ENGL 373 Jane Austen & Popular Culture: Online Primary Source Collections

Discover a wealth of original sources from the Romantic and Victorian periods, including original manuscripts, rare first editions, newspapers, diaries, letters, photographs and maps.

Jane Austen’s House holds an unparalleled collection of objects relating to Jane Austen's life and works, her family circle and her legacy. Here you can see some of the treasures of the collection, ranging from books and letters to pieces of furniture, clothing and paintings. Many of these objects can be seen in the House, although for conservation reasons some objects may be periodically removed from display.

A collection of various digitized primary sources and other materials relating to Jane Austen.

The Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts Digital Edition gathers together in the virtual space of the web some 1100 pages of fiction written in Jane Austen’s own hand. Through digital reunification, it is now possible to access, read, and compare high quality images of original manuscripts whose material forms are scattered around the world in libraries and private collections. Unlike the famous printed novels, all published in a short span between 1811 and 1818, these manuscripts trace Jane Austen’s development as a writer from childhood to the year of her death; that is, from 1787 (aged 11 or 12) to 1817 (aged 41). Not only do they provide a unique visual record of her imagination from her teenage experiments to her last unfinished writings, these pages represent one of the earliest collections of creative writings in the author’s hand to survive for a British novelist.

A blog with interesting posts on Jane Austen, as well as some fairly comprehensive bibliographies relating to JA and this time period.

Publications, biographies, essays, and more.

An online exhibition that showcases Jane Austen's (1775–1817) distinctive voice—its development, subjects, context, and physical forms—and explores why she and her writing continue to enthrall and inspire us nearly two hundred years after her death.

An Archive.org digitized copy of The Repository of arts, literature, commerce, manufactures, fashions and politics by Rudolph Ackermann. A great source of information about 18th Century
Regency material culture.

Georgian Papers Online is a catalogue created by the Royal Archives to make available in digitised form the historic manuscripts held within the Georgian Papers collections in the Royal Archives and Royal Library. The majority of the papers, which contain both official and private material, date from the reigns of George III and to a lesser extent, George IV, although papers from the reigns of George I, George II and William IV are also included, as are those relating to other members of the Royal Family and Royal Household from the Georgian period.

This site provides users with a free, expansive, searchable, reliable, peer-reviewed, copy-edited, easy-to-use overview of the period 1775-1925. Unlike dry chronologies that simply list dates with minimal information about the many noteworthy events of a given year, BRANCH offers a compilation of a myriad of short and long articles on not only high politics and military history but also “low” or quotidian histories (architecture design, commercial history, marginal figures of note, and so on)

The Mary Martin Rebow letters are a rare and significant trove of surviving correspondence of a young woman in Georgian England. Spanning the dates 1767 to 1779, these letters from Mary Martin to her cousin Isaac Martin Rebow document the progression of their relationship from a long secret engagement to their married life. In addition to Mary's letters, the collection also includes one letter by an unknown author.

Digitized collections of materials including international newspapers, primary sources, government documents, manuscripts, dissertations and more.

Search engine for historical newspapers from Google's News Archive Partner Program and other online archival collections. Note: not all material will be freely available.

HathiTrust Digital Library is a digital preservation repository and highly functional access platform. It provides long-term preservation and access services for public domain and in copyright content from a variety of sources, including Google, the Internet Archive, Microsoft, and in-house partner institution initiatives.
The partners ensure the reliability and efficiency of the digital library by relying on community standards and best practices, developing policies and procedures to manage content and services at scale, and maintaining a modular, open infrastructure.

Harvard Digital Collections provides free, public access to over 6 million objects digitized from our collections - from ancient art to modern manuscripts and audio visual materials.

Curated views that provide specialized search options and unique content

A Collection of Sources curated by the History Department of Fordham University.

Collection of digitized Welsh Newspapers.

Massive repository relating to primary sources in Europe.

German History in Documents and Images (GHDI) is a comprehensive collection of primary source materials documenting Germany's political, social, and cultural history from 1500 to the present.

The Medical Heritage Library (MHL), a digital curation collaborative among some of the world’s leading medical libraries, promotes free and open access to quality historical resources in medicine. Our goal is to provide the means by which readers and scholars across a multitude of disciplines can examine the interrelated nature of medicine and society, both to inform contemporary medicine and strengthen understanding of the world in which we live. The MHL’s growing collection of digitized medical rare books, pamphlets, journals, and films number in the tens of thousands, with representative works from each of the past six centuries, all of which are available here through the Internet Archive.

The Disability History Museum hosts a Library of virtual artifacts, Education curricula, and Museum exhibits. These programs are designed to foster research and study about the historical experiences of people with disabilities and their communities.