Publishing, Editing, and Reception is a collection of twelve essays honoring Professor Donald H. Reiman, who moved to the University of Delaware in 1992. The essays, written by friends, students, and collaborators, reflect the scholarly interests that defined Reiman's long career. Mirroring the focus of Reiman's work during his years at Carl H. Pforzheimer Library in New York and as lead editor of Shelley and his Circle, 1773-1822 (Harvard University Press), the essays in this collection explore authors such as Mary Shelley, William Hazlitt, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley; moreover, they confirm the continuing influence of Reiman's writings in the fields of editing and British Romanticism. Ranging from topics such as Byron's relationship with his publisher John Murray and the reading practices in the Shelley circle to Rudyard Kipling's response to Shelley's politics, these essays draw on a dazzling variety of published and manuscript sources while engaging directly with many of Reiman's most influential theories and arguments.

This two-volume set presents and contextualizes major manuscripts in the Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and His Circle, now at the New York Public Library. These final volumes of Shelley and His Circle include a retrospective centered on the young Shelley, featuring unpublished letters from 1809-1810, a memorandum book he kept at Eton, his libelous verse-letter about his parents, and other manuscripts predating his Italian exile. This backward glance also includes the only known exchange between Mary Wollstonecraft and Catharine Macaulay, Godwin's first letter to Malthus, and a partial draft of Mary Shelley's Proserpine, emended by her husband. The chronology of the Italian period begins in July 1820 with the press copy of Byron's verse drama Marino Faliero and continues through December, a period of political ferment when the letters of Leigh Hunt, the Shelleys, Byron, and Countess Teresa Guiccoli reflect preoccupation with Queen Caroline's "trial" for adultery in Britain and brewing revolutions in Italy. Other highlights are two important eyewitness accounts: a young British officer's reminiscences of Shelley in 1814 and Henry Reveley's testimony about the Shelley Circle. Four substantial essays along with detailed commentaries provide context for the 100 manuscripts.

Volumes VII and VIII not only carry the chronological catalogue of relevant manuscripts into July 1820, but they also contain an important retrospective of recently acquired Shelley and Byron letters and literary manuscripts from their summer together in Switzerland in 1816 through the end of 1819. (Some eighty-five percent of the manuscripts appearing in these volumes were not known to exist when Volumes V-VI of Shelley and His Circle went to press.) Among these are Shelley's long letter to Peacock describing his first acquaintance with Byron and their trip together around Lake Geneva (hitherto published as two separate letters); the press-copy manuscripts of Byron's Beppo and Shelley's "Athanase: A Fragment"; letters of Henry Brougham and Madame de Stael that comment on Byron in Switzerland; numerous letters by Byron's Venetian mistresses; and letters charting the growth of Byron's attachment to Teresa Guiccioli. In volume VIII, the materials of 1820 include E. J. Trelawny's account and commonplace book of 1820-1822; letters by Keats and others mentioning him; hitherto established letters from Peacock and others relevant to Shelley's debt to a Bath upholstery firm; Shelley's annotations in copies of Godwin's Political Justice and Spinoza's Traclatus Theologico-Politicus; three newly discovered letters of Shelley to his Florentine banker, as well as other important letters by Shelley, Godwin, and Leigh Hunt; and a web of correspondence between Teresa Guiccioli and Byron while they carried on their affair from different apartments in the Palazzo Guiccioli. These primary materials, all meticulously transcribed (those in Italian and Latin also accompanied by full translations) are complemented by detailed commentaries on events, people, ideas, and problems reused by the manuscripts, as well as by the following major essays: "Shelley as Athanase" by Donald H. Reiman; "Countesses and Cobblers' Wives: Byron's Venetian Mistresses" by Doucet Devin Fischer; "Mixed Company: Byron's Beppo and the Italian Medley" by Jerome J. McGann; "Countess Guiccioli's Byron" by Doucet Devin Fischer; "Trelawny's Lost Years" by William St. Clair; and "Shelley and the Upholsterers of Bath" by Donald H. Reiman.