Electronic Reference

Victorian Literature and Contexts

BRANCH: Britain, Representation and Nineteenth-Century History.  A new resource, as yet incomplete. It consists articles on various topics in nineteenth-century studies keyed to dates on a timeline.

Victorian Web. [This is a web of pages and links to resources for Victorian Studies, created by Victorianist George Landow with many contributions from students and scholars.]

Victorian Literary Studies Archive. [Another index of Victorian studies sites.]

Literary Texts

Google Books. This is rapidly becoming a major resource. Contains many minor as well as major works in the public domain full text searchable with images of the original pages.

Hyper-Concordance of Victorian Literature. [Electronic online concordance of Mitsu Matsuoka's Victorian Literary Studies Archive, see below.]

LION (Literature Online). Contains a comprehensive collection of literary works in English, especially poetry. Keyword searchable, and thus useful for exploring themes and tropes across large bodies of material.

Project Gutenberg. [Hundreds of electronic versions of literary texts, including most major and many minor Victorian works.]

Victorian Social History

Dictionary of Victorian London [This is a very useful collection that includes maps, street directories, maps and all kinds of topics related to Victorian London, many relevant to England as a whole.]

The Making of the Modern World. A huge collection of pamphlets and books on a wide range of social topics, especially economics.

Victorian Periodicals

British Periodicals Online. A major resource. Contains full text of many important nineteenth-century journals and reviews.

Periodical Contents Index. [This is not strictly Victorian as it indexes the contents of thousands of periodicals in the humanities and social sciences, from their first issues to 1990/1991, so you can search for articles on particular topics within dates confined to the Victorian period. It can guide you to contemporary articles on a variety of subjects treated in the novels.]

Nineteenth-Century British Library Newspapers. Keyword searchable database of newspapers. Very valuable.

Times Digital Archive. Original images, full-text searchable database for the London Times from its inception to the present.

Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals. [The online searchable version of the Wellesley Index, which provides details about the publishing history of Victorian periodicals as well as authorship of articles in those periodicals. Overlaps some with PCI, but provides author attributions.]

Research Resources

Victorian Studies. [The principal journal in the field.]

Victorian Research Web. [Links to sites for doing research in Victorian studies.]

Worldcat. [This is in effect an online union catalogue of the holdings of major research libraries in North American and Great Britain. If you come across a reference to an unusual book, it will almost always show up in Worldcat.]