The System of Title Citation for Manuscripts
The Apparatus Page for each manuscript begins with a section, “Title,” which discusses the name of that manuscript—a more or less complicated topic,
depending on how many naming systems have been applied to the manuscript in question. The most familiar system historically,
and therefore the one adopted most pervasively in
ERM for hyperlinking purposes,
derives from
W. G. Collingwoodʼs bibliographical practice in
Poems (1891).
Another system derives from
Ruskinʼs own practices of naming the manuscripts, whether in youth or old age.
Because neither of these practices was consistent and comprehensive, the traditions of naming the manuscripts require to be supplemented.
In youth, when
Ruskin was working with his manuscripts, his names for them tended to be either generic—as
in the term
red book,
which applied to a class of small, reddish‐brown bound notebooks used for the earliest juvenilia—or derived
from a work contained in the manuscript. For example, in
March 1829,
Ruskin wrote to his father:
“I am trying to get that red book of mine which has the
Monastery in it finished, by the time you come home,”
referring both to
MS III and to
a work,
“The Monastery”, included in the notebook.
The work,
Ruskinʼs versification of the novel by
Walter Scott, is not the most prominent piece contained in the
Red Book,
but it happened to be uppermost in
Ruskinʼs mind at the time.
In many of the initially blank, bound notebooks and ledgers that
Ruskin typically used to draft or fair copy his work—he
also used loose sheets of paper, or pamphlets folded and sewn by hand
(see
Overview of Manuscripts)—he dedicated the notebook initially to a major work,
for which he devised a decorated title page.
For example,
MS I,
MS III, and
MS IIIA, begin with volumes 1, 2, and 3,
respectively, of
“Harry and Lucy”. Presumably, in these cases,
Ruskin referred to the manuscript by the title of its major work, using that title interchangeably
for the text of the work and for the physical manuscript witnessing its fair copy.
Thus, when
Ruskin announces in a
14 January 1832 letter that
“Iteriad” is at last finished, quite copied in, fairly dismissed,”
and that he has “put such a finis” with “innumerable flourishes with which it is decorated and the paper loaded
you would think there never was to be a beginning of that end,” he clearly means that he has “copied in” the work,
“Iteriad”, into the bound notebook that
Collingwood would later designate as
MS VII, and “decorated” and “loaded” the “paper” of the physical object in order to celebrate
completion of the text of the poem. The title
“Iteriad” applied equally to the text of the poem and to its fair‐copy manuscript.
Such coterminous titles could not have been stable, however. We do not know what
Ruskin called the notebook containing the fair copy of
“Iteriad” when, over time, he subjected this notebook,
like so many of his manuscripts, to additional uses. In this case, he followed
“Iteriad” in
MS VII with a fair copy of a new, but never‐completed epic poem,
“Athens”. Later, still more works were fair‐copied into this ledger.
Titles of manuscripts could shift with their uses. The handmade pamphlet now known as
MS II shows “Vol 1” scrawled on the top right corner of its first recto.
The designation appears as an afterthought, inserted into a space next to the title of the first poem
of this little anthology. What the name of the manuscript means is obscure: other, complementary “volumes” may have existed,
but it is just as likely that the pamphlet only temporarily occupied the position of first in a putative series that remained only an idea.
Titles could also be kept deliberately open‐ended. On the first blank recto of the notebook now known as
MS V,
Ruskin wrote the heading,
“Miscellaneous Poetry,” and numbered this recto as page 1. As a title for the anthology of poems contained in the notebook,
“Miscellaneous Poetry” became intriguingly coterminous for both the text of the anthology and for the physical notebook containing the text,
when
Ruskinʼs
father inserted below
Johnʼs title the attribution,
“By
J. Ruskin from 10 years to 11 to 12 to [. . .] of age”—the ellipsis representing a gap that
John James left to be filled in,
as the anthology progressed. Thus, the collaborative title—along with the text of the anthology—remained open‐ended,
as the text advanced toward the physical limits
of the notebook that defined the scope of the anthology.
John James never completed his portion of the title
because
Ruskin never filled the notebook—the unpunctuated
final line, “Away and away,” of the last poem added to the anthology trailing off into the blankness of remaining pages.
Even when
Ruskinʼs usage of a title is documented consistently over time,
the evidence may be unclear to what the title refers.
In letters of
1832 and
1835,
Ruskin mentioned his
“mineralogical dictionary,”
and both the title and (roughly) the dates of composition held good decades later,
when in
1864 Ruskin referred to having “written a
Mineralogical Dictionary,”
for which he “invented a shorthand symbolism for crystalline forms,
before [he] was fourteen”. Again, in
1875, in
Deucalion, he wanted readers to know that he
“began when . . . only twelve years old, a
Mineralogical Dictionary,
written in a shorthand composed of crystallographic signs now entirely unintelligble to me.”
