Victorian Era History

The Victorian Era

introduction | article | websites | book reviews | bibliography | research | diaries | family history

Colney Hatch Lunatic Asylum Websites The web has a large selection of resources relating to the Victorian Era. The following sites provide a small sample of the types of resources available. Try using Humbul to locate other history web sites. General Poverty and Health Irish Famine Arts and Crafts Movement Great Exhibition Primary Sources Miscellaneous General The Victorian Web The Victorian Web provides a comprehensive general overview of nineteenth century British history and literature. The site is divided into sections on political, social and economic history. There are also sections on gender matters, philosophy, religion, science, technology, genre and technique, authors, visual arts and Victorian design. Within each section commentaries are provided on individual themes. These commentaries present a useful introduction to the topics covered. Use is also made of abstracts from primary sources. As well as providing commentaries The Victorian Web has a section on links to other web resources and a bibliography.The Victorian web was created under the direction of George Landow, Professor of English and Art History at Brown University. The site was originally designed as a resource to aid in the teaching of courses in Victorian literature. All the material is in English and is available free of charge. The site is easy to browse and a search facility is provided. Internet Modern History Sourcebook The Internet modern history sourcebook has been developed by Paul Halsall at Fordham University. This site forms part of a series of Internet sourcebooks covering different historical periods and themes. This sourcebook covers a wide range of topics from the Reformation up to the present and provides an extensive amount of information. The material provided is a mixture of documents hosted on the site and links to other sites. Brief annotations are available for some of the documents and introductions have been added to many of the sources hosted by the site. The emphasis of the site is the provision of primary sources; there is an interesting section on the study of history and the use of primary sources. The site is relatively easy to navigate with documents divided into sixty different categories which are further subdivided. Although a search engine specifically for the sourcebook is not available, fairly effective searches can be carried out using the Fordham University search engine. Victorian Research Web The Victorian Research Web has been designed as a resource for the scholarly study of nineteenth century Britain. The site provides information on relevant archives, libraries and bibliographies. There are details of relevant journals, internet discussion groups and of teaching syllabi. The site also has an annotated list of links to other relevant web pages. Back to top Poverty and Health Mr Charles Booth's Inquiry Charles Booth's 1889 descriptive map of London poverty Charles Booth's map of London poverty has been reproduced on this site. The map, which was originally created in 1889, has been scanned and prepared for viewing over the WWW by Sabiha Ahmad of the University of Michigan. The map has been divided into seventy-two sections, each of which can be viewed in two different sizes. The original map was created following Charles Booth's survey of life and labour in London. The map indicates different levels of wealth and poverty thorough a colour coded scheme. The reproduction of the map has worked well with the colours being fairly clear. However, some of the smaller text on the map can be difficult to read. The site includes a background section and an index, but these do not currently have any content. The Workhouse This site provides a helpful and interesting introduction to workhouses and poor relief in general. The site includes a timeline giving details of major events in poor relief from the mid-fourteenth to mid-twentieth centuries. The site provides details on life in workhouses, literature inspired by workhouses (some of which is available in full-text from the site) and education of the poor. Information on the Poor Laws, including the full text of the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act is given. There are details on the site of Poor Law Unions, including lists of Poor Law Unions by county. Further details are provided for a selection of the workhouses, for example, when they were built, plans, picture and photographs of the buildings as they currently stand. The site also includes information on how to find further information about workhouses from records and archives. There is also a section of useful links, a short bibliography and a glossary. The site makes use of frames but this does make navigation straightforward. John Snow John Frerichs of the University of California School of Epidemiology created this site in order to encourage interest in the life and work of John Snow. The site includes biographical information on John Snow including portraits. There are details of his work as an anaesthesiologist as well as his work on cholera. There is also a section which outlines the nineteenth century debates on what caused cholera. The full text of Snow's 1855 publication On the Mode of Communication of Cholera is included on the site. A fascinating feature of this site are the online maps. There is a copy of a map originally published by James Reynolds in 1859. It is possible to zoom in and out of this map. There is also a map showing where the different water companies in London operated. The John Snow site is continually being developed, and audio and broadband access is being developed. The site provides an interesting insight into the work of John Snow and the history of cholera in nineteenth century London. Back to top Irish Famine Views of the Irish Famine This web site provides access to primary source material relating to the Irish Famine. Selected articles and illustrations are available from the Illustrated London News, the Cork Examiner, The Pictorial Times and Punch. The articles and illustrations cover a period from 1842 to 1857, with the majority of the material dating from 1845 to 1847. The site also provides a full text version of the article, Narrative of a journey from Oxford to Skibbereen during the year of the Irish Famine written by Lord Dufferin and the Hon. G.G. Boyle published in 1847. The articles can be browsed by publication. The site maintains a list of links to other web site on the famine. Back to top Art and Crafts Movement The William Morris Home Page The William Morris Home Page provides a range of information on the life and works of William Morris and his associates. The site includes a short biography of Morris, details of places associated with Morris and portraits of Morris and his contemporaries. The site contains images of designs created by Morris; these include textiles, wallpapers, stained glass and book arts. These images can, however, be slow to download. The site has details of Morris's writings with some links to full text where these are available on the Internet. The site also has a bibliography which contains details of works relating to Morris, biographies, critical studies, decorative arts and on Morris and the book arts. Information is also available on collections which hold his work. The William Morris homepage has a section with links to other William Morris web sites and to discussion groups. There are details of the William Morris Society: contact details, how to join, publications and copies of the US newsletter from 1988 onwards. The site is relatively straight forward to navigate as the site has a fairly clear structure to it and there is an index which further aids navigation. William Morris Gallery The William Morris Gallery is located in Walthamstow, London, in a former William Morris family home. The gallery's web site provides details of the gallery (opening hours, location, latest news etc) and its collections. The web site has a selection of online exhibitions. These exhibitions include hand painted tiles, photographs of William Morris and family, and of Morris and Company. There are also images of arts and crafts design, stained glass, printed material and selected works. Each image is accompanied by information about the item. The web site also maintains a small selection of links to other pages of interest. Back to top The Great