Richard Ovenden, OBE

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227 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Feb 2026 last heard 6 Feb

Richard Ovenden, OBE’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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Secret Life of Books · Frankenstein in Oxford: A Conversation with Richard Ovenden, OBE · 6 Feb 2026 podcast

Yes, I think they were all kind of pretty insufferable individuals.

But after his death, his posthumous reputation just grew and grew and grew.

And so by the 1880s, Oxford was eager to bring Shelley back into the fold.

And that happened through a bequest by Lady Shelley, who gave a thing called the Shelley Memorial, a sculpture, a very romantic, extraordinary sculpture in University College, which is where Shelley had studied.

being briefly a student, and then to the Bodleian, she gave the Shelley Notebooks.

So we had these extraordinary notebooks.

A second tranche of them came from another branch of the family, a man called Sir John Shelley Rowles in the middle of the 20th century.

So we sort of had the major components of the archive of Percy Shelley, the poet.

Mm-hmm.

And then in the 1950s came a deposit from another branch of the family.

So you can see that the Shelley archive was broken up in the 19th century into branches of the family.

As people died, heirs would inherit portions of the archive of the family.

And so the barons Abinger, who were descendants of Jane Lady Shelley,

through adoption, held the papers of Mary Shelley and her parents, Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.

So this was an extraordinary trove of material that was placed on deposit in the Bodleian for scholars to access, but was still owned by the barons Abinger.

And then I came into the Bodleian as Keeper of Special Collections in 2003 and came to my desk on my first day at work.

And there was a letter from the Lord Abinger, James Scarlet, the ninth baron, who said that he had inherited from his father, his late father...

the collection and wanted to offer it for purchase.

He was going to sell it, but we were given first refusal.

The starting offer was at the time £6 million and this was on the 2nd of June 2003 and we had until the following March to buy it.

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