Background Information & Quick Reference Tools
Encyclopedia of Romanticism: Culture in Britain 1780s-1830s DA529.E53 1992
What Jane Austen Ate and Charles Dickens Knew: from Fox Hunting to Whist; the Facts of Daily Life in Nineteenth Century England PR468.S6 P66 1993
A Companion to the Victorian Novel PR871.C643 2002

Primary Sources and Guides to Primary Sources

The MERLIN Library Catalog

• Use the Advanced Search to limit your search by publication date.
• Use the phrase "19th century" to retrieve materials about the 19th century.
• Use the following expressions to retrieve source material:
  --sources
  --personal narratives
  --diaries

Materials listed in the MERLIN catalog may be in the regular shelves, in the rare book collection, on microfilm in Special Collections, or online.

The following indexes and databases list articles from 19th century sources.

• 19th Century Masterfile
  British and American scholarly journals from 1802 to 1906. Indexing is by keyword only. The fewer words you use, the more results you get.
• The Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals
  Index to articles in 45 periodicals from 1824 to 1900. CD-ROM only accessible within Ellis Library.
• Palmer's Index to the Times
  SPEC Ref. AI21 .T5
  Lists articles in the Times of London, 1790-1938. The Times is available on microfilm in Special Collections, 1789-present.
• Nineteenth Century Readers' Guide to Periodical Literature 
  Ready Ref. AI3.R496
  Lists articles published in magazines 1890-1900.
• JSTOR
  Full text of articles from older issues of many journals. Use the Advanced Search feature to limit by publication date. 
  The 19th century journals in this collection are mainly scientific and geographic.
• The American Periodicals Series
  A full-text collection of some 1000 magazines and journals published between 1741 and 1900.
• ProQuest Historical Newspapers
  Full text of the New York Times (1851-2001) and the Wall Street Journal (1889-1987)

If the articles you seek are not available online, you'll need to look up the journal title in the MERLIN catalog to locate the journal.
If we don't own something that you need, you may request it through ILL@MU and we'll get a copy for you.

Literary texts from the 19th century can be found online in:

• LION: Literature Online  
  From the main LION menu, choose Search Texts to search for words and phrases within a specific work or group of works. The advanced search feature allows you to define a corpus by period, literary movement, author's gender or ethnicity, and other criteria.
• The Wright American Fiction Collection
  Every novel published in the United States from 1851 to 1875.

Collections of Internet Resources

Victorian Web

Collect Britain: Putting History in Place

Criticism

Criticism may be published in books or as articles in journals.

Use the MERLIN and MOBIUS catalogs to locate books of criticism about an author or topic. 
Do a subject search on the author's name and scroll to an appropriate subheading. 
For example: Austen, Jane--Criticism and Interpretation.
Do a table of contents search to locate relevant chapters in books with a broader focus.
Note that tables of contents are not included in the catalog records for all books. Another way to find essays in collections is to use The Essay and General Literature Index (Ref. AI3.E752 )
The keyword search searches for words in author, title, subject headings, tables of contents and notes all at once.  You can use various search options to make your search more precise and to sort the results in various ways.
You may expand your search to include all MOBIUS libraries. Materials requested through MOBIUS are usually delivered in about 48 hours.
If you haven't found enough, use WorldCat to search libraries throughout North America. 

Finding criticism in journal articles is usually a two step process. 
1) Use the following databases and indexes to see what articles have been published and where.  If you're looking for articles from a specific time period, be sure to use an index or database that covers publications from that time. 
2) If the full text of the article is not provided in the database, check Find it @ MU to see if the journal's available electronically and use the MERLIN catalog to see if we have the journal in print and where we keep it. 
If a journal isn't available locally, use the journal request form to tell us what you need. We'll order a photocopy from another source. This is a free service with delivery usually within one to two weeks. Feel free to ask a librarian for help.

 The major literary databases are: 
MLA International Bibliography of Books and Articles on the Modern Languages and Literatures
1963-present online.
ABELL: Annual Bibliography of English Language and Literature
1920-2003 online.
You can search the MLA Bibliography and ABELL simultaneously through LION.

Supplement these with searches in additional databases:
Academic Search Premier  
Historical Abstracts

The Literary Index indexes the many Gale literature criticism sets. These books excerpt literary criticism from all periods on individual authors.