Barbara Burns talks to Dr Will Bowers (Queen Mary University of London, Co-Editor of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley (OUP)), and Dr Amy Wilcockson, the project’s MHRA Research Fellow this year.

BB. We tend to think of Percy Bysshe Shelley as the quintessential ‘Romantic genius’. He has something of a legendary reputation as a man of intense emotion and radical ideas who led an unconventional life and died tragically young. What is it about Shelley that has earned him the status of one of our most inspirational poets?

Will Bowers

WB. Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822) was a great poet and correspondent, both for his ability to write across forms (triumphant odes, lyrics, visionary poems, friendly letters, angry retorts and arguments), and because he lived through and wrote about such epochal events as the Napoleonic wars and the battle for reform in Britain. Shelley left us with influential poems and dramas such as ‘Ozymandias’, ‘The Masque of Anarchy’, and Prometheus Unbound, plus 741 letters, which have been the basis of my scholarly research over the past decade. As his complex letters attest, his relationships with other important literary figures of the Romantic period, such as the dynamic friendship he shared with the notorious Lord Byron, and his fraught marriage to Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, cement his place as a key epistolary voice of this period too.

BB. You’re working on a three-volume edition of Shelley’s letters, to be published by Oxford University Press. Can you give us a sense of the scope of this project, and of the personality that emerges from the letters?

WB. The aim of this new edition is to present the letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley for twenty-first century readers — scholars, postgraduates, and undergraduates — by providing historically accurate and comprehensively annotated texts. The edition will be published in three volumes, which will contain newly edited texts of all 741 of Shelley’s known letters. Scholars such as Timothy Webb have noted that Shelley’s letters are still too rarely recognised except as supplements for his creative work, and this is something that this edition aims to change.

The first volume begins with Shelley’s earliest letter in 1803 and covers the publication of Zastrozzi and St Irvine (his early Gothic novels), his fractious time at Oxford, his controversial elopement and marriage to the younger Harriet Westbrook, their travels around Britain and Ireland, before concluding with the Shelleys settling at Tremadog in Wales. Indeed, Volume 1, which spans the first twenty years of Shelley’s life, reveals an impetuous and occasionally very annoying young letter-writer. Despite the romantic cliches that detail Shelley railing against his unjust father, as an editor you do find yourself at times empathising with Sir Timothy Shelley for having to deal with such a dreadful teenager. Having said that, his radical philosophical correspondence with Elizabeth Hitchener and Thomas Jefferson Hogg reveals Shelley’s brilliance as a writer and thinker, which shines through in his later correspondence.

We are working too on the later volumes, which contain Shelley’s correspondences with famous figures including his second wife Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, the poets Leigh Hunt, John Keats and Lord Byron and many more.

Percy Bysshe Shelley to Thomas Jefferson Hogg, 9 May 1811, PBS 0141 (by permission of the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox, and Tilden Foundations). Until the coming of the postage stamp in 1840, it was the recipient who paid for a letter, and paid per sheet, so the polite thing was to use every square inch, and to fold and seal rather than use an envelope (which would be charged as an extra sheet). In 1811 streets were just beginning to be house-numbered throughout: Mrs Doughty, the widow of a maker of fine spinning wheels for gentlefolk, lived at number 6 Coney Street. This is now a beauty salon, but a branch of Waterstone's, a few doors along, surely has a volume or two of Shelley somewhere inside.

BB. Are there shortcomings in older scholarship that this new edition will address? Are some of Shelley’s letters still emerging from archives?

WB. There has not been a new collected version of Shelley’s letters for over sixty years, since Frederick L. Jones’s two-volume edition in 1964. Jones’s transcription is often clumsy, and his habit of standardising punctuation needlessly sanitises the letters. He was unable to access the manuscripts of nearly 150 letters he included in his volumes, particularly those in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle at the New York Public Library. Jones also took on trust the accuracy of transcripts from other published works or included short descriptions of letters rather than the full text. Since 1964, a substantial number of new Shelley letters have been discovered in archives across the world which are not included in any previous letter edition.

Our Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley will be the first to include the full texts of the Pforzheimer Collection letters and other previously excluded letters, as transcribed from the original manuscripts. Our transcription and editorial practices and principles reflect modern standards, and correct Jones’s errors, mistranscriptions, and neglect of Shelley’s cosmopolitanism. This new edition will present an entirely new Shelley to its readership: not the neat formal correspondent put forth by Jones, but an expressive, sometimes chaotic, and often conflicted writer of letters who engages deeply with European cultural tradition. The edition will also be published online on the Oxford Scholarly Editions platform, enabling greater accessibility for these letters.

