Printed Sources: Libraries, Serials, Books

Two pioneering Victorianists, Sally Mitchell and Rosemary Van Arsdel, contributed research guides to this site years ago, and although they are obviously outdated in some respects, there remains much in them that is useful. In Doing Research in Victorian Fiction: Historical, Critical, and Reference Sources Professor Mitchell put this extensive bibliography together for her graduate course in women's fiction for the period 1875-1900. In addition to its specific sections on women and fiction, the guide provides helpfully annotated entries for reference sources of essential importance to all researchers in Victorian history and culture.  Aids to Research in British Victorian Periodical Literature: A Selected Bibliography, from Professor Van Arsdel,  lists biographical sources, histories of individual periodicals, and critical commentaries.

Not all material of 19th-century interest, of course, has been catalogued. Various projects have been begun in Britain in recent years to catalogue rare materials from many libraries. The 19th-Century British Pamphlets Project, for example, first created in 2007-09, incorporates digitized version of 26,000 pamphlets from seven major collections, while now also compiling some 180,000 catalog records for pamphlets held within 21 research libraries. The site also features Laurel Brake's introductory essay and bibliography.

An important tool for Victorianists, but one that must be used with caution, is the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC), Series I & II, 1801-1870, and Series III, 1871-1919, a union catalogue of titles published during this period in Britain, its colonies and the USA held in the British Library, the Bodleian, the University Library, Cambridge, the National Library of Scotland, Trinity College Library, Dublin, the University Library in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Harvard University Library and the Library of Congress. The database includes over 1,200,000 records. Originally available on CD from its creators, Avero Publications, it is now offered through Chadwyck-Healey, which is owned by ProQuest. Essential reading for scholars wanting to use the NSTC to arrive at conclusions about the quantity of particular types of books published during the 19th century is Simon Eliot's influential two-part analysis published in the journal Publishing History in 1997-98: Simon Eliot, `Patterns and Trends and the NSTC: some initial observations' Part I, Publishing History, XLII (Autumn 1997), 79-104; and Simon Eliot, `Patterns and Trends and the NSTC: some initial observations' Part II, Publishing History, XLIII (Spring 1998) 71-112.

The British Library

The British Library in its splendid modern quarters in St. Pancras lies at the center of many researchers' plans, and with good reason--its collections are incomparable. Advance preparations for your visit, especially if you haven't used the BL before, will help you to make the most of the experience. Access to the collections requires that you present a "reader pass" (what for a century and a half or so was called a "reader's ticket") for admission to any of the Reading Rooms. This includes manuscripts; unlike in the old Reading Room, you no longer need a separate pass for working with archival material. Obtaining a reader pass is a fairly straightforward process. Simply follow the signs in the lobby to the registration office (off to your right as you enter the lobby), fill out the application form, and join the queue. You must demonstrate that the materials needed can only be obtained at the British Library, a process that entails being interviewed by Library staff. Faculty and graduate students ("postgrads," in British parlance) need to bring a recommendation letter on their university's stationery from "someone in authority" there confirming the name and status of the applicant and briefly outlining the reasons for needing to use the BL. Bring your student ID if you have one, but in any case you'll need two current forms of identification--recent utility bills with your name and address seem to be the preferred method--to apply for your first pass or to renew an old one. The reader pass you'll wind up with (pink, with a magnetic strip, a photo that they'll take right there in the office, and a number you'll need to use to order books with) is good for up to three years. Enquiries about obtaining reader passes can be made by e-mail to Reader Admissions.

If you're primarily interested in looking at manuscripts, here's an additional precaution: try to bring a recommendation letter from someone (colleague, advisor) that specifically mentions the manuscripts or at least the manuscript collection that you need to see. Although you can't tell this ahead of time, some mss. turn out, when you order them, to be classified in such a way that your reader pass alone won't allow them to be brought to you, and only a note from some other scholar will suffice.

The most powerful tool available to BL users around the world is the new British Library Integrated Catalogue, a web interface to all of the library's catalogues that allows across-the-board searches as well as ordering of photocopies. In preparing to visit you can write in advance to request that as many as six items from the collection be held for you on the date you arrive. With so much material still stored offsite, requesting materials in advance can save valuable time. In making up your request, be sure to include all relevant pressmarks and identification numbers for each item, exactly as listed in the catalogue. You must also tell the librarians which reading room you will be using. Many Victorianists will be obliged to divide their time between the Humanities Reading Rooms, at which you can get post-1851 books, and the Rare Books and Music Reading Room, where you must go to read pre-1851 monographs. (Pre-1851 periodicals will for the time being be available at either room.) Finally, include the number of your reader pass. Enquiries can be sent by e-mail to Reader Services or by post or fax to:

Readers' Enquiries
The British Library
96 Euston Road, St. Pancras
London NW1 2DB
United Kingdom
tel: +44 171 412-7676
fax: +44 171 412-7609

The Library's reading rooms are open from 10:00 a.m. until 8 p.m. on Monday, 9:30 to 8 Tuesday through Thursday, and 9:30 a.m. til 5 p.m. on Friday and Saturday; the Manuscripts Reading Room closes at 5 p.m. M-S. It's a good idea to get there early--with the new rules allowing admission to undergraduates, seats fill up quickly, especially during holidays like Easter vacation. Arriving at the front of the building that faces Euston Road, enter the library by crossing the plaza dominated by the muscular naked man who is bent over double (aka Blake's "Newton") and going through the quick security check of your bag. Once inside, nip around downstairs to the right to deposit any bags or coats in the cloakroom. Your own bags are not allowed in the reading rooms, so you'll have to carry your notebooks and pencils loose in your hands or else pick up one of the clear plastic "British Library" bags stacked on a ledge across from the cloakroom. (If there aren't any plastic bags left, request one from the cloakroom attendant.) Laptop computers can be brought in, of course, and the new facilities have many electrical outlets for them. Use your reader's ticket to go through the automatic gates and proceed upstairs to the "Humanities One" Reading Room or the Rare Books and Music Reading Room.

Once in the Reading Room, the first thing you need to do is locate a seat, make a note of the number, and somehow mark it to show that it's occupied while you go in search of an unoccupied catalogue terminal. Readers no longer write up slips to order books and, conversely, Library staff no longer deliver books to one's desk. Instead, sit down at a terminal and order your selections via the online catalogue; as part of this process you will need to key in your ticket number and seat number. Return to your seat, and wait for the light to come on indicating that your books have arrived; this waiting period is why it's a good idea to order some materials in advance of your visit.

The BL is aiming for a 30-minute wait on books, but many will take much longer to arrive. Last call for requests is an hour before closing. Queue up at the Issue Desk to get your books (no more than six at one time); when done, queue up at the Issue Desk to return them. You don't get any kind of receipts for the books you turn in, so make your own record of them if you need one; up to six books at a time can be held for you overnight. The Library's Manuscripts Reading Room follows a very orderly set of procedures: after consulting the catalogue on a terminal, you fill in slips with the citation and your seat number and place them in the basket at the front desk. The manuscripts are then brought to your table. It is at this point that you may be told that the manuscript you have requested requires special clearance; have your letter from an advisor or colleague ready to show. Up to three manuscripts can be ordered in advance of your visit.

Among the many pertinent collections of the British Library, Victorianists will take special interest in the British Printed Collections, 1801-1914 that include online collections of newspapers, periodicals, and ephemera. The library has long been engaged in an ambitious project to reproduce its rarest 19th-century materials on microfilm, now in association with ProQuest. More than 28,000 19th-century titles are now on microfiche, divided into such subject areas as women writers, colonization, and publishing. A new website enables scholars to search the catalogue of the collection.

Periodicals

"In the case of the nineteenth century," wrote Richard Altick, "one cannot possibly understand the spirit of the age without being saturated with the spirit of its periodicals." As John North has written, "Most of the eminent poets, novelists, and essayists were primarily known through the periodical literature of the time. The newly-literate classes found their reading material in this medium, such that periodicals (whether religious, political, mercantile, professional or scholarly) became a primary source of entertainment, instruction, information, and news, and an important means of social bonding." Rosemary T. VanArsdel's Selected Bibliography, while dated, is prefaced by a helpful overview and history of research in this vital area of study. A more detailed and up-to-date bibliography is compiled and published by the Research Society for Victorian Periodicals.

