Research Blogs

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Happy Holidays from the Curran Index

By Patrick Leary This year the Curran Index has a special holiday surprise for Victorianists everywhere.  In this latest update from longtime editor Gary Simons, the names of the authors of tens of thousands of unsigned contributions to three hugely influential Victorian periodicals — Punch, the Athenaeum, and the Saturday Review — are now freely available to researchers through the Curran Index database. What’s New The Index currently identifies the authors of almost 80,000 contributions (both prose and verse) published in Punch between 1848 and 1900. These were drawn from the manuscript ledgers in the Punch Collection of the British Library by Clare Horrocks, Valerie […]

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Discoveries and Surprises in The Salvation Army’s Prolific Press

by Flore Janssen The Salvation Army and its Archive At first glance The Salvation Army may seem like a world unto itself. The global church and charity grew out of the East London Christian Mission begun by preachers William and Catherine Booth in 1865. It is characterised by its own uniform, customs, and vocabulary. Its ministers are ‘officers’ with military-style ranks, its members are ‘soldiers’, its churches are ‘corps’. Its religious services feature their own repertoire of songs and take place in halls or ‘citadels’ in which a ‘mercy seat’ is a requirement. Yet in spite of this institutional singularity, […]

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Introducing the Atlas of Digitised Newspapers and Metadata

By Emily Bell and M. H. Beals Just as the nineteenth-century newspaper was a messy object, filled with an ever-changing mix of material in an innumerable number of amorphous layouts, working with the structures of digitised newspapers is no different. While a user approaching a digitised newspaper collection through a glossy web interface and inputting keywords might not realise it, there are decades of decision-making processes still influencing what exactly it’s possible for that user to search for, and what they will find.[i] And if you’ve ever wondered why there isn’t one enormous search engine for newspapers and periodicals that […]

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Pushing the Bounds of Obscenity in The Times and Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman

  Jennifer Wood recently finished her Masters degree and is hoping to begin a PhD in 2018 to continue her work. She is researching the history of divorce in Victorian literature and its role in pushing the boundaries of decency in Victorian culture and hopes to expand into transcontinental studies of divorce. When not working on her research, she teaches both American history as well as Western civilization to undergraduates at Metropolitan Community College in Kansas City. You can reach Jennifer at Jennifer.wood@mcckc.edu     Ella Hepworth Dixon’s The Story of a Modern Woman, first serialized in The Lady’s Pictorial […]

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Digital Methodologies: Using Semantic Vector Spaces for Identity Research

  Quintus van Galen is a PhD candidate at Edge Hill University, working on the application of computerised textual analysis to historical questions in periodical studies. His thesis will focus on the methodological viability of such analyses within historiography, by the use of a case study on imperial identity in Victorian newspapers. When not working on his own research, he teaches methodology to undergraduates, and acts as an assistant for Bob Nicholson’s digital projects. Quintus would be happy to answer any questions you have regarding LSI and what it can do for your research at vangaleq@edgehill.ac.uk or through twitter @QVgalen […]

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Finding Mr. Poe: Intertextuality and Periodicity between Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens

  Katie Bell is a PhD student at the University of Leicester. Her thesis is titled “The Diaspora of Dickens: Death, Decay and Regeneration”, the focus of which is the intertextuality of Dickens’s works and 20th century American texts of the Southern Gothic genre. The American authors examined in her thesis are William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and Carson McCullers.  She is based in the United States where she is also a volunteer docent for The Wren’s Nest, the home of Atlanta author Joel Chandler Harris most famous for his ‘Br’er Rabbit’ tales.  She can be found on Twitter @decadentdickens   Edgar Allan […]

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