Writing the Late Nineteenth Century: Research Resources
This used to live on my website, then I ditched WordPress and didn't have a place to put it. I think I'm gonna post very occasional writing resource type things here.
I recently gave in to destiny and started writing historical fantasy. Destiny, you ask? Well, I have a PhD in British Literature and despite the fact that PhDs are literally research degrees, I’ve been putting off writing late-Victorian fantasy because I was intimidated about the logistics of research for creative writing.
Turns out, a lot of those skills are transferrable. But you don’t have to do a PhD to research your own fin de siècle fiction, because I’m here to round up my favorite resources for writing the late nineteenth century. Enjoy!
General Resources on the Victorian Period
If you can, track down a used copy of Sally Mitchell’s 1988 Victorian Britain: An Encyclopedia. It’s an excellent reference.
Richard Altick’s 1973 Victorian People and Ideas is also a great starting point to familiarize yourself with the era.
The Victorian Web can be a great resource for searches that involve art, literature, and technology.
Victorian London Wasn’t All Rich, Straight, Nondisabled White People
Black Londoners 1800 – 1900 is an interactive map with, you guessed it, information about Black Londoners!
Black Chronicles: Photographic Portraits 1862 – 1948 a collection of photographs of Black “lives and experiences in nineteenth and early twentieth-century Britain.”
Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts “an interdisciplinary collection of primary texts and images on physical and cognitive disability in the long nineteenth century.”
Charles Booth Map This map was decades in the making, and while its biases are many (for example, equating severe poverty with viciousness) it offers an interesting glimpse into middle-class perspectives on the economic makeup of London.
And, here’s the deal, before you write prudish, painfully straight Victorians I need you to read Aimée Duc’s Are They Women? which is about lesbian college students in 19th century Europe.
Then, if you’re feeling adventurous, check out the work of Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, who co-wrote poetry as Michael Field.
There’s a lot of oversimplified hyperbole in the mainstream about homophobic Victorian laws and their consequences but the reality was more complex. Simon Joyce's LGBT Victorians explores that complexity, though it's a pricier academic book. There are some great reviews of it that point to primary sources you may want to check out.
If you're team #BeGayDoCrimes, there are lots of records awaiting you. Start with The Proceedings of the Old Bailey to check out common Victorian crimes and punishments.
Okay, But What Did They Eat?
You’ll find a lot about how Victorians ate at parties online. But sometimes you just wanna know how they ate at home with their fam on a regular Tuesday, y’know? In that case, housekeeping manuals are your BFF and there’s none better at the game than Mrs. Beeton. I referenced Mrs. Beeton’s Cookery Book and Household Guide (1898) which contains party and family dinner menus.
And… How Did They Talk?
I’ve got two resources for you:
Passing English of the Victorian Era by J. Redding Ware. This has been republished in a modern edition as A Dictionary of Victorian Slang, but it’s in the public domain and free at the above link.
Green’s Dictionary of Slang is another free resource, spanning beyond the Victorian period. I highly recommend it if you need to know how Victorians used saucy words.
What About Transportation?
Timetable World is an amazing website where you can page through train timetables from history. You do have to learn to read those timetables first. For that, I recommend this JSTOR article: Nineteenth-Century Timetables and the History of Reading Mike Esbester.
The Ships List has digitized records of ships, their routes, and their passenger lists.
Carriages of Britain check this site for, you guessed it, all the carriage deets.
Did you know there was a BICYCLE BOOM in England between 1895-1897? Some unreliable websites will tell you that women didn’t ride bikes in this period, but that is a blatant misrepresentation of the truth. They totally did, despite newspapers warning them about something called 'bicycle face' and there were lots of books and periodicals devoted to women cyclists. Check out Bicycling for ladies : with hints as to the art of wheeling, advice to beginners, dress, care of the bicycle, mechanics, training, exercise, etc., etc. by Maria E. Ward. Isn’t that the best title? It’s full of photo illustrations of women cyclists, too.
And, Please for the Love of Dog, How Did Money Work????
I’ve got one page for you: Measuring Worth. This site does more than just provide currency conversion, it contextualizes those numbers in terms of things like purchasing power and relative value.
Thankfully for those of us writing historical fiction set in the nineteenth century, the era witnessed the rise of mass media. Victorians were the first information-age people to obsessively document their lives in whatever media they had to hand. There are newspapers, photographs, scrapbooks, journals, novels, non-fiction, handbooks for everything under the sun, and more–much of which you can probably find digitized. Here are some of my favorite places to look for these primary texts:
Hathitrust digitized public domain texts galore.
UPenn’s The Online Books page (I’ve found everything from novels to museum catalogs here).
The British Newspaper Archive (this resource is not free, but I’ve found it so invaluable I can’t not recommend it).
Newspaper archives in general (there are lots of digitized ones, and Googling may turn up something free. I’d also check with local libraries.) For example check out: Chronicling America: Historic American Newspapers; or, if you need some occult vibes in your novel IAPSOP (the International Association for the Preservation of Spiritualist and Occult Periodicals); or, try searching country or topic + newspaper archives.
Okay, I think that’s it for now. I may occasionally circle back and add more resources and I hope y'all will too.
