The literature dealing with Shelley's work and life is immense,
and no attempt will be made even to summarise it here. A
convenient one-volume edition of the poems is that edited by
Professor Edward Dowden for Messrs. Macmillan (1896); it
includes Mary Shelley's valuable notes. There is a good
selection of the poems in the "Golden Treasury Series,"
compiled by A. Stopford Brooke. The Prose Works have been
collected and edited by Mr. H. Buxton Forman in four volumes
(1876-1880). Of the letters there is an edition by Mr. Roger
Ingpen (2 vols., 1909). A number of letters to Elizabeth
Hitchener were published by Mr. Bertram Dobell in 1909.

For a first-hand knowledge of a poet's life and character the
student must always go to the accounts of contemporaries. In
Shelley's case these are copious. There are T. L. Peacock,s
'Memoirs' (edited by E. F. B. Brett-Smith, 1909); Peacock's
'Nightmare Abbey' contains an amusing caricature of Shelley in
the person of Scythrops; and in at least two of her novels Mary
Shelley has left descriptions of her husband: Adrian Earl of
Windsor, in 'The Last Man', is a portrait of Shelley, and
'Lodore' contains an account of his estrangement from Harriet.
His cousin Tom Medwin's 'Life' (1847) is a bad book, full of
inaccuracies. But Shelley had one unique piece of good
fortune: two friends wrote books about him that are
masterpieces. T. J. Hogg's 'Life' is especially valuable for
the earlier period, and E. J. Trelawny's 'Records of Shelley,
Byron, and the Author', describes him in the last year before
his death. Hogg's 'Life' has been republished in a cheap
edition by Messrs. Routledge, and there is a cheap edition of