Literature

G is for Golden Age: Exploring a Golden Age of Children’s Literature with Gale’s Nineteenth Century Collections Online

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│By Elizabeth Gaglio, Academic Customer Success Specialist│

The nineteenth century is known as a “Golden Age” of children’s literature. Advancements in printing and new views on childhood transformed the genre that was overwhelmingly moral and didactic, finally allowing for tales of adventure, nonsense verse, and imaginative illustration.

Rather than reading just to learn proper behaviour and lessons, children got to find out what happened to Alice when she fell down the rabbit hole and follow the woodland adventures of “a silly old bear” and his friends. Reading for pleasure, curiosity, and wonder became a valued part of childhood in this golden age.

By looking at one popular style of book, the alphabet book, we can see echoes of trends found across children’s literature in the nineteenth century, laying the foundations of modern works. Didactic by nature, but with growing whimsy and creativity, these alphabet collections found in Gale’s Children’s Literature and Childhood archive (part of Nineteenth Century Collections Online) help us track the evolution of children’s literature.

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Digitisation as a Catalyst for Conservation

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|By Margaux Lapierre, Digitisation Project Manager, British Library│

The digitisation of rare and historic materials not only makes these materials more accessible, it also supports preservation and cultural stewardship. For institutions like the British Library, where collections of printed heritage may be large and fragile, digitisation helps to safeguard materials while expanding their visibility and value in research, education, and public engagement.

Projects such as Eighteenth Century Collections Online, Part III (ECCO III), which will be released in March 2026, are a model for how digitisation and conservation complement and strengthen one another. They provide an illustration of how a library can protect the material integrity of its holdings and fulfil its mission to provide access to knowledge for as wide an audience as is possible.

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Leaning Into The Great Gatsby and Other Primary Sources

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Still from the Film “the Painted Flapper"

│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

At 100 years’ old, The Great Gatsby is more popular than ever. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s seminal 1925 novel encapsulates the obsessive nature of the American Dream alongside investigating truths about love and desire. Novels like this are one example of a primary source, with primary sources being first-hand accounts of contemporary periods and phenomena.

Needless to say, various types of primary source should be positioned differently within the creation or evidencing of an argument, and each source has many arguments that can be drawn out from it. But what are the best ways to use these primary sources? This post will guide you through the process of finding and using primary sources from Gale Primary Sources, starting with The Great Gatsby.

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How Gale Primary Sources Supports Students Taking Exeter University’s ‘Approaches to Criticism’ Module

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│By Poppy Sargent, Gale Ambassador at the University of Exeter│

The first year ‘Approaches to Criticism’ module taught to English students at the University of Exeter is notoriously one of the hardest compulsory modules, spanning across both first and second term. Throughout this module, you learn to think about yourselves as infinitely complex social and political subjects and how our social and political being shapes reading practices, focusing on systems and subjects in relation to one another.

Leveraging literature from Gale Primary Sources, this blog will highlight how Gale supports this module, sourcing manuscripts and monographs to aid students and lecturers in their work. By focusing on three of (in my opinion) the most interesting and crucial topics of this module, I will show you how Gale’s extensive archives highlight articles covering Marxism, Bodies and Medicine, and Critical Race Studies.

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How A Girl Should Be: How Female Experiences Have Changed Over Time

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│By Olivia McDermott, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool│

As International Women’s Day begins to approach, it seems fitting that we should reflect upon the many ways in which the female experience has changed over time.

Historically, from a patriarchal lens, the female experience has been aligned with ideas of subjugation, inferiority, and passivity. With the societal expectations of marriage and childrearing being deemed as intrinsic aspects of womanhood, up until the early Victorian period, women’s freedoms were extremely limited. However, this began to change by the end of the eighteenth century, as the passing of The Education Act (1870) allowed girls to receive the same education as boys.

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Marie Stopes and Family Planning

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│By Alison Foster, Gale Technical Support Executive│

‘A magnificent monster,’ as described by Nature magazine in 1992, Marie Stopes (1880-1958) was markedly renown for successfully opening the first birth control clinic in the world, in London, in 1921. This, and subsequent clinics, gave free advice about reproductive health to married women without the sanction of the medical or health community.

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The Development of Poetry in Medieval and Renaissance British Literary Manuscripts

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│By Caley Collins, Gale Ambassador at University College London (UCL)│

Unless you study literature, chances are poetry isn’t the first thing you would think to use as a primary source for an essay. However, poetry gives a fantastic first-hand insight into the language, values, and customs that people were concerned with during specific time periods, making it useful for a wide variety of degrees, including History and Politics. Gale’s Medieval and Renaissance collection, which is part of the British Literary Manuscripts Online archive, contains a vast collection of primary sources ranging from a 1066 Old English historical translation to a 1901 collection of medieval letters.

Using these sources, this post will explore the differences and similarities between poetry written over the course of several centuries. I will quote the sources using modern English spellings, but leave the titles as they were originally written out.

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Applying Animal Theory to Gale’s National Geographic Virtual Library

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| By Jessica Crawley, Gale Ambassador at Lancaster University |

National Geographic is not only a non-profit organization, but also a media company that has taken the printing world by storm. Readers have been using the National Geographic Magazine to scratch that adventurous itch since the magazine’s first publication in 1888, quite literally placing a gateway to the non-human world at the fingertips of human hands. The magazine has sold millions of copies in 40 different languages to date, pairing fascinating visuals with a layman-friendly tone, making it the perfect companion for any reader with an interest in science, wildlife, and exploration.

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Plans, Charts, Images and Drawings: Eighteenth Century Collections Online as a Source of Visual Information Transmission

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│By Sirkku Ruokkeinen, University of Turku, Finland│

In 1786, the Scottish economist William Playfair (1759–1823) published the Commercial and Political Atlas, reporting on the trade balance between England and continental Europe, West Indies, and North America. The work included something never before seen in print: line and bar charts. These statistical tools, although familiar to many of us now, are in fact quite complex devices and necessitate some understanding of their structure for a successful reading. So how were Playfair’s eighteenth century readers able to understand them?

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Going off Script: How Gale Primary Sources Can Be Used in Theatre Studies

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│By Olivia McDermott, Gale Ambassador at the University of Liverpool│

For a subject such as drama, primary sources are continuously overlooked. Much academic study preceding degree level tends to focus on the practical realm of theatre. Though it is an important aspect, this sometimes leads to contextual ideas being ignored.

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