 6–8) were devoted respectively to the three Richardson novels—Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison (Gossman, “Spreading the Word”, 48–49). Separated out as set, the three “Novels of Richardson” volumes were advertised in 1824 at 4& 4s in boards (“Ballantyneʼs Novelistʼs Library”). John James—probably thinking that the stories involving seduction in Pamela and Clarissa should not be allowed into the household—may have been able to obtain either the Barbauld or the Scott editions of Grandison at 20s (equal to 1&) as an odd item from their respective series. Whatever its origin, the Ruskinsʼ acquisition of Sir Charles Grandison reflected a minor Richardson revival.
    • Unspecified “Books” 2/.
  • March.
1828. Books purchased in 1828 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 6r; and first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 188 n. 4.
1829. Books purchased in 1829 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 12r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 187–88 n. 4.
1830. Books purchased in 1830 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 17r.
  • January
    • Jones 16/8 (unidentified)
    • St. Pierre 10/ (possibly a work by Jacques‐Henri Bernardin de Saint‐Pierre; earliest purchase cited by Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, is a copy of Paul et Virginie, bought in 1840 [28, no. 194]
  • February
    • Burrell 42/ (unidentified)
    • Museums 10/ (unidentified)
  • April
    • Newspaper £1.5/
    • West 4/
  • May
    • Horace 9/6 (edition unidentified)
    • Cowpers £1./ (possibly William Cowper, Poems [1811], cited by Dearden, The Library of John Ruskin, 82 [no. 614], or another work by the poet)
    • Greek 11/ (unidentified)
    • Colours John 34/ (watercolors for John?)
    • Every day Book 38/ (possibly William Hone [1780–1842], The Every‐day Book; or, the Guide to the Year, illustrated by George Cruikshank et al. [first published 1825, revised annually?])
    • Rutter £8.7/. (unidentified)
  • June
    • Newspaper £1.4/4
  • August
    • Newspaper 22/9
  • December
1831. Books purchased in 1831, as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 19v–20r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 229–30 n. 2.
1832. Books purchased in 1832, as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 24v–25r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 260 n. 2.
1833. Books purchased in 1833, as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 29v–30r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 286 n. 1.
1834. Books purchased in 1834 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 34v; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 286 n. 1.
1835. Books purchased in 1835 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 39v; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 300–301 n. 12.
1836. Books purchased in 1836 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 44v–45r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 326 n. 1.
1837. Books purchased in 1837 as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, 49v–50r; first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 413 n. 2.
. Books purchased in 1828, as listed in John James Ruskin, Account Book, ; and first summarized in Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd,
Physical Descriptions of Some Books Used by Ruskin in Boyhood and Youth
Books held by the Beinecke Library, Yale University
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  • [Beinecke 1] Fairy Tales [title on binding; three separately published items bound together].
    • Location. Beinecke Library, New Haven, Conn.; call no. 2000 1638.
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    • Documentation and discussion. For the three items in the binding, see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 13 [no. 74], 19 [no. 115], 321 [no. 2527], respectively. The responsibility for and circumstances of binding these three items as “Fairy Tales” are unknown. This title on the spine applies most legitimately to the first of the items, Mother Bunchʼs Fairy Tales, whereas the other two items belong only marginally, each containing just one or two stories that feature a fairy or fantastical events. Regardless of the consistency of the collection, however, an implicit rationale becomes apparent by comparing the contents of another bound collection, [The Widow of Roseneath etc.], which appears to be a complementary volume.

      Besides their contents, the three items in “Fairy Tales” also notably have in common their publication by J. Lumsden and Son of Glasgow. Now highly regarded among collectors, Lumsdenʼs childrenʼs books are distinguished by “a certain trimness (primness one might almost call it) in the covers, the quality of the paper used, the excellent type‐face, the occasional use of coloured inks for text and illustrations, usually bistre or sanguine, occasionally green, and a few hand‐coloured illustrations”. In their own time, however, the books were apparently little known outside of Scotland; and even in their own country, they were not widely popular, because their prices were considered rather dear, even at two pence or six pence per copy—cheaper and less elegant chapbooks by this publisher being more commonly found (Roscoe and Brimmell, James Lumsden and Son of Glasgow, xi, xiii)

      The Lumsden firm produced childrenʼs books ca. 1790–1850, but seldom printed dates on title pages (Roscoe and Brimmell, James Lumsden and Son of Glasgow, xv). The three books bound together here are all undated. Dearden, without explanation, dates them tentatively as 1814, presumably because that date is the lower limit suggested by Roscoe and Brimmell in each of their analytical descriptions of of these books, as follows.

    • [Beinecke 1.1] Mother Bunchʼs | Fairy Tales. | Published for the | Amusement | of all those | Little Masters and Misses | who, | by Duty to their Parents, and Obedience | to their Superiors, | Aim at Becoming | Great Lords and Ladies. | Embellished with Engravings. | Glasgow: | Published by J. Lumsden and Son. | [Price Sixpence.]
      • Discussion. Most of the stories in this anthology originated in fairy tales by Marie‐Catherine Le Jumel de Barneville, Comtesse dʼAulnoy (ca. 1650–1705), written for the sophisticated Paris literary salons in the age of Louis XIV. The texts translated into English from Countess dʼAulnoyʼs originals have a complex history. Ruskinʼs copy matches the bibliographical description of an edition published ca. 1817 by the firm J. Lumsden and Son (Roscoe and Brimmell, James Lumsden and Son of Glasgow, 68–69 [no. 102]; see Fairy Tales: Documentation and Discussion). The Lumsden edition was a piracy and abridgement of an English edition published in 1802 and 1817 by the London publisher of childrenʼs books, John Harris; and the Harris editions were in turn based on editions (ca. 1773–99) published by the firm of John Newbery (Blamires, “From Madame dʼAulnoy to Mother Bunch”, 75; and see , 72 [nos. 470–71).

        Newbery originated the title, Mother Bunchʼs Fairy Tales, and adapted an earlier English translation (1721, reprinted frequently through 1817, and including tales by other French salon writers). This early eighteenth‐century English translation, according to David Blamires, was faithful to the original, sophisticated French tales and intended for adult readers. The Newbery edition and its descendents simplified the texts for child readers, and reassigned the authorship from Madame dʼAulnoy to the fictitious Mother Bunch, an English folklore figure whom children could imagine as a storyteller similar to Mother Goose. Through these successive adaptations of the English texts by Newbery, Harris, and Lumsden for an audience of middle‐class children—as well as through issues of individual tales in chapbook form for a working‐class audience—the French salon fairy tales came be regarded as English and traditional (Blamires, “From Madame dʼAulnoy to Mother Bunch”, 75–78).

        In the subtitle, first applied by Newbery and carried through the adaptations by Harris and Lumsden, the specification that the tales were meant to amuse “little masters and misses” signals that the tales were meant for younger children. For Newbery in the eighteenth century, the purpose of such books was to teach children basic reading, as compared with books designated for “young gentlemen and ladies”, which contained “lessons of life” (Townsend, “John Newbery and Tom Telescope”, 82–83).

    • [Beinecke 1.2] Christmas | Tales | For the Instruction | of | Good Boys and Girls, | by | Mr. Solomon Sobersides. | Embellished with Engravings | Glasgow. | Published by J. Lumsden & Son. | & Sold by Stoddart & Craggs. Hull | Price Sixpence
      • Discussion. The copy is consistent with a bibliographical description in Roscoe and Brimmell, James Lumsden and Son of Glasgow, 44 (no. 57), which cites a watermark date of 1814.

