Alan M. Weinberg, ed., The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts Volume XXII: Percy Bysshe Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Part One (Bodleian MS. Shelley adds. d. 6); Part Two (Bodleian Shelley adds. c. 5). New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997. ISBN: 0815311575. Price: US$375. Donald H. Reiman and Michael O'Neill, eds., Fair-Copy Manuscripts of Shelley's Poems in European and American Libraries. The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics: Percy Bysshe Shelley Volume VIII. New York and London: Garland Publishing, 1997. ISBN: 0815311516. Price: US$260.

The nearly 800 pages of Volume XXII of the Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts bring the series to a close, apart from the index volume which at the present time of writing has yet to appear. The two parts into which the material of Volume XXII is divided have required considerably different editorial treatment. The editing of the notebook (MS Shelley adds. d. 6) into which Mary W. Shelley transcribed copies of her late husband's prose works in a legible hand is an altogether less arduous affair than that required by the papers grouped in the volume that forms Part II. Alan Weinberg's labours in presenting and commenting upon the number and variety of MSS contained in the box of miscellaneous papers designated as MS. Shelley adds. c. 5 is likened by the general editor Donald H. Reiman to "sorting and packing the contents of medicine cabinets and desk drawers". And in common with the usual contents of such receptacles the items in box c. 5 derive from various sources and sort oddly with their fellows. Almost all the surviving pages of the d. 6 notebook are devoted to MWS's transcription of the holograph MS of the uncompleted A Philosophical View of Reform. Little else in the notebook (nearly 2/3 of its pages have been removed) survives intact. The greater part of the transcriptions appear to have been made in 1822-23 with the intention of preparing for publication a companion-volume to Posthumous Poems (1824); but when that volume of poems was withdrawn under menaces from Sir Timothy Shelley, the project for a collection of PBS's prose was abandoned. Some few transcriptions, which follow APVR in the notebook, would appear to have been made much later, in 1839. A detailed table of contents and the close scrutiny of the surviving stubs of torn-out pages provide the basis for some painstaking editorial reconstruction of the missing transcriptions. Obviously, the principal feature of the notebook to command attention is MWS's transcription of PBS's unfinished draft of APVR, his most substantial political essay, which dates from the period late 1819 to early 1820. As Weinberg points out, her transcription may fairly be regarded as the first 'edition' of the work—in the sense that it represents her efforts to recover from an unfinished and unrevised source a text which she intended to print as part of a volume of PBS's prose. Her attempt to produce a reading text, though far from perfectly consistent with what would now be regarded as acceptable editorial practice, constitutes an important document for any future project to establish an edition of APVR. Weinberg accompanies his transcription of hers with a commentary the chief feature of which is a collation with PBS's holograph draft now in the Pforzheimer collection and transcribed by Donald H. Reiman in Shelley and His Circle VI 962-1065. MS Shelley adds. c. 5 is a collection of documents of various dates largely in the hand of MWS which were included in the gift of MSS by Sir John Shelley-Rolls to the Bodleian Library in 1946. The most important of the sixteen items would seem to be: a series of inserts intended for The Fields of Fancy, the original version of MWS's novella Mathilda; a fair copy in MWS's hand, continued in PBS's, of the earlier portion of his tale The Coliseum; the surviving MS of the 'Fragment of a Romance'(The Assassins) which is written by both the Shelleys in a mixture of fair-copy and draft and which MWS published in edited form in Essays, Letters from Abroad, Translations and Fragments (1840). …