Web Resources

A hand-picked selection of some of the most interesting and useful freely available resources for researchers working on the Victorian period.

Online projects

• George Eliot Archive: provides free access to everything George Eliot published and, increasingly, all her unpublished writing as well.
• George Eliot Scholars: a free digital commons where those who research and communicate about Eliot’s life and/or literature can share their work
• Comic Women’s Poetry of the Nineteenth Century: a searchable online collection of over 1200 comic poems written by over 250 women throughout the long nineteenth century (1789-1914).
• The Our Mutual Friend Reading Project: a blog dedicated to reading the original monthly parts of Our Mutual Friend from May 2014 to November 2015, run by Birkbeck, University of London. There is also an accompanying month by month Twitter re-telling, which you can follow here.
• Constructing Scientific Communities: Citizen Science in the 19th and 21st Centuries: project on Victorian ‘citizen science’.
• Diseases of Modern Life: Nineteenth-Century Perspectives: project exploring the medical, literary and cultural responses in the Victorian age to the perceived problems of stress and overwork.
• The Drood Inquiry: an interactive investigation into the curious case of Charles Dickens’s last, unfinished, work, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.
• Florence Nightingale Comes Home: an online exhibition and list of resources on the famous Victorian nurse and health campaigner.
• The History of the Society of Authors, 1884-1914: a searchable database of archival materials relating to the early years of the society.
• One More Voice: a work of digital humanities scholarship, focuses on recovering non-European contributions from nineteenth-century British imperial and colonial archives.
• Scrambled Messages: The Telegraphic Imaginary, 1857-1900: project on cultural responses to telegraphy.
• Undisciplining Victorian Studies: a digital humanities project that reimagines how to teach Victorian Studies through a positive, race-conscious lens.

General Humanities Resources

• Conferencealerts.com: links to academic conference announcements worldwide.
• The Literary Encyclopedia: a reference work for literatures in English, with over 3,900 biographical and bibliographical entries. Membership is needed to read the full text of most articles.
• The Voice of the Shuttle: one of the most comprehensive websites for humanities research.

Related Organisations

• Victorian Popular Fiction Association
• North American Victorian Studies Association
• Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada
• Australasian Victorian Studies Association
• Research Society for Victorian Periodicals
• Lewis Carroll Society
• Society for the Study of Nineteenth-Century Ireland
• Interdisciplinary Nineteenth-Century Studies (INCS)
• Pre-Raphaelite Society
• Women’s History Network
• Edwardian Culture Network

Nineteenth-Century Resources

• NINES (Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-century Electronic Scholarship): an innovative project which aims to provide access to the best digital scholarship on nineteenth-century topics via a single portal.
• Victorian Database Online: a bibliographical database of works published on Victorian topics, maintained by the University of Alberta.
• Victorian Literary Resources: a list of useful general resources maintained by Jack Lynch of Rutgers University.
• Victoria Research Web: a resource intended to help Victorianists find the practical information they need, from archive catalogues and bibliographies to sample syllabuses and journal’s submission guidelines.
• The Victorian Web: an award-winning and ever-expanding site edited by George Landow (Brown University) dedicated to ‘literature, history and culture in the age of Victoria’.
• Victorian Web Sites: an eclectic directory of Victorian sites (some less scholarly than others), compiled by Mitsuharu Matsuoka (Nagoya University), who also provides a listing of Nineteenth-Century British and Irish Authors sorted into poets, novelists, and ‘other authors’.
• Victorian Women Writers Project: a growing archive of e-texts from women writers
• Classical Reception Studies Network
• Journal of Victorian Culture Online

Themed Resources

Art

• Royal Academy Collection online: a superb archive drawn from the Royal Academy’s extensive art collection. Sculptures, drawings, prints, photographs and historic books feature as well as paintings.
• Database of Mid-Victorian Wood-Engraved Illustrations
• The National Portrait Gallery’s Later Victorian Portraits Catalogue

Drama

• Lacy’s Acting Edition of Victorian Plays
• AHRC Ellen Terry and Edith Craig database A guide that describes the papers of Ellen Terry and Edith Craig at the National Trust property, Smallhythe Place, Tenterden, Kent, UK

Empire

• The British Empire Gateway: an internet gateway to online resources on the British Empire created by Jane Samson (University of Alberta)

Fashion

• FragrenceX Library on Fashion and Courtship in the Victorian Era.

Fiction

• At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction.

London

• The Victorian Dictionary: an eclectic and entertaining resource from the novelist Lee Jackson
• Greenwood’s Map of London 1827: a lively site allowing you to navigate through the map, with histories of place names.

Romantic Studies

• The British Association for Romantic Studies (BARS)
• North American Society for the Study of Romanticism (NASSR)
• Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net
• Romantic Circles
• Timeline

Modernist Studies

• British Association for Modernist Studies

Music

• Sounding Tennyson, a freely-available website, includes the first
  recordings and publications of Emily Tennyson’s piano/vocal settings of “Break,
  Break, Break,” which preserve aspects of Alfred Tennyson’s recitation. The
  recordings were made in the drawing room at the Tennysons’ restored home,
  Farringford, using Queen Victoria’s piano. Sounding
  Tennyson uses sound as an experiential way of
  conceptually thinking through an archive and is part of the Tennysons Archive, the first digital
  archival grouping of Tennyson items.
  
  Science

• The British Society for Literature and Society (BSLS)
• Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical

Recreational pursuits

• The Victorian Cyclist: a blog about the joys and perils of cycling in Victorian Britain
• The Victorian Turkish Bath: a history of the rise and fall of the Victorian Turkish bath, with details of those still open for use by Malcolm Shifrin.

Teaching Resources

• Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians explores the British Library’s collection of 1,200 Romantic and Victorian literary treasures, new insights by 60 experts, 25 documentary films, 30 inspirational teachers’ notes and more.
• Teaching Transatlanticism: a new site dedicated to sharing resources for teaching transatlantic literature in a wide range of instructional contexts.
• English Subject Centre Victorian Literature: includes a selection of case studies dedicated to teaching Victorian Literature at university-level.

Victorian Journals

19: Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century
Victorian Studies
Journal of Victorian Culture
Nineteenth-Century Contexts
Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies
Blackwell’s Literature Compass
Nineteenth-Century Literature
English Literature in Transition, 1880–1920
Victorian Poetry
Victorian Literature and Culture
Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies
Australasian Victorian Studies Journal
The Gissing Journal at Gissing in Cyberspace
George Eliot Review

Victoriographies

Funding Bodies

Arts & Humanities Research Council
The British Academy
The Leverhulme Trust

Are there other nineteenth-century resources that you find helpful? Please contact Claire with further suggestions.