        As pointed out in the “Introductory Essay” on the copy in the Hockliffe Archive, the tales have no connection with Christmas, despite the anthologyʼs title, which presumably was a marketing ploy. The text, which in some copies includes a description of the Seven Wonders of the World, was apparently based on a collection first published in London, ca. 1780 (“Stories before 1850. 0220: Anon. [‘Solomon Sobersides’], Christmas Tales”).

        The first story in the collection opens with commentary on the neglect of religion and morality in childhood education, but the stories in themselves do little to redress this supposed failing. The collection is miscellaneous, some tales teaching prudent and moral conduct, some adopting an oriental flavor, and only a few entailing magic or fairies. Two of the latter sort feature dervises (i.e., dervishes), who reward hospitality with magical riches, but retract the reward and punish characters who overstep boundaries owing to greed or excess curiosity.

        The frontispiece contains an emblem of a child choosing between folly and wisdom, which may have contributed to Ruskinʼs own use of visual emblems, such as “Heights of Wisdom, Depth of Fools” [Miscellaneous Drawing, MS I].


    • [Beinecke 1.3] A | Selection of Stories; | containing the history | of the | Two Sisters, | The Fisherman, | The King and Fairy Ring, | and | Honesty Rewarded. | Embellished with copperplates. | Glasgow, | Published and sold by J. Lumsden & Son. | Price Sixpence.
      • Discussion. The copy is consistent with a bibliographical description in Roscoe and Brimmell, James Lumsden and Son of Glasgow, 78–79 (no. 118), which cites watermarks of 1814 and 1816.

        The collection consists of moral tales enjoining contentment with oneʼs lot, prudence, and trust in Godʼs providence. (Roscoe and Brimmell remark that “The Two Sisters” is not the story of that title by Mrs. Sherwood.) Only “The King and Fairy Ring” qualifies as a fairy story.


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  • [Beinecke 2] [The Widow of Roseneath etc.] [description of binding to come; eight separately titled published items bound together].
    • Location. Beinecke Library, New Haven, Conn.; call no.: 2000 1641.
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    • Discussion. For the eight items in the binding, see Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, respectively 14 [no. 77], 12 [no. 67], 13 [no, 70], 13 [no. 69], 227 [no. 1775], 345 [no. 2736], 315 [no 2475], 23 [no. 151]. The responsibility for binding these items together is unknown. Although not stated explicitly, Helen Viljoenʼs description in the exhibition catalogue, Ruskinʼs Backgrounds, Friendships, and Interests suggests that the binding was present when received from the collector, F. J. Sharp (pp. 6–7 [item 5.a]). Viljoen appears to believe that the binding was present even when “given to Ruskin by his Father“, but it is unlikely that such disparate items would have been bound together originally.

      A rationale, if not the specific occasion for the collection can be inferred, however, if the binding of these eight items was made in concert with the binding of Fairy Tales. As compared with the latter, the items collected here share an emphasis on “cautionary” tales (to draw on the subtitle of The Cowslip). Since the early nineteenth century, such Romantic writers as Charles Lamb, S. T. Coleridge, and William Wordsworth had polemically argued in favor of appealing to childrenʼs imagination with fairy tales as opposed to training their reason and morals with “instructive” and “cautionary” tales and dialogues by the “cursed Barbauld Crew”, as Lamb anathematized this group largely of women writers. In our time, critics have exposed the politics underpinning these divisions, but in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, which was probably when these two collections of Ruskinʼs books were bound, the reputation of Anna Letitia Barbauld had been disassociated from her politics and reduced to bland high‐mindedness—a “valuation” of this writing that suggests, as William McCarthy complains, “that it entirely lacked humor, irony, or wit” (McCarthy, “‘A High‐Minded Christian Lady’”, 179; and see Clarke, “‘The Cursed Barbauld Crew’”, 91–93). Such a valuation was perhaps implicitly placed on these eight items by binding them together.

      The reductive valuation may not have been Ruskinʼs, but it seems unlikely that he could have been responsible for binding this collection since, as noted in the following descriptions, he annotated some of the items separately, bequeathing them to Joan Severn and her children. One of the annotations is dated “1889”, and another “1889–1890”, clues that the binding was ordered after 1890 by someone other than Ruskin—perhaps by Joan Severn—since by that time, Ruskin himself would not have been in a mental state to take such an initiative.


    • [Beinecke 2.1] The | Widow of Roseneath; | A | Lesson of Piety: | Affectionately | Dedicated to the Young. | Glasgow: | Printed for Chalmers & Collins; | Waugh & Innes, W. Oliphant, and W. Whyte & Co. Edinburgh; | R. M. Tims, Dublin; | J. Nisbet, W. Whittemore, and F. Westley, London. | 1822.|
      • Discussion. A notice of the book appears in the July 1823 issue of the Evangelical Magazine, listed among “Tracts & Books for Children”, price 1s.

        The tale relates the fate of a Scottish widow who, reduced in circumstances by the death of her husband, must part with her two sons. One son emigrates to America and prospers, and the other son resorts to crime. As “A Lesson of Piety Affectionately Dedicated to the Young”, the tale may well have been acquired to help John contemplate the consequences of the death of his Uncle Patrick in Perth, Scotland, in 1824, and its effect on his Aunt Jessie and his cousins.

        The Ruskins regularly traveled to Perth, until Johnʼs Aunt Jessie died in 1828. By the time of her death, Jessie had lost six of her ten children, two of whom were especially dear as companions to Ruskin in his childhood—James, who lived with the Ruskins at Herne Hill after his fatherʼs death, and who himself died in 1826; and Jessie, who died in 1827. The four surviving children—three sons and the daughter, Mary, who lived with the Ruskins until her marriage—were generously supported by John James. Just so, in The Widow of Roseneath, the successful son is supported in America by his uncle, a kindly and prudent merchant. The book might even have been shared between John and his cousins living at Herne Hill who depended on John Jamesʼs charity. For a plot summary of the tale and brief commentary from an 1823 review, see Anonymous, The Widow of Roseneath (1822).

        At a later time, Ruskin wrote on the frontispiece and title page: “New and Old mine my beloved Joanna and her children. SABRINA”. He refers to his cousin Joan Agnew Severn and her children. Sabrina was . . .


    • [Beinecke 2.2] Sketches | of | the | History | of Mr | Josiah Rumbold | and | His Family. | Intended for the Benefit of | Sabbath Evening School. | Founded on Facts. | Second Edition. | Edinburgh: | Printed by William Aitchison, | for A. Johnstone, Gran‐Market; | and Sold by M. Ogle, Glasgow; and W. Whittimore, 62, | Paternoster Row, London. | 1820.


    • [Beinecke 2.3] Nicol Gray: | or, | Scenes in the Country. | A Tale | for the Cottarʼs Ingle Neuk. | “Let not ambition mock their useful toil, | Their homely joys and destiny obscure; | Nor grandeur hear with a disdainful smile, | The short and simple annals of the poor.” | Edinburgh: | Printed for Alexander Johnstone, | West Bow; | Chalmers and Collins, and Lang, Glasgow; |and Whittemore, London. | 1823.
      • Discussion. The tale contains Scottish dialect. In periodicals, the work is found among listings of Sabbath School “reward books for young persons” by Waugh & Innes, where attributed to the “author of ‘Jacob Newman’”. The author was also responsible for The Run‐away; or, I Would Be a Sailor: A Narrative.


    • [Beinecke 2.4] Memoir | of | An Old Soldier. | Written | for the Instruction of Youth. | Edinburgh: | Printed for Alexander Johnstone, | West Bow; | Ogle, Chalmers and Collins, and Lang, | Glasgow; and Whittemore, London. | 1823.


