The Bodleian Library's Abinger Collection constitutes a major source for British literary and intellectual history during the late eighteenth and early to mid-nineteenth centuries. They comprise a currently uncatalogued mass of papers of the Godwin-Shelley family - 107 notebooks containing 4,651 paper leaves, and a further 8,646 loose leaves of varying sizes (total 13,297 leaves; almost 27,000 pages).
The collection contains three key pieces: the unpublished diary of William Godwin, 1788-1836; the autograph draft of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with corrections by P.B. Shelley; and, the surviving portions of the fair copy, 1816-17; and, the joint journal of P.B. and Mary Shelley in five volumes, 1814-41.
The collection was on loan to the Bodleian Library from 1974 to 2004, when the library was finally able to purchase the Abinger Collection outright for £3.85m, due to the generosity of the National Heritage Memorial Fund, the Carl and Lily Pforzheimer Foundation, and other institutional and individual donors.
Godwin's diary begins on 4 April 1788 and ends on 26 March 1836 - a period of forty-eight years - and there is an entry for almost every day. The diary consists of 32 octavo notebooks with each page neatly ruled to allow a week's worth of daily entries. It is, however, a cryptic source: its entries are restricted to lists of people Godwin met, books he read (and wrote), plays he attended, one or two-word notes of the subjects of his conversations, and very occasionally, references to personal or political events. Nonetheless, in its pages is encoded a remarkably detailed map of intellectual, literary and political life in the turbulent period of the 1790s and beyond.