Victoria Research Web

Other Victorian Resources

General Guides

The Victorian section of Jack Lynch's helpful Literary Research Tools offers one list of useful links, as does Alan Liu's meta-page, Voice of the Shuttle. Introductory essays published in 1995 and 1997 about online and electronic materials for Victorianists are now considerably outdated but may still be worth consulting for an overview.

Information about upcoming conferences and other events can frequently be found on the Victorian section of Penn's useful Call for Papers site, as well as NAVSA's blog, "Of Victorian Interest".

Victorian Studies Organizations

Some Major Sites

The Victorian Web
George Landow, a pioneer in the theory and practice of hypertext in the humanities, has created in The Victorian Web a splendid teaching and reference tool in the form of a growing encyclopedia of Victorian culture. Visitors to the site will find capsule summaries of many events, movements, and themes, with an emphasis upon Victorian literature and religion, written by leading scholars in the field. This hugely informative and well-designed site, a product of many hands, is by far the most comprehensive and widely praised Victorian resource on the Web.

The Dante Gabriel Rossetti Archive
A pioneering (1993) project that aimed to create a vast multimedia hypertext archive of all of this astounding figure's writings and pictures, the Rossetti Archive is the work of a team led by renowned scholar Jerome McGann under the auspices of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities at the University of Virginia. The site contains thousands of images, texts, and commentaries. In 2008, the directors of the project declared it completed, and in 2012, Professor McGann announced that he would make no further updates to the site. In a similar project also associated in part with the IATH, editors Morris Eaves, Robert Essick, and Joseph Viscomi have overseen the creation of the ambitious William Blake Archive.

The Carlyle Letters Online
One of the great editions of Victorian correspondence, The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle from Duke University Press has now been made available to everyone through a beautifully designed interface. Over 10,000 letters by the inimitable Carlyles can easily be browsed by date, subject, or recipient, or searched in a variety of ways. The survival of the Carlyle Letters Online depends on the generosity of users, so if you make use of this enormous bounty, please put something in the donation jar when you can.

The Complete Works of Charles Darwin Online and the Darwin Correspondence Project
Between them, these two ambitious sites based at Cambridge University have published the most extensive set of texts and bibliographies available online for any Victorian figure. The "complete works" features over 50,000 searchable pages of writing, including many hard-to-find works by and about Darwin, and over 40,000 images, with much more planned; the smaller site associated with the correspondence project already provides visitors with over 2,000 of the letters. Together, they make the writings of this great and good man more widely and deeply accessible than they have ever been, in a form that reflects the highest standards of modern textual scholarship.

The Huxley File
Nor is Darwin's great champion neglected. The late Charles Blinderman and his collaborator David Joyce, both of Clark University, assembled no fewer than 1,000 items (text and pictures) by and about Thomas Henry Huxley, including previously unpublished essays and a wide range of 19th-century commentaries on the man and his work.

Dickens Journals Online
Under the leadership of John Drew at the University of Buckingham, a team embarked in 2006 upon an ambitious plan to digitize, and manually proof, every article in the vastly popular and influential journals that Charles Dickens edited -- Household Words and All the Year Round -- and to make them available in fully searchable form in six years, in time for 2012, the 150th anniversary of Dickens's birth. With the help of dedicated "correctors" all over the world, they did it, and here it is. Replete with features and a joy to use, DJO will be a boon to Dickensian studies for years to come.

BRANCH: Britain, Representation, and Nineteenth-Century History
BRANCH, the brainchild of the indefatigable Dino Felluga of Purdue, aspires to provide no less than a peer-reviewed overview of British literature and culture from 1775 to 1925, including a timeline that branches out to include multiple perspectives on the same events. In practice this so far means an excellent online journal with a wide assortment of stimulating scholarly articles by several hands.

NINES: Nineteenth-Century Scholarship Online
The long-running, lavishly funded NINES project (it stands for Networked Infrastructure for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship) at the University of Virginia was created to encourage and support digital scholarship by providing software tools as well as a peer-review process. The site allows scholars to search and annotate selected online resources through its COLLEX interface. For those who speak "digital humanities" (a rather clubbish language group, alas) there is much to ponder here. NINES director Andrew Stauffer conducts a blog called The Hoarding.

Victorian Women Writers Project
Created by Perry Willett and his colleagues at Indiana University Libraries, Bloomington, in 1995, the VWWP aims to make available electronic texts of lesser known women writers of the period, prepared with scrupulous scholarly care. The project's library currently boasts over 150 texts by over fifty authors. Abandoned in 2003 after Willett's departure, the VWWP was revived in 2010 and relaunched with new search tools and features in 2012. Similarly, the British Women Romantic Poets Project at the University of California, Davis, likewise sought to make available texts of hard-to-find poems from the period 1789-1832. There have been no reports of updates, alas, since 2002.

Greenwood's Map of London 1827
A model of how to make cartographic resources available over the Web, Mark Annand's site at Bath Spa University College provides a range of tools that allows visitors to explore the byways of early-nineteenth-century London in fascinating detail. More recent and equally astonishing is this rare, recently discovered map of London from 1868, from David Hale and MAPCO, that allows one to call up truly high-resolution views.
 
