Obvious errors are corrected. Further historical collations are given at the back of the book. This attention to minute detail, necessary if a text is to be edited on fully historical principles, is the cornerstone of the monumental edifice which these editors are beginning to rear. The actual editing of the poetry in the volume is superbly done. The history of the texts is always thoroughly given, allowing one to gain access to what in his article for Romanticism on the Net Neil Fraistat calls 'full biographies' of the poems.
Nothing is too small to escape notice.
Shelley's plagiarism of 'Saint Edmond's Eve' from Tales of Terror . Again, there is a comprehensive analysis of the complicated textual status of The Wandering Jew . The editors add one new poem to the canon. Here, as elsewhere, the arguments are models of rigour and common sense. One piece of 'evidence' not mentioned by Reiman and Fraistat in their account of this matter, which, in his article in Romanticism on the Net , Fraistat makes exemplary of the 'biography' of a Shelleyan text, is the fact that parts of the passage are reworked as poetry in Queen Mab , canto IX, ll.