LibGuides: ENG 292: Reading Romanticism / Thinking Politics: Primary Sources

Primary Sources

Primary sources are original documents used by scholars to reconstruct a historical event, provide an interpretation of a text, or engage in other intellectual activity. The terms "original" and "document" are both broadly defined. A digital reproduction of an English translation of a Latin text may be considered "original" in some contexts as far as primary sources are concerned. "Document" may also have a wide range of meanings: it may be a critical edition of a literary text, a manuscript, or a news paper, but it can also be an image, a speech, or a data set (to name only a few examples).

Primary Source Databases and Collections

British Library Newspapers
Sourced from the extensive holdings of the British Library, British Library Newspapers delivers a wide range of irreplaceable local and regional voices to reflect the social, political, and cultural events of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries.
British Library: Romantics
This article contains several images illustrating the British Library's holdings of Romantic authors.

British Periodicals
British Periodicals traces the development and growth of the periodical press in Britain from its origins in the seventeenth century through to the Victorian 'age of periodicals' and beyond. Topics covered in Collection I include literature, philosophy, history, science, the fine arts and the social sciences. Topics in Collection II include literature, music, art, drama, archaeology and architecture.
British Politics and Society
The British Politics and Society archive of Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) is packed with primary source documentation that enhances a greater understanding and analysis of the development of urban centers and of the major restructuring of society that took place during the Industrial Revolution
British Theatre, Music, and Literature
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. Included in Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO).
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
A comprehensive digital edition of The Eighteenth Century microfilm set, which has aimed to include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas, between 1701 and 1800. Consists of books, pamphlets, broadsides, ephemera. Subject categories include history and geography; fine arts and social sciences; medicine, science, and technology; literature and language; religion and philosophy; law; general reference. Also included are significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth century, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare. Where they add scholarly value or contain important differences, multiple editions of each individual work are offered.
European Literature, 1790-1840: The Corvey Collection
The Corvey Collection constitutes one of the most important collections of British Romantic-era writing in existence anywhere. The extent of its scholarly significance is indicated, for instance, by the considerable number of exceedingly rare publicationsand even numerous previously unknown worksby British writers (and women writers in particular, whose works comprise over 1,000 of the titles) who were active during the Romantic period.
HathiTrust Digital Library
HathiTrust is a large-scale collaborative repository with over 10 million volumes including content digitized via the Google Books project, Internet Archive, and by local libraries. Public domain content is full-text; non-public domain content (post-1923) is for full-text searching only. Since Tufts is a member, those with a Tufts login can download the pdf of pre-1923 materials and can build a personal collection. To login select Collections, then select login from the upper right; choose Tufts University and login using your Tufts username and password.

The Keats Letters Project
The Keats Letters Project is an exploration of the epistolary writing of Romantic poet John Keats. By publishing each letter on the 200th anniversary of its original composition alongside reflections on that letter by some of today’s most exciting scholars and poets, the Keats Letters Project offers a new Keats for the 21st-century – one inspired by both the material traces of Romantic-period correspondence and our own digital media environment, and one that aims to respond to the playful, heartfelt, and speculative spirit of Keats’s letters.
Romantic Circles
A refereed scholarly Website devoted to the study of Romantic-period literature and culture. Useful for both primary and secondary sources.
Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection
The Seventeenth and Eighteenth Century Burney Newspapers Collection represents the largest single collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century English news media available from the British Library and includes more than 1,000 pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks and newspapers from the period.
The William Blake Archive
A free site on the World Wide Web since 1996, the Blake Archive was conceived as an international public resource that would provide unified access to major works of visual and literary art that are highly disparate, widely dispersed, and more and more often severely restricted as a result of their value, rarity, and extreme fragility.

Women Writers Online
A full-text collection of works written by women, in English or in English translation, before 1850.

Find Primary Sources in JumboSearch

JumboSearch can be used to find books, articles, films, and other resources from Tisch Library. You can even customize your search results to return primary source material if you combine select subject terms with your other search terms. For example, if you search "William Blake" as a keyword and "correspondence" as a subject term, you will discover print collections of William Blake's personal correspondence. Try it by clicking here. Here are other subject terms which will help you find primary sources in JumboSearch: