Any editor working on Shelley’s texts at present necessarily owes a large debt to two series of manuscript facsimiles with commentary: The Bodleian Shelley Manuscripts and the volumes containing material by Shelley in The Manuscripts of the Younger Romantics, both under the general editorship of Donald H. Reiman. In addition, we have benefitted particularly from the documents and commentaries in the volumes of Shelley and His Circle 1773–1822, edited (successively) by Kenneth Neill Cameron, Donald H. Reiman and Doucet Devin Fisher, as well as several recent editions of Shelley’s work: by Donald H. Reiman, Neil Fraistat and Nora Crook for Johns Hopkins University Press; Geoffrey Matthews, Kelvin Everest and others for the Longman Annotated English Poets series; Timothy Webb for Dent; Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat for Norton; and Michael O’Neill and Zachary Leader for OUP World’s Classics.
For valuable advice and help over many years the editors wish to thank especially Bruce Barker-Benfield, John Barnard, John Birtwhistle, Nora Crook, Elizabeth Denlinger, Kelvin Everest, Doucet Devin Fisher, Michael O’Neill, Michael Rossington, Timothy Webb and Alan Weinberg.
Kate Parker’s meticulous and patient copy-editing has been exemplary.
The following institutions have kindly allowed us to take manuscripts in their possession as the basis of our texts, for which detailed references are supplied in the notes to the relevant poems and prose: the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York; the British Library; the Houghton Library, Harvard University; Edinburgh University Library; the Provost and fellows of Eton College; Special Collections Centre, University of Aberdeen; the Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford; the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, New York Public Library; the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, Inc.; the Library of Congress; the Syndics of Cambridge University Library; the Rosenbach of the Free Library of Philadelphia; the Bibliotheca Bodmeriana, Cologny-Genève, Switzerland; the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, California; and the John Rylands University Library of Manchester.