Finally, in
1885 in
Praeterita, he remembered that his “fifteenth birthday gift” of
Voyages dans les Alpes,
by
Horace Bénédict de Saussure, assisted him in “carrying on [his]
mineralogical dictionary”
(
Burd ed., Ruskin Family Letters, 263, 311;
Ruskin, Works, 26:553, 97; 35:121).
In the
1930s, when
Charles Goodspeed purchased
“Early Geology” included in lot 27 of
Sothebyʼs Sale of Ruskin Manuscripts and Library, 1931,
he did not hesitate to advertise this manuscript for sale as
Ruskinʼs “Mineralogical Dictionary”
Goodspeedʼs Book Shop, A Catalogue of Paintings, Drawings and Manuscripts by John Ruskin, 20;
and see
Sotheby & Co., Catalogue of the Final Portion of the Manuscripts & Library of John Ruskin, 6).
But while this manuscript does include portions written in a boyhood “shorthand symbolism,”
it shows no title; and this manuscript, or compilation of manuscripts, which was bound in red buckram at some point during preparation of the
Library Edition and labeled
Early Geology on the spine
may or may not include what
Ruskin meant in
1832 and/or
1835 by his
“mineralogical dictionary”—or even in
1864,
1875, or
1885.
(Another example of
Ruskin exhibiting different ideas at different times about his early manuscripts is his docketing of some of the
Red Books in
1870, using a numbering scheme guided by some purpose that can now only guessed at).
Perhaps owing to an awareness of these ambiguities, or perhaps just for the sake of simplicity,
W. G. Collingwood was led in
1891 to found a numerical system of identifying the early manuscripts.
In the
“Preliminary Note on the Original MSS. of the Poems,” appended to his edition of
Ruskinʼs poetry,
the
Poems (1891),
Collingwood compiled the first systematic descriptive bibliography of selected early manuscripts,
and he identified these manuscripts according to a sequence of Roman numerals
(Poems [4o, 1891], 1:261–67;
Poems [8o, 1891], 1:262–68).
The primary purpose of this descriptive bibliography was to explain and justify a chronological order of the manuscripts,
supplying a “justification of the hypothetical dates assigned to some of the poems”
(Poems [4o, 1891], 1:261;
Poems [8o, 1891], 1:262–63).
The Roman numerals reenforced this idea of a proven chronology.
Collingwoodʼs scheme was elaborated by subsequent editors.
A decade after the
Poems (1891),
the editors of the
Library Edition,
E. T. Cook (1857–1919) and
Alexander Wedderburn (1854–1931),
carried forward with
Collingwoodʼs nomenclature by reprinting and expanding his
“Note” as an appendix to
the
Poems, volume 2 (
1902) of the
Works.
In
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs “Notes on the Original MSS. of the Poems [Revised and Completed from the Edition of 1891],”
the editors accounted for manuscripts that
Collingwood had omitted by inserting new descriptions
and designating them with a Roman numeral plus an English alphabet letter.
In this way, the editors attempted to maintain
Collingwoodʼs chronological order, inserting the new item into its appropriate place in the numerical order
Thus, for example, they inserted
MS IA and
MS IB between the manuscripts that
Collingwood had numbered
MS I and
MS II, because the earliest work contained in
MS IA and
MS IB as a whole appeared to fall chronologically into that position.
Collingwoodʼs aim of representing a chronological order of manuscripts
could never have achieved more than an approximation of the manuscriptsʼ sequence, since several of the bound manuscripts overlap one another
in the chronological range of their contents. His sequence is also erroneous in parts owing to misdating of some manuscripts.
Most problematically,
Collingwood decided from the start to omit from the
“Note” those manuscripts containing exclusively prose,
as these seemed to him irrelevant to the project of editing the
Poems (1891).
Presumably,
Collingwood intended ultimately to supply a corresponding nomenclature for manuscripts to be included in a complementary edition of the
early prose, but this project never came to pass
(see
History of Bibliography and Editing of the Early Manuscripts).
As a result, arbitrary and misleading limitations were built into the scope of
Collingwoodʼs bibliography,
confusions that
Cook and
Wedderburn perpetuated by confining their revision of
Collingwoodʼs “Note” to manuscripts containing poetry,
and relegating prose manuscripts to the
Bibliography, volume 39 (
1912) of the
Works.
In
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs bibliography, the early prose manuscripts known to them appear in division III,
“Catalogue of Ruskin MSS.”,
section B, “Diaries and Note-Books” (as opposed to manuscripts of published works, in section A), subsection
b, “Note-Books, Etc.”
(
Ruskin, Works, 39:205–6).
The prose manuscripts are assigned discursive titles, rather than Roman numerals, such as “Sermon Book (
1827),”
“Mineralogical Dict. (
1831)”, and
“Juvenilia”. The latter title subsumes three early notebooks, collected together and separated without explanation from other prose manuscripts of the
1820s–30s listed under their own titles; presumably, the editors associated them, because all three are
Red Books. These three notebooks are given brief descriptions rather than titles
(in
ERM, the three notebooks correspond, respectively, to
MS Juvenilia A,
MS Juvenilia B, and
MS Juvenilia C).
