British Library's early newspaper archive goes online

[alp227]

Source: The Guardian

As the Leveson inquiry reveals fresh horrors about press behaviour every day, the British Library's archive of early newspapers, which has gone online, shows there is nothing new under the Sun – or, perhaps, in it.

More than 4m pages, drawn mainly from 19th-century regional newspapers, previously kept in decent obscurity at the library's newspaper archive in Colindale, north London, will now be available for historians and family researchers to browse for a small fee, or free if they visit the central library in King's Cross. All human life, not to say all the news fit to print, is certainly there, albeit written up in florid Victorian prose – great events, horrible murders reported in exhaustive detail, celebrity gossip, as well as the occasional intrusion into private grief.

Thus, the Herts Guardian, Agricultural Journal and General Advertiser, reporting on the death of Lord Raglan, the hapless British commander in the Crimean War: "Our commander-in-chief … pained in his last hours by the ribald attacks of an unprincipled press."

They could knock down celebrities in those days too. Following the death of Grace Darling, the lighthouse keeper's daughter who had become a heroine for rescuing shipwrecked passengers off the coast of Northumberland, the editor of the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette sneered in the sort of tone to be heard any day now on blogsites: "We wonder our contemporaries do not know better than to suppose the public are generally interested in the health of this peasant."

Read more: http://www.guardian.co.uk/media/2011/nov/29/british-library-newspaper-archive-online

[grasswire]

1. interesting, thanks

I have a huge coffee table book of New York Times front pages for a good part of the twentieth century, and it is a good way to put today's news in perspective. There has always been corruption, mayhem, and exaggeration.

[Skittles]

2. is it a big red book?

I have one like that

[Sherman A1]

3. Thanks for Posting

This could be important to both historians but also those doing family research. :toast:

[iamthebandfanman]

4. neat stuff, wish ya didnt hafta buy a subscription

to check it all out..

[_eh]

5. Well, it's in God's Hands now

O8)

[Norrin Radd]

6. It would be awesome if most archives of papers and documents

would be scanned and available online.

[dipsydoodle]

7. If anyone is over here

and wants to see the originals I think you'll find they're still up at Colindale : not at the British Library in Kings Cross.

[enlightenment]

8. One of my favorite places - even if it does

make me feel like I'm stepping into Bleak House. Every time I've gone, it's started raining just as I push open the creaky iron gate . . . then there is the dismal lighting, cramped rooms, and the strange, creepy draft through the ventilation system that sounds like the moans of a thousand lost souls.

Love it!

[muriel_volestrangler]

9. The BBC story says the images will be available for free at St. Pancras too

The digital material will be made free to users at the main library site at St Pancras, north London.

A charge will be levied for searches conducted from outside the library.

Which implies, to me, that while the original physical copies may stay at Colindale, you can look at the images of them for free if you do it inside the BL at St. Pancras/King's Cross.

[dipsydoodle]

10. Colindale

is only about 30 minutes drive from me - car and train combined about 30 minutes to Euston too. I'm sure I'd find the originals to be infinitely more interesting than the scans. That's cos I'm an old fashioned ****.