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Oxford acquires rare Shelley letters
Indo-Asian News Service

London, Oct 20 (IANS) A rare collection of letters by poet Percy Bysshe Shelley that throws new light on the Romantic period has been discovered.

The collection has been acquired by the University College, Oxford, and the Bodleian Library, Oxford, where Shelley was an undergraduate student and was expelled with his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg in March 1811.

The previously unknown letters were written by Shelley and Hogg during their two terms at Oxford and in the Christmas vacation, December 1810 to February 1811. 

All the letters were addressed to Ralph Wedgwood, famous as the inventor of carbon paper.

Shelley's last letter to him in February 1811 was indeed a carbon copy, written with a sample of the carbon paper that Wedgwood sent him.

The focus of the letters springs from another, more mysterious invention of Wedgwood in early December 1810. Shelley and Hogg had seen an advertisement for his Othiothograph, which was intended to convert letters, numbers and musical intervals into a new universal language and notation-system. 

Wedgwood had rashly tried to justify his new idea not through science but theology. It would restore the "universal language and character" of Adam, by leading back to the time before Bible.

Under the guise of a polite enquiry, Shelley and Hogg in these letters poke fun at the theological basis of Wedgwood's work, taking turns in a brilliant sequence of letters. 

The letters were recently discovered with a small lot of other Wedgwood papers in the autograph collection of two elderly brothers, who had bequeathed their house and its contents to the neighbour who had cared for them. 

Auction house Christie's was called in for a valuation, and the letters were recognised and saved just in time before being sent to a car boot sale.

With the aid of a generous donation from the A.G. Leventis Foundation, they were purchased at auction by University College in cooperation with the Bodleian Library, and have been deposited at the Bodleian. 

The letters may be studied by scholars alongside other papers of Shelley already at Bodleian, which are the world's paramount collection of his manuscripts.

Lord Butler of Brockwell, Master of University College, said: "We are enormously grateful to the A.G. Leventis Foundation for helping us acquire these fascinating letters, uniting them with the Bodleian Library's existing collection of Shelley papers." 

"I am delighted that scholars will now have the opportunity to study these letters, adding to our understanding of one of England's finest Romantic poets."