Wordsworth Summer Conference: Michael Rossington on Shelley's Textual History
Professor Michael Rossington (Newcastle University) reflects on his Wordsworth Summer Conference keynote lecture on ‘Shelley’s Textual History’. In this conference Q&A with Communications Fellow Amanda Blake Davis, Professor Rossington discusses textual afterlives and the value and challenges of working with manuscripts.
Your lecture at the Wordsworth Summer Conference focused upon Percy Bysshe Shelley’s ‘unending textual life’. For those who were not able to attend the first part of the conference at Rydal Hall in August, could you please explain what you mean by this phrase?
By ‘unending textual life’, I mean that while Shelley’s writings have animated audiences since his lifetime and will continue to do so in the future, in many cases the texts of his poems and prose have resisted a finally agreed, ‘definitive’ form. Among the reasons for this lack of textual fixity is the fact that so much of his poetry and prose remained unpublished on his sudden death in 1822. One consequence is that the sole textual witness to a work is often a difficult to decipher, roughly drafted manuscript from which two editors may well create different reading texts.
The Triumph of Life
Shelfmark: MS. Shelley adds. c. 4, fols. 19-58 [52v + 53r]
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
via Shelley's Ghost
In addition, I meant this phrase to draw attention to the way that the mediation of Shelley’s texts has often been vitally unpredictable; his writings have reached, and will continue to be transmitted to, audiences through forms other than textually sound print editions (musical accompaniments, film, and so on). I am conscious that my phrase echoes two sources. Firstly, the title of Kathryn Sutherland’s brilliant study of the afterlives of Austen’s text: Jane Austen’s textual lives: from Aeschylus to Bollywood (2005). Secondly, the opening sentence of a letter to a friend by the Victorian-era Shelley scholar, William Michael Rossetti (1829-1919). On discovering, soon after he had published The Complete Poetical Works of Percy Bysshe Shelley, 3 volumes (1878), that this friend had recently purchased the press-copy manuscript of Hellas, Rossetti told him (apparently cheerfully, and invoking a line from Dryden’s Alexander’s Feast), that ‘Shelley work is with me “never ending, still beginning”.’
We are able to access great amounts of digitized manuscripts and textual materials online nowadays, but you demonstrated how certain details are not reproduced in digitizations, such as pencil marks. Could you expand upon your experience of working with original manuscripts and digitizations?
There are many reasons why high-resolution images are invaluable for the scholarly editing of manuscripts. For a curator, and for the sake of future generations of scholars, the need to preserve the originals and therefore to disturb them as little as possible is paramount. For a researcher, digital technology can be deployed to assist in deciphering words, punctuation marks, and cancellations and to establish different hands. An excellent scholarly resource that demonstrates the extensive range of such digital capabilities is The Shelley-Godwin Archive, general editors Neil Fraistat, Elizabeth Denlinger, and Raffaele Viglianti.
Shelfmark: MS. Shelley e. 3, fol. 16v
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
(via The Shelley-Godwin Archive)
However, some aspects of digital mediation are not without challenges. Firstly, there is a financial cost to imaging and it is not always possible for archives to make high quality colour images freely accessible to the user. Secondly, originals remain essential to consult for certain kinds of evidence, for example to differentiate between media (pencil and ink), and to distinguish between marks of punctuation on the one hand, and show-through, marks in the paper itself or other kinds of interference such as splattered ink on the other. In addition, manuscript notebooks and home-made booklets are usually easier to understand as a whole in their original form rather than through a series of images of individual leaves. While advocating the value of working with both originals and high-resolution scans, a couple of further observations are perhaps worth making. Firstly, older imaging technology can still be of real value. For example, photographs of the water-damaged notebook salvaged in September 1822 from the wreck of the boat in which Shelley drowned that were presented to the Bodleian Library by Sir John Shelley-Rolls in 1926 (having probably been taken a decade earlier) are now more legible than the original notebook.
Shelfmark: MS. Shelley adds. e. 20, fol. 37r
Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
(via Shelley's Ghost)
Secondly, an original manuscript – however close up to it an editor can get with the right combination of natural light, a magnifying glass, and their wits about them – and a high-quality image may each resist definitive legibility. Editorial endeavour, even as it is buttressed by technology, will continue to confront stubborn resistances in the material evidence. Being able to admit defeat in such circumstances matters since an editor’s responsibility to establish a manuscript reading as accurately as possible carries with it an imperative to be honest about limitations, and to be duly cautious when offering conjectural readings lest their doubtful status be overlooked.
Michael Rossington is Professor of Romantic Literature at Newcastle University and joint general editor of the Longman Annotated English Poets series (Routledge). His current project is editing poems and plays for, and coordinating, the fifth and final volume of The Poems of Shelley in the Longman Annotated English Poets series. His next project is, with Ruth Abbott (Cambridge) to edit The Poems of Wordsworth for the Longman Annotated English Poets, and to produce The Wordsworth Digital Edition which will present all locatable manuscripts and lifetime print publications of Wordsworth’s poetry that have authority.
Professor Rossington’s numerous publications include ‘Creative Translation’ in David Duff, ed., The Oxford Handbook of British Romanticism (2018) and ‘Editing Shelley’ in Michael O'Neill and Anthony Howe with the assistance of Madeleine Callaghan, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley (2013). He is a member of the Advisory Board for The Shelley-Godwin Archive.