The Victorian Periodicals Review has long been the journal of record in this exciting and rapidly expanding field of study. The VPR has published the RSVP bibliography for many years, first annually and, more recently, every two years; the installments since 1999 are already accessible in digital form, and others are planned.  Since 2009, the VPR has been published by Johns Hopkins University Press, and is available through Project Muse. All serious students of 19th-century media should consider joining RSVP, which offers an impressive assortment of grants and fellowships to support research in this field, and sponsors a lively annual conference. RSVP also hosts a Facebook Group open to anyone interested in the 19th-century press.

The indispensable source for the study of the major Victorian magazines and reviews is, of course, the venerable Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900 (5 volumes, Toronto, 1966-89), one of the 20th century's great feats of collaborative scholarship. The intensive research that went into the Wellesley revealed the identities of thousands of the men and women who wrote for some of the most prominent magazines, for the first time matching articles with their authors. Most research libraries will have a copy of this five-volume masterpiece in their reference rooms. In 1999, Routledge created a searchable CD-ROM version of the Wellesley that has long since been supplanted by a more versatile (but still somewhat clumsy) online version available from ProQuest. The working documents left behind in the Wellesley College Archive by the Wellesley Index's team of scholars remain a treasure-trove of unpublished information; see the finding guide here.

Many corrections and additions to the Wellesley Index have come to light since the last volume of the Index appeared in 1989. The Curran Index was the first online compilation and continuation of attribution research carried out by the late Eileen Curran. Since 2013, under the guidance first of Dr. Gary Simons and then of Drs. Lars Atkin and Emily Bell, the Curran Index has made the latest discoveries about Victorian periodical authorship available in readily searchable database form. The Curran Index has expanded enormously in recent years, and now incorporates many titles not covered by the original Wellesley volumes, including such mainstays of Victorian middle-class reading as weeklies like Punch, Saturday Review, Athenaeum, and Once a Week, while also including attributions to poetry, which was not part of the Wellesley. As of 2021, the Curran Index had documented 168,000 periodical contributions by over 3300 authors, 1800 of whom did not appear at all in the Wellesley. It also includes listings for over 10,000 poems that had appeared in Victorian periodicals, and over 1,000 identified writers of verse. Unlike the online Wellesley Index, the Curran Index, which is supported by RSVP, is completely free to use. If you are trying to find out who wrote something in a Victorian periodical, or trying to find out what a particular author may have written for periodicals, the Curran Index should be at the top of your list (along with the Wellesley if you can find it) of places to check.

Professor Curran, part of the original Wellesley team of scholars, also made use of her extensive research notes and ongoing scholarly detective work to bring us "Biographies of Some Obscure Contributors to 19th-century Periodicals", which sought to shed new light on some of the darker recesses of Victorian authorship. New entries will be added in the future from notes that Professor Curran left behind, and from contributions volunteered by other scholars

Another vital and monumental resource in this area is the Waterloo Directory of English, Irish, and Scottish newspapers and periodicals published between 1800 and 1900, a vast ongoing project. Created, edited, and published by John North, the directory offers incomparably extensive bibliographical information to researchers. For anyone who needs to know when a 19th-century magazine or newspaper was published, what copies survive, and who published, edited, and wrote for it, the Waterloo Directory should be the first port of call. The third series now features no fewer than 73,000 entries, and is available in both print form (20 volumes) and in an online edition. This enormous storehouse now includes, among its 68,000 personal names, the names of all persons in the original DNB or Modern English Biography who were in any way associated with periodicals, as well as scans of some 23,000 title pages. Alas, like so many important resources, it is currently available only through institutional subscriptions.

To locate copies of many of these titles, North American researchers will also want to consult Richard D. Fulton's Union list of Victorian serials; a union list of selected nineteenth-century British serials available in the United States and Canadian libraries. (Garland, 1985). See also Richard Altick's elegant 1952 essay about the Newberry Library's extensive collection of Victorian periodicals. 

Poole's Index to the contents of 19th-century American and British periodicals has long been an idiosyncratic but essential reference tool for locating articles on particular subjects. There is of course a subscription version by the ubiquitous ProQuest (check with your nearest research library), but digital facsimiles of the original volumes, and their supplements, can be found on HathiTrust and Internet Archive. Many scholars will find useful Michael Hancher's listing of British periodicals to 1850 at the University of Minnesota library.

For scholars working on the perennially fascinating topic of the publication and reception of fiction in 19th-century periodicals, the Victorian Fiction Research Guides, under the guidance of the estimable Andrew King, are a key resource. In addition to indexes devoted to authors who published much of their work in periodicals, the guides include indexes to fiction in such titles as:

• Belgravia (1866-1899);
• Cassell's Family Magazine (later Cassell's Magazine (1874-1910);
• Chambers' Journal (1854-1920);
• The Harmsworth Magazine, later London Magazine (1898-1915);
• The Idler (1892-1911);
• Illustrated London News and the Graphic;
• The Lady's Realm (1896-1914);
• London Journal (1845-1883);
• Pall Mall Magazine (1893-1914);
• Tinsley's Magazine, later The Novel Review;
• Time, Murray's Magazine, & The Quarto
• Windsor Magazine;

The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism (2009) follows in the honored tradition of ambitious, collaborative reference works in this field, with hundreds of entries on titles, editors, contributors, and other aspects of the Victorian press. Edited by Alexis Easley, Andrew King, and John Morton the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-century Periodicals and Newspapers represents a huge step forward for Victorianists everywhere in our study of this burgeoning field.

The digital revolution, part 1

Indices and listings are essential research tools for studying Victorian periodicals, but what about direct access to the texts themselves? The pioneering Internet Library of Early Journals project created a digitized, searchable collection of portions of selected 18th- and 19th-century periodicals, freely accessible via the Web. Notes and Queries, 1849-58, and Blackwoods, 1843-51, and The Builder, 1843-1852, were the Victorian titles available in this way. The site is now archived and inoperative, though with links to other resources.  Although the project was limited in scope, the newfound ability to search the texts of thousands of articles in these periodicals represented an important step forward. The ILEJ's larger U.S. counterpart, the "Making of America" collection of 19th-century periodicals (many of which contain excerpts from British magazines) also demonstrated how useful uncorrected OCR texts of these sources, linked to page-images, could be.

With such projects as prologue, access to 19th-century periodicals have in the past ten years made a revolutionary advance. Gale Cengage has been digitizing complete 19th-century runs of hundreds of titles, modeled on their pioneering Times Digital Archive, offering institutional subscribers access to the full text of the London Times. This stunningly ambitious project, called 19th Century U.K. Periodicals Online, has enormous potential for the future of Victorian Studies. The project is comprised of five series covering many genres and themes; the first installment of the series, for example, covering women, satire, empire, and children, includes such titles as the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, Punch, Tomahawk, the Northern Star, and the Boy's Own Paper, along with many less familiar ones, the whole comprising some 1.2 million pages.

A similar initiative came from ProQuest, Gale's arch-rival as publishers of digitized primary sources and works of reference. ProQuest has digitized hundreds of British periodicals published between the 17th and the early 20th centuries, as part of its British Periodicals collection. Among the first titles included in British Periodicals II have been such influential Victorian periodicals as Bentley's, Temple Bar, the Fortnightly, the Athenaeum, and Blackwood's;recent additions include the Saturday Review and the Westminster Review. The Victorian titles are included in a new compendium called C19: The Nineteenth-Century Index, which includes the subject index to the Parliamentary Papers (themselves available from ProQuest as a standalone full-text collection), the Nineteenth-Century Short-Title Catalogue, the Wellesley Index, the Curran Index, and the Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism ; the DNCJ is also available in a hardcopy edition.

Non-profit initiatives, meanwhile, continue to forge ahead in this area. The Nineteenth-Century Serials Project has digitized six influential and representative periodicals -- Monthly Repository, Northern Star, Englishwoman's Review, Leader, Tomahawk, and Publishers' Circular -- in fully encoded, annotated, and complete editions (multiple editions of each title, for example, are included) that will allow extremely sophisticated kinds of searching unavailable to most mass digitization projects. This project made its debut in the spring of 2008.