Exhibition The Great Exhibition Information from the Victorian Web Back to top Primary Sources Select list of Victorian illustrated newspapers and journals in the British Library Newspaper Library This page forms part of the British Library Newspaper Collection web site. This page gives details of a selection of Victorian newspapers and periodicals which can be viewed in the British Library. The issue dates which are available are indicated on the web page. The page also provides details of where the newspapers can be viewed. Further details about visiting the newspaper collections can be obtained from the main British Library Collection web site, which also has an online catalogue of newspapers held in the British Library. The select list of Victorian illustrated newspapers and periodicals page also has some illustrations taken from newspapers and periodicals. Internet Library of Early Journals The Internet Library of Early Journals aims to gives access to a twenty year consecutive run of a selection of 18th and 19th century British journals. The 18th century journals available are Gentleman's Magazine, The Annual Register and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. The 19th century journals available are Notes and Queries, The Builder and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. Details of why these journals were selected and short descriptions of the journals are given on the site. It is possible to browse the journals chronologically and searches can be carried out on Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, Gentleman's Magazine, Notes and Queries and Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It is possible to search the subject index, title index or author index. Each journal, however, has to be searched individually. The site makes use of frames and JavaScript. The Penny Magazine This site, from the History Department at the University of Rochester, has copies of twelve issues of The Penny Magazine, a weekly publication produced by the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge. The magazine issues on this site date from immediately before Queen Victoria took the throne. The site includes a very brief introduction to The Penny Magazine, a copy of the first issue of the magazine from 1832, one from 1833 and ten from 1835. Each issue can be browsed for full-text articles, poems and illustrations published in the original magazines. The site makes use of frames. Victorian Women Writers Project The Victorian Women Writers project aims to provide access to highly accurate transcriptions of works from British women writers from the nineteenth century. The project aims to encode all its texts using Standard Generalised Markup Language (SGML) according to the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Further information about the project and SGML and TEI are available from the site. The site provides access to a wide variety of material; this material includes anthologies, novels, political pamphlets, religious tracts and children's books. All works can be viewed as HTML or SGML files or can be downloaded. Full bibliographical details are provided for each item. The works can be browsed alphabetically by author. It is also possible to search the site by carrying out either a simple keyword search or a boolean search. The site also has a list of works currently available and a list of those currently under preparation. Back to top Miscellaneous Industry: the Industrial Revolution and the Railway System This site, created by Julia Lee and maintained by Robert Schwartz of Mount Holyoke College, presents a wide variety of information on the railway system of nineteenth century England and Wales. The web site includes primary source material in the form of extracts from six prominent Victorians voicing their opinions on the railways and articles from the Illustrated London News. The newspaper articles are divided into different categories relating to the railways, such as accidents and disasters, stations, personalities, and politics and economics. The images section of the site contains a large number of Victorian images portraying the period as a whole and not just the railways. These images have, unfortunately, not been annotated. The site as a whole is also well illustrated. The data analysis section contain a wealth of information. There are, for example, maps showing growth of the railways, population distribution and natural resources distribution. Robert Schwarz provides a commentary on his data analysis. Other features of the site include student research projects and a section of links. The City as Hero: Victorian London in Life and Literature This site was created by Susan Horton from the English Department of the University of Massachusetts at Boston for a course that she teaches. Although some of the details on the site are specific to the course, information of general interest is also available. The site is especially geared towards the study of Victorian towns, particularly London. The site has an annotated timeline of Victorian history, which includes links to appropriate web sites. A lengthy bibliography has also been created. This has been divided into categories, and resources are arranged alphabetically within these categories. There is also a list of links to online resources. The site includes a section of student research projects. This site provides an interesting general introduction to Victorian urban themes. Monuments and Dust: the Culture of Victorian London Monuments and Dust: the Culture of Victorian London is a joint project between the University of Virginia and University College London. The aim of the project is to create a visual, textual and statistical representation of Victorian London. Further details about the aims and intentions of the project and its contributors are available from the web site. The site currently has a selection of resources available. There is a model of the Crystal Palace in 1851 (a VRML plug in is needed to view this). Primary source material is available in the form of Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor, extracts from the Times and Dore and Jerrold's London: a Pilgrimage. The site also contains London mortality and population statistics which can be searched by London borough and decade. If the site further develops to fulfill the aims of the project this should prove to be a very interesting and valuable resource. Gardiner's Atlas - 1892 This web site provides reproductions of maps from A School Atlas of English History published in 1892. Victorian Census Project The aim of the Victorian census project, led by David Gatley at Staffordshire University, is to computerise nineteenth century census documents and related material about Great Britain and Ireland. The sources that are to be included in the project are nineteenth century census abstracts, vital registration statistics, returns of the Poor Law Commissioners, agricultural statistics, crime statistics and Pigot's and Slater's Topographies of Great Britain and Ireland. The web site provides details of the project and the types of data available from their teaching pack. The projects hopes to make this information more widely available to the academic community. Although the majority of the data is made available through a teaching pack it is currently possible to download four sets of data extracted from the 1831 and 1861 censuses and the Scottish Registrar General's Annual Report for 1861. Abridged sections from Pigot's and Slater's Topography of Great Britain and Ireland are available on the site. The Cambridge Victorian Studies Group The Cambridge Victorian Studies Group website provides information about the group's five-year, interdisciplinary research project, funded by the Leverhulme Trust, entitled "Past versus Present: Abandoning the Past in an Age of Progress". The project aims to examine Victorian attitudes to the past, and in particular to understand how the Victorians reconciled their commitment to "creating the future" with the contemporary unearthing of "multiple pasts in wonderful profusion and vexingly contradictory detail". A detailed description of the project's aims is provided, together with listings of forthcoming related events such as seminars and symposia, and an archive of past events. Back to top Created Spring 2001 by the Institute of Historical Research. Copyright notice. [Data & Analysis] [Research] [Links] [Opposing Voices] [Illustrated London News ][Images]

