In 1830, 6 years after his death, about 560 of Byron's letters were published by his friend Thomas Moore under the title Letters and Journals of Lord Byron: With Notices of his Life. The next edition of the letters and journals appeared in six volumes in 1898-1901, edited by R. E. Prothero as part of a 13-volume Works. Prothero included nearly 1200 letters, conscientiously edited, though like Moore he excised all passages likely to offend 19th-century sensibilities. A collection of about 350 unpublished letters was bequeathed by John Hobhouse's daughter Lady Dorchester to John Murray, who published them as Lord Byron’s Correspondence in 1922, in two volumes, though yet again in a bowdlerized form. In 1950 Peter Quennell produced a selection of the letters, called Byron: A Self-Portrait, of which 50 letters had not up to that point been published. In 1966 the American literary scholar Leslie A. Marchand, having written a magisterial biography of Byron, began work on editing his letters. The result, Byron's Letters and Journals, appeared in 11 volumes plus an index volume between 1973 and 1982, with a final supplementary volume in 1994. He was assisted in his work by the edition's publisher, John Murray VI, grandson of the earlier editor and great-great-grandson of Byron's own publisher. Marchand's work included about 3000 letters, and it remains the reference edition. The first two volumes won the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize for 1974, the judges calling it "an outstanding achievement in humane editing". In 1982 he followed this up with a one-volume selection of Byron's letters and journals. In 2015 Richard Lansdown published another selection, which differed from Marchand's in being about twice the size and in attempting to cover Byron's whole life rather than just picking out the best letters. Jeffery Vail called it "engrossing, moving, hilarious, and sometimes heartbreaking", and preferred it to the Marchand selection.