    • [Beinecke 2.5] Active Goodness | Beautifully Exemplified, | in the | Life and Labours | of the || Rev. Thomas Gouge, A.M. | By a Minister of the Church of Scotland. | Glasgow: | Printed for Chalmers & Collins; | Waugh & Innes, William Oliphant, and W. Whyte & Co. | Edinburgh; | R. M. Tims, Dublin; | J. Nisbet, W. Whittemore, J. Offer, and F. Westley, London. | 1822.
      • Discussion. The author is identified as the Rev. Robert Burns (1789–1869), Minister of St. Georgeʼs, Paisley, in the second edition (1825), and in Burns, Life and Times of the Rev. Robert Burns by the Rev. R. F. Burns, 120. Thomas Gouge (1605–81) was an English clergyman who, although ejected from his living for nonconformist sympathies, continued to preach and was revered for his “active goodness”—his extensive good works of practical Christianity. His collected works were published in Kilmarnock in 1815.


    • [Beinecke 2.6] The | Cowslip; | or, | More Cautionary Stories, | in Verse. | by the Author of that Much‐Admired | Little Work Entitled | the Daisy. | the Seventh Edition. | London: | Printed for J. Harris and Son, | Corner of St. Paulʼs Church‐Yard; and Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, | Paternoster‐Row. | 1820.
      • Discussion. The author is Elizabeth Turner (1775–1846); Ruskinʼs copy matches the bibliographical description in Moon, John Harrisʼs Books for Youth, 129 (no. 932 [7]). The “more cautionary stories” constituting The Cowslip were first published by Harris in 1811, following the “cautionary stories in verse adapted to the ideas of children from four to eight years old” constituting The Daisy, first published in 1807. The Daisy was originally “illustrated with thirty engravings on copper‐plate”, but The Cowslip was illustrated with thirty woodcuts, which formed headpieces to the poems (Moon, John Harrisʼs Books for Youth, 129 [nos. 933 (1), 932 (1)]).

        In Ruskinʼs copy, the signature was written by his father, as Ruskin notes in a later hand, perhaps because he was too young to have signed the copy for himself when first presented with the book. The primitiveness of drawings scattered throughout the book suggest a very early age. In a later hand, it appears that Ruskin re‐dedicated the book to “My Joanna, and her children” on “New Years Day. 1889”. Later, he wrote “Deeper and deeper still. / 2nd April 1889–1890”; also a date, “1822” underlined, and the comment, “Now in Heaven”.


    • [Beinecke 2.7] A | Drive in the Coach | through the | Streets of London. | A Story founded on Fact. | By Mrs. Sherwood, | Author of “Little Henry and his Bearer,” &c. &c. | | Seventh Edition. | Wellington, Salop: | printed by and for F. Houlston and Son. | And sold by | Scatcherd and Letterman, Ave‐Maria Lane, London. | 1822. | [Entered at Stationerʼs Hall.]
      • Discussion. During a drive through London with her mother, a “self‐pleasing” girl is allowed to write down what she would like to buy at each shop they pass. When they encounter a coffin‐makerʼs establishment, representing the end of all worldly pleasures, the girl of course balks at adding that item to her list. Her mother instead buys the girl a bible, so she can learn to contemplate death without fear.


    • [Beinecke 2.8] Hymns in Prose | for | Children. | by the Author of | Lessons for Children. | Twenty‐Second Edition, | Much Enlarged. | I will praise God with my voice, though I am | but a little child. | London: | Printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, | Paternoster‐Row; | and R. Hunter, Successor to J. Johnson, | St Paulʼs Church‐Yard. | 1821.
      • Discussion. By Anna Letitia Barbauld.


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  • [Beinecke 3] Fables | of | Aesop, | and others: Translated into English. | with | Instructive Applications | and a print before each fable. | by Samuel Croxall, D.D. | [ . . . ] | The Nineteenth Edition | Carefully revised and improved | London | Printed for F. C. and J. Rivington, G. Robinson, J. Walker, J. Cuthell, Scatcherd and Letterman, [ . . . ] | 1811.
    • Discussion. See Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 8 (no. 29). A flyleaf and the title page are inscribed “J. J. Ruskin” in the hand of John James Ruskin, while pencil copies of the illustrations testify to the bookʼs use by John Ruskin (see The Ruskin 1 for similar activity of copying of illustrations).

      The presence of John Jamesʼs signatures led Viljoen to infer that the book was “evidently . . . acquired, originally, for the library of Ruskinʼs father” (Ruskinʼs Backgrounds, Friendships, and Interests, 7). From the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries, English collections of Aesopʼs fables did appeal across age groups and were accessible across class boundaries. The original adult readers of the 1722 translation by Samuel Croxall (1688/89–1752) would have understood his lengthy “instructive applications” appended to each fable as whiggish ripostes to the Jacobite Fables of Aesop and Other Eminent Mythologists (1691, 1699) by Sir Roger LʼEstrange (1616–1704). Notwithstanding their political applications, both translators presented their fables as appropriate reading also for children, just as John Locke (1632–1704) considered “Aesopʼs Fables . . . the best . . . Stories apt to delight and entertain a Child”, while the stories “may yet afford useful Reflections to a grown Man; and if his Memory retain them all his Life after, he will not repent to find them there, among his manly Thoughts”. In 1703, Locke produced his own interlinear Latin and English version of Aesop as a scheme for teaching children language (Lewis, The English Fable, 20, 25–26, 40; Locke, to come). Thus, while we do not know exactly when (in 1811 or afterward) John James Ruskin acquired Croxallʼs Aesop or for what purpose, he may have conceived of the book both as edification for himself and as basic instruction in reading and grammar, as well as morality, for a child.

      In the eighteenth century, according to Stephen H. Daniel, the taste for fable collections with political agendas like LʼEstrangeʼs and Croxallʼs declined in favor of versions deemed appropriate to child readers, “in which delicacy and daintiness become characteristic traits” (“Political and Philosophical Uses of Fables in Eighteenth‐Century England”, 170). Nonetheless, Croxallʼs collection maintained its grip long into the next century, perhaps because its anti‐Jacobite posture was deemed a safe choice for the early Victorian household (although another youth in Camberwell, Robert Browning, was “affected . . . so painfully” by the violent death of a lion in “Croxallʼs Fables” “that he could no longer endure the sight of the book” and “buried it between the stuffing and the woodwork of an old dining‐room chair, where it stood for lost” [Orr, Life and Letters of Robert Browning, 28]).

      Croxall styled himself as a protector of British youth, dedicating his collection to the five‐year‐old George Montagu‐Dunk, future earl of Halifax (1716–71). There was urgency to guard a noble youth who, “though but in” his “fifth Year”, was “capable of reading any Thing in the English Tongue, without the least Hesitation”, and might be exposed to versions of Aesop like LʼEstrangeʼs, which likewise claimed to be intended for “the Use and Instruction of Children; who, being . . . mere blank Paper, are ready indifferently for . . . the first Comer to write Saint or Devil upon them, which he pleases”. “[W]hat poor Devils”, Croxall exclaimed, would LʼEstrangeʼs book “make of those Children, who should be so unfortunate as to . . . imbibe his pernicious Principles! Principles coined and suited to promote the Growth, and serve the Ends, of Popery and arbitary Power”. Such lessons are not meant for the “Children of Britain who “are born with free Blood in their Veins, and suck in Liberty with their very Milk”. Croxall accuses LʼEstrange of perverting Aesopʼs message, “particularly when any political Instruction is couched in the Application”; and he commends himself as “a Lover of Liberty and Truth; an Enemy to Tyranny, either in Church or State; and one who detests Party Animosities, and factious Divisions, as much as I wish the Peace and Prosperity of my Country” (Fables of Aesop and Others, trans. Croxall, vi, xxi–xxiv).

