London: J.M. Dent, 1935

12mo, pp. 380. Original orange boards, lettered in gilt to spine. Publisher's device blind-stamped to front board. Decorated endpapers. Foyles bookseller's label to front pastedown. Gilt faded at spine, which is worn and marked. Corners a little bumped, and lacking the dust jacket.

1935 reprint of the 1905 Everyman edition. THE 20-YEAR-OLD EDWARD BOND'S COPY, WITH HIS ELABORATE OWNERSHIP SIGNATURE (1955) TO FRONT FREE ENDPAPER, AND HIS PENCILLED VERSES TO FRONT PASTEDOWN AND REAR ENDPAPER.

Edward Bond's austere world outlook and writing style both set in early. The untitled poem to the front pastedown, signed 'T[homas]B' and dated 9 June 1955 begins: 'There is a need we should not be | Conceived in violence -- | When we are born there shall be pain | More than that is not [?]sane.' The revised three-stanza poem to the rear endpaper is titled 'Study', and begins: 'What shall we learn? Who is to teach? | Masters have to forget | Thought solves itself -- no more than that | It has found nothing yet.'

Bond left school at the age of fifteen in 1949; his first theatre credit was The Pope's Wedding, staged by the Royal Court theatre in London in 1962, with whose young writers' group he'd been working since 1958. This volume of Ruskin, seemingly acquired during the last year of his National Service, dates from the mid-1950s, a period of intense self-education for Bond, and carries some of his earliest, unpublished verse.