York University Libraries offer a range of materials – from the original serial installments of Dickens’s Dombey and Son to the most current critical and theoretical work in Victorian studies – to support research projects across the disciplines.  A wealth of online resources and databases, such as a searchable database of nineteenth-century newspapers (including the London Times), an online archive of material relating to Victorian popular culture, the full run of British Parliamentary Papers, and an impressive array of transatlantic materials, is also available to the York community through the Library’s website.

York’s collection of original Victorian manuscripts is located at the Clara Thomas Archives and Special Collections on the second floor of the Scott Library. The collection includes the extensive Lady Victoria Welby fonds (F0443), 42 boxes of manuscripts that include letters from Havelock Ellis, Thomas Huxley, Henry and William James, Charles Pierce, Christina Rossetti, Herbert Spencer, Leslie Stephens, and H.G. Wells. York continues to build its collection of correspondence by Pre-Raphaelite and other Victorian artists, authors, poets, and political activists, including letters from Matthew Arnold, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, John Bright, Ford Madox Brown, Oliver Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones (with a comical sketch), Thomas Hall Caine, Bryan Waller Procter [Barry Cornwall], Walter Crane, George Frampton, J.A. Froude, William Abbott Herdman, Frederic Leighton, William R. Lethaby, Mary Louise Molesworth, Edward Poynter, Christina Rossetti, John Ruskin, John Tyndall, Graham Wallace, and Thomas Woolner.

York is also home to the archives of the second oldest scholarly organization devoted to the Victorian period, the Victorian Studies Association of Ontario (1967– ), and to the archives of The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies (1977– ), both located at 624 Atkinson College. The archives of JPRS include letters from Matthew Arnold, Walter Crane, William Holman Hunt, George Meredith, William Morris, Violet Paget [Vernon Lee], Walter Pater, William Michael Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, and Thomas Woolner. For more information about the archives of the VSAO and of JPRS, please contact David Latham.

To read about other Toronto-area resources and collections recommended by our members, click here.