      The engravings heading each fable, which are unattributed, were described by Thomas Bewick in the introduction to his 1818 collection of fables as “cuts on metal, in the manner of wood” (Fables of Aesop and Others, xv). Bewick was “extremely fond” of Croxallʼs and aspired to substitute “better executed designs” in order to “impart the same kind of delight to others that I had experienced from attentively reading it” (Memoir of Thomas Bewick, 172–73)
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  • [Beinecke 4] Evenings at Home; | or the | Juvenile Budget Opened. | consisting of | a Variety of Miscellaneous Pieces | for the | Instruction and Amusement | of | Young Persons | by Dr. Aikin and Mrs. Barbauld | London | Printed and Published by J. F. Dove, St. Johnʼs Square.
    • Discussion. See Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 8 (no. 34). It is not likely that this copy was used by Ruskin in boyhood, although the collector who obtained it, F. J. Sharp, appears to have assumed that was the case (see the exhibition catalogue, Ruskinʼs Backgrounds, Friendships, and Interests, as Reflected in the F. J. Sharp Collection, 8 [5.f]; see also Lightman, “‘No Man Could Owe More’”, 260–61, 264).

      While the copy has a Brantwood bookplate—type 2, a type that Ruskin himself never used, as Dearden explains (Library of John Ruskin, xcvi–xcvii)—and while the copy contains a holograph note in Ruskinʼs mature hand, this is a single‐volume edition of Evenings at Home (vi+479 pp.), whereas the edition that Ruskin preserved as his boyhood copy was divided into six separate volumes. That number of volumes is documented by Ruskin in a 4 February 1885 letter to Simpson & Co., arranging to rebind three of the volumes remaining from his boyhood set, emphasizing that his youthful markings were to be retained, and to number the volumes 1, 2, and 3, since he had “lost the rest” of the volumes (quoted in Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 8 [no. 34]). The remaining volumes sent for binding would have been the original volumes 1, 2, and 5, with volumes 3, 4, and 6 gone missing, according to details in an 1868 partial catalogue of Ruskinʼs books, as cited by Dearden. On this evidence, Dearden suggests that, since the Sharp/Viljoen copy at the Beinecke Library “is not bound in the style specified in the letter to Simpson & Co.”, this volume “may be one of the volumes which Ruskin mentioned he had lost” (Library of John Ruskin, 8 [no. 34], and see cviii–cxii). This possibility is ruled out, however, since the Sharp/Viljoen copy, which is a six‐volumes‐in‐one edition, complete in itself, cannot have formed a part of Ruskinʼs original set.

      Dearden gives 1792 as the year of publication for the Sharp/Viljoen copy, but this date is not supported by the title page, which is undated. Its publication by J. F. Dove places it, rather, as a reprint in a series conceived by John Fowler Dove (1787–1866), St. Johnʼs Square, Clerkenwell, London. Starting in the first half of the 1820s, Doveʼs printing house issued the “Doveʼs English Classics” series, which played a part in the early history of books illustrated by steel engraving—a development that contributed to the success of the literary annuals and gift books during the same period (see Annuals and Other Illustrated Books: Collected Editions). At first, Dove produced these reprints as “Printed for the Proprietors of the English Classics by J. F. Dove”—the “proprietors” being comprised of a long list of publishers, including Smith, Elder & Co. from the time when that firm was located on Fenchurch Street. Two books in the “English Classics” series, which may well have been acquired through Smith, Elder, held an important place in Ruskinʼs boyhood library, his 1824 copy of Popeʼs translation of the Iliad, and his 1825 copy of Drydenʼs translation of the Aeneid and other works. The “English Classics” reprint of Evenings at Home would have appeared too late, however, to have served as his boyhood copy, since Aikin and Barbauldʼs tales and dialogues perceptively influenced some of Ruskinʼs earliest extant juvenilia from 1826 (see, e.g., “The Needless Alarm” and “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol I”).

      As Naomi Lightman comments, “as Ruskinʼs copy [held by the ] has no date, we cannot know when it was purchased” (“‘No Man Could Owe More’”, 264). According to WorldCat, a date of purchase was not possible prior to 1827, when Dove published Evenings at Home with a frontispiece and title page engraved by Charles Heath (1785–1848) after a drawing by Henry Corbould (1787–1844), and with the series title “English Classics” printed on the “cover”. Supporting evidence for an 1827 publication date is supplied by an advertisement for the “English Classics” series—an advertisement that is itself undated, but that is included with the Google Books reproduction of an 1825 Dove reprint of Waltonʼs Complete Angler. No listing of Evenings at Home appears among either the titles “Now Ready” or the titles “In the Press”. The “Ready” list does include, however, the 1824 Popeʼs Iliad and the 1825 Drydenʼs Works of Virgil, suggesting that an 1827 Evenings at Home lay too far in the future to project the status even of “In the Press”.

      A bibliographical detail of the undated Sharp/Viljoen copy likewise points to publication in the second half of the 1820s. While the WorldCat description is silent whether the 1827 “English Classics” version of Evenings at Home was, like earlier volumes in the series, printed for the “proprietor” publishers, the Sharp/Viljoen copy identifies itself as “Printed and Published by J. F. Dove, St. Johnʼs Square”. According to Laurence Worms, this imprint took the place of the “Printed for the Proprietors of English Classics” “within a couple of years” of the mid‐1820s series but no later than 1833 when Dove retired (Worms, “Doveʼs English Classics”, accessed 27 March 2022). Apparently, the “Published and Printed” imprint—accompanied by a device of a dove bearing an olive branch, and the motto “perseverantia et amicis [perseverance and friendship]”—represented an advance beyond acting only as a printer for large shareholding publisher groups.

      The textual history of Evenings at Home does bear consequences for what edition Ruskin first used. In an analysis of the publishing history of the book, Aileen Fyfe explains that, from 1792 until 1823, the text of the first edition was controlled by the first publisher, Joseph Johnson, his successor Rowland Hunter, and other publishers to whom Hunter sold shares. In 1823, to maintain copyright, the shareholders solicited a corrected and slightly expanded edition from John Aikinʼs son, Arthur Aikin, which was published as the thirteenth edition, apparently in six volumes; and in 1826, an edition rearranged by John Aikinʼs daughter, Lucy Aikin, was published in four volumes. Despite these new editions descending from the original, “from the mid‐1820s”, Fyfe notes, “any publisher could print the original text of Evenings at Home, and a number did so”, including provincial and Scottish publishers (Fyfe, “Copyrights and Competition”, 40). If Dove waited until 1827 to reprint Evenings, even in its original text, he already lagged behind some other publishers.

      The Ruskins would have entered the market for Johnʼs initial copy of Evenings at Home during the transitional period in the bookʼs publishing history, between the early‐ and mid‐1820s, when the Aikins were revising the text in order to extend copyright, and when other publishers were issuing reprints of the first edition. At this point, the Ruskins would likely have acquired either the new edition of 1823, whose shareholder publishers included (since 1815) Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, who also published the Ruskinsʼ editions of Maria Edgeworthʼs “Early Lessons” series; or they would have purchased a first‐edition reprint available from non‐shareholder publishers. At that time, those non‐shareholder reprints would not have included Doveʼs, since, as we have seen, evidence shows him coming late to the game. Consequently, putting aside the Sharp/Viljoen Dove edition—undated, but probably after 1827—we cannot determine what state of the text of Evenings at Home was availble to Ruskin in his boyhood six‐volume version, whether the revised edition by Arthur Aikin or the original descended from the Johnson/Hunter shareholders (or even as originally published by Johnson/Hunter). A good bet may be the revised text of 1823, since the shareholders carrying that text, including Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, produced substantial print runs that sold well (see Fyfe, “Copyrights and Competition”, 43); and the Ruskins were familiar with Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy from their purchase of Edgeworthʼs Frank and Harry and Lucy Concluded. Definitive evidence, however, must await recovery of Ruskinʼs three stray volumes, as rebound by Simpson.