Digitized volumes of many titles are now available online through a combination of Google Books, HathiTrust, Internet Archive, and various curated collections.  This still-growing list of open-access 19th-century periodicals has been  gathered together using the list of serials generated by John Mark Ockerbloom and his team at Penn. 

In 2012 Dickens Journals Online at the University of Buckingham was completed, in time to celebrate the bicentenary of Charles Dickens's birth. This project offers free access to a searchable text of two journals famously "conducted by" Dickens: Household Words (1850-59) and All the Year Round (1859-1870). All of the OCR'd text in this edition has been manually corrected by a crew of dedicated volunteers to ensure maximum accuracy in digital searching, while of course the page-images are available for browsing, as well. This project, still adding features and soliciting feedback from users, is a boon to all students of Dickens and of Victorian periodicals. The 2015 discovery of a marked set of All the Year Round has raised hopes that its trove of information about the authorship of contributions to that important journal will ultimately be made available through DJO.

Victorian magazines and newspapers that have survived to the present day have often resisted licensing their old numbers to companies like ProQuest and Gale Cengage for inclusion in digital databases. A few of these, like the Scotsman (see below), have done the job themselves and charged a fee for access. The venerable Spectator, founded in 1828, whose back numbers are available by subscription in ProQuest's Periodicals Archive Online, digitized its trove of past issues into a well-designed online database published in the summer of 2013 as The Spectator Archive. In a disaster for 19th-century scholarship, the office book that recorded the authorship of unsigned Spectator's articles, to which scholars like Malcolm Woodfield and Robert Tener once had limited access as recently as the 1990s, has since been lost.

Digitized collections of specialist periodicals are well worth seeking out.  The IAPSOP archive, for instance, contains the full text of dozens of Spiritualist, occult, and reformist papers, while the Museum of Freemasonry offers a fabulous collection of Masonic periodicals.

All students of the period will want to follow the development of these digitization projects very closely, including those involving 19th-century newspapers. Their implications for the future of Victorian research methods -- and, more importantly, their promise for deepening our understanding of the period -- can scarcely be exaggerated.

In 2009, the late Sally Mitchell published a magisterial overview of the field that has continuing relevance today: "Victorian Journalism in Plenty". Her call for the creation of a "union list" of all digital facsimiles of 19th-century periodicals and newspapers remains an elusive goal. Published in 2016, the Routledge Handbook to Nineteenth-century Periodicals and Newspapers, edited by Alexis Easley, Andrew King, and John Morton, represents a huge step forward for Victorianists everywhere in our study of this essential element of Victorian life.

A range of free online sources for periodical study include the following:

• Julie Sorge Way's Open Access index to the Englishwoman's Domestic Magazine, her detailed notes, and Richard Noakes's introduction to the magazine.
• Victorian Print Trade Journals Database, created by Jamie Horrocks and Brian Croxall at Brigham Young University, is a model annotated bibliography of this important and varied segment of the 19th-c. trade press.
• "Press Characters" from Press News, a series that ran in the printers' trade journal Press News in 1869, offers useful sidelights on 19th-c. journalistic practice
• "Using Periodicals in Creative Research and Teaching," a presentation given by Kitty Ledbetter at the 50th anniversary celebration of the founding of the Victorian Periodicals Review, features beautiful images from her collection, questions that spurred some of her own research projects, and sage advice for those just beginning to work iwth Victorian periodicals
• Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry and the Periodical Poetry Index are devoted to scholarly exploration of poetry as a major component of the Victorian periodical press. A great many of the poets responsible for verse in Victorian periodicals have been identified by the DVPP and also by the Curran Index, an ongoing process that continues to yield remarkable results.
• Leslie Howsam's HBooks project (formerly HiPPO), a methodologically innovative quest to find out how history was presented to readers of Victorian periodicals;
• Linda Hughes's essay on Macmillans and the Cornhill, the pioneering shilling monthlies of the 1860s;
• the online index of the British Cartoon Archive in Canterbury at the University of Kent's Templeman Library;
• an invaluable index to the Girl's Own Paper, 1880-1940, by Honor Ward;
• the Athenaeum Index of Reviews and Reviewers, 1830-70, based on a marked file of this important journal, once allowed one to search for book reviews by author, title and reviewers. A separate project at the University of Ghent extended the index to include the period 1872-1893.  Much of this material is now included in the Curran Index.
• Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical is an extensive index that traces the representation of science, technology, and medicine across a wide range of 19th-c. periodicals, published by the SciPer Project at the Universities of Leeds and Sheffield;
• the Missionary Periodicals Database at Yale, an admirably detailed guide to these important but neglected periodicals that is searchable by region (just click on the world map), title, and keyword;
• Victorian Fiction Research Guides (see above);
• a guide to the locations of some 19th-c. missionary and religious periodicals in U.S. libraries, by April Logan and Rachel Bright;
• John Tenniel and the American Civil War: Political Cartoons from Punch, 1860-65, fro, Allan T. Kohl
• the Penny Magazine project by Sarah Wadsworth and Laurie Dickinson at Minnesota [now disappeared off the server, another victim of neglect];
• collector John Weedy's pages devoted to the Illustrated London News;
• the Quarterly Review Archive by Jonathan Cutmore;
• past issues of the British Medical Journal, which started publishing in 1840, are now available online
• the Database of Mid-Victorian wood-engraved Illustrations from selected periodicals
• "Attributions of Authorship in Gentleman's Magazine" for 1731-1868, by Emily Lorraine de Montluzin, now available as a searchable file at UVa;
• the BL's Newspaper Library online listing of selected Victorian illustrated newspapers;
• Patrick Leary's interpretation of Notes and Queries as a Victorian "virtual community";

Newspapers

Until recently, nineteenth-century newspapers were a vast terra incognita of Victorian research. Out of thousands of titles and millions of copies, many did not survive, those that did survive were not easily available, and the prospect of creeping through the bewilderingly diverse wilderness of closely printed prose via unindexed volumes on microfilm daunted many a hardy researcher. 

The digital revolution of the 21st century has changed all this, and researchers, many of them working in teams, are sifting through millions of pages of newspaper text and imagery in increasingly sophisticated ways. There has never been a more exciting time to explore the world of the nineteenth century, and the enormous treasure-trove represented by Victorian newspapers is one important reason why this is true.  No student of the period can afford to ignore the opportunities afforded by this kind of research.

Yet amid this plenty, intractable barriers to access persist, as well as formidable methodological puzzles.  Many collections remain behind pay walls, available only to those who have access to a major research library with an institutional subscription.  Once access has been obtained, the individual researcher will still want to proceed with caution, armed with the knowledge that even seemingly thoroughgoing digitized collections of titles will still have omissions and gaps that may have profound consequences for a project.  The British Library's British Newspaper Archive, for instance, offers individual subscriptions at a modest price, and all researchers can be grateful for its growing inclusion of provincial papers, and its easily navigable interface. And yet the BNA does not include such hugely important newspapers as the Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Manchester Guardian, or the Scotsman.  For these, and other titles, one must look elsewhere.  Every collection has omissions like these, and before planning your research project it's a good idea to look carefully not only at the list of available titles for  each collection but at which years are covered by each title. One important attempt to begin to come to grips with some of the issues surrounding the proliferation of different databases is the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers, which gathers metadata on a substantial sampling of digital collections around the world.  The Atlas's introductory explanation may be somewhat opaque to those not conversant with digital humanities lingo, but editors Emily Bell and M. H. Beals give an accessible introduction here.  Or you can go straight to the chart of Database Histories.  

The Waterloo Directory remains a helpful guide to finding out about individual titles.  With the demise of the venerable British Library Newspaper Library at Colindale, the center of such research at the British Library is now The Newsroom, a dedicated reading room on the second floor. Many 19th-century newspapers have not been (and some will never be) digitized, so this is the place to order microfilm and, if that is not available and the materials are not too fragile, original hardcopies of newspapers. 

Also online is a short Union List of 19th-c. newspapers in New York libraries. You can begin to get a feel for what manuscript materials are available by having a look through the National Register of Archives information sheet on sources for the history of the press in Britain; similarly worth consulting is David Linton and Ray Boston, editors, The newspaper press in Britain: an annotated bibliography (1987). Note that some reference material described above under the heading of periodicals applies to newspapers as well, as periodical publications, including some portions of Rosemary VanArsdel's selected bibliography.

