Nineteenth Century Collections Online:
Explore British plays, music, and literature in the nineteenth century.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online: British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture features a wide range of primary sources related to the arts in the Victorian era, from playbills and scripts to operas and complete scores. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history. Covering approximately 1733 to 1968, this is without equal as a resource for nineteenth-century scholars.
Interest in the arts became big business in the Victorian era, as a burgeoning middle class became patrons. This archive includes thousands of invaluable primary sources -- including original, signed works -- that explore Victorian popular culture, bloods and penny dreadfuls, music, the history of the English stage, and more.
VIEW SAMPLE ARTICLES ON THE GALE PRIMARY SOURCES PLATFORM:
Nineteenth Century Collections Online is the most ambitious electronic scholarly archive of its kind, providing full-text, fully searchable content from a wide range of primary sources. Selected with the guidance of an international team of expert advisors, these primary sources are invaluable for a wide range of academic disciplines and areas of study, providing never before possible research opportunities for one of the most studied historical periods.
This unparalleled collection provides a detailed look at the state of the British art world. It contains not only manuscripts and compositions, but also documents such as personal letters, annotated programs, meeting minutes, and financial records, offering scholars an unmatched glimpse into the inner workings of the arts world and life in Victorian Britain.
British Theatre, Music, and Literature: High and Popular Culture is available on Gale's cutting-edge research platform. This state-of-the-art platform was developed using our flexible Agile approach, incorporating user testing and feedback throughout the process to ensure that we are providing the features that scholars require -- such as detailed subject indexing and metadata, textual analysis tools, personalized user accounts, and more -- for research in the digital age. These rare documents, many of them never before available, were sourced from the British Library and other renowned institutions, and curated by experts in British arts history.
Collections include:
- Archives of the Royal Literary Fund
- Archives of the Royal Philharmonic Society
- Crystal Palace Saturday Concerts
- Crystal Palace Triennial Handel Festival
- Drury Lane Theatre Archive
- J.W. Davison Papers
- King's Theatre, Haymarket Archive
- Konzert-Programm-Austausch
- Lord Chamberlain's Plays
- Royal Albert Hall Archives
- Sir George Smart Papers
- St. James Hall Monday/Saturday Popular Concerts
- Wandering Minstrels
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FEATURED REVIEW
“The wealth of rare, hard-to-find works available in NCCO will be of great interest to researchers in a variety of disciplines, while the unique 'Term Clusters' feature will delight users. For academic and larger public libraries.”
- Booklist
Additional Details
subjects covered
- British Studies
- Literature
- Drama
- Literature Criticism
- World Literature
Support Materials
View and download these PDFs
Platform Features & Tools
Term Frequency
Researchers can see the frequency of search terms within sets of content to begin identifying central themes and assessing how individuals, events, and ideas interact and develop over time.
Topic Finder
By grouping commonly occurring themes, this tool reveals hidden connections within search terms—helping to shape research by integrating diverse content with relevant information.
Cross-Search Capability
Search across the content of complementary primary source products in one intuitive environment, enabling innovative new research connections.
Reviews & Testimonials
“The ranges of sources of all this material boggled my mind. Yes, some of it is from mainstream publications, but so much of it was from rare, hard-to-find sources that I gained an appreciation for the time and effort it's taken to assemble these vast digitized collections.”
“The scope of this digitization project makes it a significant research resource for both scholars and undergraduates. There are several benefits to this scope: the sheer size of the collections; the geographic range including comparative materials from various cultures; and the variety of types of documents including a significant amount of unpublished material . . . . The new platform tools developed for NCCO are impressive and should be useful to scholars as well as students. These include the browse features for 'Exploring Collections,' the search within results features, text analysis tools, and sophisticated image viewing tools.”
“I've thoroughly enjoyed exploring the material in the first two archives – British Politics and Society and European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection. It really is most impressive – very easy to navigate, extraordinarily good definition of hand-written archival material, and including some pretty obscure – and hence invaluable – finds amongst what has been loaded on the two archives. Nineteenth Century Collections Online is clearly destined to become a gold star resource for economic and social historians.”
“With its outstanding content and effective search devices, this is an excellent research tool for all library users interested in the subject areas it encompasses. SUMMING UP: Recommended. Lower-division undergraduates and above; general readers.”