      As for the Sharp/Viljoen copy, given that it contains annotations by Ruskin from later years, a plausible explanation may be that he acquired this Dove edition at some point to replace the missing volumes of his boyhood set, at or before the time of sending the surviving copies for rebinding; or, if the Dove reprint was a more youthful acquisition, it should be treated as an additional household copy, circa 1830. While the front endpaper contains illegible scrawls, one of which Viljoen was tempted to make out to be the letter J and interpret as Ruskinʼs earliest signature, all the legible marginalia is in Ruskinʼs mature hand. The back endpaper has the note: “p 315. Earth & Stones — 331”, referring to pages comprising the twenty‐first evening, which is connected with mineralogy. That chapter is heavily marked in ink throughout, especially the passages on siliceous minerals.

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    • [Beinecke x] Elizabeth; or, The Exiles of Siberia. A Tale, Founded upon Facts. From the French of Madame Cottin. London: Printed for John Sharpe, 1817.
      • Engravings after designs by Richard Westall. Engravers: John Romney, William Finden, George Corbould, Charles Heath
      • Discussion. That the Ruskins acquired this novel by the French writer, Sophie Ristaud Cottin (1770–1807), is consistent with their care to provide John with other works in this list “founded on facts”. At the same time, their acquisition of this particular historical novel invites the possibility that the Ruskins witnessed its popular musical stage adaptation, the “melodramatic opera” The Exile, dramatized by Frederick Reynolds (1764–1841) and scored by Joseph Mazzinghi (1765–1844).

        The facts of the tale derive from the heroism of a Russian girl, Praskovʼia Lupolova, whose father had been unjustly exiled to Siberia. In 1803, to correct the injustice and reverse her familyʼs exile, the twenty‐year‐old girl journeyed on foot from Ishim in the Tyumen Oblast of western Siberia to St. Petersburg, where she was able gain the sympathy of nobles who interceded to petition a pardon from Czar Alexander I. In Élizabeth; ou, Les Exilés de Sibérie (1806), Madame Cottin renamed the brave and virtuous heroine Élizabeth, invented a variety of characters—from pious to sinister—to assist her on her journey, and at the end of her ordeal brought her into the midst of Alexanderʼs coronation in Moscow Cathedral, where the girl dramatically interrupts the ceremony in order to plead her case. In this telling, it is a young Siberian noble who intervenes and helps convince the czar, thus winning Élizabethʼs hand in marriage along with her fatherʼs pardon. The novel was translated into English in 1808, influencing a generation with its clichéd depiction of Russia (Heller, “‘A Tale Founded upon the Facts’”, 159–60; Phillips, “‘A Nihilist Kurort’”, 474–78).

        Because Cottin reformulated the story using the essential elements of melodrama—as summarized by Wendy Heller, “a virtuous hero and heroine, an evil antagonist (with collaborators), opportunities for action sequences and spectacle, an intricate and even improbable plot, a moral message, a sincere tone and a happy ending that averts tragedy”—the tale was quickly adapted for the stage. From two French melodramas to Reynolds and Mazzinghiʼs The Exile (1808), Heller shows, the rendering evolved from a French classicist treatment to a complex spectacle with many scene changes (reproduced in a colored “childrenʼs copper plate picture”). In revivals of The Exile in the 1820s, the aspect of spectacle was further elaborated by stage designers, who included David Roberts, with an emphasis on authenticity of representation. The czarʼs coronation was replaced by the crowning of Empress Elizabeth Petrovna, an event that was simultaneously widely circulated in pictorial print culture. The emphasis on authenticity was regarded as educational as well as spectacular, and associations with the 1821 British coronation of George IV added patriotism to the appeal (Heller, “‘A Tale Founded upon the Facts’”, 161–73). Throughout the 1820s, Reynolds (whose eldest son, Frederick Mansel Reynolds [1800/01–50] became editor of the literary annual best known for lavishness, The Keepsake) became known for producing spectacles in this opening decade of French grand opera, inaugurated by La muette de Portici (1828) composed by Daniel Auber (1782–1871) to a libretto by Eugène Scribe (1791–1861). The opera, which arrived in London in 1829, culminated in an eruption of Mount Vesuvius—a favorite sublime topic for Ruskin (Fuhrmann, Foreign Opera at the London Playhouses, 148, 157; Giroud, French Opera, 128–29, 136–37).
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    • [Beinecke 5] Frank | A | Sequel to Frank | in | Early Lessons | by | Maria Edgeworth | in three volumes | Vol. I | London | Printed for R. Hunter | Successor to Mr. Johnson 72 St. Paulʼs Churchyard | and Baldwin Cradock and Joy | Paternoster Row ʼ 1822.
      • Location. Beinecke Library, New Haven, Conn.; call no. 2000 1673; holdings, vols. 1–3.
      • Discussion. See Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 105 (no. 810). In the description of volume one of this set for the 1965 exhibition catalog of the Sharp Collection, Helen Gill Viljoen wrote: “This volume is inscribed ‘John Ruskin’ in the handwriting of Ruskinʼs Father and presumably contains, on a blank page which follows, Ruskinʼs earliest known signature—a pencilled ‘John Ruskin’ apparently copied, in a most childish scrawl, from the name as written in ink by his Father” (Ruskinʼs Backgrounds, Friendships, and Interests, as Reflected in the F. J. Sharp Collection, 6 [item 2]). While a more likely candidate for Ruskinʼs earliest surviving signature is his pencil print‐lettered “John Ruskin” signing his so‐called first letter, which he dictated to his mother for his father on 15 March 1823, the book signature in Johnʼs hand is valuable as a clue to the approximate date when he acquired this text. While Ruskin first took up a pen to write in ink around April 1827, prior to this development he had already transitioned from a print to cursive hand, using a pencil, at least for rough draft. A reasonable guess, then, for his acquisition and first reading of Edgeworthʼs Frank: A Sequel is on or around his eighth birthday in February 1827, an age in keeping with that of the eponymous hero. As Edgeworth specifies in the preface: “The following volumes contain the History of Frank from seven years old, where we left him [in Frank, part 4], till between ten and eleven” (Edgeworth, Frank: A Sequel, x; and see Frank, Part IV: Being the Ninth Part of Early Lessons, in The Novels and Selected Works of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Butler, 12:223–37). Ruskin also used the identically formed signature on what his mother called his “first written letter” of May 1827 (John to John James Ruskin, May 1827; Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 157–58; and see The Ruskin Family Handwriting: Ruskinʼs Cursive Hand).

        The first volume also contains a childʼs pencil drawings, which Viljoen quotes Sharp as describing: “‘On the inside cover and facing the title page in Vol. I [there] are two sketches, an elevation . . .’ and a pencilled floor plan of what Mr. Sharp conjectured to be the Ruskinsʼ Herne Hill home, with what was probably a precocious attempt to indicate a winding staircase”. While Viljoen respectfully conveyed Sharpʼs conjecture, she must have realized that Herne Hill cannot be the subject of the sketch, which depicts a manor with two wings on either side of a center space and a semicircular front. As Viljoen notes, in volume 1 of Frank: A Sequel,“Frank is being taught how to draw a house ‘by a scale’”, indicating the more probable inspiration for the sketches (Ruskinʼs Backgrounds, Friendships, and Interests, as Reflected in the F. J. Sharp Collection, 6 [item 2]).

