Nineteenth-Century Britain: Romanticism and the Victorian Period
At the Circulating Library, a site developed by Troy Bassett, is very helpful for finding out information about the publishers of particular Victorian novels and where they were first serialized.
The Curran Index, which identifies anonymous contributors to Victorian periodicals, also has a list of related open-access sites.
Dickens Journals Online: this site has the full text of the journals Dickens edited (and to which he contributed some of his own fiction). Other important Victorian authors also wrote in these pages, including Elizabeth Gaskell (North and South) and Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White, The Moonstone, etc.).
The Our Mutual Friend reading project provides the text of the first edition of Dickens’s novel in its original monthly parts.
NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online: An amazing number of peer-reviewed open-access scholarly websites on authors and texts of interest from the long nineteenth-century (1770–1920) are available at NINES. Browse the Federated Websites at the bottom of the NINES page. Some of their pages include
- Romantic Circles Editions
- The William Morris Archive
- The Yellow Nineties Online
- Livingstone’s 1871 Field Diary
- The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, 1674–1913 (“197,745 criminal trials held at London’s central criminal court”)
- Price One Penny: Cheap Literature, 1837–1860
- The Swinburne Project
- Letters of Christina Rossetti
- Collective Biographies of Women.
- The Carlyle Letters Online
The Nineteenth-century Serials Edition offers free digitized versions of six nineteenth-century periodicals and newspapers, the Monthly Repository and Unitarian Chronicle, the Northern Star, the Leader, the English Woman’s Journal, Tomahawk, and Publishers’ Circular. (This is a NINES site.)
Punch (1841–2002). See 19th-century British cartoons.
Romantic Circles has a strong collection of open-access resources dealing with Romantic authors and texts. Take a look at the resources about both Percy and Mary Shelley, John Thelwall, Joanna Baillie, Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Blake, as well as resources dealing with periodicals such as The Quarterly Review (The Quarterly Review Archive, which identifies contributors and digitized copies of The Quarterly Review).
The Spectator archive (1828–2008) is available here.
The Victorian Research Web (Patrick Leary) has many pages that will be of interest to scholars, including information on archives with Victorian material; information on planning a research trip to Britain; Troy J. Bassett’s At the Circulating Library, and (all on one page), a list of Victorian Studies organizations, a list of major sites, and a list of other resources of interest. Some of the sites highlighted here were first found using the Victorian Research Web; I recommend that interested scholars look through the other sites there.
The Victorian Women Writers Project “is primarily concerned with the exposure of lesser-known British women writers of the 19th century. The collection represents an array of genres – poetry, novels, children’s books, political pamphlets, religious tracts, histories, and more. VWWP contains scores of authors, both prolific and rare.”
The William Blake Archive. See all of Blake’s illuminated books, book illustrations, prints, drawings, and paintings.
You may also take a look at my own website, the Andrew Lang Site, if you are interested in nineteenth-century periodicals, fairy tale collections, psychical research, anthropology, folklore, or any of Lang’s many other interests.
Please let me know of other open-access resources that belong on this page.
Return to the Open-Access Resources main page.
Book History in Taiwan 