Thomas Hutchinson, M. A by Percy Bysshe Shelley

This isn't a poem by Shelley; it's a short dedicatory inscription found in the 1914 Oxford edition of his works, with Thomas Hutchinson listed as the editor. It serves as a title page attribution, noting Hutchinson's academic degree and his previous editorial work on Wordsworth. There's no lyrical or narrative content here—just a bibliographic note included in the text.

Formal and distant — it reads like a title page rather than a poem. There's a lack of emotional depth, no identifiable voice, and no rhetorical flourish. It's strictly informational, reflecting how the Victorian and Edwardian scholarly communities endorsed texts based on the editor's reputation.

Thomas Hutchinson (1849–1924) was a British scholar who gained recognition for his 1895 Oxford edition of Wordsworth's Poetical Works, which became a go-to reference. In 1904, he published an edition of Shelley's complete poetry for Oxford University Press, which he later revised and reissued in 1914—the edition associated with this inscription. This work was part of the Oxford Standard Authors series, designed to provide general readers with reliable and affordable single-volume editions of significant English poets. Shelley had passed away in 1822 at the young age of thirty, and his reputation experienced considerable ups and downs before the late Victorian era solidified his status as a key Romantic figure. By the time Hutchinson's edition came out in 1914, editing Shelley's work was taken quite seriously, and having Hutchinson's name on the title page served to assure buyers that the text had been meticulously prepared.