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 it's missing the first few leaves which have been torn out.

And you can see where they've been torn.

And this is a pamphlet that was found in Boscombe House in a drawer.

And it had a note in it that said that the pages were torn out in order to wrap the remains of Shelley's heart after his body was burned on the beach in Italy.

Absolutely astonishing.

Yeah.

So these documents had lives of their own.

And I think, you know, that's one of the most exciting things about, you know, the jobs that me and my colleagues in the Bodleian and other great libraries have is that...

To reconstruct those stories, to bring those to life, to appreciate them, to take them out of the kind of private legends into the public realm is an extraordinary gift that we're so lucky to be able to do it.

I think yes and no.

I think it still holds something back.

It can't convey...

even what you can see under glass in a vitrine in an exhibition.

And it certainly can't convey what you get from turning the original pages.

And I think what it does is that it brings the text that you might read on your screen, on your iPhone or whatever, it brings us back to the way in which the author writes.

created it in the first place and you can see in high quality digital reproduction you can see in the manuscript fragments and digital bobbin where Percy has added you know Mary has written his hair was black and Percy has said added a note saying his hair was of a lustrous black and

And you can see how the two of them were thinking, how can we make this a more readable text, a more beautiful text to convey the sense of the creature as having material qualities itself?

You can see that on the page in a way that seeing it on the printed text in a modern paperback edition or on a screen on a digital e-reader does not convey.

And so in that sense, you're giving ordinary people access to that magic in a way that they would have to come to Oxford and call it up from the stack and get a reader's card and all of that kind of cumbersome stuff.

But it's not the same as being able to sit even in the reading room of the Bodleian Library and turn the pages of the Frankenstein manuscripts.

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