Online Resources for Pre-Raphaelite and Arts and Crafts Research
Many fine resources for research into Pre-Raphaelitism and the Arts and Crafts movement can be found online, which range from author and artist-focused knowledge sites to scholarly editions, to public education pages on museum webpages. Hopefully the following list composed by an LUCVS member will be helpful for students and scholars interested in this complex movement of the Victorian avant-garde.
Rossetti Archive: The Rossetti Archive remains one of the best online scholarly resources on the internet, and it has been a model for scholarly websites in any discipline. The Archive is notable for the depth of its collections, the quality of its editing, and its emphasis on the many version of Rossetti’s artistic and poetic works.
William Morris Archive: Spearheaded by Florence S. Boos (University of Iowa), the William Morris Archive is the premier scholarly database for Morris research and has many helpful visual and textual resources for Morris scholars and aficionados.
Charles Algernon Swinburne Project: While the Swinburne Project does not have the range of the Rossetti Archive, this site remains a quality resource for anyone interested in Swinburne’s artistic legacy.
Ruskin Research Center: This archive is is for all things Ruskin, and one of its most useful resources is its online archive of Cook & Wedderburn’s edition of Ruskin’s complete works, as well as digitized copies of some of his notebooks and other writings.
Marxists.org is the premier online resource for Marxist thought, and while the site is not specifically-Pre-Raphaelite in focus, the Pre-Raphaelites’ own emphasis on leftist social reform ensures that many Pre-Raphaelite influences and PRB-influenced artists such as John Ruskin feature prominently in this online encyclopedic collection, as well as many Victorian social thinkers, from Mary Wollstonecraft to Kier Hardy, and from Oscar Wilde to H.G. Wells. In particular, marxists.org’s compilation of William Morris lectures and articles remains, in my opinion, the finest on the internet.
Any discussion of Pre-Raphaelitism is incomplete without referencing museum websites, since most museums with sizable Pre-Raphaelite collections provide excellent educational introductions to the artists and works in their collections. Of particular benefit are the following museum and gallery collections:
The Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery’s extraordinary collection of images
