In 1928, novelist Radclyffe Hall published her seminal LGBTQ work The Well of Loneliness. Following the story of Stephen Gordon, an upper-class woman who finds love with one Mary Llewellyn and is consequently shunned by society, the work was groundbreaking in its lesbian subject matter. Radclyffe Hall | Graphic | 30 April 1927 Although it was received favourably by many publications including the Daily Herald and Lady’s Pictorial, Sunday Express editor James Douglas began a campaign on 18 August 1928 to have Hall’s book banned – naming The …
literature
This week at The Archive we are delighted to welcome 69,314 brand new pages to our collection, covering Scotland, Ireland and England and over a century and a half’s worth of headlines. We have one new title joining us this week, as well as comprehensive updates to six of our existing titles. Register now and explore the Archive We turn to County Limerick today for our exciting brand new addition, namely the Munster News. The Munster News was set up by Francis Counihan, a proud Catholic …
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Here at The Archive this week we have released 73,928 brand new pages – and we are delighted to welcome three brand new titles to our ever-expanding collection, covering three different countries and nearly a century of news. Register now and explore the Archive Our first new title this week is for the West Yorkshire town of Halifax. Described as a ‘reputable provincial newspaper,’ the Halifax Guardian began life in 1832 as the Halifax Guardian and Huddersfield and Bradford Advertiser. The preferred local newspaper of the Brontë …
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The Rev Patrick Brontë of Thornton, has been nominated to the Perpetual Curacy of Haworth, in the parish of Bradford, and has been licenced to the same by his Grace the Archbishop of York. Manchester Mercury | 14 March 1820 This rather innocuous announcement appeared in the pages of the Manchester Mercury on the 14 March 1820. At the time, it would have been considered fairly run-of-the-mill: a typical clergy appointment. But 200 years later, these short sentences conjure up a …
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As Britannia & Eve relates, ‘In 1586 a young genius of twenty-two, already the father of twins, packed his bags, said good-bye to the fading charms of his older wife, and quitted his home in Stratford-upon-Avon to earn his living in London as an actor.’ This young genius was of course none other than William Shakespeare, about whose life precious little is known. But we do know that it was to London that the bard went, Dick Whittington-like, to pursue …
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THROUGH thy battlements, Newstead, the hollow winds whistle; Thou, the hall of my fathers, art gone to decay; In thy once smiling garden the hemlock and thistle Have choked up the rose which late bloomed in the way. So wrote the poet Lord Byron, inspired by his ancestral home of Newstead Abbey. Using pages from the British Newspaper Archive, this blog will explore Byron’s affinity with the ancient building, and how Newstead Abbey beat the odds to survive until the …
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This week we have added 70,450 new pages to The Archive, with two new and very important titles joining us from home and abroad. We have added an extensive run of pages to the Westminster Gazette, which was seen by some as ‘the most powerful paper in Britain.’ Established in 1893 by E.T. Cook, the Westminster Gazette was a liberal newspaper, which found its audience in London’s gentlemen’s clubs and was consequently known as a ‘clubland paper.’ Despite this audience being small, and …
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Novelist Edwin Muir attempted in 1926 to identify those writers who were ‘influencing the development of literature’ (Nottingham Journal, October 1926) in a series of essays entitled Transition. His choices, which included Virginia Woolf, James Joyce and D.H. Lawrence, amongst others, survived the test of time and as such represent the most celebrated authors of the modernist period. Graphic | 26 October 1929 Using reviews taken from the pages of the British Newspaper Archive, and limiting our search to only those …
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Much can be learned on the topic of literature from historic newspapers: book reviews, author biographies, histories of adaptations, and more. For this blog post, we will look at what the newspapers have to offer on the topic of children’s literature. Explore the below articles to discover what books were being read by and recommended for children. Click on an image to enlarge then use the arrows to move image by image throughout the collection. In the image viewer, you …
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2018 marks the 200th anniversary of the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the iconic novel about the young scientist, Victor Frankenstein, and the monster he created in his laboratory. In this post, we will take a look at the history of the novel, a critical early review, the novel’s origins, and its various adaptations for the stage and screen. Publication The Morning Post printed a notice of the publication of a new novel, ‘Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus’, by an anonymous author. The …