The archival records -- correspondence, ledgers, indices, etc. -- retained by two of today's newspapers are a marvelous and under-utilized resource for historians of the press. The Times's fabulously extensive archive of manuscript material, a major source for Victorian journalistic and political history, is available to researchers by appointment. So, too, is that of the Manchester Guardian going back to 1821. In its modern incarnation, the Guardian has established Guardian News and Media Archive in London, a center devoted to the paper's history.

The digital revolution, part 2

The Times of London was, of course, the most powerful Victorian newspaper, and although its prominence has led to a neglect of other London papers and, most significantly, of the very different perspectives to be found in the provincial press, the paper remains a key resource for students of the period. Palmer's Index, an idiosyncratic but indispensable key to the paper's contents, is available by subscription from ProQuest.  Some libraries even retain the hardcopy volumes, which are, by the way, great fun to browse -- check out one or more of these digitized volumes on HathiTrust. (Also Internet Archive.) One might think that an old index like Palmer's would be obsolete in an age of full-text searching (see below), but in fact it is an indispensable compendium of Victorian journalistic usage that enables the researcher to target a search by focusing on the language in which various events would have been reported. If you are doing a lot of work with the Times it is worth looking for a major research library in your area that has a subscription to the Times Digital Archive.  

Individual papers offer access to their archives under a variety of schemes. Gale offers institutional subscriptions to the Telegraph Historical Archive, 1855-2016 contains over a million pages from this hugely important paper, known in Victorian times (and long after) as the Daily Telegraph. The Scotsman offers a searchable digitised version of its entire 19th-century run, for which you must register. The website includes a helpful short account of the newspaper's long history.  The Manchester Guardian has now followed suit with its own archive, which reaches back to 1821.

The National Library of New Zealand and the National Library of Australia have each pushed forward with projects to digitize a wide range of 19th-century newspapers, making the results freely available to users.  The New Zealand papers currently run from the 1830s to 1920, the Australian papers from 1803 to 1954.  The Australian collection  includes a revolutionary feature allowing users to correct the results of automated OCR (optical character recognition), thereby increasing the accuracy of searching for subsequent users.  In both cases, scholars will want to seek out the "Advanced search" module.

The future of scholarly work on the contents of old newspapers is clearly in digitized editions, accessed remotely online. In 2004, JISC and the British Library announced a joint partnership to digitize entire runs of dozens of newspapers published between 1800 and 1900 to create the 19th Century British Library Newspapers collection. The project was later joined by Gale, a leading creator and marketer of digital collections, and made its welcome debut in 2008. The collection did not originally include several important papers that are still publishing -- like the Guardian and the Telegraph and the Inverness Courier--online access to entire 19th-century runs of major newspapers like the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News, as well as to provincial papers and working-class papers, in fully searchable form, was a huge boon to researchers everywhere. Like many of the forthcoming periodical projects mentioned above, this ambitious undertaking marks a decisive change in scholars' access to -- and, ultimately, our understanding of -- the vast print culture of 19th-century Britain.  The BL's 19th-century newspaper database has been made available in libraries all over Britain through JISC, but in the U.S., access can be made through major research libraries.  See historian Martin Conboy's March 2009 review of the collection for the Institute of Historical Research.

On November 30, 2011, in a landmark development for Victorianists around the world, the British Library announced a partnership with Brightsolid to digitize a great many more newspapers (many of them provincial papers, dating from the 18th century to the early 1900s) and to make these digital facsimiles accessible by anyone on a pay-as-you-go basis as the British Newspaper Archive. The searches are free, and then you pay for a period of time, from 48 hours to a month to a year, during which you can explore the full search results -- up to a certain capped monthly number of page-views. One feature of this archive that I am extremely happy to see is a mode that allows users to see the underlying, uncorrected text and then submit corrections. Some of us have been pressing the big vendors for the inclusion of this feature for years and years, and I'm delighted to see that the British Library has gone in this direction. Bob Nicholson wrote a very useful review of the promise and the drawbacks of this important resource, and after that review appeared the BNA made improvements that obviate many of his criticisms. The BNA has continued to grow exponentially and is now an essential part of any plan of research for virtually any topic in modern British history.

The new availability of digitized Victorian newspapers is making possible a wide range of exploratory strategies. Paul Fyfe's Nineteenth Century Newspaper Analytics at North Carolina State, for example, is experimenting with innovative analysis of illustrated papers. Bob Nicholson's Victorian Meme Machine, a collaboration with British Library Labs, illuminates the structure and circulation of jokes in the Victorian press. Initiatives like the Viral Texts Project at Northeastern University and the U.S. News Map at Georgia Tech, although they mainly concern American papers, offer suggestive models for studying the geographical circulation of news and opinion.

In May, 2010, Gale completed and put online the Illustrated London News Historical Archive, 1842-2003, at last making the world's first illustrated newspaper available in searchable form. Accompanied by essays contributed by various experts on Victorian periodicals, this new database marks a major step forward for the study of the illustrated press. Those hoping to access, save, and print high-resolution copies of the ILN's marvelous wood engravings via this edition will be disappointed, however. For these one must still have recourse to the original volumes.

 Patrick Leary's 2005 essay "Googling the Victorians" (also available for download here in PDF) considered some of the implications of these digitization projects . Leary returned to the subject ten years later in "Search and Serendipity," as part of an anniversary roundtable for Victorian Periodicals Review. His 2013 essay, "How the Dickens Scandal Went Viral," demonstrates how digitized newspaper collections can be used to trace the circulation of individual rumors among and between British and American papers.

In the midst of all these riches, however, it is crucial to bear in mind the large number of newspapers and periodicals that remain in the "offline penumbra" of material that has not been (and may never be) available in digital form. Likewise, as Paul Fyfe reminds us in "An Archaeology of Victorian Newspapers" (Victorian Periodicals Review, Winter 2016, 546-577), it is crucial that scholars strive to make themselves aware, not only of what is missing from digital full-text collections, but how decisions made during the creation of those collections have shaped what texts are represented there, the forms in which they appear, and the limits of the methods by which the interface allows scholars to "search" and manipulate these complexly remediated facsimiles.

Photographs and illustrations

Many pictures of Victorian people, places, and things can be obtained, for a fee, from picture libraries and agencies; Hulton Getty Collection, Mary Evans Picture Library, and Francis Frith Collection are particularly rich in 19th-century images. The National Portrait Gallery's picture library supplies and licenses reproductions of the gallery's portraits.

The Documentary Photography Archive in Manchester is a major repository for Victorian photographs, while the Victoria and Albert holds some 300,000 photographs, many of them illustrating Victorian daily life. The London Metropolitan Archives (formerly the GLRO) has a large and well-indexed collection of photographs of London. The Print Room of the Guildhall Library, a prime source for London images and the source of much of what is on COLLAGE, has now closed, and its collection moved to the London Metropolitan Archives at 40 Northampton Road, London EC1R 0HB; enquiries can be sent to ask.lma@cityoflondon.gov.uk. The City Gallery site offers a number of excellent resources created specifically for those researching 19th-century American and British photographs. Although much of its collection consists of 20th-century images, the new National Media Museum also has a great many from the 19th century, including the early Fox Talbot photographs that used to reside in the Science Museum.

The Courtauld Institute houses many thousands of photographs of artworks and buildings as part of its Witt and Conway Libraries; a similar service is provided by the National Gallery's picture library. The Images of England project of the National Monuments Record is accumulating an online library of images of 370,000 listed buildings.

Finally, a couple of resources for finding copies of paintings and drawings, especially for teaching purposes. If you're looking for a reproduction of a Victorian artwork, be sure to consult Kristine Garrigan's Victorian Art Reproductions in Modern Sources: A Bibliography (Garland, 1991). If it was published somewhere before 1990, chances are you'll find that reproduction listed in Garrigan. Online sources include John Malyon's Artcylcopedia, which features a search engine for individual artists that directs you to any online reproductions of their works that may be available. And a fine source for 18th- and 19th-century British engravings and paintings is the London Picture Archive, which features an image database of over 20,000 works from the London Metropolitan Archives and Guildhall Art Gallery in London, helpfully organized by theme. You can order prints of these from the site.

