LINKS FOR VICTORIAN STUDIES


Lists of Links                                      Biographical Links                                          Primary Sources                      Victorian Arts


Victorian Things                                             Victorian Nature                                 Victorian England, Reloaded

 

 

Lists of Links:

                                                                                                                               

 

Pride of place should go to the tremendous number of 19th-century research tips and finding aids – particular resources for all kinds of special research topics – which have been assembled by Patrick Leary in his amazing collection of links, The Victoria Research Web: http://victorianresearch.org/ . This site lists so many other sites that is has its own search engine (scroll down to the bottom of the main page.  The collection even stretches as far as a Victorianized version of London available through GoogleEarth (which you must first install): http://www.victorianlondon.org/googleearth.htm

 

And if Patrick Leary’s is the greatest assemblage of links and advice on on-line sources and libraries for the study of Victorian England, the greatest assemblage of on-line essays on Victorian writers and intellectual movements is George Landow’s collaboratively written Victorian Web:  http://www.victorianweb.org/, where each subject is in turn linked to the rest of the Internet. 

 

For a huge collection of articles, links, and potted histories -- this time for the British Empire rather than for Victorian England, see Stephen Luscombe’s The British Empire:  http://www.britishempire.co.uk/empire.htm .  Note the map room.

 

Another great linker – again, concentrating on imperial rather than more generally Victorian resources – is Jane Samson, at http://www.ualberta.ca/~janes/EMPIRE.html

 

Biographical Links:

 

The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, which includes the text of Leslie Stephen’s Dictionary of National Biography alongside wholescale rewrites, supplements, and corrections to most of it, is available to SDSU affiliates through the library website at http://infodome.sdsu.edu/research/databases/databases.shtml#o. Neither the old version (the DNB) nor the new version (the ODNB) is a primary source. Because of their level of detail they are the place to start when reading about people. Yet despite the labor that went into them, they both have some articles that are rotten with errors. This suggests that the far less carefully checked and in most cases far less detailed articles in Wikipedia cannot be taken so seriously (unless they are about singers or cult t.v. shows, so that many people have checked them).

 

So if you are pursuing a biographical subject, the next place to go is not Wikipedia, but the Royal Historical Society Bibliography: http://www.rhs.ac.uk/bibl/bibwel.asp

 

 

Links to Primary Sources:

 
Printed primary sources are nicely digested in the British areas of http://eudocs.lib.byu.edu/index.php/Main_Page.   

See also the leads in the Modern History Sourcebook: http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/. 

For images, see museum sites, and the British Library’s  http://www.collectbritain.co.uk/.

 

A huge collection of 19th-century British newspapers has been digitized by the British Library: http://www.jisc.ac.uk/index.cfm?name=digitisation_bln

 

Britain’s decennial census data are available on-line back to 1841(the first British census was in 1801, eleven years after America’s).  The indexes are free but getting the actual information costs about twelve dollars for the first twenty pages and escalates from there: http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/census/.  The larger National Archives site – which includes the former Public Record Office (PRO) as well as the National Register of Archives – is at http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/

 

A variety of other things, some of them primary sources, are available at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/ (a quick registration is required). Most notable for Victorianists are the nineteenth-century Ordnance Survey maps at http://www.british-history.ac.uk/mapsheet.asp, which also requires the Adobe SVG plug-in.

 

And Lee Jackson has a wonderful encyclopaedia of Victorian London at http://www.victorianlondon.org/. It is made out of substantial excerpts from published primary sources.

 

If you are at SDSU, see my own guide to finding 19th-century British primary sources in the Love Library: http://www.empiretheory.fortunecity.net/PrimarySourcesSDSU.doc

  

 

 

 

Looking at people and art:

 

The National Portrait Gallery has much of its collection on-line, so you can see people famous and not so famous, and how they were portrayed: http://www.npg.org.uk/live/index.asp

 

British paintings of all kinds, not just portraits, are displayed in the Tate Britain: http://www.tate.org.uk/britain/

 

Another fine collection of Victorian Art is the Manchester Art Gallery: http://www.manchestergalleries.org/

 

And there is the National Gallery of Ireland: http://www.nationalgallery.ie/

 

For the experiences of Great Britain and its Empire in the World Wars, see the Imperial War Museum: http://www.iwm.org.uk/. The main Imperial War Museum in London is housed in what is left of the Bethlem Royal Hospital – the madhouse whose name came into our language as “bedlam”.  (Captain Bligh’s house was across the street.)

 

Life in the capital is explored in The Museum of London: http://www.molg.org.uk/english/ and the London Transport Museum:

 

 

Looking at the Things that People Have Made

The Victoria and Albert Museum, the world’s largest museum of applied arts and design, was founded under the reign of guess who, and besides illustrating everything in the world, still encapsulates the material culture of the nineteenth century:  http://www.vam.ac.uk/

 

And for an especially important area of material culture, see the Victoria and Albert’s branch in the East End, the Museum of Childhood: http://www.vam.ac.uk/moc/

 

For Victorian and other kinds of science and technology, see the Science Museum: http://www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/

 

Many of the archeological and ethnological collections gathered during the Victorian period are on display in the British Museum: http://www.thebritishmuseum.ac.uk/

 

And there are the seemingly infinite arrangements of words that people have made: www.bl.uk

 

 

Looking at Other Forms of Life:

 

The Natural History Museum (or in Victorian times the British Museum, Natural History), is a great Victorian fantasy of a building – which, in part, showcases Darwin: http://www.nhm.ac.uk/

 

And the Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, which predates the nineteenth century, is perhaps at its most Victorian in the great Palm and Temperate Houses (Victorian buildings of white steel spandrels and glass) and in the Marianne North Gallery: www.kew.org

 

The Zoo remains a living imperial archive: http://www.zsl.org/london-zoo/

 

 

Finally, there is Victorian England, reloaded – showing that people are still interested in inhabiting
and reimagining
the world’s first modern, global, literate civilization:

 

                                    http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9094/STEAM.html

                                                http://www.geocities.com/SoHo/9094/STEAMFAQ.html

                                                            http://bigredhair.com/robots/

                                                                        http://republika.pl/steampunk/link01.html

                                                                                    http://www.gentlemansemporium.com/index.php

                                                                                                http://www.pjfarmer.com/woldnewton/Pulp2.htm

                                                                                                            http://www.bakerstreetdozen.com/loeg.html

                                                                                                                        http://www.steam-trek.com/

 

 

 

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