Linking to the Nineteenth Century

Working on the nineteenth century without the aid of the internet is now hard to imagine. The growth in online databases and archives has been rapid and a massive boon to all scholars of the period. Alongside the many large and useful websites now available to the scholar of the long nineteenth century, there are many smaller gems, unaffiliated to larger projects or run by enthusiasts, which provide access to more arcane material are or simply of interest in themselves, which may well have escaped your notice. Updating regularly, we will provide links to some of the best and most interesting sites. If you know of a small or little-known web resource that would fit on these pages, please contact us: chrissiebradstreet@hotmail.com and heathert81@yahoo.co.uk.

	Image and Sentiment: Five Publishers of Victorian Holiday Cards Image and Sentiment is based on an exhibition that was held at the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington in 2001 explores Victorian card designs by Charles Goodall and Son, Marcus Ward and Company, Raphael Tuck and Sons, Hildesheimer and Faulkner and Louis Prang and Company. Best of all, you can send your own electronic Victorian holiday card.
	ArtMagick - your source of Visual Intoxication! ArtMagick is a virtual gallery dedicated to the continual quest of seeking out obscure 19th century artists and long-forgotten paintings showing a "magic world of romance and pictured poetry". The majority of the content in the archive covers the Pre-Raphaelite and Symbolist movements. Here, you can send a Victorian art card, find out about upcoming Victorian art exhibitions, read artist biographies, and browse an eclectic offering of poetry, pictures and original article on 19th and early 20th century art and literature.
	Get the Perfect Victorian lifestyle At Victoriana.com you can research Victorian wedding dresses, find Victorian embroidery and craft patterns from Victorian magazines, learn how to make paper dolls, celebrate Christmas with authentic Victorian recipes or decorate your house in true Victorian style. The opportunities are endless at this site, which has links to dealers, services, clubs and societies specializing in Victorian era lifestyles to articles on everything from Queen Victoria's “unmentionables” to calling-card etiquette and Victorian mourning customs. Not to mention the digitalized copies of Harper's Bazaar and The Delineator …
	Travel the globe and discover the world's flora through the remarkable paintings of the Victorian-Lady Traveller, Marianne North. The Marianne North Gallery at the Royal Botanical Gardens at Kew houses a collection of 832 paintings by Marianne North, who between 1871 and 1885 visited America, Canada, Jamaica, Brazil, Tenerife, Japan, Singapore, Sarawak, Java, Sri Lanka, India, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the Seychelles and Chile. The gallery is one of Kew's most popular attractions and is not only of great botanical importance, but also deserves much greater recognition amongst art historians and Victorianists. It is the first English gallery devoted to the art of a single artist, and contains almost her entire oeuvre, displayed in their original Victorian arrangement.
	Explore aspects of the Victorian book at the British Library. The British Library website has a section devoted to aspects of Victorian publishing which ties in well with this number of 19, and also discusses other aspects of printing in the nineteenth century. The site gives information about many aspects of print technology, book publishing, binding and illustrations. Rich in images, this site offers an insight in to penny dreadfuls, children's books, the novel and Yellowbacks.
	Learn more about science in the ninteenth century. Science in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical is a searchable electronic index to the science content of sixteen nineteenth-century general periodicals. The SciPer Index currently contains entries for around 7,500 articles and references to more than 5,500 individuals and 2,000 publications. Explore them here.
	Optical Entertainment from the Bill Douglas Centre for the History of Cinema and Popular Culture! Swap cards around in the myriorama, scroll through a toy panorama or watch a zoetrope spin. With these digitally interactive optical toys from the Bill Douglas Centre you can get closer to experiencing these objects as a Victorian might have done. As the website acknowledges, ‘the zoetrope image does flicker, the peepshow is difficult to look into, the toy panorama does wobble a bit as it is wound.' This is a truly wonderful example of how the implementation of new media techniques can digitally simulate the viewing experience, enabling wider access to rare or fragile material.
	Victorian photographs galore at The Roger Vaughan Personal Collection. This wonderful online resource holds over 3000 images of Victorian carte-de-visite, cabinet cards and portrait postcards. There is even a useful section that gives you the tools you need to date Victorian photographs through the identification of marks on the backs of photographs and recognising the changes in women's fashions across the decades.
	Lateral Science Lateral Science is an online resource which details some of the weird and wonderful scientific experiments that man has conducted through the ages. There are a large number of nineteenth-century experiments and a vast amount of material from The Young Man's Book of Amusement (published in 1854) which details an array of interesting and some potentially dangerous experiments involving electricity, magnetism, hydraulics and fire-works.
	Gaslight - online stories from the nineteenth century. Gaslight is an online resource which gives etext versions of stories of mystery and adventure from 1800 to 1919. There is a vast, eclectic collection of stories including many that are well known but numerous that are less so. This collection of weird and wonderful stories makes available many texts that are not currently in print. Louise May Alcott, Grant Allen, Arthur Machen, L T Meade, are just some of the authors whose work is made available here.
	Two albums of Victorian mugshots A real gem from the Gathering the Jewels website of Welsh cultural history - two volumes of mugshots, with accompanying rap sheets, compiled by Denbighshire County Constabulary from 1862 to 1896. The quality of some of the later photographs is exceptional. [To access the full archive of images, click on either volume 1 or 2, then follow the "pages" link on the right side of the screen.] Go to site...
	Oscar Wilde paper dolls It would make Oscar proud - the patron saint of decadent queerness is now available as a cut-out-and-keep paper doll, as are many of his creations and companions (including "The Panthers") . Admittedly, most of these slightly dodgy drawings from enthusiast David Claudon have a decidely limited repertoire of wardrobe changes (in most cases you can only add or subtract a hat) but the whole crazed enterprise is fun nevertheless. Go to site...
	Get William Morris wallpaper on your desktop! Courtesy of the London Borough of Waltham Forest, home to the William Morris Gallery, you can download one of Morris's wallpaper designs as wallpaper for your own desktop. The site also contains a wealth of information about the Gallery's collections, and a select number of other images. [You may need to select "tile" in Control Panels: Display in order to make the wallpaper display correctly.] Go to site...
	Early cinema from the Paperprint Collection, Library of Congress A selection of fascinating short films from 1897-1905, involving trick shots, time lapse photography and some business with an air vent which predates Marilyn Monroe by over 50 years. Check out especially "The Broker's Athletic Typewriter" for a an office worker's revenge on her lecherous boss, 1905-style. Go to site...