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The extant portions of the Last Draft and the later Fair Copy of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein are among the collection of Shelley and Godwin materials that Lord Abinger, their inheritor, deposited in the Bodleian Library in 1974 and 1976.[1] Since then various partial accounts of the Frankenstein manuscripts have been published, the most detailed and even-handed being "Shelley's Contribution to Mary's Frankenstein" by E. B. Murray. However, as Murray himself states in an initial footnote, he does not deal with all of those manuscripts: "I do not use manuscript materials I have seen only in microfilm . . ." (50 n1). The Last Draft reveals that Frankenstein, at the time of the Last Draft's creation, was conceived as two separately paginated volumes (as distinct from the three-volume Fair Copy, of which only concluding parts of the separately paginated Volume Three survive, and the original edition derived from it, issued as three separate volumes by Lackington, Hughes, Harding, Mavor and Jones in 1818). Murray does not report on the first of those Last Draft volumes. Furthermore, Murray appears to mistake the Last Draft — much of which clearly involved rough copying of material previously composed in rough draft form — for the original rough draft.
Like Murray, virtually all commentators on the Frankenstein manuscripts (notably, James Rieger, in his edition of the 1818 text, and Anne K. Mellor) have focused on the most sensational issue the material gives rise to: how substantial, how improving, how damaging was Percy Shelley's contribution to Mary's work? The Last Draft includes numerous corrections and additions, and some suggestions in Percy's hand, while the final thirteen pages of the last Fair Copy fragment, which are entirely in Percy's hand, contain significant revisions of the corresponding Last Draft section that Murray
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