Scholarly Resources
for
Victorian Research

Welcome to the Victoria Research Web, a guide to research resources written by Patrick Leary, the founder and manager of the long-running VICTORIA discussion list for Victorian Studies. Like VICTORIA, the VRW is dedicated to the scholarly study of nineteenth-century Britain, and to aiding researchers, teachers, and students in their investigations of any and all aspects of this fascinating period.
The various sections of the VRW are intended to supply advice and links to help Victorianists find the practical information they need, whether it's an archive catalogue, a bibliography, a listserv address, a cheap place to stay in London, or a journal's submission guidelines. A facility for searching the VICTORIA archives puts at your fingertips over twenty years' worth of scholarly discussion by Victorianists around the world.
Increasingly, the VRW has become a modest publishing medium for brief reference works created by some of the finest scholars in the field. These extraordinary resources include the recently updated Curran Index of hitherto anonymous contributors to the Victorian press, the VanArsdel guide to periodical research, Sally Mitchell's introduction to researching Victorian fiction, the Weedon guide to using Victorian publishers' records, and "At the Circulating Library," Troy Bassett's ever-growing database of three-volume novels, in addition to topical bibliographies, biographies, archive descriptions, and other aids to research prepared specifically for the VRW. Published here exclusively, too, is the popular VRW guide to planning the research trip to Britain
The table of contents below will help you find your way to these and many other resources featured throughout the site. I hope that you'll enjoy your exploration of the Victoria Research Web, and find the information here helpful in your own Victorian research.

-- P.L.

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VRW Table of Contents

Research Resources

• Archives: locating manuscript material
  
  • Key works of reference
  • The National Archives
  • NUCMC and A2A
  • 19th-century family and census data
  • A guide to Victorian holdings in selected archives in Britain and the U.S.
  • Other archival records
    • Victorian publishers' archives, including the new Weedon Guide to Research.
    • Banking records

• Printed Sources: Libraries, Serials, Pictures, Books:
  
  • Research guides to reference sources in libraries
  • Links to library catalogues
  • Using the British Library
  • Finding out about
    • periodicals
      • the VanArsdel bibliography
      • the Curran Index to Wellesley Revisions
      • "Biographies of Some Obscure Contributors"
      • other periodical research resources
      • The digital revolution: periodicals
    • newspapers and their own digital revolution
    • pictures of people and places
  • Bibliographical resources, including
    • "At the Circulating Library," a database of three-volume novels, and
    • topical bibliographies
  • Book reviews on-line

• Planning the Research Trip: tips for working in Britain
  
  • Online travel guides
  • Places to stay
  • Getting around
  • Staying connected
  • Fun stuff: Victorian sightseeing and the London Lectures List

Journals

The VRW journal guide: contributor and subscription information, tables of contents, and online resources for some of the major journals in the field. Now includes listing of book publishers' series.