Elsewhere in
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs bibliography, the editors list “Minor Writings” that are quoted thoughout the
Works,
including brief “extracts” from “Juvenilia” (some prose, some poetry)
(
Ruskin, Works, 39:92).
One solution to this complexity would be to scrap
Collingwoodʼs nomenclature, and start anew with a corrected and comprehensive system,
but this drastic move would cause unnecessary confusion.
More than a centuryʼs accumulation of scholarship has relied on the nomenclature in
Collingwoodʼs “Note” as expanded in the
Library Edition.
Moreover, the
“Note”, however faulty, retains considerable historical interest, as
Collingwood compiled it when
Ruskin was still alive;
and while the ill and elderly
Ruskin is unlikely to contributed in any extensive way to this descriptive bibliography,
one cannot discount the possibility that the
“Note” conveys some of
Ruskinʼs own
ideas about the preservation and classification of these manuscripts.
Even if
Ruskin played no part at all in
Collingwoodʼs editing of the
Poems (1891),
the involvement of the fin de siècle Brantwood circle in the project is just as significant.
Helen Gill Viljoenʼs solution was to compile her own version of
Collingwoodʼs “Note”, in competition with
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs version.
In her typescript, “Dating MSS. of Boyhood”, a descriptive bibliography that she attached as “Appendix VII”
to her unfinished biography of
Ruskin, “Dark Star”
(
1930–48, in
“Helen Gill Viljoen Papers”),
Viljoen continued
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs practice in the
Library Edition of fitting additional manuscripts into
Collingwoodʼs
Roman‐numeral scheme of chronological sequence; for example,
the “Sermon Book” that
Cook and
Wedderburn list in their
bibliography
(III.B.
b [
Ruskin, Works, 39:206])
becomes MSS No. II.A, B, C, D, and E, containing the
Sermons on the Pentateuch.
Viljoenʼs item is expanded to include all five of these handmade pamphlets, only one of which was known to
Cook and
Wedderburn;
and she situates it following
MS II, another handmade pamphlet with sermon content, and which
Collingwood had included in his original
“Note”.
Reverential of
Collingwood as
Viljoen was, she recognized that his original
“Note” contained dating errors;
and so in order to preserve his Roman‐numeral nomenclature, while also correcting, yet remaining faithful to the spirit of his chronological ordering of manuscripts,
Viljoen layered a Roman‐numeral
reordering over top of
Collingwoodʼs original Roman‐numeral designations.
Thus, “Dating MSS. of Boyhood” proposes a sequence identifying manuscripts as follows:
- I. MS No. I
- II. MS No. IA
- III. MS No. III
- IV. MS No. IIIA
- V. MS No. II
- VI. MSS Nos. IIA, B, C, D, E
- VII. MS No. IV
And so on, in which the first Roman numeral in a given entry represents
Viljoenʼs attempt a chronological reordering,
while the second (the manuscript number per se) is drawn either from
Collingwoodʼs original scheme or represents
Viljoenʼs insertion
of a manuscript into that scheme. (
Viljoen wanted nothing to do with
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs insertions, so she ignored their assignation of
“MS IA”
to the collection of manuscripts that they bound under that name, and instead assigned
“MS IA” to the manuscript of
“The Puppet Show”, which
Cook and
Wedderburn
called
“MS IB”.)
Whatever the other merits of
Viljoenʼs “Dating MSS. of Boyhood,” her solution for naming and numbering manuscripts fails to lend clarity to what
was already a losing proposition of ordering objects linearly that
Ruskin did not use in that fashion.
He protracted use of some manuscripts over several years,
and he overwrote others, building up layers of chronological sequence within a given manuscript.
Fortunately, electronic publication provides alternatives to linear ordering
(see
Plan of the Archive).
As for
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs and
Viljoenʼs accretions of manuscript designations to
Collingwoodʼs “Note”,
the practice in
ERM is, in any case, to document fully as possible the history of naming manuscripts and works in the “Title” sections
of apparatuses, while for hyperlinking purposes to use short titles for which a clear trail exists in bibliography and scholarship.
Therefore, manuscripts are designated by Roman numeral if they were assigned one either in
Collingwoodʼs
“Note”,
or in
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs revision of the
“Note” for the
Library Edition.
Since
Viljoenʼs additional Roman‐numeral designations (and even
redesignation, in one case) were never published,
ERM prefers the short discursive titles established in
Cook and
Wedderburnʼs bibliography (III.B.
b),
titles that typically are also reflected in the provenance of modern bindings, sales catalogs, and library catalogs for the collections that ultimately
preserved these manuscripts.