The British Library has opened up a huge online collection of literary treasures and scholarly articles via its new website, Discovering Literature, in a bid to get young students’ interested in classic books.
The new project covers the Romantic and Victorian periods, from William Blake to the science fiction of H G Wells. However, the British Library aims to extend this online collection up to present day authors and as far back in time as the Old English epic Beowulf.
Among the artefacts digitized for the first time are Jane Austen’s notebooks, the childhood works of the Brontë sisters, manuscripts by Keats, Wordsworth and many others plus intriguing early drafts of William Blake’s classic poems ‘Tyger Tyger’ and ‘London’.
The British Library has commissioned over 150 articles and 20 short films from leading scholars designed to illuminate the changing society and cultural scene behind the literature. The topics are illustrated with newspaper clippings, playbills, artworks and other contemporary material.
The article on Crime in Oliver Twist, for instance, uses an 1809 Dictionary of Criminal Slang to reveal that “twist” was a word for “hanged”, while the article on Inventing the Future uses satirical cartoons and works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to explain how the the Industrial Revolution’s technological advances inspired nineteenth century writers to set their novels in the future.