        In this episode of Frank: A Sequel, Frank examines house plans in the Engineerʼs portfolio, thinking “he could draw the plan of . . . [his own] house without much difficulty”, but his resulting drawing shows, as his cousin, Mary, remarks, “some of the rooms . . . larger than they were in reality, and some smaller”, plus he “‘forgot the stairs’” altogether—an omission that is pointedly corrected in Ruskinʼs floor plan on the volumeʼs endpaper, regardless of what structure he intended the drawing to schematize. In the tale, the Engineer instructs Frank to make proper measurements of the rooms and draw the floor plan to scale, so that, by the end of the episode, Frankʼs “plan of his house was now tolerably neatly finished; and this time the staircase was not forgotten; the breakfast room was not robbed to make space for the passage, and the library was of its just length, and, as Mary observed, none of the rooms were too large or too small—all were like reality. ‘And now’, said Frank, [‘]that I know how to draw by a scale, Marys, you shall never see such wretched plans as this’, added he, crumpling up his first plan as he spoke, and throwing it away” (Frank: A Sequel, 308, 309, 313). Volumes 1 and 2 also contain brief marginalia by the adult Ruskin.
Books held by the The Ruskin, Lancaster University
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  • [The Ruskin 1] THE | HISTORY | OF | LITTLE JACK | Embellished with numerous Engravings. | London; | PRINTED FOR J. BYSH, PATERNOSTER‐ROW; | Sold also | BY ALL OTHER BOOKSELLERS. | 1820

    • Discussion. This tale is the second work (1787) for children by Thomas Day (1748–89), published between the releases of the second and third volumes of Dayʼs best‐known work for child readers, The History of Sandford and Merton (1783, 1786, 1789). The 1820 edition of Little Jack is illustrated by colored copper engravings, which are not the Bewick wood engravings designed for the 1797 edition of the tale published as part of the Childrenʼs Miscellany.

      According to Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 91 (no. 690), in 1885 Ruskin had the book rebound in brown calf with a gilt‐decorated spine by Simpson & Co. For Ruskinʼs project of rebinding childhood books, see Physical Descriptions: Books Held by the Beinecke Library—Evenings at Home. Original boards of this 1820 edition published by J. Bysh may be viewed attached to a copy digitized by Google. According to this cover, the book sold for 1s.

      Drawings. On the blank versos of pages printed with colored engravings on their rectos, Ruskin traced the outlines of the figures in the engravings on the opposite side (thus making the traced figures reversed mirror images of the originals). Ruskin traced all the engravings except one, which depicts Little Jack fighting another boy (see Plot summary, below).

      (3v) A pencil drawing of a ship in full sail colliding with an iceberg, captioned above the drawing in pencil print lettering: packet / of The Lady hobart / The Shipwreck (Dearden misreads Lady as Hady). The caption refers to a British Post Office packet, the Lady Hobart, which was wrecked in June 1803 after scoring a heroic success early in the war with France. While sailing from Halifax to Falmouth, the Lady Hobart was pursued by a French schooner. Firing on the schooner, the British boarded the ship and captured its crew, which were soon thereafter transferred as prisoners of war to two English schooners nearby. British naval officers took possession of the French ship, and the Lady Hobart continued on its way, carrying the French captain and his nephew. On June 28, on a foggy night, the ship collided with a huge iceberg and rapidly sank. Twenty‐nine surviors filled two small boats carried by the packet, including the captain, William Dorset Fellowes (1769–1852), the French captain, three women (one of them Fellowesʼs spouse), and seamen. The boats carried few provisions, and for seven days the castaways suffered from exposure, hunger, and thirst, causing the French commander in a delirium to throw himself into the sea and drown. Nearing the Canadian coast, the boats were rescued on 4 July. Fellowes published an account of the ordeal, A Narrative of the Loss of His Majestyʼs Packet, the Lady Hobart. Various editions of the narrative included a foldout frontispiece depicting the disaster, which Ruskin may have copied for his drawing. A scene of the disaster was also depicted the Bristol marine painter, Nicholas Pocock (1740–1821), and engraved by Robert Pollard (1755/56–1839) (Fellowes, Narrative of the Loss of . . . the Lady Hobart; Stray, “The Sinking of the Lady Hobart”).

      Ruskinʼs caption for his drawing incorporates a title, “The Shipwreck”, which may echo the title of the epic poem, The Shipwreck (1762, 1764, 1769), by the Scottish seaman and poet, William Falconer (1732–70), which the Ruskins owned in at least two editions of 1796 and 1858 (Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 112 [nos. 868–69]). Pocock also illustrated an edition (1804, 1811) of this poem (Cordingly, “Pocock, Nicholas (1740–1821), marine painter”), although the 1796 edition owned by the Ruskins was illustrated by Thomas Stothard and limited to figures, without scenes of shipwreck (wreckage caused, in this case, not by an iceberg but by a storm driving the ship onto a rocky shore).

      (65v–66r) The blank verso 65v is divided horizontally, with a pencil drawing of a sailing ship in the upper half, and a drawing of sidewheeler steamship in the lower half. Another drawing of a sailing ship is drawn on 66r with the word vewe written twice in print letters.

      Marginalia. See The Ruskin Family Handwriting for connections between The History of Little Jack and writing instruction.

      (3r) In pencil, a ruled square frame, divided into three vertical columns, contains repeated shapes that may be meant for an alphabet letter or letters, five of these shapes on the left, three (larger) in the middle, five on the right.

      (4–5) In ink, in Margaret Ruskinʼs hand, “Domestic / House‐Servant” (p. 4) and “Divert / Amuse” (p. 5), the initial words in these pairs appearing in print on the respective pages. Apparently, the annotations are traces of vocabulary instruction.

      (67r) In pencil, in John James Ruskinʼs hand, “fa mi so la do” / “Duryhill” (unclear) / “do re mi fa sol la do”.

      (67v) In pencil, John James Ruskinʼs(?) hand, but very faint and the page badly smudged with some writing completely illegible, words including “annihilation”, “arrived”, “preserve”.

      Plot summary. Little Jack is a foundling adopted by an old man, formerly a soldier, and now living on a “wide uncultivated moor” where he has built a hut and grows his own vegetables (p. 3). Although poor, he is content, having “‘avoided, perhaps, many faults, and much uneasiness, which I should have incurred had I been in another situation” (p. 19). He owns “one domestic” and “friend” (pp. 4–5), a goat named Little Nan, which he rescued as a kid. Finding the infant likewise abandoned on the moor, the old man trusts “Providence which feeds the birds of the wood and the beasts of the field, and which has promised to bless all those that are kind and charitable” (p. 6). So it is that Nan, having “lost her kid”, willingly suckles the infant, “seem[ing] to adopt him with equal tenderness as her offspring” (pp. 7, 8). “‘Who knows’”, concludes the old man, “‘but Providence, which has preserved this child in so wonderful a manner, may have destined it to something equally wonderful in its future life; and may bless me as the humble agent of its decrees’” (p. 8).

      A Rousseauvian savage, Little Jack is “left to nature” to grow; and since he is “unfettered by bandages or restraints” and wears “neither shoes nor stockings, nor shirt”, “his limbs” attain “their due proportions and form” (pp. 9, 10). A lady passing in her carriage hears his story, and although she “had seen a great deal of the world, and had read a variety of books, it had never once entered into her head that a child might grow strong and vigorous by sucking a goat, instead of eating pap” (p. 14). She offers to take him in, but, Jack refusing, gives him money for shoes and stockings. Jack dutifully attempts to discharge the charity, but finds the shoes so cumbersome that he uses the money to buy his “daddy” a warm coat instead.

      Jackʼs daddy teaches him only “plain and simple morals and religion”, so that, when Nan dies, Jack is “not able to talk as finely about love, tenderness, and sensibility, as many other little boys, that have enjoyed greater advantages of education”. Nonetheless, like Harry Sandford compared to Tommy Merton, Jack feels “the reality” of such emotions “in his heart, and thought it . . . natural to love every thing that loves us” (p. 13). Jack has one fault, however, of being “a little too jealous of his honour”, which he is able to defend with “such dispositions for the art of boxing, that he could beat every boy in the neighbourhood, of his age and size” (pp. 16–17). (The plate showing Jack boxing with Tom the Collier is the only cut that Ruskin did not outline on the reverse.)

