Don't neglect the County Record Office system. special collectionsĬounty Record Offices. ArchiveGrid consists of MARC records from WorldCat and is best consulted for items in U.S.Register (for free) for the LMA's "History Card" to unlock various features. (The Foundling Hospital records alone-eight tons of paper-are astounding.) The catalogue website offers a large set of suggested searches of its subject guides. the London Metropolitan Archives covers a staggering array of government records to do with Greater London.the Discovery portal from the National Archives gives one-point access to material formerly divided among the National Register of Archives (NRA), Directory of Archives (ARCHON), and Access to Archives (A2A) and.AIM25 is a public gateway to over 150 archival repositories in the Greater London area.Archives Hub is a gateway to descriptions of thousands of archives held by UK colleges and universities.
Your first ports of call for locating the unpublished materials you need to see should be the online databases and finding aids created and maintained by archivists and librarians. ArchivesHub (see below) features a good short overview of UK archives. The relevant portions of Melissa Van Vuuren's Literary Research and the Victorian and Edwardian Ages, 1830-1910: Strategies and Sources (2010) can also be of service. Another is the magisterial British Archives: A Guide to Archival Resources in the United Kingdom (4th edn., 2002), by Janet Foster, Julia Sheppard, and Richard Storey. Richard Storey and Lionel Madden, Primary Sources for Victorian Studies: A Guide to the Location and Use of Unpublished Materials (London: Phillimore, 1977), for instance, supplemented by a 1987 pamphlet, has its moments. If your library has them, though, you can pick up a few good clues by browsing through them. Victorian publishers' archives: finding them and using themĪll of the old printed guides to locating and using manuscript sources, once essential, are badly out of date.A guide to Victorian holdings in selected archives in Britain and the U.S.The purpose of this section of the VRW is to help you find your way to these kinds of sources. And yet those who have worked with rare manuscript materials will tell you that such encounters have been among the most exciting and fulfilling experiences of their scholarly lives. This is the "offline penumbra" into which many scholars never venture.
For everything else, you will physically have to travel to where the documents are kept - in special collections libraries, local record offices, national archive collections, and private hands - or else get someone to make copies for you.
Larger collections of more miscellaneous manuscript materials are also online, usually behind subscription paywalls.įor the most part, though, as admirable and useful as these online projects are, they represent only a small fraction of the surviving manuscript heritage of 19th-century life. In some cases, you can consult scans of original manuscripts. Several of those projects have now moved online, where they can readily be searched. A huge amount of scholarly effort over the past several decades has gone into preparing and publishing reliable transcriptions of manuscripts written by prominent Victorians, hence the still ongoing projects associated with the letters of Carlyle, Gladstone, Dickens, Darwin, Eliot, Nightingale, and others. For 19th-century researchers, that generally means handwritten documents: letters, diaries, ledgers, rosters, meeting minutes, handwritten originals of books/essays/poems, notebooks, scrapbooks, sketches, and the like. Archives are collections of documents, usually ones created by members of a group-a government department, for instance, or a society of some kind-or by an individual, and normally not intended to be published in their original form.