One of the United Kingdom's five national research libraries, the Bodleian Library at Oxford University, is the permanent home of Jane's guitar. In 1897, an extreme fan of Percy Bysshe Shelley, retired merchant seaman Captain Edward Silsbee of Salem, Massachusetts, purchased the guitar from Jane Williams's grandson and immediately donated it to the Bodleian. This library, founded by the sixteenth-century scholar Sir Thomas Bodley, is one of the oldest and most useful research libraries in England. It is architecturally distinctive. Lots of people can recognize its cylindrical main building, the Radcliffe Camera, which contains the main reading rooms.

The Williams family had offered the guitar for sale contingent upon the buyer donating it to a public collection. One gets the sense that Silsbee would have preferred to keep it, at least for his lifetime. That's how he was: the ultimate fan. There is even a suspense novel with a protagonist based on Silsbee, who will do literally anything to collect objects associated with his favorite Romantic poet: Henry James's The Aspern Papers (1888).

According to Jane's grandchildren, she took good care of it, considering it a memento from the famous poet. Consequently, it is in good condition for its age, but due to its fragility and some cracks and other issues, is no longer playable. Since the Bodleian acquired it from Silsbee slightly before the popularization of recorded sound, there is no recording of it. 

The Bodleian curators agreed with Silsbee that the guitar is a "relic" of Shelley; an object infused with his personality. Indeed, that's how the women in his life, including Jane Williams and Mary Shelley, were often seen--by their Victorian contemporaries and far more recently. The Bodleian catalogued the guitar as Shelley Relics (the name of the collection comprising objects associated with Shelley) number 1. In 1992, the bicentenary (200-year anniversary) of Shelley's birth, the guitar formed the centerpiece of a museum exhibit titled "Shelley's Guitar." By looking at this instrument, the exhibit suggested, we might access Shelley's ghostly poetic voice. 

Today, the guitar is kept with the rest of the Shelley Relics Collection in the Bodleian Library's Weston Annex, a (relatively) modern building across the street from the Camera.

The Radcliffe Camera, Bodleian Library, in 2006.