“I have always been suspicious of claims that electronic resources can transform your research life, but an exception has to be made for the online archive of British Library nineteenth-century newspapers. For the first time, it is possible to search a wide range of titles in the provincial and metropolitan press quickly and easily: work that would have taken painful weeks on a microfilm reader can now be done in an afternoon. Everything from biographical details to editorials about major events can be recovered, making this a tool useful for anyone interested in the national past.”

“[It] gives us an invaluable new perspective on the way Victorian Britain came to understand itself as a community of citizens, consumers and commentators. It is hard to imagine any researcher with nineteenth-century interests to whom it does not offer important insights on their subject: and it is dangerously addictive!”