LibGuides: Nineteenth Century Resources: General Resources

Encyclopedias, Dictionaries, Bibliographies

Oxford Bibliographies: Victorian Literature
An authoritative guide to the best literature and literary criticism in the field.
Orlando: Women's Writing in the British Isles from the Beginnings to the Present
Provides entries on authors' lives and writing careers, contextual material, timelines, sets of internal links, and bibliographies. Interacting with these materials creates a dynamic inquiry from any number of perspectives into centuries of women's writing.
Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought
Provides essential information on, and a critical interpretation of, nineteenth-century thought and nineteenth-century thinkers. The project takes as its temporal boundary the period 1789 to 1914. Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Thought primarily covers social and political thinking, but key entries also survey science, religion, law, art, concepts of modernity, the body and health, and so on.[publlsher description]
Routledge Dictionary of Modern British History
From the Romantic age to the twenty-first century, The Routledge Dictionary of Modern British History is a guide to 250 years of history that have seen ‘this sceptr’d isle’ rise, fall and rise again as a major world power. Written for undergraduate and high school students,

Periodical and Book Indexes

C19: The Nineteenth Century Index
...is the bibliographic spine of 19th century research, providing integrated access to the most important finding aids for books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers and archives. Users of C19 can query its 12 collections simultaneously, or can conduct more detailed research using collection specific search screens. [publisher]
19th Century Masterfile
Aggregation of various indexes to nineteenth century printed materials, including journal, magazine, and newspaper articles. Depending on the index selected, coverage ranges from 1774 to 1920.
Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue
Defines the printed record of the English-speaking world from the beginning of the 19th century to the end of WWI. The project aims to index all printed works published in Britain, its colonies and the USA, all printed works in English wherever published, and all translations from English. Also searchable within C19: The Nineteenth Century Index.
JSTOR
...offers both multidisciplinary and discipline-specific collections. It includes journals from the arts, humanities, business, and social sciences as well as the natural and life sciences. This is a resource that offers a comprehensive archive of scholarly journal literature -- including many periodicals of the 19th century.
Historical Abstracts
Covers world history, excluding North America, from 1450 to the present era. It indexes journals from around the world and also includes books and dissertations. Topics covered range from the Renaissance to Tiananmen square. Coverage is from 1954 - present.
America History and Life
Indexes articles on the history and culture of the United States and Canada from prehistory to the present.
History of Science, Technology and Medicine
...describes journal articles, conference proceedings, books, book reviews, and dissertations in the history of science, technology, and medicine and related historical fields. The database integrates four bibliographies: the Isis Current Bibliography of the History of Science, the Current Bibliography in the History of Technology (Technology and Culture), the Bibliografia Italiana di Storia della Scienza, and the Wellcome Library for the History and Understanding of Medicine.
ARTstor
ARTstor is a rich digital library that contains approximately 300,000 images covering art, architecture and archeology, including a large collection of images from the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. ARTstor's software tools support a wide range of uses including: viewing and analyzing images through features such as zooming and panning, saving groups of images online for personal or shared uses, and creating and delivering presentations both online and offline.

Primary Sources

NINES
NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) is a scholarly organization which peer reviews digital projects relating to the 19th century in Britain and America.
Literary Manuscripts
Drawn from the 19th century holdings of the Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature. Authors include: Matthew Arnold, the Brontës, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Wilkie Collins, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, George Gissing, Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Ruskin, Alfred Tennyson, and William Makepeace Thackeray. Includes unpublished poems, working notebooks, holograph manuscripts and drawings. [publisher]
Victorian Popular Culture
A resource for the study of popular entertainment in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This portal invites users into the darkened halls, small backrooms and travelling venues that hosted everything from spectacular shows and bawdy burlesque, to the world of magic and spiritualist séances. The resource is divided into four self-contained sections: Moving Pictures, Optical Entertainments and the Advent of Cinema; Music Hall, Theatre and Popular Entertainment; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; and Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic
InteLex Past Masters
.... a collection of primary-source full-text humanities databases. Past Masters titles are usually comprised of the complete works of individual authors. [publisher]
North American Women's Letters & Diaries
This resource includes the immediate experiences of 1,017 women, as revealed in approximately 120,000 pages of diaries and letters. This is a massive, ongoing project to catalog and index Canadian and American women's diaries and correspondence over centuries.
North American Women's Drama
Contains over 700 plays by over 150 playwrights, together with detailed, fielded information on related productions, theaters, production companies and more.
Slavery, Abolition and Social Justice, 1490-2007
A portal for slavery and abolition studies, bringing together documents and collections covering an extensive time period 1490-2007, from libraries and archives across the Atlantic world. Close attention is being given to the varieties of slavery, the legacy of slavery, the social justice perspective and the continued existence of slavery today. [publisher]
Making of Modern Law
Covering the watershed period of legal development during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this unprecedented archive is the world's most comprehensive full-text collection of Anglo-American legal treatises of the period. [publisher]

Book Reviews

Sometimes it is useful to be able to examine how an author's work was received when it was first published. Reviews may be found in some of the sources listed in the Periodicals and Book index section of this guide, however researchers may also want to look at the online Routledge Critical Heritage Series.

"The Critical Heritage series collects together a large body of criticism on major figures in literature. Each volume presents the contemporary responses to a particular writer, enabling the student to follow the formation of critical attitudes to the writer's work and its place within a literary tradition.The carefully selected sources range from landmark essays in the history of criticism to fragments of contemporary opinion and little published documentary material, such as letters and diaries. Significant pieces of criticism from later periods are also included in order to demonstrate fluctuations in reputation following the writer's death." (Publisher site)

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