The second digital edition of Lyrical Ballads (2026) has been created by Bruce Graver and Laura Mandell, in consultation with Pratham Tushar Shah.
Video Introduction to the site.
This digital edition has been
peer reviewed by Romantic Circles. It is among the first Romantic Circles projects to be
set up as a static website, in keeping with best practices for preservation.[1]
If you find errors of any
kind, textual or technical, please email the Technical Editor for this edition,
Laura Mandell. For the full team, see People
below.
As explained in greater
detail in the Technical Editor's Introduction, the digital
Lyrical Ballads project was first released in 1997 by Romantic
Circles and has been revived in 2026.
The image of the Lyrical Ballads volumes — — provides a link back to the main page throughout the site: click on it anytime you need to return home.
This digital edition can be reused and shared because it has a Creative Commons Zero
license.
Originally coded in the SGML version of TEI.2, the 25 files of each copy were transformed using a Python Script to render tags compatible with TEI/XML, Protocol 5.[2] After validating against a TEI All Schema as TEI/XML (P5 Version 4.11.0), XSL transforms were used to create the editions.html page, to create web pages for each copy, to splurge out the XML files of each copy into separate item files ("items" are listed here), to create single-item web pages, and to create comparison pages for each item. Python and transforms are only used to prepare the files for uploading and archving. That is, the XSLTs do NOT run on the fly: everything is run beforehand and the resulting html files with their css and js are uploaded to static server space that is publicly available.
| TEI/XML download | CSS download | JavaScript download | XSLT download |
In all except a few special cases, the file names for the 25 volumes of Lyrical Ballads presented here are made up of "LB" — for Lyrical Ballads —, then the last two digits of the year published (1798, 1800, 1802, 1805), whether it has a Bristol imprint or a London, and then initials for a particular library. For example, LB98-Bbl, is a copy of a state of the 1798 edition of Lyrical Ballads published by Joseph Cottle in Bristol (B), currently held by the British Library (bl). The irregularity of the file names have been preserved for the sake of preserving the publication history of this digital edition.
Bruce Graver: Bruce Graver is Emeritus Professor of English, Providence College. He edited Wordsworth’s Translations of Chaucer and Virgil for the Cornell Wordsworth (1998), co-authored with Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum Peggy Webling and the Story Behind Frankenstein (Bloomsbury, 2024), and wrote The Stereoscopic Picturesque (Liverpool UP, 2025). He is currently preparing, with Patrick Vincent, editions of Mary and Dorothy Wordsworth’s 1820 Continental Travel Journals for Liverpool UP, as well as a short biography of William Wordsworth for Reaktion Books’ Critical Lives series. Contact
Laura Mandell: Laura Mandell is Professor of English and Presidential Impact Fellow at Texas A&M University where she founded, and for 12 years directed, the Center of Digital Humanities Research. She is the author of Breaking the Book: Print Humanities in the Digital Age (2015), Misogynous Economies (in 18thC Literature, 1999), and numerous articles and chapters. Dr. Mandell is Technical Director for Romantic Circles and the Texas A&M Digital Cultural Heritage Project, including this edition of Lyrical Ballads and the Criticism Archive. She spearheaded the Early Modern OCR Project or “eMOP,” a project concerned with improving OCR for early modern and 18th-c. texts via high performance and cluster computing, funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Dr. Mandell’s digital projects also include the Digital Mary Leapor’s Poetry, and Digital Editions, Start to Finish, an open access textbook for creating digital editions. Contact
Ronald Tetreault: Dr. Tetreault, Professor of English and European Studies, Dalhouisie University, was co-editor of the original digital edition of Lyrical Ballads.
Pratham Tushar Shah: Pratham Shah is a master’s student at UCB in Data Science who likes building websites, working with data, and making digital things a little more thoughtful and a little easier to use. When he’s not debugging or organizing content, he’s probably overthinking design details in the best possible way. Contact
1. Please see the recommendations offered by the Endings Project, principles that structure the Cultural Heritage Archive now hosting Romantic Circles.
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2. The original SGML and python scripts are available here. Back