Fascinating Victorian Archives/Websites
As digital media trickles into every era and branch encompassed by the humanities, new online resources and archives crop up every day that can inform and assist Victorian studies, both print and visual. With searchable databases, categorization, and cross-indexing, these websites often do half the work for a dedicated researcher and can provide a valuable overview of eras and fads in popular culture. For some of our favorites among the thousands of archives and databases available, see the following list compiled by one of our members:
History:
Since it mostly contains British and Irish records from 1300-1800, British History Online works best as a history database for those students of Romanticism and early Victorian history and culture.
The British Library Online contains thousands of digital collections, including British and Irish newspapers, folk song recordings, festival books, endangered archives, Americas studies, and much, much more!
BRANCH: This site, which is intertwined with Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net, provides users with a free, expansive, searchable, reliable, peer-reviewed, copy-edited, easy-to-use overview of the period 1775-1925. BRANCH offers a compilation of a myriad of short articles on not only high politics and military history but also “low” or quotidian histories (architecture design, commercial history, marginal figures of note, and so on). Authors come from History, Art History, and English departments across the world.
Carlyle Letters Online contains 10,000+ of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle's collected letters categorized by date, recipient, subject, and volume.
Duke University's Rubenstein Library contains the Sallie Bingham Center for Women's History and Culture, the John Hope Franklin Research Center for African and African American History and Culture and the John W. Hartman Center for Sales, Advertising & Marketing. Their extensive online databases contain many books and records on the History of Medicine, Human Rights Archive and Archive of Documentary Arts. These collections are perhaps of most value to researchers of medical, minority, and women's history.
Crace Collection: The British Library's collection of London maps.
Literature:
Conrad First: is an open-access archive of the serials which first published the work of Joseph Conrad. It is sponsored by the Department of English, Uppsala University.
Curran Index: reference tool and ongoing research project whose mission is to identify the authors of stories, poems and articles which appeared anonymously in nineteenth-century British periodicals.
Darwin Correspondence Project with the complete, searchable, texts of around 5,000 letters written by and to Charles Darwin up to the year 1865.
Darwin, Charles. The Complete Works online.
Dickens, Charles. Page from David Purdue, links to online texts of many of Dickens's works, together with biographical information and information about the context of his works.
Dickens Journals Online an online edition of Dickens's weekly magazines, Household Words and All the Year Round.
Dickens Our Mutual Friend reading project: Our Mutual Friend was released online in its original monthly installments from May 2014 to November 2015, to coincide with the 150th anniversary of the novel’s original serialised publication.
Visual Haggard: Visual Haggard is a digital archive intended to preserve, centralize, and improve access to the illustrations of popular Victorian novelist H. Rider Haggard (1856 - 1925). The majority of Haggard’s approximately fifty novels were lushly illustrated, many of them repeatedly in different editions and by different illustrators. Illustration was always an essential part of reading Haggard’s romances during the nineteenth-century. Visual Haggard seeks to revalue and reintegrate the illustrations of Haggard's novels as unique artworks and texts for contemporary audiences.
The Drood Inquiry.
The Old Bailey Online (1674-1913).
Literary and Historical Research:
The Online Victorian Database contains over 118,000 records listing books, articles, and dissertation abstracts published from 1945 to 2016 on every field of nineteenth-century British studies.
Art and Illustrations:
Old Book Illustrations is an image collection website, the brainchild of two talented individuals who focus on Victorian and French Romantic illustrations. Not only are these prints and woodcuts beautifully reproduced and scanned in black and white and color, but they are also categorized by source, listed under artist, keywords, printer, and year of publication, and easily accessed in their original format either by clicking on a link or searching for the specified book.
Literary and Historical Organizations:
The Brontë Society. Founded in 1893, it is a charity and depends entirely on admissions and the generosity of members for its income. Responsible for the famous Brontë Parsonage Museum in the picturesque village of Haworth in West Yorkshire, the society promotes the Brontës' literary legacy and houses the Brontë collections at the Brontë Parsonage Museum.
The Dickens Society. Founded in 1970 as an organization to encourage and support research and writing on Charles Dickens. Dickens Quarterly, a scholarly journal and organ of the Society, is published in March, June, September and December.
The Gaskell Society. Founded to promote and encourage the study and appreciation of the work and life of Elizabeth Gaskell (1810-1865).
Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies: INCS is an international group of scholars dedicated to interdisciplinary discussion and research. The organization sponsors annual meetings and enjoys a collaborative relationship with Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. INCS encourages scholarly work that transcends disciplinary boundaries in its approach to cultural studies.
The Tennyson Society. Founded 1960, the Tennyson Society exists to promote the study and understanding of the life and work of Alfred, Lord Tennyson. It has a world-wide membership.
The William Morris Society. Founded in New York in 1971 as an affiliate of the UK William Morris Society, the William Morris Society in the United States strives to publicize the life and work of William Morris and his associates. They coordinate their activities with fellow Morris Societies in the UK and Canada, and distribute UK and US Newsletters and a biannual Journal of William Morris Studies.
Other Links to Other Links:
