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

And at one point in Boscombe House in the south of England, where part of the Shelley family ends up, there is a kind of almost like a mausoleum, a room where treasures, documents are kept.

There's an immense amount of hair clipped from the bodies of these people and kept in beautiful jewellery.

Absolutely a thing at a time.

Mary Shelley's travelling case is kept.

One of the members of the family almost literally walked in off the street and donated it to us with kind of perfume bottles and more hair.

So this whole sort of curation of a literary reputation.

It was very kind of purposeful.

And then the division of the papers among the family meant that that curation became more broken up.

Some of the family really kept it up strongly, others less so and sold material.

It's quite an interesting way of how literary reputations survive after the death of the Principals.

I think you're absolutely right.

There's another example which is why those – Philip Larkin came up with this idea that literary manuscripts have both magic and meaning.

And the meaning is the thing that graduate students and scholars pour over, you know, who wrote that word, what did they mean when this comma was inserted, those kind of things.

But the magic is this aura of contact with those original minds, that this was the surface on which the pen of Percy Shelley or Mary Shelley or Lord Byron wrote these words at that moment.

And that still has an incredible potency.

And I think in the digital age, it has an increased potency.

You know, Walter Benjamin, the aura of materiality in the age of mechanical reproduction.

Wow.

It really is true.

And there's one thing which always drops me almost to my knees, which is a pamphlet that we have of the first printing of Shelley's Adonais.

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