This week we have added 143,678 pages to The Archive. We have added one new title, the Oxfordshire Weekly News, and we have continued to augment our Irish collection, with updates to three of our Irish titles. We have also added more pages to the Liverpool Echo, with titles now spanning the years 1879 to 1988 for this particular newspaper.

We have published titles from the Oxfordshire Weekly News covering the years 1869-1895, and then 1898-1926. The Archive now has sixteen titles covering the county of Oxfordshire. Oxford during this time was home to many leading lights in the literary sphere: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and Oscar Wilde, to name but a few.

Possibly one of the most influential Oxonian residents during this period was John Ruskin. John Ruskin was a prominent art critic, social thinker and philanthropist, whose early work Modern Painters championed painter J.M.W. Turner. The Oxfordshire Weekly News provides unique insight into his remarkable, and often times divisive life.

For example, in 1874 Ruskin championed a controversial road-mending scheme just outside of Oxford, on the Ferry Hinksey Road. Well-heeled undergraduates, amongst them Oscar Wilde, took on work more commonly associated with navvies, in a bid to undertake, as Ruskin saw it, wholesome manual labour in public service. Ruskin wanted to promote a ‘new form of athletics,’ with the purpose of aiding the greater good, however, detractors saw it as taking work away from those who actually needed it. You can read about Ruskin and his ‘diggers’ here.

Whatever opinions Ruskin inspired, he was a veritable social force, passionate in his defence of the arts and prominent in promoting some of the most famous artists of the day, most notably Pre-Raphaelites William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais and  Dante Gabriel Rossetti. An anonymous poem published in the Oxfordshire Weekly News in 1878 reveals the depth of ardour that he inspired. Faced with the possibility of war in Russia, Ruskin is elevated by the poet to something of a deity, entrusted with protecting both art and England.

Oxfordshire Weekly News | 20 March 1878

Ruskin died in 1900, and was buried in Coniston Churchyard. As befitted the man, his memorial stone was subject to great scrutiny, and was designed with the belief that ‘Mr Ruskin himself would have wished for some headstone of a quiet and unpretentious, and and yet of an artistic and decorative kind.’ You can read more about Ruskin’s final resting place here.

New Titles

Updated Titles

This week we have updated some of our recently added titles.

You can learn more about each of the titles we have added to this week by clicking on their names. On each paper’s title page, you can read a FREE sample issue, learn more about our current holdings, and our plans for digitisation.

Register now and explore the Archive

You can keep up to date with all the latest additions by visiting the recently added page.  You can even look ahead to see what we’re going to add tomorrow.