In recent decades the study of Victorian Britain has undergone great transformation as interest in what was previously defined as “low culture” in the performing arts and entertainment has now become the subject of great academic scrutiny. With the advent of popular culture studies as well as an increased interest among even traditional historians and literary scholars in artefacts of Victorian popular spectacles and stage acts, the demand for ephemera such as playbills, pamphlets, advertisements, illustrations, photographs and other such items has correspondingly increased. Adam Matthew Digital, a UK‐based company dedicated to providing unique digital collections to libraries, has created a fascination compendium of nineteenth‐ and early twentieth‐century materials in its Victorian Popular Culture database. To provide a broad range of memorabilia and other historical items, Adam Matthew has digitized items from some prominent cultural archives such as the Senate Library, University of London, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, the UK National Archives in Kew, and the National Fairground Archive at the University of Sheffield. The rare content in this online collection can shed new light on the music halls, travelling venues, and circus sideshows, providing researchers a tantalizing array of scanned images and texts documenting the stagecraft of Victorian entertainers.
The collection is divided into three large categories representing various forms of popular entertainment from the late eighteenth century to the early 1900s: Spiritualism, Sensation and Magic; Circuses, Sideshows and Freaks; and Musical, Theatre Entertainment (to be added to the collection later in 2010). The Spiritualism and Magic section contains records of the Victorians obsession with séances and other occult spiritual phenomenon, and offers many rare photographs and publicity material used by mediums, magicians, and other spiritualists in their performances. The history of the circus in Britain, America, and Europe starting with the travelling shows and great touring spectacles of the 1800s appears in the numerous broadsides, post cards, manuscripts, and other rarities included in the database. The last section to be added in 2010 will contain materials related to the popular theatre and the Victorian vaudeville acts in music halls, pleasure gardens, and other exhibitions.
The digital contents of Victorian Popular Culture can be browsed by title (in alphabetical order), by the source archive or library, by document type (manuscript, visual, or printed material, and then further breakdowns after that), or by section of the database. It has a quick search box on the database homepage, and an advanced search with the standard three search boxes connected by Boolean operators. The search engine supports stemming and wildcard symbols, and has additional limits to refine the advanced search. It has a Popular Searches list to serve as a starting point for novice users, helping them to learn the various topics and related subjects covered in this unusual collection. The database uses its own topic indexing terms to provide subject access to the items in the collection. The images are vivid and look crisp at a variety of different screen resolutions and on different monitors. Each individual document or image has a full citation record giving its publication history, source, and other descriptive information. The images can be viewed in a separate frame, and can be manipulated for a better view. Subscribers can download PDF versions of the whole document image or of a section of the image. Users can also simply print the screen view of the document. The database also provides additional resources such as a chronology, biographies of important persons in Victorian popular entertainment, bibliographies of secondary sources, and a glossary of terms.
Victorian Popular Culture would be an excellent resource for research libraries that support large print and digital collections of nineteenth‐century books and periodicals. It will greatly benefit researchers studying the life and times of ordinary people in the Victorian and early Edwardian periods, for it opens up aspects of popular culture in that period that are not widely recorded but are nonetheless vital for understanding the historical and social context in which Victorian history and literature took shape. The availability of such a digital collection will ensure that today's scholars will be able to use their desktop computers to explore a treasure trove of ephemera housed in disparate repositories across the globe.
