1882 MARY SHELLEY & PERCY SHELLEY. A Unique Typescript of the Dowden-Wise MSs - Frankenstein, Lord Byron, & More.

An extremely rare, likely one-off typescript of Shelley and Mary, one of the most historically significant and rare private primary textual archives in nineteenth-century English literary studies. Originally printed in 1882 by Percy Bysshe Shelley’s son, Sir Percy Florence Shelley, and daughter-in-law, Lady Jane Shelley, in an extraordinarily restricted run of roughly twelve copies for private family circulation, Shelley and Mary compiled the original, unedited joint journals, notebooks, and intimate correspondence of Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley from their 1814 elopement through Percy’s death in 1822.

This typescript of the 1939 rotograph photographic facsimile edition represents a pivotal moment in American literary scholarship. It made an otherwise inaccessible, heavily guarded family archive available to researchers, bypassing decades of Victorian family censorship and controlling the foundational evidence of second-generation Romanticism.

The correspondence collection serves as the central documentary backbone for understanding the entire second-generation Romantic circle. Because Lady Jane Shelley actively worked to cultivate a sanitized Victorian "legend" around Percy and Mary, suppressing scandals involving Harriet Westbrook, Claire Clairmont, and Lord Byron, biographers like Edward Dowden relied heavily on curated access to the present texts. The unvarnished journal entries and correspondence in Shelley and Mary detail the daily intellectual, financial, and emotional ecosystem binding the Shelleys to figures like Lord Byron, William Godwin, Leigh Hunt, Thomas Love Peacock, Edward Trelawny, and Claire Clairmont. By preserving unredacted exchanges, the archive allows scholars to trace real-time creative cross-pollination, political debates, personal fallouts, and shared reading lists across the entire movement without relying on secondhand Victorian romanticization.

Of special interest, the primary material within Shelley and Mary is indispensable in developing an authorial understanding of Mary Shelley's gothic classic, Frankenstein. The daily journals and letters spanning 1816 to 1818 capture the exact chronology of the novel’s genesis. They document the atmospheric summer of 1816 at the Villa Diodati near Lake Geneva, the famous ghost-story contest proposed by Lord Byron, and Mary's recorded waking nightmare that spawned the Creature. Crucially, these papers reveal the intimate reading regimen Mary pursued while writing the novel, spanning Locke, Rousseau, Milton, Lucretius, and contemporary scientific works by Humphry Davy and Erasmus Darwin, proving the deep philosophical rigor underlying her masterpiece. Furthermore, the textual record clarifies the nature of Percy Shelley’s editorial participation in the draft, showing his inline suggestions and critical feedback while cementing Frankenstein as distinctively Mary’s original conceptual vision shaped within a rich collaborative dialogue.

The typescript was supervised by Professor Frederick L. Jones of Mercer University, being painstakingly typed by hand from 1933 to 1939. The handwritten corrections, notations, and commentary throughout the text almost certainly by Jones himself, spanning the entirety of the more than 1200 folio pages.. He would go on to become one of the most influential Shelley scholars of the 20th century, authoring or editing The Letters of Mary Shelley [1944]; Mary Shelley's Journal [1947]; Mary Shelley and Maria Gisborne. New Letters [1955]; Shelley's Friends. Their Journals and Letters [1951]; An Examination of the Shelley Legend [1951]; The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley [1964]; etc. All of these works share one thing in common; they share the present typescript as their genetic parent. Whether another example exists is uncertain. We have been unable to locate one; this likely the typescript overseen by Jones and the only extant typescript of the Shelley and Mary in existence. 

Each volume signed by Donald H. Reiman [d.2019], to whom it likely passed after Jones' death. He would become the author of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Twayne], co-editor of Shelley and His Circle [Harvard Press]; co-editor of Shelley's Poetry and Prose [W. W. Norton]; editor The Romantics Reviewed, The Romantic Context: Poetry, General Editor of Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics and The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts [Garland Publishing]; editor The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley [Johns Hopkins University Press] etc. etc. 

Three large folios, containing:

[Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Frankenstein] Shelley and Mary. Volume I & Volume II. An Exact Page-by Page Reproduction of the Dowden-Wise-British Museum Copy of the Original Book. Made from the Modern Language Association Rotograph No. 278, on Deposit in the Library of Congress. Mercer University, Supervised by Frederick L. Jones. 1939. For Private Circulation Only. 466pp. 

[With]

[Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Frankenstein] Shelley and Mary. Volume III. An Exact Page-by Page Reproduction of the Dowden-Wise-British Museum Copy of the Original Book. Made from the Modern Language Association Rotograph No. 278, on Deposit in the Library of Congress. Mercer University, Supervised by Frederick L. Jones. 1939. For Private Circulation Only. 467-908pp. 

[With]

[Mary Shelley, Percy Shelley, Frankenstein] Shelley and Mary. Volume IV. An Exact Page-by Page Reproduction of the Dowden-Wise-British Museum Copy of the Original Book. Made from the Modern Language Association Rotograph No. 278, on Deposit in the Library of Congress. Mercer University, Supervised by Frederick L. Jones. 1939. For Private Circulation Only. 909-1243pp. 

Bound in buckram with faux marbled endpapers by National Library Bindery, c.1939/1940. Cloth has some light wear and bumping with some surface stains as shown. Contents exceptionally clean with exception of the original MSs notes inserted. Irreplaceable.