Touching the Past:
A Day with the Shelley Manuscripts at the Bodleian
Ancestor Stories · Archives · Shelley · February 2026
The Bysshe-Shelley family scroll, partially unrolled at the Bodleian Library. Commissioned by Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet — Percy's grandfather — it traces the family's lineage back to William the Conqueror across twenty feet of illuminated vellum.
There are days in genealogical research that stay with you. Days when the names you have spent months tracing through parish registers and census returns suddenly become physical — not entries in a database but objects you can reach out and touch. My visit to the Bodleian Library in Oxford was one of those days.
I went to view the Shelley-Bysshe Collection. What I had not entirely prepared myself for was how personal it would become.
The Scroll
Stephen unrolled it carefully across the full length of the table — and kept unrolling. Twenty feet of illuminated vellum, bordered in red and gold, filled with heraldic shields painted in vivid reds, blues, and golds, each family member contained within their own carefully calligraphed roundel, connected by elegant lines stretching back through the centuries.
This was the family tree commissioned by Sir Bysshe Shelley, 1st Baronet — Percy's grandfather — who was famously consumed by a desire to establish and celebrate his family's noble lineage. The scroll traces the Bysshe and Shelley lines back, generation by generation, to William the Conqueror. It is as much a work of art as a genealogical document: the heraldic shields individually painted with the correct arms and charges, the calligraphy meticulous throughout.
The scroll unrolled to its full extent across the reading room table — heraldic shields, calligraphed roundels, and a decorative red and gold border running the full length of the vellum.
I was allowed to touch it. Running my fingers along the painted vellum, I was acutely aware that somewhere on this scroll was my own family. My line connects through Sarah Bysshe (1696–1732), born in Burstow, Surrey, who married William Pattenden of West Hoathly and became my 7x great-grandmother. The Bysshe family that Sir Bysshe was so proud to commemorate in this extraordinary object is also my family — and his obsession with establishing the lineage was, in a very real sense, establishing mine too.
Percy Bysshe Shelley's middle name was not a literary affectation. It was his grandmother's maiden name — the same surname, from the same Sussex and Surrey family, that appears in my own tree through the West Hoathly Pattendens. The scroll was, in a very real sense, part of my story too.
If you'd like to read more about this genealogical connection in detail: A Name in the Tree: Following the Bysshe Line to Percy Shelley →
Frankenstein — In Her Own Hand
Next came the Frankenstein manuscript. Mary Shelley was nineteen years old when she wrote it, and here were the pages to prove it — loose sheets of thin paper, covered in her flowing, urgent hand, with crossings-out and revisions visible throughout. The corrections make it feel startlingly alive: a young woman's mind moving fast, second-guessing herself, pressing forward.
Mary Shelley's draft — her hand urgent and forward-moving, with corrections woven through the text.
Chapter 7 — "It was on a dreary night of November..." — the creation scene. The crossings-out and rewrites are visible throughout.
I did not dare touch these. There is something about Mary Shelley's manuscript that feels almost too sacred — the paper on which one of the most influential novels in literary history was first written out, in the hand that wrote it, by a teenager. Looking at the Chapter 7 creation scene with its crossings-out intact, you are watching the monster being born in real time.
As a professional palaeographer, I spend my working days reading and transcribing historical handwriting. I like to think I can read most things. Sitting in that quiet room at the Bodleian, I found myself simply looking rather than reading — just taking in the fact of it.
Percy's Notebooks
Percy's notebooks were different in character again. Where the Frankenstein manuscript has an almost reverential quality, these are wonderfully chaotic — the working space of a restless, tumbling mind. Poetry shares the page with arithmetic; landscape sketches jostle with draft lines; doodles of mountains and sailing boats appear between stanzas. The red wax seal on one cover is still intact.
Ozymandias in Percy's hand — the whole poem on a single page, numbered 85. The sketch in the margin appears to be a tree or plant study.
The notebook cover: an elaborate alpine lake scene in pen and ink — mountains, pine trees, a sailing boat — with the original red wax seal still intact in the upper left corner.
One page stopped me completely. Written in Percy's elegant, slightly italic hand, titled simply Ozymandias — the whole poem there on a single page. The thick, textured paper of these notebooks is completely distinctive. When Stephen allowed me to touch them, that surface felt like a direct physical connection across two centuries. You could almost hear a quill scratching across it.
A characteristic spread: the title The Revolt of Islam sits among mountain sketches, draft verse in multiple languages, and columns of arithmetic — all on the same page.
There is something particular about handling the actual physical object that no facsimile or digital reproduction can replicate. As someone whose work is built around the belief that original documents carry meaning that transcription alone cannot fully convey, that afternoon at the Bodleian confirmed everything I believe about why primary sources matter.