      When Jack is twelve, the old man dies. In his grief, Jack desperately tries to restore warmth to the corpse by stripping naked and lying atop him. A local farmer who is acquainted with Jack takes him in and teaches him farmwork, but the farmer dies as well. Jack resolutely sets out to find other means to support himself. Chancing on an iron foundry, he is drawn to its warmth and shelter. The industry contrasts with his agrarian upbringing, but his straigtforward account of himself leads to a position. Because he is incautiously open about his history, however, the other boys tease him, provoking Jack to frequent fistfights. One day, the foundry is toured by gentlemen and ladies. (The foundry processes are detailed sufficiently to form a brief example of the factory tour genre.) The visit is interrupted by the disturbance of another fight, causing the master to threaten Jack with dismissal. The foreman interjects how Jack is a dependable workman, and Jack stoutly defends his behavior, describing how the boys mock his strange upbringing. While the visitors also cannot restrain their laughter at the story of Nan, the company happens to include the lady who had heard the story previously and given him money for shoes. She once again offers to take Jack into service, and he accepts. “Call him a little soldier, and Jack was at every oneʼs disposal. This was Jackʼs particular foible and vanity”, imitating his daddy, the old soldier, by “poising a dung‐fork, charging with a broom‐stick, and standing sentry at the stable‐door” (p. 31). He also developes an “immoderate love of horses” (p. 32); and building on his experience at the foundry, learns some smithing, sadlery, and carpentry. His resourcefulnesss makes him useful and entertaining to his mistressʼs orphaned nephew, young Master Willets. Allowed to be on familiar terms with the boy, Jack listens to Master Willetsʼs lessons, and practices writing and studying on his own at night. This happiness comes to an end when Master Willets is visited by a young gentleman “with a very great taste for finery, and a supreme contempt for all the vulgar” (p. 37). The gentleman of course cannot abide Jack, and Jack resents the injury to his honor. Happening to acquire a monkey from a showman, Jack outfits the animal as a parody of the gentleman, inciting the gentlemen to cruelly slay the monkey and receive a harmless indignity in return. Jack refuses to apologize, and his “obstinacy” leads to his dismissal (p. 42). Coming at last to his adoptive fatherʼs profession, Jack enlists as a marine and is sent to India. While pausing to hunt on an island, Jack is separated from his party and loses his way. Fearing to be treated by the natives “as the white men generally treat the blacks when they get them into their possession”, Jack decides to survive on his own, content to be rid of anyone “‘to quarrel with me, or baa, or laugh at my poor daddy and mammy [Nan]’” (pp. 48–49). A brief Robinsonade ensues until Jack is rescued by an English ship, which carries him to India. Jack serves ably in India, but when his regiment marches within reach of the “Tartars”, he warns the officers to avoid these warriorsʼ calvary skills. His warnings are ignored, resulting in the armyʼs routing. Jack is taken among the hostages, though “he alone, accustomed to all the vicissitudes of life, retain[s] his chearfulness, and [is] prepared to meet every reverse of fortune” (p. 56). The narrator supplies an anthropological account of the Tartars, preparing to show how Jack ingratiates himself by means of his horsemanship. He draws on his smithing to introduce the Tartars to shoeing their horses, on his sadlery to improve the Tartarsʼ gear, and on his regard for animals to train the Tartarsʼ horses for docility without violence. When the English negotiate freedom for the hostages, the Tartars present Jack with valuable presents. Returned to the English camp, he secures an honorable discharge. Back in England, Jack returns to the iron foundry as a foreman, and ends as a partner. He buys the moor where the old man found him and Nan, and on the site of the old manʼs hut he builds a “small but convenient house” where “he would sometimes retire from business, and cultivate his garden with his own hands, for he hated idleness”. He now freely relates his history without fear of mockery, since “it is of very little consequence how a man comes into the world, provided he behaves well, and discharges his duty when he is in it” (pp. 64, 65).
Untraced Books
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  • [Untraced 1] “Children of the Wood” (or “Children in the Wood” or “Babes in the Wood”)
    • Discussion. In 1823, to mollify John during an illness, Margaret Ruskin was “obliged to buy I donʼt know how many books”. Worried that John James might duplicate a purchase, she recommended he bring home this traditional ballad along with “Sinbad the Sailor” (Margaret to John James Ruskin, 11 March 1823, Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 126–27 and see 127 n. 1). No further indication appears in the family letters whether “Children of the Wood” was acquired or, if so, in what edition. The tale was widely familiar to child readers, but in starkly differing versions.

      The original ballad relates how a dying man and his wife commend their young son and daughter to the care of the manʼs brother. After a year of caring for the children, the uncle succumbs to the temptation to steal their inheritance, and hires assassins to convey the children to a wood and murder them. One of the would‐be killers has a change of heart and, to avert the deed, kills his partner, but then abandons the children to die of starvation and exposure in the wood. Their bodies are covered with leaves by a robin.

      The ballad first appeared in print in 1595 and long held popular appeal in broadside form, before becoming an object of antiquarian interest when included in Reliques of Ancient English Poetry compiled by Thomas Percy (1765). Patricia Crain has traced the balladʼs “life as a printed text and its migration from the ballad canon to the childrenʼs literature canon” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries—the point at which Margaret Ruskin perceived the story as appropriate comfort for an ailing four year old. As Crain explains, these “genre and format transformations” from popular broadside to a childrenʼs book “converse[d] and coordinate[d] with shifting views and valuations of childrenʼs lives and deaths”. By 1823, the texts and illustrations designed for child readers, which would have been available to the Ruskins, included a prose revision by a pseudonymous “Clara English”, The Children in the Wood: An Instructive Tale (1801), published by Darton and Harvey. In this version, the childrenʼs death and avian burial are replaced by their rescue and training for useful work in a utopian manufacturing town (Crain, Reading Children, 44, 50–51). In another prose version, presented as a “continuation” of the story, Perfidy Detected! or, The Children in the Wood Restored, by Honestas, the Hermit of the Forest (1814), the children wandering in the woods fall into the arms of a kindly hermit, who has retreated to the forest to mourn the abduction of his own children. Not only are the children providentially discovered at the hermitage by their father, who is inexplicably alive; the hermitʼs own lost daughters are revealed and reunited with their father, as well. At the same time, the original story was preserved in a prose version published by William Darton, The Children in the Wood: A Tale for the Nursery, featuring a frontispiece showing the childrenʼs corpses strewn with leaves and guarded by the robin.
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  • [Untraced 2] “Sinbad the Sailor”
    • Discussion. See above, Untraced 1, “Children of the Wood”, for the possible simultaneous purchase of “Sinbad the Sailor” in 1823.

      The stories known as “Sinbad the Sailor” (or “Sindbad”) form part of the Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments, as the collection was familiarly entitled in Britain. In the eighteenth century, English readers were introduced to the Arabian Nights by way of France, where Antoine Galland (1646–1715) translated the stories from Arabic as Les Mille et Une Nuits (1704–17)—the first English translations based on Gallandʼs version starting to appear around 1706 (Ali, Scheherazade in England, 11). In the course of the century, the Sinbad tales, like other favorite portions of the Arabian Nights, became part of the popular literature that entertained children, though not intended specifically for them. As M. O. Grenby characterizes the development of an English childrenʼs canon, popular tales were not displaced by the new, late eighteenth‐century literature devised especially for children, but absorbed into it (Grenby, The Child Reader, 111, and see 94, 96, 109).

