Secondary Sources
The definition of a secondary source from the Society of American Archivists' Dictionary of Archives Technology appears above. As you are working with the primary-source material (The Illustrated London News and The Graphic) be thinking about keywords that describe what you are seeing and parallel terms that may lead you to additional information. Use those keywords to search the online catalog and the databases for materials that analyze, criticize, contextualize, or explain content from primary sources.
Secondary Source Examples
The Victorians and Race
Focusing on race, the aim of this work is to reflect, develop and extend interest in the 19th century - as the former epoch has come sharply into focus as a locus for our understanding not only of the past, but the contours of our modernity.
Everyday Violence in Britain, 1850-1950
The diverse violence of modern Britain is hardly new. The Britain of 1850 to 1950 was similarly afflicted. The book is divided into four parts. 'Getting Hurt' which looks at everyday violence in the home (including a chapter on infanticide). 'Uses and Rejections' two chapters on the use of violence within groups of men and women outside the home (for example, violence within youth gangs, and male violence centred around pubs). 'Going Public' three chapters on how violence was regulated by law and the professional agencies which were set up to deal with it. 'Perceptions and Representations' this final section looks at how violence was written about, using both fiction and non-fiction sources. Throughout the book the recurring themes of gender, class, continuity and change, public/private, and experience, discourses and representations are highlighted.
Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England
The Victorians worried about many things, prominent among their worries being the 'condition' of England and the 'question' of its women. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England revisits these particular anxieties, concentrating more closely upon four 'crimes' which generated especial concern amongst contemporaries: adultery, bigamy, infanticide and prostitution. Each engaged questions of sexuality and its regulation, legal, moral and cultural, for which reason each attracted the considerable interest not just of lawyers and parliamentarians, but also novelists and poets and perhaps most importantly those who, in ever-larger numbers, liked to pass their leisure hours reading about sex and crime. Alongside statutes such as the 1857 Matrimonial Causes Act and the 1864 Contagious Diseases Act, Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England contemplates those texts which shaped Victorian attitudes towards England's 'condition' and the 'question' of its women: the novels of Dickens, Thackeray and Eliot, the works of sensationalists such as Ellen Wood and Mary Braddon, and the poetry of Gabriel and Christina Rossetti. Sex, Crime and Literature in Victorian England is a richly contextual commentary on a critical period in the evolution of modern legal and cultural attitudes to the relation of crime, sexuality and the family.
The Lost Chord
The Lost Chord is a pioneering effort to establish the place of music in the life and literature of Victorian Britain and to establish its value as art. In an introductory essay, Nicholas Temperley gives a detailed assessment of the current state of research in this field and examines the reasons for the relative obscurity of most Victorian music, which he traces to the Victorians' own belief that great music must come from across the Channel. The intrinsic value of Victorian music is the main message of Peter Horton's essay on Samuel Sebastian Wesley and Linda K. Hughes's critical study of Arthur Somervall's song cycle on Tennyson's Maud; but both also examine the proper function of music, a subject that greatly concerned many Victorian writers and thinkers. Among them was John Ruskin, whose ideas and musical compositions are explored by William J. Gatens. The function of music in education is the subject of Bernarr Rainbow's essay, while Mary Burgan surveys the treatment of music as an occupation for women in nineteenth-century fiction. Robert Bledsoe investigates the reception of a great Italian composer, Giuseppe Verdi, by Victorian critics and audiences. Since, as Temperley points out, serious Victorian music is difficult for the general reader to locate, the book is accompanied by a special cassette recording of music to illustrate some of the essays.
The Darkened Room
A highly original study that examines the central role played by women as mediums, healers, and believers during the golden age of spiritualism in the late Victorian era, The Darkened Room is more than a meditation on women mediums--it's an exploration of the era's gender relations.