19th Century British Library Newspapers

“The newspaper is the chronicle of civilization”

Sir Edward Bulwer Lytton

Novelist and Parliamentarian

If the Elizabethan England is characterized by the love of wordplay, Victorian Britain was infatuated by print. Books, newspapers, journals, and magazines all grew explosively, fueled by an increasingly literate and urban population, a coal and steam-driven economy, changes in print technology and taxation, and a expansionist Imperial vision that embraced and propelled huge shifts in trade and finance, geography and demographics, and communications and transportation.

19th Century British newspapers, in particular, leave an evidentiary trail of the scope and context of the Victorian age second to none. To digitally document this era, the British Library created a new bibliography of 48 publications from its vast holdings of historic newspapers. This new collection includes London and regional newspapers as well as those from both established country or university towns and the new industrial powerhouses of the manufacturing Midlands. Newspapers that helped lead particular political or social movements such as Reform, Chartism, and Home Rule are also included as well as Welsh, Scottish, and Irish papers. Finally penny papers aimed at the working and clerical classes were added, such as the pictorial Illustrated Police News and The Graphic.

These papers cover more than just an era or an empire – they document the world as seen by a newly energized and uncensored reportorial culture – from a new class of professional journalists covering Europe’s financial markets to gentlemen-adventurers penning missives from the casbahs of Kabul. From a generation of black abolitionists given a voice in British papers to Churchill’s florid description of Teddy Roosevelt’s exploits in Cuba to the more domestically focused editorial practices of Dickens and Coleridge, British Library Newspapers reflects a century of global social, political and cultural change.

Search the Centuries in Seconds with Gale Historic Newspapers!

  • 19th Century British Library Newspapers features 48 newspapers specially selected by the British Library’s editorial board.
  • This 2 million page collection is also cross searchable with the 17th & 18th Century Burney Collection and the 19th Century UK Periodica s– and in the near future with all Gale Digital Collections.
  • Where possible the papers in this collection are complete runs – many span the breadth of the century. Gaps have been filled from holdings across the UK.
  • They have been sourced from both existing microfilm and from original imaging – with graphics and illustrations rendered in 400dpi gray scale for additional clarity.
  • Hosted on Gale’s Historical Newspaper platform, these papers are all full text searchable, categorized by article type, exportable to email, and fully documented at the publication level with MARC records.
  • Headnotes and specially commissioned essays on the impact of the press on Victorian society have been written by British Library curators, scholars and associates.

Newspapers featured in this collection include:

  • The Aberdeen Journal
  • Birmingham Daily Post
  • The Bristol Mercury
  • Cobbett’s Annual Register
  • The Public Register or Freeman’s Journal
  • Jackson’s Oxford Journal
  • Lloyd’s Illustrated London Newspaper
  • The Liverpool Mercury
  • The Morning Chronicle
  • The Northern Star and Leed’s General Advertisor

British Library Newspapers

Systematic collection of newspapers at the British Library began in 1822. It currently holds over 52,000 individual newspaper, periodical and journal titles. It repositories include over 26 miles of newspaper holdings – a unique, but increasingly fragile, resource drawing researchers from around the world.

The British Library, in association with the JISC, prioritized creating an accessible collection of diverse newspapers representing multiple political, regional and social points of view from Britain’s past over 5 years ago. Care was taken to avoid duplication with other known commercial digitization efforts or with newspapers that continue publications today. Emphasis was placed on including complete runs – and covering the full breadth of the century. Conservation – along with leading edge imaging processes – helped optimize readability on-screen as well as for search engines.

The British Library newspaper digitization project is a work in progress. Additional selections of material will be released in the future and published by Gale Digital Collections.