The three notebooks are alike in format.[iii] One of Lord Abinger’s notebooks contains the first part of The Fields of Fancy, Chapter 1 through the beginning of Chapter 10, 116 pages.  The concluding portion occupies the first fifty-four pages of the Bodleian notebook.  There is then a blank page, followed by three and a half pages, scored out, of what seems to be a variant of the end of Chapter 1 and the beginning of Chapter 2.  A revised and expanded version of the first part of Mathilda’s narrative follows (Chapter 2 and the beginning of Chapter 3), with a break between the account of her girlhood in Scotland and the brief description of her father after his return.  Finally there are four pages of a new opening, which was used in Mathilda.  This is an extremely rough draft:  punctuation is largely confined to the dash, and there are many corrections and alterations.  The Shelley-Rolls fragments, twenty-five sheets or slips of paper, usually represent additions to or revisions of The Fields of Fancy:  many of them are numbered, and some are keyed into the manuscript in Lord Abinger’s notebook.  Most of the changes were incorporated in Mathilda.

The second Abinger notebook contains the complete and final draft of Mathilda, 226 pages.  It is for the most part a fair copy.  The text is punctuated and there are relatively few corrections, most of them, apparently the result of a final rereading, made to avoid the repetition of words.  A few additions are written in the margins.  On several pages slips of paper containing evident revisions (quite possibly originally among the Shelley-Rolls fragments) have been pasted over the corresponding lines of the text.  An occasional passage is scored out and some words and phrases are crossed out to make way for a revision.  Following page 216, four sheets containing the conclusion of the story are cut out of the notebook.  They appear, the pages numbered 217 to 223, among the Shelley-Rolls fragments.  A revised version, pages 217 to 226, follows the cut.[iv]

The mode of telling the story in the final draft differs radically from that in the rough draft.  In The Fields of Fancy Mathilda’s history is set in a fanciful framework.  The author is transported by the fairy Fantasia to the Elysian Fields, where she listens to the discourse of Diotima and meets Mathilda.  Mathilda tells her story, which closes with her death.  In the final draft this unrealistic and largely irrelevant framework is discarded:  Mathilda, whose death is approaching, writes out for her friend Woodville the full details of her tragic history which she had never had the courage to tell him in person.