British Library: Discovering Literature: Britain's Involvement With New World Slavery and the Transatlantic Slave Trade

“Words can be like x-rays if you use them properly—they’ll go through anything.” Readers of Brave New World will be pierced by an activity that asks them to use details from the text to craft a biopoem for one of the characters in Aldous...

From Robinson Crusoe to the anti-slavery activism of Olaudah Equiano and the letters of Ignatius Sancho: explore a range of writing produced during an age of travel, trade and colonial conquest, in which Britain vastly expanded its...

Throughout the course of the 19th century, the middle classes expanded rapidly. Those moving up the social scale had to learn new modes of behavior and ways of life. These articles research how this sector of society was reflected in the...

The 19th century saw a rapid technological change, together with paradigm shifts in scientific understanding. These articles research how authors responded to the new possibilities afforded by technology and science.

Read newly-commissioned articles on Victorian and Romantic literature.

Discover a wealth of original sources from the Romantic and Victorian periods, including original manuscripts, rare first editions, newspapers, diaries, letters, photographs, and maps.

A series of articles that research how gender roles were defined in the 19th century, and how they were represented in the literature of the period.

This article describes how four writers, taken from Africa as children and sold into slavery, grew up to write works that challenged British ideas about race, called for African brotherhood, and demanded the abolition of the slave trade.

From eccentric inventions to fears of invasion; from social degeneration to visions of the apocalypse - these articles research literary depictions of the future and how they reflect contemporary fears of social, technological, and...

Towards the end of the 18th century, a movement emerged calling for an end to the slave trade and, later, slavery itself. This article traces the road to abolition from the 1780s to the 1830s, highlighting the impacts of grass-root...