Mary Shelley, Life of William Godwin

Announcement of Forthcoming Edition 1999

Edited by Judith Barbour

Professor Margaret Harris and Dr Judith Barbour in the Department of English, University of Sydney, together with Dr Creagh Cole in the University of Sydney's Fisher Library Scholarly Electronic Text and Imaging Service (SETIS), and with the research and editorial assistance of Dr Clara Tuite, in the Department of English and Cultural Studies, University of Melbourne, and Dr Gerard Goggin in the School of English, Media and Cultural Studies at Southern Cross University, NSW, are preparing an electronic edition of previously unpublished 18th and 19th-century manuscripts and microfilms of Mary Shelley's Life of William Godwin (composed in the years 1836 to 1840). The project engages scholarly text-editing of primary sources and archival texts, and research in eighteenth-century, Romantic and Victorian literature and their historical, cultural, and print-technology contexts. The project has theoretical implications in the application of theories of textual editing, and beyond its basic aim of making this work available in an appropriate form, undertakes a pilot study for further scholarly editions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary texts from primary manuscript and unpublished sources.

The World-Wide Web medium offers features uniquely suited to the electronic editing of this text, and thus we intend to use the hypertext structure of the edition to offer innovative ways of collating its diverse elements. The source text of the edition in preparation is in the Abinger Shelley-Godwin Manuscripts deposited in the Bodleian Library, Oxford, and standard copyright and acknowledgment conditions apply to citation and reproduction of these materials. Formal acknowledgment is due to their owner, Lord Abinger, for his permission to transcribe, edit, and publish the manuscripts. Permission was not given for photographic reproduction on the Internet of images or original handwritings in the Abinger collection.

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Mary Shelley's Life of William Godwin is an incomplete biography of a major author of the Enlightenment by his daughter, a major Romantic author. The working title 'Life of William Godwin' was affixed some time ago by the Bodleian to a sheaf of papers dated 1835 to 1839, the majority in the handwriting of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, forming an 'unfinished' and 'abortive' biographical memoir of her late father. In July 1836, Godwin s widow Mary Jane signed a contract with publisher Henry Colburn [Bodleian, MS. Eng. lett. c. 461, fol. 153] for a two-volume 'Memoirs and Correspondence of the late William Godwin', to be written by Mary Shelley, who referred to it while it was in preparation as 'my Father's Life'. At this period, she was 'Mrs Shelley', widow of the poet Shelley, mother of the heir to a baronetcy and daughter of a famous but questionable marriage - that of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, to William Godwin, author of An Enquiry concerning Political Justice.

There is no evidence that Mary Shelley worked on the Life later than May 1840. The single volume which she then announced - though she might still decide to withdraw certain letters - is an 'Early Life' of Godwin, from entering Hoxton College as a student for the dissenting ministry in 1773 to publishing his Memoirs and a Posthumous Works of Mary Wollstonecraft in 1798. It stops short of his second marriage, Mary s childhood, and the entry into the Godwin family of son-in-law Percy Bysshe Shelley. Mary Shelley herself casts only a faint shadow on her script, occasionally speaking of 'my father' and confirming that he adhered to this or that early opinion 'to the end of his life'. It is a decorous biography, glancing from recent personal intercourse to the textually accommodated distant past which is now history.

The E-text project has theoretical implications in the application of theories of textual editing, and is a pilot study for further scholarly editions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary texts from primary manuscript and unpublished sources. The attraction of Mary Shelley's text for a complex and flexible technology of editorial presentation and annotation lies in the fact that it is an incomplete, informal series of scripts. Because of its fragmentary nature, and the existence of a body of related manuscript material, it is particularly suitable for hypertext presentation. A wordprocessor edition has been established by Dr Judith Barbour, with Dr Clara Tuite s assistance in 1992-1994. The task of transcribing the manuscripts and reels has occupied research trips to Oxford over ten years. The challenge now is to present the fruits of this research in a manner which responds to the nature of the material. The primary sources, in this case, are the more than thirty separate Bodleian folders of papers in Mary Shelley's, Mary Jane Godwin's, and William Godwin's hands, as well as miscellaneous papers in other hands. These materials have been collated, redistributed, annotated and culled, by a succession of private editors and literary executors, including Charles Kegan Paul in 1873 and 1876, Richard Garnett in the 1880s, members of the Shelley family, and 20th-century scholars such as Newman Ivey White (see below), until finally received and listed at the Bodleian.

The copying of materials from The Shelley -Godwin Collection of Lord Abinger on to microfilm reels was begun in 1948 by the late Professor Newman Ivey White, and subsequently completed under the supervision of Miss Marion Kingston in 1952. These were catalogued for the Perkins library of Duke University, Durham, N. C. by Professor Lewis Patton in 1953. [See Lewis Patton, 'The Shelley-Godwin collection of Lord Abinger',Library Notes, No. 27 (April 1953), pp. 11-17. Annotated copy kept in Bodleian, Duke Humfrey's Library open shelves, R. 6. 112a]. Eleven of the sixteen microfilm reels of The Shelley Godwin-Collection from the Perkins Library at Duke University, Durham NC have been consulted by the present editors, and in some places are the copy text of the wordprocessor edition. None of the manuscripts contained in the Bodleian folders labelled 'Mary Shelley's Life of William Godwin' (Dep. c.606/1-5), have been identified on the White/Patton film archive, which is numbered differently in the Bodleian and Perkins Libraries.

