Eleven authors are included in this final part of Volume III of the Index, beginning with Laurence Sterne and concluding with Edward Young. It also includes the final cumulative first-line index of all the verse which is described in the manuscript entries or mentioned in the Introductions in Parts 1-4 of Volume III.

This volume, the third in the series, discusses the works of 11 British 18th-century writers, providing information on the nature of the MS, date, variant title(s), state of completion, provenance and location, date and first form of publication, any scholarly use of the MS, and the existence of any published facsimiles. Information is drawn from material in libraries, record offices and private collections throughout the world. The listing of each author's manuscripts is preceded by an introduction. The book records many hitherto unrecorded manuscripts.

More than fifty specialists have contributed to this new edition of volume 2 of The Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature. The design of the original work has established itself so firmly as a workable solution to the immense problems of analysis, articulation and coordination that it has been retained in all its essentials for the new edition. The task of the new contributors has been to revise and integrate the lists of 1940 and 1957, to add materials of the following decade, to correct and refine the bibliographical details already available, and to re-shape the whole according to a new series of conventions devised to give greater clarity and consistency to the entries.