Discussion

The VRW guide to Groups and Blogs covers all sorts of places for reading about and discussing the 19th century, including listservs, bulletin boards, social networking sites, and blogs.

Other Victorian Resources

The VRW annotated guide to related areas to explore online.

• General Guides
• Victorian Studies Organizations
• Some Major Sites
• Other Resources of Interest

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To Search VRW, try your search term here:

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Archival Sources

• Key works of reference
• The National Archives
• NUCMC
• 19th-century family and census data
• A guide to Victorian holdings in selected archives in Britain and the U.S.
• Other archival records
  • Victorian publishers' archives: finding them and using them
  • Banking records
  
  

  Works of Reference

  An ancient but still informative overview for Victorianists in search of archival resources is Richard Storey and Lionel Madden, Primary Sources for Victorian Studies: A Guide to the Location and Use of Unpublished Materials (London: Phillimore, 1977). This was supplemented in 1987 by Richard Storey's booklet, Primary Sources for Victorian Studies: An Updating, published in the series "Occasional Papers in Bibliography" by the Victorian Studies Centre, University of Leicester, Leicester LE1 7RH. Both works focus on materials available in the United Kingdom.

  
  

  R. J. Olney's 1995 overview is still helpful: Using Manuscript Sources for British History. Although now showing its age (the last edition appeared in 2002), the best printed guide to archival repositories for British history is British Archives: A Guide to Archival Resources in the United Kingdom (4th edn., 2002), by Janet Foster, Julia Sheppard, and Richard Storey. However, this sturdy volume was undoubtedly the last of its kind, as online reference resources are vastly more usable and easily updated. These include:

• Archives Hub, a gateway to descriptions of thousands of archives held by UK colleges and universities;
• AIM25, a public gateway to over 150 archival repositories in the Greater London area;
• the Discovery portal from the National Archive, which gives one-point access to material formerly divided among the National Register of Archives (NRA), Directory of Archives (ARCHON), and Access to Archives (A2A); and
• the London Metropolitan Archives, covering a staggering array of government records to do with Greater London, and including a helpful set of subject guides

An ongoing research project at the University of Reading under the direction of David Sutton has created "location registers" of the literary manuscript materials associated with British writers, thus rescuing researchers from many a wasted fishing expedition and fruitless inquiry-letter.  The first register to appear was the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: 18th and 19th Centuries.  This register has now been integrated into OCLC's WorldCat, the archival section of which is searchable free through the Library of Congress's NUCMUC site. Note, however, that some writers whom one might expect to find there, including many whose first works were published in the latter part of the 19th century (e.g., Thomas Hardy, Rider Haggard, and many others) are instead in the Location Register of English Literary Manuscripts and Letters: 20th Century. In 2003, this location register of 20th-c. literary manuscripts, including all additions and corrections since their publication in 1988, was made freely available online by the University of Reading.  Some other online sources for archival literary material may be found in the next sections.




Scholars wishing to photocopy, quote from, or otherwise make use of manuscript materials (or, for that matter, printed ones) will find helpful David Sutton's guide to "Locating UK Copyright Holders," which also summarizes the application of current copyright law in Britain. Sutton's guide, links to other copyright resources and, most importantly, a searchable database of copyright holders in the U.S. and U.K., are all part of the WATCH (Writers and Their Copyright Holders) project, a collaborative effort of the University of Texas and the University of Reading. Particularly given recent extensions of copyright protection, it is never safe to assume that the published work of a Victorian author is in the public domain, while unpublished manuscripts remain in copyright indefinitely.




Despite the growing reach of digitized resources, it is worth remembering that another alternative to on-site inspection of manuscript material may be to borrow from among the large collections of documents still available on microfilm at various research libraries. Adam Matthew Publications, for example, although now primarily a digital publisher, has long made the filming of historical and literary mss. a specialty, including Harriet Martineau's papers in Birmingham, the Margaret Oliphant papers at the NLS, and the Browning, Eliot, Thackeray and Trollope mss. held by the British Library. The University of Delaware Library, for instance, thanks to the early advocacy of veteran researcher Charles Robinson, possesses the 124-reel set of microfilm of the entire Royal Literary Fund Archive, an invaluable resource for any research on the 19th-century literary world. With research travel so expensive, it's always worth checking to see if materials like these are available to you through Inter-Library Loan.

