Historical e-books
Visit the links below to find out more about our historical e-book collections.
Early English Books Online (EEBO)
Chadwyck Healey
Contains digital facsimile page images of virtually every work printed in England, Ireland, Scotland, Wales and British North America and works in English printed elsewhere from 1473-1700, from the first book printed in English by William Caxton, through the age of Spenser and Shakespeare and the tumult of the English Civil War.
Early English Prose Fiction
- ProQuest
Contains 211 works in English prose by writers from the British Isles from the period 1500-1700.
Early European Books Collections 1-4
- ProQuest
Traces the history of printing in Europe from its origins through to the close of the seventeenth century, offering full-colour, high-resolution facsimile images of rare and hard-to-access printed sources.
Eighteenth Century Collections Online
- Gale
Provides access to over 180,000 titles published during the 18th Century including books, pamphlets, essays and broadsides. Subject coverage includes history, geography, literature, religion, law, fine arts, medicine, science and technology. Full-text searching of approximately 33 million pages included in the databases is possible.
Jisc Historical Texts
- Jisc
Enables you to cross-search over 300,000 historical books published in English or in England before 1800 and 65,000 19th century books from the following historically significant collections: Early English Books Online (EEBO); Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO); 19th Century books from the British Library collection - digitised versions of more than 65,000 first editions from the 19th century, covering philosophy, history, poetry and literature. The collection extends to over 25 million pages of previously rare and inaccessible content, and includes the original typeface and illustrations for each book.
Literature Online
- ProQuest
A collection of literature in English, comprising poetry from 600 to the present, drama from 1280 to 1915 and prose from 1500 to 1900. It currently includes more than 175,000 individual works. The Literature Online English Corpus does not include American literature.
Nineteenth Century Collections Online
- Gale
- British politics and society
- European literature 1790-1840 : the Corvey collection
- Europe and Africa : Commerce, Christianity, Civilization, and Conquest
- Asia and the West : diplomacy and cultural exchange
- British theatre, music, and literature : high and popular culture
- Photography : The World through the Lens
- Women : Transnational Networks.
A multi-year global digitization and publishing program focusing on primary source collections of the nineteenth century; comprised of numerous collections to be released over many years. Includes a variety of material types: monographs, newspapers, pamphlets, manuscripts, ephemera, maps, statistics, and more.