Digital Sites & Collections
Every year, more literature and humanities-related collections are being made available on the web thanks to grant funding and other initiatives. Look for scholarly sites and use terms such as archive or digital collection when using a search engine like Google in order to identify any interesting web-based resources that may be helpful in your research. Below are just a few of the wide range of accessible collections available on the web:
- British Library, Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians"The first phase of Discovering Literature focuses on Romantic and Victorian literature, and showcases some of the Library's most treasured literary collection items, including the manuscripts of William Blake, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë. In addition, the site includes a rich range of contextual material, such as newspapers, letters, diaries, photographs, pamphlets, broadsides, playbills and other forms of ephemera" (About the project). See especially Technology and Science under Themes.
- British Library, Victorian Britain"Discover historical sources and articles written by experts that reveal the everyday reality of living in Victorian Britain. The Victorian period in Britain was one of huge industrial and technological change, shocking divisions between rich and poor, sensational crimes, spectacular entertainments for the masses, and grand attempts to combat squalor and disease" (website description).
- Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RaVoN)"Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net (RaVoN) is an international, open access journal devoted to British Nineteenth-Century Literature" (from website).
- The Victorian Literary Studies Archive Hyper-ConcordanceA series of online concordances to works by 200 British, Irish, and American Victorian authors. Choose and author and a work, then search for a particular term to see where that term occurs in the text.
- The Victorian WebThe Victorian Web is a scholarly website that includes "primary and secondary texts (including scholarly book reviews) in British Victorian economics, literature, philosophy, political and social history, science, technology, and visual arts (painting, architecture, sculpture, book design and illustration, photography, decorative arts, including ceramics, furniture, jewelry, metalwork, stained glass, and textiles, costume and various movements, such as Art Nouveau, Japonisme, and Arts and Crafts)" (from website).
- BBC Archive - H.G. Wells on the Future"In the 1930s and 40s, novelist HG Wells (1866-1946) made regular radio broadcasts from the BBC to the nation. Some have survived the passage of time and they reveal just a hint of the creative mind . . .Hear Wells in his own words as he discusses topics as diverse as world politics, the history of the printing press, the possibilities of technology and the shape of things to come..." (from collection description)
- Harry Ransom Center, Robert Louis Stevenson Digital Collection"The Robert Louis Stevenson collection includes manuscripts and letters written by the Scottish novelist, as well as letters and manuscripts about him by others. Correspondents include Stevenson's wife, mother, and cousin, as well as writers Edmund Gosse and H. Rider Haggard. Also present are a facsimile of baby records kept by Stevenson's mother (1850-1858), lecture cards from the University of Edinburgh (1869-1872), and a journal kept by Stevenson's father in 1845. Several letters to Sir Sidney Colvin concerning Stevenson are also present" (from collection site).
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