Transcription of 19th-century manuscript material has gone on for years, particularly in the big letters projects for such prominent Victorians as Darwin, Thomas and Jane Carlyle , Arnold, and Swinburne, all of whom have impressive websites dedicated to them. Most scholars, however, dealing with letters or diaries by less exalted figures, wind up doing their own transcribing. A new tool, T-PEN, has emerged as an aid to such transcription. Although developed for early modern manuscripts, it is easily adaptable for more modern projects, such as the Chesson Diaries Transcription Project under way at Northwestern University under the direction of Tracy C. Davis.




Increasingly, specialized databases of archival materials are bringing together location information for particular subject categories. One example is MUNDUS, a guide to missionary collections in the United Kingdom that is particularly rich in 19th-century materials. Others include the Medical Archives and Manuscripts Survey undertaken by the Wellcome Trust.

The National Archives

The National Archives, occupying the stunning quarters in Kew once known as the Public Record Office, now oversees the whole of the governmental documentary heritage of the United Kingdom, consolidating under one heading what had been the PRO and the Historical Manuscripts Commission. The Archives' fine website should be the first online port of call for general enquiries about where to find government records. (See especially the leaflet and map as well as the jazzy animated guides.) The best place to begin a search for archival material in the UK is with Discovery, the catalog of the National Archives, which has replaced the former National Register of Archives. The National Archives site also lists materials that have recently been added to archive repositories all over the U.K., organized by topic. (The list of 2013 additions, for instance, has a separate listing for literary history that tells of an accession of manuscripts by the poet John Clare at the Peterborough Archives and a Coleridge letter acquired by the Somerset Heritage Centre. Interesting accessions like these can be found in almost every year's listings.) Although a few important manuscripts are online, most are not; if you are unable to visit the National Archives in person, you might consider employing one of the many independent researchers who can look up and copy records for a fee.
The National Archives puts out scores of research guides to help people make use of their vast holdings, as well as to help them determine if the records they are seeking (such as birth, marriage, or death certificates) are someplace else altogether. Whether you are looking for a person or a subject, a search among the guides, and a close reading of the most relevant ones, is an excellent place to begin. The NA (and before it, the PRO) used to feature a number of guides addressed to specifically 19th-century matters (e.g., a guide to the Ecclesiastical Census of 1851, now gone), but those guides -- which were essentially leaflets -- have all been replaced by more general guides that have useful links to sub-sections of the online site. Among the guides that Victorianists may find particularly interesting are:





• Anglo-Jewish history: 18th-20th centuries
• Bankrupts and Insolvent Debtors
• British Army and Militia, 1760-1915;
• Business Records at the National Archives and Business Records Held by Other Archives
• Census records, 1841-1911
• Chancery Cases in the Supreme Court after 1875
• Chancery Equity Suits after 1559
• Civil Trials in English Assize Courts
• Copyright Records Stationers' Hall
• Coroner's Inquests
• Court of King's Bench (Crown Side) Cases, 1675-1875
• Crimean War
• Crime, Prisons, and Punishment
• Criminal Transportees to Australia
• Criminal Trials in the Assize Courts, 1559-1971
• Death Duty Records, 1796-1903
• Divorces
• Divorces: Further Research
• Home Office Correspondence: 1782-1939
• Mental Health (e.g., lunatic asylum records)
• Newspapers and the Press
• Nineteenth-Century Political History
• Nineteenth-Century Public Health and Epidemics
• Poverty and the Poor Laws
• Railways
• Trials in the Old Bailey and Central Criminal Court
• Whitechapel Murders (Jack the Ripper)
• Wills and Probate before 1858
• Wills or Administrations after 1858
  




NUCMC

The NUCMC, or National Union Catalog of Manuscript Collections, is a free-of-charge cooperative cataloging program operated by the Library of Congress. This gateway offers searching through OCLC Worldcat..

Family and Census Data




The boom in family history is making a splendid array of resources available to all historical researchers, but a fee or subscription is almost always involved. (An exception, thanks to hard-working volunteers, is FreeCen, though not all counties are available for every census.) Useful tips can be found at the GENUKI site, while links to birth, marriage, and death information can be found at UK BMD. Individual family historians are also sharing their research findings online, as Mark Crail has done with his Chartist Ancestors site. After the first attempt failed due to an overwhelming demand, the National Archives made some adjustments and has now succeeded in making fully available not only the 1901 Census of England and Wales but also (in association with Ancestry.co.uk) the censuses for 1841 through 1911. Easy to use, the service is a boon to genealogical and historical researchers alike. The searching itself is free, but there are charges for viewing the full results of your search in printable form or as saveable images. (Read the FAQ's about charges at both sites carefully, as the fee scheme is a bit complicated.) If you use any of the censuses in person at the National Archives in Kew, viewing the transcripts is free; you pay only for copies.
Civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths in England and Wales began on July 1, 1837, in the first year of Victoria's reign. A company called FindMyPast has put online the parish registers in which this information was recorded. For a fee, researchers can search for, view, and print these indexes. A limited but growing number of free version of these index entries is also available. Keep in mind that 19th-century registration could be spotty and the process of conversion to electronic form is necessarily imperfect, so the records do contain a number of mistakes and omissions.
The graphic illustration of 19th-century data of various kinds has steadily advanced since the pioneering 1990s "Mapping the Life Course" project by Humphery Southall and Ben White, as part of the Great Britain Historical GIS Programme. Presentations using animated mapping of Victorian cholera epidemics and infant mortality help to demonstrate just how much this approach has to offer. A remarkable offshoot of this program is the lottery-funded Vision of Britain site, which allows visitors to obtain comparative historical statistics (1801 to 2001) about social class, religion, industry, population, language, and mortality. One of many fun features is the complete text of William Cobbett's classic Rural Rides whose profuse sprinkling of place-names is linked to information in the database.

