• Home
  • Archive: "Victorian and Edwardian Literature" Category

Archive: "Victorian and Edwardian Literature" Category

Sweet, sour, and salty: Victorian valentines

Will you soon be headed to buy a Valentine’s day card for a loved one? Picking up packages of cheap cartoon character valentines to be distributed in your kids’ classrooms? These sorts of commercially produced valentines greetings first rose to prominence in the early Victorian period. From cheaply printed verses to fancy embossed and cut …

Read More →

Remembering the work of Wilkie Collins

January 8 marked the 200th anniversary of the birth of Victorian author Wilkie Collins, whose thrillers like The Woman in White and The Moonstone still capture readers with their plot twists and sympathetic characters. To celebrate, the Special Collections Reading Room features a small exhibit of first editions of these two novels as well as other books …

Read More →

Fitful Gleams from Fancy-Land, Edith Milner

Edith Milner (1845–1921) lived in York, Nun Appleton, England. An 1880 interview for the Women’s Penny Paper reported that her youth was spent in the country “amongst the farmers and peasants, teaching in the schools, training the village choir, [and] visiting the poor and the sick in their homes.” She taught botany at the York …

Read More →

Holiday gift books, old and new

Are books always at the top of your Christmas gift list? If so, you’ll want to take a look at two of Special Collections’ small rotating exhibits. Fine Printing: The Next Generation’s Heirlooms showcases the work of contemporary printers who value traditional methods and produce amazing, well-crafted and expertly-designed books using high-quality materials. These books …

Read More →

Two Decadent Dandies: Aubrey Beardsley and Max Beerbohm in the Outrageous 1890s

August 21 marks the 150th anniversary of the birth of well-known British artist Aubrey Beardsley. Three days later, August 24, is the 150th anniversary of the birth of Beardsley’s friend, caricaturist and essayist Max Beerbohm. As young men, both artists shocked English society with their boundary-pushing creativity, becoming celebrities in literary and artistic circles in …

Read More →

Special Collections authors you’ve never heard of: Charles Lever

June 1 marks the 150th anniversary of the death of Victorian novelist Charles Lever (1806-1872). Lever was born into a middle-class Anglo-Irish family. He began writing to supplement his income while training to become a physician. He quickly found success writing rollicking tales of Ireland and of military life, drawing on his childhood in Dublin …

Read More →

Newly-digitized rare literature

The HBLL has been scanning items from the Rare Books Collections which have recently entered the public domain. Selected items published between 1924 and 1926 are now available in the library’s repository at the Internet Archive. Highlights include works by Rudyard Kipling, Eugene O’Neill, and H.G. Wells. More material from Special Collections’ holdings will be …

Read More →

Middlemarch

This week marks the 150th anniversary of the appearance of the first installment of George Eliot’s Middlemarch, A Study of Provincial Life. Often considered to be one of the greatest novels in English literature, Middlemarch was serialized in eight parts between December 1871 and December 1872. Middlemarch originated from two different writing projects which Eliot …

Read More →

Gothic novels and other tales of terror

Looking for some Halloween reading suggestions? We bring you a grim and grisly new addition to the Victorian Collection: the 1847 anonymous Gothic novel The Mysterious Avenger. Issued by a Yorkshire publisher, this cheaply produced “penny dreadful” features everything a reader might expect in a modern horror thriller. Spooky locales? Sinister characters? The supernatural? Revenge? …

Read More →

A Halloween exhibit

From October 13-31, Special Collections reprises the “Thrills and Chills in Cloth” exhibit for Halloween. It features some particularly spooky 19th and 20th century books from our Rare American Literature and Victorian and Edwardian collections. The exhibit demonstrates how British and American book designers took advantage of new technologies to stamp full-color images into cloth …

Read More →

Recent Posts

Archives