BB. Will, you’re not a stranger to the MHRA, having benefitted from the same funding scheme in your early days as a postdoctoral researcher. How did your experience as an MHRA Research Associate help get you started in your academic career?

WB. I was an MHRA Postdoctoral Research Associate at Newcastle University in 2014/15, working on the Longman Annotated English Poets volumes of The Poems of Shelley with Professor Michael Rossington. I had a wonderful time at Newcastle, and this role gave me both my first experience of postdoctoral work and of textual editing from manuscript. It provided the foundation of my research and teaching career.

BB. Amy, you began your work as an MHRA Research Fellow in October. Can you tell us a bit about your educational background and how that led you to become involved in this project?

Amy Wilcockson

AW. I first became interested in the Romantic poets as I’m from Nottinghamshire and took regular trips as a child to Byron’s Newstead Abbey. An English degree, combined with buying too many books on Byron and Shelley from the Newstead gift shop, led to my later PhD study in Romantic-period correspondence. This research focused on the letters of Thomas Campbell, a Scottish poet who had networks across the literary, political and cultural world, and who seemed to know just about everyone in the early-mid nineteenth century. After I finished my PhD, my first postdoctoral experience was working at the University of Glasgow on a project assisting with the editing of the poems of Robert Fergusson. I have a lot of experience editing Romantic-period texts and have always been a huge Shelley fan. When this job opportunity came up, I had to apply! It is not just the chance to work on a major new edition which is so exciting, but the opportunity to work alongside Will and the wider editorial team. I am learning a lot from them and really enjoying all the literary detective work I am doing at the moment.

The signature of Percy B. Shelley is perhaps a little studied: a slanting italic penmanship was expected of an Eton boy

BB. Can you give us a flavour of the work you’re doing on the project?

AW. My biggest task so far has been to complete a huge census document which details all of Shelley’s letters. There are a few letters remaining which were thought lost or have not been seen in over a hundred years. I have been contacting libraries and archives (over 700 so far), attempting to locate any missing or previously unknown letters. We have found some letters which have never been published before, and many of the missing letters, but there are still a few more to go!

Will has also been very supportive in encouraging me to apply for further fellowships and grants which allow for international travel to access and transcribe Shelley letters. I have been awarded a Keats-Shelley Association of America Carl H. Pforzheimer Research Grant and hope to travel to US archives in the coming months. I am also starting to edit letters, which I have been really looking forward to.

BB. What further benefits have you reaped as a result of being based at QMUL? Have you managed to get any teaching experience?

AW. I have really been enjoying engaging with the Queen Mary Centre for Eighteenth-Century Studies, which is an interdisciplinary research centre across the arts and humanities with a broad range of topics and focuses. I have been a regular attendee at the Centre’s research seminar which runs every fortnight or so in term-time. In October, I was invited to give a paper on my own research. It was useful to get feedback on my work from my new colleagues, and to meet everyone involved in the Centre straight away.

I have been given the opportunity to teach on the second-year specialist Romanticism module. A highlight was lecturing on Frankenstein the same week as the new Netflix film came out; the room was packed! The Letters team are also delivering a specialist panel at the forthcoming international British Association for Romantic Studies Conference in July, and I am very excited to be representing the project then.

BB. How would each of you sum up why this project is important?

WB. The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley aims to meet the demand for a meticulously edited, up-to-date edition which sustains and renews interest in Shelley as a letter writer and in Romantic letter-writing at large. The edition will enable readers and scholars fully to recognise and appreciate the value of Shelley’s letters in their own right.

AW. This edition will be the basis for future scholarship on Shelley and also for the wider Romantic period. It will contain more information on Shelley and his letter-writing than any other resource. Will and the editorial team have been working hard too on providing a large amount of information not just in the explanatory notes to the letters, but in appendices that are full of freshly examined manuscript sources. The edition will be a huge achievement, and I am thrilled to be a small part of it thanks to the MHRA.

Will Bowers is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Literature and Thought at Queen Mary University of London. His first book, The Italian Idea, was published by Cambridge University Press in 2020 and won a first book prize from the European Society for the Study of English. He has published numerous articles on Romantic poetry and culture and was an editor on the final volumes of the Longman Poems of Shelley (2024). He is currently preparing the three-volume edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley for Oxford University Press, alongside an edition of William Cowper’s Poems, Hymns and Letters for Oxford World’s Classics.

Amy Wilcockson is MHRA Research Fellow at Queen Mary University of London, assisting with the new edition of The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley. Prior to this role, she was a Research Assistant at the University of Glasgow, on ‘The Works of Robert Fergusson: Reconstructing Textual and Cultural Legacies’ project. Her edition of the selected letters of the neglected Scottish Romantic poet Thomas Campbell (1777-1844) is forthcoming with Liverpool University Press.

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