Selected Archives with Victorian Materials

Most manuscript materials created in the 19th century -- letters, diaries, ledgers, rosters, meeting minutes, handwritten originals of books/essays/poems, notebooks, scrapbooks, sketches, and the like -- are not available online in digital facsimile, and most of them never will be. Yet much of what we want to know about the Victorians can only be found in these kinds of records. This makes it imperative that researchers be able to locate the manuscripts relevant to their projects. For mss. that are not in private hands, the work of special collections librarians is crucial to this effort. Most repositories with major collections have worked hard to create finding aids, and to put these online. What follows are links to a selection of online catalogues that include significant manuscript materials of interest to students of the long 19th century. (Note, however, that several major repositories of such materials--including the Houghton Library at Harvard, the New York Public Library's Berg Collection and the National Library of Scotland--have yet to establish detailed Web-based guides to their holdings.) The highlighted name of the library connects to an overview of that library's manuscript holdings, while links to more specific descriptions, where available, can be found in the entry that follows.

Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University

While the ABL's holdings of material related to Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are unsurpassed, the library also contains many other collections of Victorian literary material, including signifiant manuscripts of Mathew Arnold and John Ruskin. A collaboration with Wellesley College has resulted in an online collection of Browning love letters.

Beinecke Library, Yale University

Famous for its collection of George Eliot and George Henry Lewes papers (the original catalogue description is by Gordon Haight), the Beinecke also holds significant mss. for J. M. Barrie, Max Beerbohm Mrs. Humphry Ward, and many others, as well as a large collection of Swinburne letters and manuscripts. Despite its bewildering interface, a Finding Aids Database makes it possible to find descriptions of individual collections, though calling up a list of 19th-century literary manuscript collections appears to be beyond its abilities.

University of Birmingham Library

The Library's Victorian collections include not only the papers of Joseph Chamberlain and his descendants, but thousands of letters, prints, photos, and paintings associated with artist Lawrence Alma-Tadema and over 1500 manuscript items in its Harriet Martineau archive, the world's largest collection of her papers.




Bodleian Libraries, Oxford

Nineteenth-century manuscript materials can now be accessed in the wonderful new Weston Library in its rare books and manuscripts reading room. In addition to its extensive literary collections (which include the original ms. of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein as well as the papers of such luminaries as Gerard Manley Hopkins), the Bodleian maintains an archive on modern politics that features the papers of Benjamin Disraeli and other Victorian political figures. They also have a fascinating collection of the correspondence of Bradbury and Evans, the publishers and printers best known as the proprietors of Punch. Faster than searching the catalog of manuscripts for some purposes is a browse of the listing of modern manuscript collections.




University of Bristol Information Services

The gem of Special Collections at Bristol is its vast trove of the papers of the remarkable Brunel family of entrepreneurial engineers, though other items of Victorian interest include the family records of John Addington Symonds.

British Library

The massive 19th-century manuscript holdings at the BL include the Royal Literary Fund papers and the gargantuan India Office Records. The catalogue of the BL's entire manuscript collection is now searchable online. Manuscripts can be consulted in the Manuscripts Reading Room.

Cambridge University Library

Home of the Darwin Correspondence Project, the CUL also has important collections for such Victorian notables as Lord Acton, the Eyre family, and Edward Fitzgerald. Students of empire will find an astounding range of manuscript and photographic material in the library of the Royal Commonwealth Society.




Centre of South Asian Studies (University of Cambridge)

A principal gem of the Centre's holdings of private papers concerning the Raj in the 19th and 20th centuries is a fascinating collection of unpublished memoirs that includes a number of first-hand accounts, by both men and women, of the 1857 Mutiny.

Glasgow University Library

The collections of the University of Glasgow library includes the largest collection anywhere of papers and correspondence by artist James McNeil Whistler as well as the papers of poet Thomas Campbell and his family. The library also hosts an electronic illustrated catalogue of 1840s photographs by the legendary team of Hill and Adamson.