      Such assimilation may have came about over the objections of writers with a more exclusive plan for children—whether plans for practical education like the Edgeworthsʼ or for religious orthodoxy like Sarah Trimmerʼs—but the Arabian Nights tales seem to have been allowed exceptional approval. The objections by neoclassicists to the extravagance of Eastern tales were countered by positive comparisons of the Sinbad stories to Western classical literature, such as the voyages of Odysseus (Ali, Scheherazade in England, 22–24). Shifting ground from neoclassical aesthetics altogether, in an essay exploring how and why readers find pleasure in “well‐wrought scenes of artificial terror . . . formed by a sublime and vigorous imagination”, Mrs. Barbauld and John Aikin considered “the story of Aladdin and the travels of Sinbad . . . particularly excellent” as “examples of the terrible joined with the marvellous” (Aikin and Aikin, “On the Pleasure Derived from Objects of Terror”, 125, 126). By the first quarter of the nineteenth century, British essayists nostalgically associated the Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments with the wonder and enchantment of childhood reading, (Ali, Scheherazade in England, 38–39, 45, 65 n. 40). For the young Ruskin, an attraction to Sinbad might be explained more simply by his love of seafaring, as witnessed by his many drawings of ships, both sail and steam (see his drawings, e.g., in his copy of Day, Little Jack, and in his “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol 1” and “Harry and Lucy . . . Vol 2”).

      According to David Whitley, the first collection of tales from Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments adapted specifically for child readers, “heavily expurgated and moralised”, was published by Elizabeth Newbery (1745/46–1821) as The Oriental Moralist, or The Beauties of the Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments, Translated from the original & accompanied with suitable reflections adapted to each Story, by the Revd Mr Cooper, Author of the History of England &c. &c. &c. (ca. 1790) (Whitley, “Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments, The”; “The Oriental Moralist”). The Reverend Cooperʼs supplementing the tales “with suitable reflections” suggests the precedent of Croxallʼs annotating Aesopʼs fables “with Instructive Applications” (see Beinecke 3). An early example specifically of the Sinbad stories published for children is held by the Hockliffe Collection. Dated 1805, The Voyages of Sinbad the Sailor, with engravings, appeared as a two‐volumes‐in‐one publication drawn from the Popular Stories published by Tabart and Co. This series was edited for child readers probably by William Godwin (1756–1836) and the Sinbad may have been translated by Mary Jane Godwin, formerly Mrs. Clairmont and Godwinʼs second wife (“Fables and Fairy Tales”).



      An edition of the entirety of the Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments came into the Ruskin library, according to John Jamesʼs extant accounts, as a purchase in November 1834: “Arabian Nights 27/” (Account Book, 34v; see Burd, ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 286 n. 1). Assuming that this edition was an English translation, the most recent was The New Arabian Nightsʼ Entertainments, translated into German by Jos. von Hammer and, in turn, into English by the Reverend George Lamb. This version was published in 1826 by Colburn and Bentley, with a second edition appearing in 1829. Its advertised price of 18s for three small octavo volumes does not, however, match John Jamesʼs expenditure of 27s. The closest match with this price is a listing of 1£ 8s for a four‐volume 12mo, with engraved illustrations by Richard Westall, share‐published in 1819 by J. Booker; Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy; Rodwell & Martin; and G. & W. B. Whittaker (London Catalogue of Books . . . 1814 to 1846, 16).

      In mature writings, Ruskin frequently alluded to the Sinbad stories, especially the story of the Valley of Diamonds, on which he based lecture 1, “The Valley of Diamonds”, in The Ethics of the Dust (1866) (Ruskin, Works, 18:209–20).
  • [Untraced 3] [Stéphanie Félicité] Madame de Genlis, Tales of the Castle
    • Discussion. On 15 May 1827, Margaret Ruskin reported to John James that Johnʼs “aunt has sent him a neat second hand copy in two Vols of M Genlis Tales of the Castle I mention this lest you might think of buying them” (Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 166). This was Les Veillées du château (1784), by the comtesse de Genlis (1746–1830), which was translated into English in 1785 by Thomas Holcroft (1745–1809). Burd glosses Ruskinʼs copy as a publication of 1817—not on the basis, it seems, of a known physical copy, but on the evidence of Margaretʼs noting “two Vols” (Ruskin Family Letters, ed. Burd, 168 n. 1; see also Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 128 [no. 1004]).

      Initially, Holcroftʼs translation was published in five volumes, and sometimes four, while a two‐volume edition appears to have been published only in 1816 or 1817. The British Museum
    • N
  • [Untraced 4] Edward Baldwin, Esq. [pseud. William Godwin], Fables Ancient and Modern, Adapted for the Use of Children
    • Discussion. As discussed in contextual glosses to Leo and to Lynx in "The Constellations", strong evidence indicates that Ruskin had access to William Godwin's retelling of classic fables from Aesop, with illustrations by William Mulready. The family definitely owned two other texts published by Godwin and his second wife, Mary Jane Godwin, under the pseudonym, Edward Baldwin, as part of their "Juvenile Library" series: The History of England for the Use of Schools and Young Persons; and The Pantheon; or, Ancient History of the Gods of Greece and Rome (Dearden, Library of John Ruskin, 21 [nos. 135-36]).

      First published in 1805, Fables Ancient and Modern was a popular book, reaching ten British editions by 1824, when still under the control of the Godwins' publishing venture. In that time, several American piracies also appeared, and Mary Jane Godwin produced a version in French in 1806. Embellished with seventy-three copper engravings after Mulready's illustrations, Fables was first published in two volumes and later in a cheaper one-volume edition (Clemit, "William Godwin's Juvenile Library", 94-95; see the digitization of an 1807 edition in New York Public Library Digital Collections).

      Also popular were the two other texts in Godwins' Juvenile Library series that can be traced to the Ruskin library: The History of England, which remains physically extant in the Ruskins' copy; and The Pantheon, which is named in a catalogue of Ruskin's books. According to Dearden, the extant Ruskin copy of The History of England (held by the Southwark Local Studies Library) is an 1819 edition, inscribed 1822 on the flyleaf. In the year that the copy was inscribed--if the inscription was originally made by one of the Ruskins, and inscribed in the year of purchase--the Godwins were still operating as their own publisher and selling their Juvenile Library through their own bookshop. Until July 1822, the premises of the Juvenile Library were located at 41 Skinner Street, Snow Hill, Holborn, as appears in the publisher's imprint of the Ruskins' copy of The History of England. After July 1822, the premises moved to the Strand, where the firm continued to flourish until the financial crash of 1825 (Clemit, "William Godwin's Juvenile Library, 93).

      Since the earliest indirect evidence that Ruskin drew on Fables Ancient and Modern dates from circa late 1826 through early 1827, when he was composing "The Constellations"--a work for which he may have drawn on Godwin's The Pantheon for mythology, as well, though the textual evidence is less definite in that case--the Ruskins could have obtained copies of all three texts either as early as 1822, as suggested by the inscribed copy of The History of England, or up to four years later. Until 1825, the Ruskins may well have visited the Godwins' own shop for the Juvenile Library; in 1825 and afterward, they would have obtained their copies from Baldwin, Craddock, and Joy, the firm that bought the Juvenile Library stock following the financial crisis of that year, or from a bookseller retailing that publisher's list. While it seems bizarre to picture the Tory, evangelical Ruskins patronizing a shop belonging to a politically radical philosopher--demonized as an atheist and revolutionary, whose Juvenile Library a government agent had accused of insinuating "'by degrees'" into the minds of the nation's children "'every principle professed by the infidels and republicans of these days'"--the Godwins' books, published under various pseudonyms, achieved popularity on their own terms with a public unconscious of supposedly nefarious designs (Clemit, "William Godwin's Juvenile Library", 91, 95).