19th
Have you ever wanted to read what Darwin’s contemporaries wrote about him? Or wanted to see an 1860 British pamphlet trying to raise public support for what would eventually become the Channel Tunnel between Britain and France? Perhaps you are looking for primary source documents to beef up a paper or project? If you have any interest in the 19th century, you are in luck, because Baylor has a subscription to a Nineteenth Century microfiche collection produced by Chadwyck and sold through Proquest.

The Nineteenth Century is a thirty-year publishing programme which reproduces on microfiche a significant proportion of English-language works first published between 1801-1900. The Programme is situated at the British Library, and it is the holdings of this great library that form the basis of the Programme.

However, individual titles don’t appear in BearCat. To locate the titles on the fiche, you must use the online index or the more comprehensive index C19 which indexes this collection as well as many other 19th century materials that Baylor purchases from Proquest.

The Nineteenth Century has been issued in several parts. Baylor owns the General Collection which contains over 19,000 texts for research in every area of human life and ideas. Included in the General Collection are Books on Economics (Approximately 1,000 texts on economic history focusing on the second half of the century), Books on British Colonization (Over 600 texts documenting the impact of British colonization around the world), Books on Ireland (327 texts, mainly pamphlets, on all facets of Irish political and social life), and Books on Evolution and Creation (319 essential books and pamphlets on the ‘Darwinian revolution’ and controversies that surrounded it).

Baylor has also purchased two specialized collections:Children’s Literature (A collection of 2,369 nineteenth-century books for children) and Books on Publishing and the Diffusion of Knowledge (Almost 800 texts for the study of printing, publishing and bookselling).

Also available and searchable through the index (but not purchased by Baylor) are these specialized collections: Women Writers (this collection of works of imaginative literature will eventually include about 4,500 authors, many never before identified or studied), Art and Architecture (2,445 books sourced from the National Art Library at the Victoria and Albert Museum, The British Library and the Bodleian Library), Books on China (733 works on the history and culture of China selected from Henri Cordier’s Biblioteca Sinica), and Books on Linguistics (over 1,200 texts for the historical study of language).

If you have any questions, or need help locating a microfiche found through searching the 19th Century index, be sure to contact a Reference Librarian.