Since 1974, the notebooks and folders of loose papers which constitute the Abinger collection have been deposited on loan at the Bodleian in successive batches by Lord Abinger, the latest so far in 1993. The folders of papers have not been rearranged, but they have been allocated 'Dep.' shelfmarks and briefly listed by the staff of the Department of Western Manuscripts (now Department of Special Collections and Western Manuscripts), primarily at first by the late Miss Margaret Crum and subsequently by Dr. Bruce Barker-Benfield. The deposited originals include some materials which are either not included on the microfilm reels, or are at least hard or

impossible to identify as coherent groups on the films, in view of apparent changes in arrangement between the filming of 1948-52 and deposit at the Bodleian in 1974-93.

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In 1992 with publication of William Godwin s Autobiographies, and Autobiographical Notes and Fragments, edited by Dr Mark Philp from the Abinger Shelley-Godwin MSS (London: William Pickering, 1992), the extent of overlap between the Mary Shelley holograph manuscripts labelled Life of William Godwin , and the much larger archive labelled William Godwin , or Miscellaneous began to emerge. Dr Philp has precedence in first publication of Godwin's autobiographies, including several sections of his text where Godwin's original is no longer extant, and Mary Shelley's copies of Godwin's originals as part of her script for Life of William Godwin have become Philp's copy-text. Only the nucleus of the script in Mary Shelley s holograph was found to be contained in the five labelled folders Dep. c.606/1-5. An unascertainable number of original letters, memoranda and other documents in Godwin s and other hands were transcribed in part or whole by Mary Shelley for incorporation into her script, or (more frequently) attached to it by pins, and numbered in sequence with her commentary. These have at some past time been removed to other folders, often with original signatures cut off. Over forty of these letters have been reentered in the wordprocessor edition where the context is prepared in Mary Shelley s commentary and her numbering of sequences acts as a clue.

The wordprocessor copy presents the text page by manuscript page, indicating Bodleian shelf-number and distinguishing Mary Shelley s numbering systems from others. The endnotes contain reference information and bibliographical data. These editorial supplements are yet to be ordered into a comprehensive guide to analysis of the text and to scrutiny of its editorial ordering. The integrity of each chapter , consisting as it does of manuscripts brought together from different Bodleian folders and microfilm reels, remains to be established. The next stage is to proceed to systematic coding of data of watermarks, paper types, handwriting, reel and shelf numbers, page numbers and numbered sequences, cancellations, interpolations, and marginalia of differing provenance. Hypertext will provide readers with supplementary and relevant MS and microfilm reel transcriptions that cannot strictly speaking be entered in Mary Shelley s text, as for instance, when Shelley quotes or paraphrases part of a letter or other document and the original is located intact among the folders or reels.

It will be necessary to establish a consistent editorial policy, achieving accurate definition of a fragmentary and self-revising text, registering a standard of 'authorial intention', and making decisions about whether to include or marginalise doubtful items. Our contention is that this challenge is best met by electronic techniques of differentiating and layering contexts of reading, investigating, and interpreting the text.

To test this contention, in March 1998, Dr Creagh Cole, Coordinator of SETIS, collaborated with Dr Barbour on setting the first chapter as a prototype of the proposed six-chapter edition and placing it on SETIS website at: http://setis.library.usyd.edu.au/artsworks/godwin.html

This trial run has been helpful in estimating the time required to mark up the text, and to identify matters that will need editorial decision, such as whether to annotate names of people and places occurring in Godwin s letters and journal entries, many of which are hitherto unpublished, or to confine annotations to Mary Shelley s script. For this prototype we opted for Text Editing Initiative (TEI) tagging, which can then be used more fully to encode such aspects of the text in order to prepare the full critical edition. The chapter 1 prototype on the SETIS carrier presented the text and endnotes of the wordprocessor copy without any textual or critical apparatus and has now been withdrawn.

The title-page of the forthcoming edition states as follows:

Mary Shelley, Life of William Godwin/ Edited by Judith Barbour, with the assistance of Clara Tuite./Chapters: 1: literature 2: politics 3: law 4: pedagogy 5: women 6: writing / Introduction by Judith Barbour: A well known literary character . Quotations and transcriptions from The Shelley -Godwin Collection of Lord Abinger in the Bodleian Library, Oxford and in microfilms of the Perkins Library of Duke University, Durham NC appear with the kind permission of Lord Abinger. In quoting from the edition, citations of the Bodleian shelf deposit number of each paper and sequence of papers in the text are required in the form: 'Oxford, Bodleian Library, [Abinger deposit], Dep. [xyz] .

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