Bibliographies

The "Victorian Bibliography" first appeared in 1933, but has now been discontinued, which can only be seen as a loss for the entire field of Victorian Studies. The Victorian Studies annual bibliographies from 1999 ton are supposed to be available in searchable electronic form , free to non-subscribers, but no working links hve been found. The annual listings for the ten years from 1975 to 1984 are compiled in Richard C. Tobias, editor, Bibliographies of Studies in Victorian Literature (New York: AMS Press, 1991).

An excellent, annotated bibliography by R. K. Webb of historical scholarship on Britain and Ireland since 1760 may be found in Section 24 of the 3rd edition of the American Historical Association's Guide to Historical Literature (Oxford, 1995). Similarly, the relevant sections of the Royal Historical Society bibliography (see below), though often appearing as much as two years after the year covered, often turn up specialist and regional articles and monographs of interest. Likewise, the annual MLA International Bibliography should be consulted for authors like Conrad, Shaw, Yeats, and Wells, who continued to publish major works into the 20th century.

A fine guide to older works is Heather Creaton's Bibliography of Printed Works on London History to 1939 (Library Association Publishing, 1994). Organized by subject and period and helpfully indexed, the book makes it easy to browse entries covering virtually any aspect of Victorian London. Beginning in January of 2003, the whole of Creaton's bibliography, along with her subsequent updates, has been made available as part of the free online RHS Bibliography of British and Irish History once free but now behind a paywall.

Editors of Victorian and Edwardian texts must often search far and wide, online and off, to identify quotations and allusions. Longtime VICTORIA subscriber George H. Thomson has generously made the byproduct of his own annotative labors available to other scholars in the form of a bibliography of printed reference works useful in exactly this kind of editorial detective work.

Royal Historical Society bibliographies

The Royal Historical Society has for years compiled an extensive annual bibliography of books and articles relating to the history of the British Isles. The complete set of these volumes was published on cd-rom in 1998 by Oxford University Press, and a free online edition appeared in the summer of 2002 that represented a major new bibliographical resource for scholars everywhere. Alas, since 1 January 2010, the RHS Bibliography disappeared behind a subscription wall. The RHS bibliographies are uniquely valuable in the breadth of their coverage, particularly of specialized and local British publications, and very helpfully organized and indexed.

Theses and dissertations

Equally useful resources on the IHR pages are lists of Historical Theses, Completed and in Progress at UK universities. One can access just the "modern" (i.e., post-1485) portions of the listing of completed theses by year, and scroll down to the 19th-century section, which is further subdivided by topic areas such as general, ecclesiastical, political, social, etc.:

The EThOS service from the British Library allows you to search UK theses and order copies online, many of which can be immediately downloaded as PDF files for free. An older service provides international doctoral theses through the British Library Document Supply Centre, which holds 110,000 theses from 95 countries. Many of these cannot be obtained from any other source. The theses are held at DSC as microfilm and can be supplied to the end user as microfilm, microfiche or paper copies. They are available for loan or purchase to both UK and overseas registered customers of the Document Supply Centre, while individuals and organisations not registered as BLDSC customers can purchase copies. There are some copyright restrictions which need dealing with on an individual basis as they vary from university to university. Further information may be obtained from the British Thesis Service at the DSC. Users from registered (i.e., paying) institutions can search for theses completed between 1970 and the present at "Index to Theses of Great Britain and Ireland".

In the U.S. doctoral dissertations are submitted to UMI (now owned by ProQuest), which has traditionally made them available in microfilm or paper copy. The company is shifting to electronic formats; you can now search for a dissertation through the Dissertation Express service.

Topical bibliographies

Much helpful bibliographical information may be found included with the syllabi listed under "Teaching Resources." The following are bibliographies on specific Victorian people or topics:

• William Blake (Blake Archive)
• The British Empire: Selected Bibliography George Landow
• Chartism Ursula Stange
• Darwin: An Introductory Guide (John van Wyhe)
• English Literature and Religion, William S. Peterson [Particularly strong on such 19th-c. figures as Newman, Keble, Tennyson, and others.]
• Gaskell Bibliography (Nancy Weyant)
• Police and Policing in the United Kingdom: An Annotated Searchable Bibliography, Stanley D. Nash
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti (from The Rossetti Archive, UVa)
• Robert Louis Stephenson, Richard Drury
• Victorian Authorship and Publishing: Suggested Readings, P. Leary
• Victorian Law and British India: Primary Periodical Sources (David Wayne Thomas)
• Victorian Divorce: Suggested Readings, Gail Savage (from VICTORIA)
• Victorian Painting, David Lavender and John Woodwark
• Victorian Periodicals, Rosemary T. VanArsdel
• Victorian Periodicals, RSVP
• Victorian Photography, Thomas Prasch
• Victorian and Edwardian Women Travellers (PDF format, requires free Adobe reader) by John Theakstone. Included also is Mr. Theakstone's annotated guide to selected authors of these works.
• The "White Slavery" Debate: Suggested Readings, L. Murdoch (from VICTORIA)
• Women Writers: Biographical and Critical Sources, Sally Mitchell

Book Reviews: a selection

[Note: this section has not been updated for some years. (Too much work!) It remains here in case some of the links still point to reviews of interest. Those interested in tracking down reviews of a particular book outside of the main academic journals would do well to first consult the Times Literary Supplement, the Reviews In History site of the IHR, and Review 19.]

For several years, now, academic electronic resources like the IHR's Reviews In History and the H-NET consortium of history discussion lists, as well as general interest publications like the Guardian and the Telegraph, have provided an outlet for thoughtful reviews of scholarly books. (See also Romantic Circles Reviews, which features reviews of books about the Romantics.) USC's "New Books in Nineteenth-Century Studies" did excellent excellent service by listing new books and commissioning reviews; inactive for several years, it was revived in 2007-08 only to fall silent again. The most recent and ambitious attempt to review books about the 19th-century is the Review 19 project out of Dartmouth, launched in the summer of 2009, which aims to review Victorian Studies books within a few months of their publication, by contrast to the current system in which an author typically waits two years or more to see his or her book reviewed in print journals.

Bravo to those review sites that continue to make their archived reviews freely available to the public at stable addresses, at a time when an increasing number of publications whose reviews were once linked to from this section -- like the Sunday Times, the New York Review of Books, and History Today -- have since determined that older articles should be accessible only on payment of a fee. This part of VRW is no longer being updated. Nevertheless, here are links to a small selection of reviews of books of 19th-century interest that have appeared in the past few years. Apologies in advance for any dead links -- many newspaper sites discard links to their articles at unpredictable intervals, while many journals have moved their past reviews behind subscription walls, making it difficult to keep this section properly weeded.

