“Mary Shelley’s Lives of the Eminent Literary and Scientific Men: An Electronic Edition” reproduces five volumes of biographies that Mary Shelley (the author of Frankenstein) contributed to Dionysius Lardner’s Cabinet Cyclopaedia: Italian Lives (2 volumes,1835), Spanish and Portuguese Lives (1837), and French Lives (2 volumes, 1839). The Cyclopaedia, a 133-volume project directed by Reverend Dionysius Lardner (1793-1859), appeared between 1829 and 1846 and was organized into nine “cabinets” or areas (versus the A to Z organization of the Encyclopaedia Britannica). Bound in cloth and priced at six shillings each, they offered an affordable means of authoritative knowledge for middle-class readers. Mary Shelley’s place in this project is significant, as she is the only woman among the thirty-eight acknowledged contributors. Her involvement in the project offers a portrait of a writer working within the conditions of print culture and balancing participation in the commercial literary trade as well as working as a public intellectual. Shelley was a widow writing for a living to support herself and her son. At the same time, in her writings she is working out a form of citizenry that advocates subjects thinking for themselves.
Because the project was sold in separate volumes, sets of the work are rare. The University of Saskatchewan Library is among the few research libraries to have a uniformly bound set. The searchable digital edition is reproduced with permission of the Library’s Department of Special Collections. The scanned pages are searchable through OCR (Optical Character Recognition) software, which allows the scans to be transformed into an editable document. The pages are presented at a high resolution to provide clear reading texts of the five volumes in their original form. Interested readers can download and edit and search documents for key words and concepts. The web edition is intended to supplement Pickering and Chatto’s scholarly print edition Mary Shelley: Literary Lives (2002) under the General Editorship of Nora Crook. It makes a little-known but significant literary and scholarly achievement accessible to readers in its original form.
- General Introduction
- Dr. Lardner
- Mary Shelley and the Lives
- Provenance of the University of Saskatchewan Collection