LibGuides: English Language and Literature: Primary Sources

Special Collections

Special Collections Home
Special Collections is an area within Mearns-McPherson Library which houses rare, unique, or valuable material. It has many collections related to English Literature, which students are encouraged to use. Note the hours and special guidelines for using this material, which you are not able to take home.

Selected collections located in UVic Libraries Special Collections:

Literature Collections
The archival holdings at University of Victoria Special Collections include correspondence, published and unpublished works, notebooks, sketchbooks, diaries, and ephemera by authors such as: John Betjeman, T.S. Eliot, Robert Graves, Wyndham Lewis, Henry Miller, Ezra Pound, Kathleen Raine, Herbert Read and Laura Riding.
Robertson Davies Victorian Plays
Medieval and early modern to 19th C in Special Collections
This database lists early editions of printed books held in Special Collections

Online collections

UVic Libraries subscribe to a number of electronic collections of historical literature:

British Literary Manuscripts Online Facsimile images of literary manuscripts, including letters and diaries, drafts of poems, plays, novels, and other literary works, and similar materials. Searching is based on tags and descriptive text associated with each manuscript. Images of the complete manuscript can be viewed, manipulated and navigated on screen. Contains British Literary Manuscripts Online, Medieval and Renaissance & British Literary Manuscripts Online, c. 1660-1900.
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Ben Jonson Online A complete reappraisal of this major Renaissance writer, complementing and extending the seven-volume print edition of Jonson’s works published in 2012. The Online Edition presents a fully searchable version of the Print Edition, including all the original introductions, collations, and commentary, but it complements, develops, and vastly extends the Print Edition with a large and flexible array of textual and contextual materials.
Early American Imprints - Evans, 1639-1800 Books, pamphlets, broadsides and other imprints listed in the renowned bibliography by Charles Evans.
Early American Imprints - Shaw-Shoemaker, 1801-1819 Covering every aspect of American life during the early decades of the United States, Early American Imprints, Series II (1801-1819) provides full-text access to American books, pamphlets and broadsides published in the first nineteen years of the nineteenth century. The continuation of Readex's Early American Imprints: Series I, this rich primary source database, based on the authoritative bibliography by Ralph R. Shaw and Richard H. Shoemaker.
Early English Books Online (EEBO) Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700 - from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
Early European Books History of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online ECCO includes a variety of materials — from books and directories, Bibles, sheet music and sermons to advertisements — and works by many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection of material for the researcher of the eighteenth century. Included are works from women writers of the eighteenth century; collections on the French Revolution; and numerous editions of the works of Shakespeare.
Electronic Enlightenment Philosophy and writing of the founders of the modern world. 18th-century primary sources and correspondence: read letters between the founders of the modern world and their friends and families, bankers and booksellers, patrons and publishers.
English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) International union catalogue listing early books, serials, newspapers and selected ephemera printed before 1801. It contains catalogue entries for items issued in Britain, Ireland, overseas territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. Also included is material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic,
Incunabula Short Title Catalogue (ISTC) The database records nearly every item printed from movable type before 1501, but not material printed entirely from woodblocks or engraved plates. 30,375 editions are listed as of March 2014, including some 16th-century items previously assigned incorrectly to the 15th century.
Internet Shakespeare Editions The aim of the Internet Shakespeare Editions is to inspire a love of Shakespeare’s works in a world-wide audience. To do so, we create and publish works for the student, scholar, actor, and general reader in a form native to the medium of the Internet: scholarly, fully annotated texts of Shakespeare’s plays, multimedia explorations of the context of Shakespeare’s life and works, and records of his plays in performance.
Literary Manuscripts from the Brotherton Library 17th and 18th Century poetry from the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds. The focus of this collection is to provide direct access to facsimile images of verses as catalogued in the Brotherton Library’s BCMSV database. The manuscripts range from contemporary copies of poems by writers like Colvil, Dryden, Fairfax and Pope to popular tags and epitaphs.
Perdita Manuscripts: Women Writers, 1500-1700 The Perdita Manuscripts project is on the cutting edge of digital scholarship, allowing scholars to consult detailed descriptions and full facsimiles of early modern womens' manuscripts from a wide range of public and private collections through a simple yet versatile search interface. This resource is produced in association with the Perdita Project based at the University of Warwick and Nottingham Trent University.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online (NCCO) A resource for 19th century studies, NCCO is a multi-year global digitization and publishing program focused on primary source collections of the “long” nineteenth century. Collections for this program are sourced through partnerships with major world libraries as well as specialist libraries, and content includes monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more.
Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue (NSTC) NSTC defines the printed record of the English-speaking world from the beginning of the nineteenth century to the end of the First World War, comprising more than 1.2 million records drawn from eight copyright and research libraries.
Past Masters (Intelex) InteLex Past Masters is comprised of 117 full-text humanities databases that make available cohesive collections of editions, in both original language and in English translation, of seminal figures in the humanities and social sciences. Much of the content is licensed from Oxford University Press, with significant collections from other major scholarly publishers including Harvard University Press, Indiana University Press and Pickering & Chatto.
Richard Brome Online Online edition of the Collected Works of the Caroline dramatist, Richard Brome. The edition not only makes the texts accessible to scholars and theatre practitioners, but also begins to explore their theatricality visually, serving as inspiration to encourage more frequent staging of Brome's works.
Romanticism: Life, Literature and Landscape Discover the working methods of Romantic poets and trace the evolution of celebrated verse in this powerful digital resource. Presenting the manuscript collections of the Wordsworth Trust, this digital collection offers students and researchers of the Romantic period unique access to the working notebooks, verse manuscripts and correspondence of William Wordsworth and his fellow writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas De Quincey and Robert Southey.
Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period Scottish Women Poets of the Romantic Period is a collection organized by Nancy Kushigian of the University of California, Davis and Stephen Behrendt of the University of Nebraska. In addition to 60 volumes of Romantic poetry composed by Scottish women, the database includes extensive contemporary critical reviews and numerous scholarly essays specially commissioned for the project by Alexander Street Press.
T.S. Eliot - The Complete Prose of T.S. Eliot: The Critical Edition Collected, uncollected, and unpublished prose of one of the most prolific writers of the twentieth century. This eight-volume critical edition dramatically expands access to material that has been restricted or inaccessible in private and institutional collections for almost fifty years.

Openly available online collections

Carlyle Letters Online A digital archive based on the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle. The print edition is also available in the Library. Call number: PR4433 A4 1970 (v. 1-33)