• Dana Arnold. Re-presenting the Metropolis: Architecture, urban experience and social life in London, 1800 - 1840. 2000. Review by John Marriott.
• Owen Ashton, Robert Fyson, and Stephen Roberts, eds. The Duty of Discontent: Essays for Dorothy Thompson. 1995. Review by Simon Cordery.
• Rosemary Ashton. 142 Strand: A Radical Address in Victorian London. 2006. Reviews by Matthew Sturgis, Simon Heffer, and Philip Hoare.
• Rosemary Ashton. George Eliot: A Life. 1997. Review by William S. Peterson (from the NYT)
• Rosemary Ashton. Thomas and Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a marriage. 2002. Reviews by Kathryn Hughes, and Jan Marsh.
• Jeffrey Auerbach. The Great Exhibition of 1851. 1999. Reviews by Geoffrey Tyack and John R. Davis.
• Diane Atkinson. Love and Dirt: The Marriage of Arthur Munby and Hannah Cullwick. 2002. Reviewed by Kathryn Hughes.
• Andrew August. Poor Women's Lives: Gender, Work and Poverty in late-Victorian London. 1999. Review by Anna Davin.
• Stephanie L. Barczewsk. Myth and National Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Legends of King Arthur and Robin Hood. 2000. Review by Rosemary Mitchell.
• Paula Bartley. Prostitution: Prevention and Reform in England, 1860-1914. 1999. Review by Maria Luddy, with the author's response.
• C. A. Bayly. The Birth of the Modern World 1780–1914. Global Connections and Comparisons . 2004. Review by Catherine Hall (IHR).
• Deirdre Beddoe. Discovering Women's History: A Practical Guide to Researching the Lives of Women Since 1800. Third edition. 1998. Review by Elizabeth Dunn.
• Gillian Beer. Darwin's Plots: Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction. 1983; 2000. Review by by Johann W.N. Tempelhoff.
• Early Bloomsbury and the Edwardians. Review article by Noel Annan, 1997 (from NYRB).
• Michael Bentley. Lord Salisbury's World: Conservative Environments in Late-Victorian Britain. 2001. Review by Alain Lauzanne (from Cercles).
• Alistair Black. A New History of the English Public Library: Social and Intellectual Contexts, 1850-1914. 1996. Review by Chris Baggs.
• Kelly Boyd. Manliness and the Boys' Story Paper in Britain: A Cultural History, 1855-1940. 2003. Review by Stephen Heathorn.
• Asa Briggs. The Age of Improvement, 1783-1867. 2nd ed., rev. 2000. Review by Miles Taylor.
• R. Angus Buchanan. Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel. 2002. Review by James A. Jaffe.
• Arthur Burns and Joanna Innes, eds. Rethinking the Age of Reform. 2004. Review by Helen Rogers (IHR).
• Antoinette Burton. Dwelling in the Archive: Women Writing House, Home and History in Late Colonial India . 2004. Review by Sarah Ansari (IHR).
• Julia Bush. Edwardian Ladies and Imperial Power. 2000. Review by Clare Midgely and Dr. Bush's response.
• Anna Clark. The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class. 1995. Review by Carol Turbin.
• Syndy M. Conger, Frederick S. Frank, and Gregory O'Dea, eds., Iconoclastic Departures: Mary Shelley After 'Frankenstein' . 1997. RoN).
• Chris Cook and John Stevenson. The Longman Handbook of Modern British History, 1714-1995. 1996. Review by Paul Doerr.
• Annie E. Coombes. Reinventing Africa: Museums, Material Culture and Popular Imagination in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. 1995. Review by K. Scott Rodolitz.
• Jeffrey N. Cox. Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle
  The Examiner, 1818-1822, introduced by Yasuo Deguchi. 1998. Review by Nicholas Roe (from RoN).
• Adriana Craciun. "Women Writers of the Romantic Period: New Anthologies and Resources," 1998 review article, in RoN.
• Charles Darwin. The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals [1872], ed. by Paul Ekman. 1998. Review by Eric Korn (from the LRB).
• Martin Daunton. Trusting Leviathan: The Politics of Taxation in Britain 1799-1914. 2001. Review by Alain Lauzanne (from Cercles).
• Martin Daunton. State and Market in Victorian Britain: War, Welfare and Capitalism. 2008. Review by Jim Tomlinson.
• Leonore Davidoff. Worlds Between: Historical Perspectives on Gender and Class. 1995. Review by Mary Chamberlain.
• Apollon Davidson and Irina Filatova. The Russians and the Anglo-Boer War. 1998. Review by R. W. Johnson (from the LRB).
• Phillip Davis. The Oxford English Literary History: The Victorians. Volume 8: 1830-1880. 2002. Review by Josephine M. Guy.
• Benjamin Disraeli. Benjamin Disraeli Letters: Volume 6: 1852-1856, ed. by M. G. Wiebe, Mary S. Millar, and Ann P. Robson. 1998. Review by Stanley Weintraub (from the NYT).
• Thomas Dixon, The Invention of Altruism: Making Moral Meanings in Victorian Britain. 2008. Review by Mark Blacklock.
• Jeannie Duckworth. Fagin's Children: Criminal Children in Victorian England. 2003. Review by Judith Flanders.
• Durbach, Nadja. Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England, 1853-1907. 2005. Review by Susan Pedersen.
• Carol Dyhouse. No Distinction of Sex? Women in British Universities, 1870-1939. 1994. Review by Joyce Pederson.
• Benita Eisler. Byron: Child of Passion, Fool of Fame . 1999. Review by Tom Holland (from NS).
• Helen Epstein, "The Mysterious Miss Nightingale." Review of books by Hugh Small, Christopher Hamlin, and Barbara Dossey, in the NYRB, March 2001
• Niall Ferguson. The Pity of War. 1999. Reviews by Benjamin Schwartz (from AM) and Jay Winter and Dr. Ferguson's response.
• Niall Ferguson. The World's Banker: A History of the House of Rothschild. 1999. Review by Jeremy Wormell.
• Ian Finlayson. Browning: A Private Life. 2003. Review by Andrew Motion.
• Margot C. Finn. The Character of Credit: Personal Debt in English Culture, 1740-1914. 2003. Review by Robin Hermann (H-NET).
• Judith Flanders. Consuming Passions: Leisure and Pleasure in Victorian Britain. 2006. Reviews by Jacqueline Banerjee, Jan Marsh, and Jane Stephenson.
• Judith Flanders. The Victorian House. 2003. Reviewed by Kathryn Hughes.
• Tim Fulford. Romanticism and Masculinity: Gender, Politics, and Poetics in the Writings of Burke, Coleridge, Cobbett, Wordsworth, De Quincey, and Hazlitt. 2000. Review by David Vallins (from RoN).
• Ian Gibson. The Erotomaniac: The Secret Life of Henry Spencer Ashbee. 2001. Review by Richard Davenport-Hines
• Paula Gillett. Musical Women in England, 1870-1914: "Encroaching on all Man's Privileges. 2000. Review by Dave Russell.
• Eleanor Gordhunton and Gwyneth Nair. Public Lives: Women, Family and Society in Victorian Britain. 2004. Review by Kathryn Gleadle (IHR).
• Peter Gray. Famine, Land and Politics: British Government and Irish Society, 1843-50. 1999. Review by Donald M. MacRaild (IHR).
• Phyllis Grosskurth. Byron: The Flawed Angel. 1997. Review by Terry Castle (from the NYT).
• Raymonde Hainton and Godfrey Hainton, The Unknown Coleridge: The Life and Times of Derwent Coleridge, 1800-1883. 1997. Review by Molly Lefebure (from Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net).
• Catherine Hall, editor. Cultures of Empire: Colonizers in Britain and the Empire in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries: A Reader 2000. Review by Elizabeth Buettner (IHR).
• Catherine Hall, Keith McClelland and Jane Rendall. Defining the Victorian Nation: Class, Race, Gender and the British Reform Act of 1867. 2000. Review by Martin Hewitt (H-NET).
• Donald E. Hall. Fixing Patriarchy: Feminism and Mid-Victorian Male Novelists. 1997. Review by Guin Nance (H-NET).
• Lesley Hall. Sex, Gender and Social Change in Britain Since 1880. 2000. Review by Paula Bartley and Dr. Hall's response.
• Ian Hamilton. A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold. 1998. Reviews by Nicholas Murray (from LR) and Helen Vendler (from TNR
• Royden J Harrison. The Life and Times of Sidney and Beatrice Webb: 1858-1905, The Formative Years. 1999. Review by Bernard Crick (from TI).
• Kathryn Gleadle and Sarah Richardson, eds. Women in British Politics, 1760-1860: The Power of the Petticoat. 2000. Review by Emma Vincent Macleod
• David Hempton. Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland from the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire. 1996. Review by Arthur Burns and Dr. Hempton's response.
• Christopher Hibbert. Victoria: A Personal History. 2000. Review by Sarah Bradford.
• Christopher Hibbert. Wellington: A Personal History. 1997. Review by Roy Jenkins (from the NYT).
• Carol Engelhardt Herringer. Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830-85 2008. Review by Carmen Mangion
• Pam Hirsh. Barbara Leigh Smith Bodichon, 1827-1891: Feminist, Artist, Rebel. 1998. Review by Jan Marsh (from TI).
• Matthew Hilton. Smoking in British popular culture 1800-2000 . 2000. Review by Sean O'Connell.
• Tim Hilton. John Ruskin: The Later Years. 2000.
  John Batchelor. John Ruskin: No Wealth But Life. 2000.
  Robert Hewison. Ruskin, Turner and the Pre-Raphaelites. 2000.
  Review by Jan Marsh (from TI)
• Tim Hilton. John Ruskin: The Early Years and John Ruskin: The Later Years. 2000. Reviews by Peter Ackroyd and John D. Rosenberg (from NYRB).
• Adam Kirsch. Benjamin Disraeli. 2008.  Review by Todd Endelman.
• Diane Long Hoeveler. Gothic Feminism: The Professionalization of Gender from Charlotte Smith to the Brontës. 1999. Review by Lauren Fitzgerald (from Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net).
• Merlin Holland and Rupert Hart-Davis, editors. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. 2000. Review by Richard Davenport-Hines.
• Richard Holmes. Coleridge: Darker Reflections. 1998. Review by Juliet Barker (from LR).
• Sandra Stanley Holton. Suffrage Days: Stories from the Women's Suffrage Movement. 1996. Review by Krista Cowman and Dr. Holton's response.
• K. Theodore Hoppen. The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846-1886. 1998. Review by Miles Taylor.
• Kathryn Hughes. George Eliot: The Last Victorian. 1998. Review by Victoria Glendinning; another review by John Bayley (from NYRB).
• Tristram Hunt. Building Jerusalem: The Rise and Fall of the Victorian City 2004. Review by Jonathan Glancey.
• Kate Jackson. George Newnes and the New Journalism in Britain, 1880-1910: Culture and Profit. 2001. Review by John Jenks (from Jhistory).
• Mark Jackson. The Borderland of Imbecility: Medicine, Society and the Fabrication of the Feeble Mind in Late Victorian and Edwardian England. 2000. Reviewed by Peter Bartlett.
• Keith Jeffery. Ireland and the Great War. 2000. Review by Virginia Crossman.
• Roy Jenkins. Gladstone: A Biography. 1997. Review by Ian Buruma (from NYRB); another review by Norman Stone (from the NYT).
• Kenneth R. Johnston. The Hidden Wordsworth: Poet, Lover, Rebel, Spy. 1998. Review by Juliet Barker (from LR); another review by Jonathan Bate.
• Kathleen Jones. A Passionate Sisterhood: The Sisters, Wives and Daughters of the Lake Poets. 1997. Review by Rosemary Ashton.
• Patrick Joyce. Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England. 1995. Review by David Fahey.
• Frederick Karl. George Eliot, Voice of a Century: A Biography; Rosemary Bodenheimer. The Real Life of Mary Ann Evans: George Eliot, Her Letters and Fiction. 1996. Review by Millicent Bell (from NYRB).
• Daniel Karlin. The Penguin Book of Victorian Verse. 1999. Review by Adam Kirsch (from TNR).
• John Keegan. The First World War. 1997. Review by Alan Judd.