Charles Booth's 1889 Descriptive Map of London Poverty
Building on the pioneering efforts of Mark Annand and others, David Wayne Thomas and Sabiha Ahmad have made it possible to explore late nineteenth-century London as laid out in Booth's celebrated color-coded map of the city. The supporting materials for the site are currently being assembled and the site will soon move to a permanent location but the map itself, allowing visitors to zoom in on specific sections, is a marvel. Those wishing to delve further into Booth's aims and methods have a marvelous set of resources available from the London School of Economics's Charles Booth Online Archive, which features a rich variety of archival materials in searchable form. Quite apart from its intrinsic usefulness, this site demonstrates what can be accomplished when existing archival collection descriptions, instead of being merely scanned and transferrred online, are thoughtfully adapted in ways that make the most of the online environment.

Bob Speel's pages on Victorian art and artists
focus particular attention on the PRB, and feature an exhibit of paintings by women artists, lists of Victorian painters, and a guide to finding Victorian artworks in museums all over England. Likewise, web-designer and PRB enthusiast Julia Kerr offers an extraordinarily useful compendium of exquisite reproductions of dozens of Pre-Raphaelite paintings.

Romantic Circles
An ambitious site devoted to Byron, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Keats, and "their contemporaries and historical contexts." Designed for scholarly interaction and featuring reliably edited e-texts and other resources, RC made its official debut at the NASSR conference in November 1996. Over ten years later, it has come to host a number of extraordinarily useful and meticulously edited materials for all students of the 19th century, including (to name but two) Letitia Landon's Verses and Keepsake for 1829 and the Quarterly Review Archive.

The 19th-Century London Stage: An Exploration
A remarkable feat of research organized in imaginative hypertext form, this site was created by PhD. students at the University of Washington School of Drama, working under the direction of Professor Jack Wolcott.
UPDATE: When Professor Wolcott retired in 2004, he expected that the University of Washington would leave these webpages on the university's server, much as a library book would remain on the shelf. Instead, all of the files associated with this much admired and widely referenced collaborative resource, which had been in progress since 1995, were simply deleted. A few bits and pieces of the site may be salvaged from the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine, but for most practical purposes this valuable project has been destroyed forever. I leave the description here as a reminder of the extreme fragility of online scholarly resources.

The Victorian Plays Project
A boon to students of Victorian theatre everywhere, this impressive resource, begun in 2006 under the direction of Richard Pearson at the University of Worcester (now at the National University of Ireland, Galway), makes available the full texts of dozens of plays and burlesques that before now could be found in most research libraries, if found at all, only on microfilm or microfiche. Much more than merely a collection of e-texts, the project also reproduces successive editions of Lacy's Acting Edition of Plays published between 1848 and 1874, thereby providing a much-needed catalogue of often obscure plays, dramatists, and performances.

Trenches on the Web
Subtitled "An Internet History of the Great War," the late Mike Iavarone's pages are a model of how to make a historical website both exciting to casual visitors and useful to scholars and teachers. With an exemplary site map and thematic "tours," the pages, now managed by the Great War Society, make an extraordinarily diverse collection of articles, sources, and images readily accessible and easily browsable.

Footlight Notes
[Gone. A few pages from the mid-2000s are still online, but the heart of this wonderfully informative site has disappeared. Again, I leave this here to remind us how fragile these resources are, particularly in the absence of an institutional base -- and sometimes even then (see Jack Wolcott's site, above).] For devotees of British music hall there is no more delightful or informative browsing to be had than John Culme's "Footlight Notes," an online newsletter about popular entertainment in the English-speaking world from the 1850s to the 1920s. Combining biographies of performers with a marvelous collection of photographs, Mr. Culme brings an infectious enthusiasm to the task of memorializing the culture of this vanished era. Fans and serious students of theater history alike will find much here to enjoy.
 
The Industrial Revolution and the Railway System
Created by Mt. Holyoke student Julia Lee and extended and maintained by Professor Robert Schwartz, this fine site combines reports of original research in progress with a wide range of images and excerpts, most notably a beautifully designed section devoted to articles and engravings about various aspects of Victorian railways culled from the Illustrated London News.
 
Dr. John Snow
Dr. Ralph R. Frerichs of UCLA's Department of Epidemiology has explored the dramatic career of the legendary John Snow--the man who discovered how the deadly cholera was spread--in fascinating detail in this richly informative multimedia site. Frerichs skilfully combines primary materials with the latest historical research and epidemiological news to illuminate Victorian public health and medicine.
 
The Dictionary of Victorian London
Lee Jackson's enormous, indispensable, and still growing site features an enjoyable collection of excerpts from a range of Victorian sources, organized by aspects of life in the city, from "Advertising" to "Words and Expressions." Included, too, is the whole of the indispensable handbook from which the site takes its name: the younger Charles Dickens's Dictionary of London of 1879. A much smaller site with some useful background material and illustrations is Z. Ashe's The 19th-Century City. David Perdue's ingenious Map of Dickens's London features links for each site to both Lee Jackson's page and the more detailed maps on Ralph Frerichs's pages.

Other Resources of Interest

For a more comprehensive listing of Victorian websites, see one of the general guides noted at the top of this page; resources for various kinds of 19th-century research can of course be found throughout the VRW, while links to museums and other places of Victorian interest can be found on the research trip page. What follows here is a modest selection of useful, entertaining, and unusual webpages, including some smaller sites that tend to get lost in the shuffle of the big meta-page listings.
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