Long Essays

Approach

Long essays are not longer short essays.

Instead they allow greater depth of analysis and (possibly) some primary source research

Choose a broad topic and then narrow it down

Add question later once research in secondary literature has been undertaken

Typical Structure

Introduction setting out aims and objectives/research questions

Literature review setting out key themes/debates of relevant historiography and how these may frame the analysis.

Analysis of themes/case studies/people/events etc. Here is an opportunity to make your essay original

Conclusions bringing your analysis back to the wider literature and how this challenges/supports other debates

Write to length as you will be penalised if you go over 4500 words

Topics

  • Domestic violence
  • Prostitution as a social evil
  • Why women got the vote
  • Women and industrialisation
  • Victorian family
  • Women and socialism
  • Rights restricted by class
  • Philanthropy
  • Homosexual subculture
  • Crime and gender
  • Unmarried mothers and the poor law
  • Motherhood and the state
  • Maternal crime
  • War and gender roles
  • Anti-suffrage movement
  • Masculinity and war
  • Domestic servants
  • Marriage and divorce
  • Female friendship

Secondary Sources

Use seminar reading as starting point

There may also be reading lists on other relevant modules (eg Britain in the Twentieth Century; Feminism and Social Change; Crime and Punishment etc)

Use the Bibliography of British and Irish History for further research and an overview of what has been written on the subject

Primary Sources

There are rich digitised primary sources for this module:

Modern Records Centre Extracts

See digitised archives from the Modern Records Centre here

Electronic Resources

  • ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online, an online corpus of texts published in Britain from 1700-1800
  • Historical Texts – EEBO, ECCO and Nineteenth Century Books
  • Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets
  • Women Writers Online, 1400-1850 Full text searchable copies of texts from a range of women writers.
  • Defining Gender 1450-1910
  • British History Online
  • Women, War and Society, 1914-18
  • Old Bailey Online, a searchable site which gives the proceedings of the London court for the period after 1674 and is a wonderful source of the social history of the period:
  • Oxford Dictionary of National Biography

Newspapers, periodicals and other prints:

  • The Times Digital Archive
  • The Guardian and Observer
  • British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers
  • Daily Mail
  • John Johnson Collection of Early Ephemera
  • See also the collection of broadside ballads
  • The British Museum's prints and drawings:
  • British Periodicals Collection
  • Nineteenth-century UK Periodicals
  • The Burney collection of newspapers

Parliamentary:

  • House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1801-2003
  • Hansard in the Nineteenth Century