• Christine Kinealy. A Death-Dealing Famine: The Great Hunger in Ireland. 1997. Review by L. A. Clarkson and Dr. Kinealy's response.
• Steven King and Geoffrey Timmins. Making Sense of the Industrial Revolution: English Economy and Society, 1700-1850. 2001. Review by Katrina Honeyman.
• Rudyard Kipling. The Letters of Rudyard Kipling, Vol. 4: 1911-1919, ed. by Thomas Pinney. 2000. Review by David Gilmour (from NYRB).
• Sandra Knapp. Footsteps in the Forest: Alfred Russell Wallace in the Amazon. 1999. Review by Andrew Berry (from LRB).
• Judith Knelman. Twisting in the Wind: The Murderess and the English Press. 1998. Review by Malcom M. Feeley (from LPBR).
• William M. Kuhn. Henry and Mary Ponsonby. 2002. Revbiew by Kathryn Hughes.
• Jerome McGann and Daniel Riess, eds. Letitia Elizabeth Landon: Selected Writings. 1997. Review by Fiona Price (from Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net.) >
• Jon Lawrence. Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867-1914. 1998. Review by James Vernon and Dr. Lawrence's response.
• Mary-Louise Legg. Newspapers and Nationalism: the Irish provincial press, 1850-1892 . 1999. Review by John McGurk, with the author's response.
• Laurence Lerner. Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century. 1998. Review by Rosemary Dinnage (from NYRB).
• Mary S. Lovell. A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton. 1998. Review by Sara Wheeler; another review by David Gilmour (from NYRB).
• Robert Low. W.G.: A Life of W. G. Grace. 1997. Review by Tim Rice.
• Clinton Machann. The Genre of Autobiography in Victorian Literature. 1994. Review by Carl Dawson (from NCL).
• W. J. Mander and A. P. F. Sell, eds. The Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century British Philosophers. 2002. Review by Walter Arnstein.
• Ian Machin. Disraeli. 1995. Review by Barry M. Doyle
• Donald M. MacRaild, editor. The Great Famine and Beyond: Irish Migrants in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. 2000. Review by Paul O'Leary and Donald MacRaild's response.
• Peter T. Marsh. Bargaining on Europe: Britain and the First Common Market, 1860-1892. 2001. Review by Eugenio F. Biagini.
• Karl E. Meyer and Shareen Blair Brysac. Tournament of Shadows: The Great Game and the Race for Empire in Central Asia. 2000. Review by David Gilmour (from NYRB).
• Terry Meyers. The Sexual Tensions of William Sharp: A Study in the Birth of Fiona Macleod. 1996. Review by Flavia Alaya (from VP).
• Sneh Mahajan. British Foreign Policy 1874-1914, The Role of India . 2001. Robert J. Blyth. The Empire of the Raj. India, Eastern Africa and the Middle East 1858-1947 . 2003. Review by Keith M. Wilson (IHR).
• Dame Alix Meynell. What Grandmother Said. 1998. Review by Kathryn Hughes.
• G. E. Mingay. Land and Society in England, 1750-1980. 1994. Review by James A. Jaffe.
• Leslie Mitchell. Bulwer Lytton: The Rise and Fall of a Victorian Man of Letters. 2003. Review by Kathryn Hughes.
• Rosemary Mitchell. Picturing the Past: English History in Text and Image 1830-1870. 2000. Review by Miriam Elizabeth Burstein.
• Sean Farrell Moran. Patrick Pearse and the Politics of Redemption: The Mind of the Easter Rising, 1916. 1994. Review by Thomas P. Moloney.
• Charles More. The Industrial Age: Economy and Society in Britain, 1750-1995. Second Edition. 1997. Review by Neil S. Butler (from History Reviews Online, 5:1 [1998]).
• Marjorie Morgan. National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain. 2001. Review by Roger Beck.
• Representations of William Morris. Review article by Ruth Levitas, 1996
• Andrew Motion. Wainewright The Poisoner. 2000. Reviews by Mark Bostridge and by Jonathan Bate (from TI).
• Lynda Mugglestone. 'Talking proper' : the rise of accent as social symbol. 1995. Review by John Honey.
• Douglas Murray. Bosie: A Biography of Lord Alfred Douglas. 2000. Review by Christopher Hitchens.
• Nicholas Murray. A Life of Matthew Arnold. 1997. Review by James R. Kincaid (from the NYT).
• Lynda Nead. Victorian Babylon: People, Streets and Images in Nineteenth-Century London. 2000. Review by Pamela Pilbeam.
• Roger Owen. Lord Cromer: Victorian Imperialist, Edwardian Proconsul. Review by Donald Reid (IHR).
• Claudia Nelson and Ann Sumner Holmes, eds. Maternal Instincts: Visions of Motherhood and Sexuality in Britain, 1875-1925. 1997. Review by Lesley Hall.
• Pamela Neville-Sington. Fanny Trollope: The Life and Adventures of a Clever Woman. 1998. Review by Linda Simon (from the NYT).
• Neil Parsons. King Khama, Emperor Joe, and the Great White Queen: Victorian Britain through African Eyes. 1998. Review by Douglas A. Lorimer (from the CJH).
• Robert L. Patten. George Cruikshank's Life, Times, and Art. 1996. Review by Richard Jenkyns (from the NYRB).
• David Philips and Robert D. Storch. Policing Provincial England, 1829-1856: The Politics of Reform. 1999. Review by Peter Jupp.
• John Pollock. Kitchener. 2001. Review by Niall Ferguson.
• Bernard Porter. The Absent-Minded Imperialists: Empire, Society and Culture in Britain. 2004. Reviews by David Cannadine and Dane Kennedy.
• Roy Porter. London, a Social History. 1994. Review by Derek Keene.
• Leah Price. Anthology and the Rise of the Novel. (2000). Reviewed by Michael Gamer.
• Yopie Prins. Victorian Sappho. 1999. Reviews by Terry Castle and David Latane.
• Erika Diane Rappaport. Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London's West End. 2000. Review by Elaine Showalter (from LRB).
• Barry Reay. Microhistories: Demography, Society and Culture in Rural England, 1800-1939. 1996. Review by Andrew Hinde and response by Dr. Reay.
• K. D. Reynolds. Aristocratic Women and Political Society in Victorian Britain. 1998. Review by Peter Mandler.
• Angelique Richardson and Chris Willis, eds. The New Woman in Fiction and Fact: Fin-de Siècle Feminisms. 2002. Review by Michelle Elizabeth Tusan.
• Harry Ricketts. The Unforgiving Minute: A Life of Rudyard Kipling 1998. Review by Elizabeth Young (from NS).
• James C. Riley. Sick, Not Dead: The Health of British Workingmen During the Mortality Decline. 1997. Review by Herb Emery.
• Elizabeth Roberts. A Woman's Place, An Oral History of Working Class Women, 1890-1940. 1996. Review by Sally Alexander and Dr. Roberts's response.

