This paper reveals findings and practices from Recovery of Literary Manuscripts, an Arts-STEM collaboration to restore lost lines of anglophone literature that had been erased and environmentally damaged (www.recovery-of-literary-manuscripts.net). In this project, we apply and advance techniques of multispectral analysis for the study of nineteenth-century manuscripts, with particular attention to the digital processes and visualization methods that can enable the restoration of lost cultural text. Digitally stripping away deletions in manuscripts has transformative consequences for our relations with literary archives, turning previously examined collections into untapped repositories of lost literary lines now newly visible. From the revised manuscripts of Alfred Tennyson to water-damaged works of the Shelley Circle, the project’s methods have yielded new insights into factors affecting conservation and material condition. In addition to recovering previously unreadable variants, the work advances multispectral processing as a literary-critical act and theorises the consequences of its new methods for the study of material composition, preservation, and literary form. [1]
Extending this research from Victorian to Romantic authors, in 2025 we honed this developing technology through the test case of Percy Bysshe Shelley, analysing in particular his drowned notebook. [2] Shipwrecked with him on his final voyage, Shelley’s drowned notebook is among the most fragile items in the Bodleian Library and contains a draft of Adonais, his elegy for Keats. The significance of Shelley’s drafts is compounded for the many further poems that were never published in Shelley’s lifetime, where his notebooks remain the only witness to a poem’s existence. Selected resulting analysis and insights into Shelley’s texts have already informed the commentary of the 2025 volume of Shelley’s Complete Poetical Works.[3] The present paper releases a further tranche of results from Shelley and Christina Rossetti, while identifying the wider differences between multispectral and hyperspectral techniques for literary criticism. Through the lens of Shelley and Christina Rossetti, this paper therefore discusses the complementary roles of multispectral and hyperspectral imaging and the consequences for their digital processing in Data Cubes. It illustrates how the two methods can be fused for the purpose of literary analysis of manuscript drafts and palimpsests, with interdisciplinary implications for Digital Humanities and Textual Scholarship. As a window onto the study and survival of material texts in a digital age, the paper further proposes a model for the use of spectral imaging within textual criticism.
Notes
1. Michael J Sullivan, Roger Easton and Andrew Beeby, ‘Reading Behind the Lines: Ghost Texts and Spectral Imaging in the Manuscripts of Alfred Tennyson’, The Review of English Studies, 76/324 (2025), 196–210, https://doi.org/10.1093/res/hgaf007.
2. Michael J Sullivan & University of Oxford Public Affairs Directorate, Recovery of Literary Manuscripts, University of Oxford, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IvIqW-qj7eA.
3. Percy Bysshe Shelley, The Complete Poetry of Percy Bysshe Shelley, eds. Nora Crook, Neil Fraistat, Stephen Behrendt & Stuart Curran, vol. 4 (Johns Hopkins UP, 2025).