Victorian Literature Research Guide
What are primary and secondary sources?
Primary sources in literary studies are original works that typically were created contemporaneously with the event, object, or time period being studied. Examples include:
- original works of literature,
- newspapers,
- letters, and
- diaries.
Primary sources can provide first-hand information about the object or event being studied, and can help you interpret a work in new ways. For example, scholars may look to personal correspondence (such as letters) or diaries to explore questions about why an artist made decisions about the creation of a particular work of art or literature. Or, scholars may look to historical newspapers to think about how public events may have influenced an artist or shaped the creation of a particular work or even an artist's entire body of work.
Primary sources are often contrasted with secondary sources, which analyze, evaluate, or interpret primary sources. Examples include critical works like scholarly journal articles and books.
Learn more by watching the short video below.
Primary sources for Victorian literature
Find more primary sources in the library's catalog.
- C19, the Nineteenth Century Index This link opens in a new windowC19 (Nineteenth Century Index) provides integrated access to the most important finding aids for books, periodicals, official publications, newspapers and archives for nineteenth century research. It is possible to search its twelve collections simultaneously, or conduct more detailed research using specific collections, including the Nineteenth Century Short Title Catalogue, Nineteenth Century microfiche project, American Periodicals Series, British Periodicals, Periodicals Index Online, Poole's Index to Periodical Literature, Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals, 1824-1900, House of Commons Parliamentary Papers, U.S. Congressional Serial Set, Archive Finder, Palmer's Index to The Times, and Dictionary of Nineteenth-Century Journalism.
- Gale Primary Sources: Nineteenth Century Collections Online This link opens in a new windowA ground-breaking resource for 19th century studies, NCCO is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focused on primary source collections of the “long” nineteenth century. Collections for this program are sourced through partnerships with major world libraries as well as specialist libraries, and content includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more.
- Nineteenth Century Fiction This link opens in a new windowA collection of 250 British and Irish novels from the period 1782 to 1903, stretching from the golden age of Gothic fiction to the Decadent and New Woman novels of the 1890s. Major novelists of the period such as Austen, Scott, Mary Shelley, Dickens, Eliot, Hardy and the Brontës feature alongside popular romances, sensation fiction, colonial adventure novels and children's literature.