Greater Manchester County Record Office

The GMCRO is set up to provide guides to family history, including its microfilm records of the . The Documentary Photography Archive contains thousands of Victorian photographs, and can be searched through A2A. The Pathfinder database consolidates thousands of descriptions of the holdings of local government offices in the Manchester area.

Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas

Of particular interest to Victorianists is the HRC's catalogue of manuscripts in the Robert Lee Wolff Collection of mss. and correspondence to and from 19th-century women authors (Note that this file is quite large [300K] and may take some time to retrieve.)

University of Huddersfield

A descendant of the Young Men's Mental Improvement Society of 1841, the University maintains archives of the Huddersfield Mechanics Institution from 1843-1884 as well as those of the associated Female Educational Institute and the Literary and Scientific Society (1857-1882).

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

The Rare Book and Special Collections Library at UIUC contains a large assortment of the papers of two giants of the Victorian book business: Richard Bentley, the publisher, and Charles Mudie, the subscription-library proprietor. The library also holds many of the papers of William Allingham (1824-1899), poet, folklorist, editor, and diarist, as well as those of novelist and publisher Grant Richards (1872-1936).

Institution of Civil Engineers

The ICE has substantial archives on such feats of Victorian engineering as the Forth Railway Bridge and the Thames Tunnel, as well as assorted manuscripts about individual engineers like William Mackenzie, Thomas Telford, and the Stephensons; additional manuscripts are held by the Institution of Mechanical Engineers.

Institution of Electrical Engineers

The IEE's London archives contain not only its own papers (it was founded in 1871), but an extensive collection of manuscript materials relating to Victorian science and scientists, including notebooks of Michael Faraday.

John Forster Collection, National Art Library

Housed at the NAL, which is a branch of the Victoria and Albert Museum, the vast collection of Dickens' friend and literary executor ranges from the 17th to the 19th century. In addition to letters and a short diary by Dickens, the collection includes almost all of the original mss. of Dickens' novels. As described by Annette Lowe in "The Conservation of Charles Dickens' Manuscripts," recent efforts to preserve and restore these mss. are revealing corrections and additions that have heretofore remained hidden.

John Rylands University Library, Manchester

Among the Rylands' extensive holdings of 19th-century manuscripts is a vast trove of material from the archives of the Manchester Guardian and recent additions to its collection of Charles Dickens' books and papers, including his letters to Elizabeth Gaskell, while its huge collection of materials on the history of Methodism spans the 18th and 19th centuries.

University of Kent at Canterbury

The university's Templeman Library houses several truly extraordinary collections of documents reflecting the life of Victorian and Edwardian theatre. Including an introductory essay by noted scholar Louis James, the website for these collections features an enormously useful online catalogue of playbills from both London and provincial theatres.

King's College London

The archives of the KCL library include the papers of such Victorian notables as F. D. Maurice, F. J. Furnivall, and George Macdonald, as well as records of the College and Hospital going back to, respectively, 1828 and 1839.

Lambeth Palace Library

The official repository for material concerning the Church of England, the historic Lambeth Palace Library's manuscript holdings include not only Gladstone's diaries and other papers but also the papers of such luminaries as Richard Whately, A. C. Tait, John Keble, and Roundell Palmer, those of a range of other 19th-c. bishops and churchmen and their families, and the records of various Church societies.

Lilly Library, Indiana University

The Lilly's extensive collection, whose index can be searched online, includes materials on the Bloomsbury Group and World War I, as well as British poetry.

University of Liverpool Library

In addition to its collection of the papers of reformers Charles Booth and Josephine Butler, the Library also has a large collection of early Victorian literary annuals and keepsakes as well as a complete set of Kelmscott Press books.

Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick

The MRC's 19th-century holdings (summarized here by archivist Alan Crookham) includes extensive records of Victorian trade unions, builders, the YWCA, and other groups. The complete database of descriptions can now be searched online.

National Archives of Ireland, Dublin

Formerly the Public Record Office of Ireland, the NAI's collections are full of 19th-century material, including records of persons transported from Ireland to Australia between 1788 and 1868 (the index to which can now be searched on-line), administrative and other records of the Great Famine, and sources for women's history.

National Portrait Gallery

The NPG's Heinz Archive and Library contains a number of autograph letters and other documents besides its extensive printed resources on British portraiture. The NPG's website features images and transcriptions of correspondence involving various 19th-c. subjects of portraits.

National Library of Scotland

Though detailed descriptions of the NLS's manuscript collections are not yet online, the library's still-evolving manuscript catalogue includes a small sampling of descriptions from its massive archive of the papers of the Blackwood's publishing firm. The NLS's extensive literary collections include holdings for Burns, Scott, Stevenson, the Chambers brothers, and of course the letters of Jane and Thomas Carlyle. In 2006, the library succeeded in acquiring the fabulous John Murray Archive for the nation.

Newcastle University Library

The collections devoted to Victorian traveller, writer, and diplomat Gertrude Bell and to several members of the prominent Trevelyan family are among the library's largest.

University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

UNC's library contains collections of materials relating to publishing firms J. M. Dent and John Murray, as well as papers of the powerful late-Victorian literary agent A. P. Watt. (The other major collection of Watt's papers is in the Berg Collection of the New York Public Library.)

Princeton University Library

The great jewel of Princeton's collection is the enormous Morris L. Parrish collection of books by Victorian novelists. Archival holdings include many drawings, mss., and letters by George Cruikshank, the Rossetti family letters (most by Christina) to the Heimann family, a collection of Trollope's papers, and an assortment of letters by such notables as Walter Besant, John Bright, R. D. Blackmore, John Davidson, "George Egerton,", G. P. R. James, Coventry Patmore, and G. A. Sala.

University College London

UCL's major 19th-century holdings include its own college archives as well as enormous collections of the papers of Jeremy Bentham, Henry Brougham, Sir Edwin Chadwick, and the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge.

University of Reading

Reading has assembled an unparalleled set of the business records of Victorian publishers, including George Bell, Routledge, and Longman. (Note that some of these are available on microfilm.) The library also has a number of letters and papers associated with Aubrey Beardsley.

St Deiniol's Library

This remarkable institution, Britain's only residential library, was founded by William Ewart Gladstone from his own vast collection assembled over a long lifetime of extraordinarily wide-ranging reading, and contains as well a number of the statesman's manuscripts and letters.

University of Southampton

The largest collection in the world (100,000 items) of papers relating to the life and career of the Duke of Wellington is accompanied by a splendid searchable database of document descriptions. Southampton also holds extensive materials about 19th- and 20th-century Jewish communities in Britain. In 2007 the library began work on a project to digitize 23,000 19th-c. pamphlets, now available as (what else) 19th Century British Pamphlets online.

University of Sussex

The collection at Sussex includes letters concerning the periodical Household Words as well as extensive holdings for Rudyard Kipling and the Bloomsbury Group. Of unusual interest are the papers of the Vizetelly family, Victorian printers, publishers, and journalists.

The Women's Library

A major repository of materials for the study of British feminism and women's history, the Women's Library--formerly and still better known as the Fawcett Library--has been expanding into new quarters in Old Castle Street. Of particular interest among its extensive holdings is its Josephine Butler Society Collection, which illuminates Butler's life and work and contains important documentary sources on Victorian prostitution. The Library opened in its new building in February of 2002.




Other Archival Records

Victorian Publishers' Archives



• Locating publishing records. There are excellent finding guides for those in search of the archives of Victorian publishers. The Bott/Weedon location register of 19th-century publishers' records, covers locations in the United Kingdom. The Albinski list, which also includes American publishers, covers archive locations in the United States. Acquisitions by UK archives of manuscripts relating to publishing in 1996, 1997, 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001, 2002, 2003, 2004, and 2005 are listed on the NRA pages. Many of the records of major Victorian publishers are available on microfilm, including the Bentley archives at the University of Illinois and the BL, the Longman archives at Reading, and John Murray Archive and Smith, Elder correspondence and records at the National Library of Scotland. More general material about Anglo-American publishing history may be found, with much else, on SHARP Web, the page of the Society for the History of Authorship, Reading, and Publishing.
• Using publishing records: the Weedon Guide In 2003, Ashgate published Alexis Weedon's magisterial survey, Victorian Publishing: The Economics of Book Production for a Mass Market 1836-1916. In the first chapter, the author gives detailed practical advice to researchers about how to find and make sense of the kinds of records that have survived from Victorian publishing and printing firms. Professor Weedon and Ashgate have graciously made that chapter freely available here for download, as The Weedon Guide to Research in Victorian Publishing Records. (This file is about 500K and in PDF format, readable with the free Adobe Reader.)
  19th-c. ledgers are always going to present puzzles, but this guide goes a long way toward arming researchers with the information they will need to investigate such crucial matters as how profitable or otherwise a given book was, how expensive it was to produce, and how many copies it sold in various editions. VRW is most grateful to the author and publisher for allowing us to host this very useful handbook here.




Banking Records

One exciting and under-utilized source of information about the Victorians is banking records. Writer Jenny Woolf has discussed the potential of such records in "Victorian Bank Accounts as Material for Research," a subject she came to know while investigating Lewis Carroll's surviving bank records. The British Bankers' Association list of mergers may help to trace which current bank may hold the records of its Victorian precursor. A search for "corporate name" in the National Register of Archives can then be most helpful. The Barclays Bank Group Archive where Woolf found the Dodgson/Carroll material, for instance, is located in Wythenshawe, near Manchester, and the NRA records list the subsidiary banks whose records may be found there. As Woolf points out, a bank account record is considered to be in the public domain 100 years or more after the death of the account's owner, so many of these kinds of records for the Victorians are only now becoming available to researchers.

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