• Charles E. Robinson, ed. The Frankenstein Notebooks: A Facsimile Edition of Mary Shelleys Manuscript Novel, 1816-17. 2 vols. 1996. Review by Michael Laplace-Sinatra (from Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net).
• Terrie Romano. Making Medicine Scientific: John Burdon Sanderson and the Culture of Victorian Science. 2002. Reviewed by Stephanie Snow.

• Jonathan Rose. The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes. 2001. Reviews by Ian Jack, Christopher Hitchens, and Donald MacRaild.
• Christina Rossetti. The Letters of Christina Rossetti, Vol. I, edited by Antony H. Harrison. 1997. Review by R. W. Crump (from VP).
• Andrew Scull, Charlotte MacKenzie and Nicholas Hervey. Masters of Bedlam: The Transformation of the Mad-Doctoring Trade. 1996. Review by Jonathan Andrews (IHR).
• James Secord. Victorian Sensation: the Extraordinary Publication, Reception and Secret Authorship of "Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation". 2001. Review by Kathryn Hughes.
• Richard Shannon. Gladstone: Heroic Minister 1865-1898. 1999. Review by Roy Foster (from ES); other reviews by Robert Blake, Roy Hattersley, and Eugenio F. Biagini (with the author's response).
• Joanne Shattock, editor. The New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, Third Edition, Volume 4. 2000. Review by Jim McCue.
• Robert B. Shoemaker. Gender in English Society, 1650-1850: The Emergence of Separate Spheres? 1998. Review by Kolleen M. Guy.
• Heather Shore. Artful Dodgers: Youth and Crime in Early Nineteenth-Century London. 1999. Review by John Springhall with the author's response.
• Elizabeth Siberry. The New Crusaders: Images of the Crusades in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries. 2000. Review by Michael Brett.
• Lisa Sigel. Governing Pleasures: Pornography and Social Change in England, 1815-1914. 2002. Review by H. G. Cocks.
• Carole G. Silver. Strange and Secret Peoples: Fairies and Victorian Consciousness. 1998. Review by James Kincaid (from the NYT).
• Michael Slater. Douglas Jerrold, 1803-1857. 2002. Reviews by Kathryn Hughes and Mark Turner.
• Michael Slater and John Drew, editors. Dickens' Journalism, Volume IV: 'The Uncommercial Traveller' and Other Papers, 1859-1870. 2000. Review by Mark Turner,
• Grahame Smith, Dickens and the Dream of Cinema (2003) Review by Ken Mogg.
• John Hanning Speke. Journal of the Discovery of the Source of the Nile. [1868; 1996]. Review by Sean Redmond (from JATW).
• Daniel Stashower. Teller of Tales: The Life of Arthur Conan Doyle. 2000. Review by Christopher Hitchens (from NYRB.)
• Mark Storey. Robert Southey: A Life. 1997. Review by David Bromwich (from the LRB).
• Anne Stott. Hannah More: The First Victorian. 2003. Reviewed by Lucasta Miller.
• Matthew Sturgis. Aubrey Beardsley. 1998. Review by Patrick Taylor-Martin (from LR).

• John Sutherland. Can Jane Eyre Be Happy? More Puzzles in Classic Fiction. 1997. Review by Ian Hamilton.
• Doran Swade. The Cogwheel Brain: Charles Babbage and the Quest to Build the First Computer. 2000. Review by Kathryn Hughes.
• Matthew Sweet. Inventing the Victorians. 2000. Reviews by Kathryn Hughes, Rupert Christiansen, and John Gross.
• Roger Swift and Sheridan Gilley. The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension. 1999. Review by Alexander Peach.
• Simon Szreter. Fertility, Class, and Gender in Britain 1860-1940. 1996. Review by Michael Mason and Dr. Szreter's response.
• Andrew Taylor. God's Fugitive: The Life of C. M. Doughty. 1999. Review by Lawrence James (from LR).
• D. J. Taylor. Thackeray. 1999. Reviews by Caroline Moore, Allan Massie, and Robert Colby.
• Philip Meadows Taylor. Confessions of a Thug. [1839] 1999. Review by Tracy A. Smith (from n.b.).
• J. Lee Thompson. Northcliffe: Press Baron in Politics, 1865-1922. 2000. Reviews by Allan Massie and Andrew Roberts.
• Herbert F. Tucker, Epic: England's Heroic Muse, 1790-1910. 2008. Review by Lee Scrivner.
• Ann Thwaite. Glimpses of the Wonderful: The Life of Philip Henry Gosse 1810-1888. 2002. Review by D. J. Taylor.
• Frank M. Turner. . 2003. Reviewed by Tristram Hunt.
• Alison Twells. The Civilising Mission and the English Middle Class, 1792-1850: The ‘Heathen’ at Home and Overseas. 2009. Review by Rhonda Semple.
• Lynn Vallone. Becoming Victoria. 2001. Review by Kathryn Hughes.
• Georgios Varouxakis. Victorian Political Thought on France and the French. 2002. Review by Detlev Mares (H-NET).

• W. E. Vaughan. Landlords and Tenants in Mid-Victorian Ireland. 1994. Review by Gerald Hall.
• Nicola Verdon. Rural Women Workers in 19th-Century England: Gender, Work and Wages. 2002. Review by Karen Sayer.
• Janet Wallach. Desert Queen: The Extraordinary Life of Gertrude Bell. 1997. Review by Sara Wheeler.

• Stanley Weintraub. Albert: Uncrowned King. 1997. Review by Rosemary Ashton; another review, also including the film Mrs Brown, by Ian Buruma (from NYRB).
• A. N. Wilson. The Victorians. 2002. Reviews by Robert McCrum and Kathryn Hughes.
• Simon Winchester. The Professor and the Madman. [British title, The Surgeon of Crowthorne.] 1998. Review by John Gross (from NYRB).
• Ruth Windscheffel. Reading Gladstone. 2008. Review by Frank Turner.
• Alison Winter. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. 1998. Review by Rosemary Ashton.
• Sylvia Wolf, et al. Julia Margaret Cameron's Women. 1998. Review by Janet Malcom (from NYRB); another review by Sarah Bancroft (from NS).
• John Wolffe. God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843-1945. 1994. Review by David S. Nash.
• Ellen Wood. East Lynne. 1861. Edited by Andrew Maunder, 1999. Review by Dinah Birch (from the LRB).
• Robert Woods. The Demography of Victorian England and Wales. 2000. Review by Sally Sheard.
• David Wright. Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum 1847-1901. 2001. Review by Mark Jackson.
• Linda Young. Middle-Class Culture in the Nineteenth Century: America, Australia and Britain. 2003. Reviewed by John Lowerson.
• Charlotte Zeepvat. Prince Leopold: The Untold Story of Queen Victoria's Youngest Son. 1996. Review by Richard Mullen.
• Paul R. Ziegler. Palmerston: British History in Perspective. 2003.
  David Brown. Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846-55. 2002. Review by T. A. Jenkins (H-NET).

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