From today’s Guardian newspaper:
British Library's
early newspaper archive goes online
More than 4m
pages, drawn mainly from 19th-century regional newspapers, previously kept in
decent obscurity at the library's newspaper archive in Colindale, north London,
will now be available for historians and family researchers to browse for a
small fee, or free if they visit the central library in King's Cross. All human
life, not to say all the news fit to print, is certainly there, albeit written
up in florid Victorian prose – great events, horrible murders reported in
exhaustive detail, celebrity gossip, as well as the occasional intrusion into
private grief.
For example:
Following the
death of Grace Darling, the lighthouse keeper's daughter who had become a heroine
for rescuing shipwrecked passengers off the coast of Northumberland, the editor
of the Exeter and Plymouth Gazette sneered in the sort of tone to be heard any
day now on blogsites: "We wonder our contemporaries do not know better
than to suppose the public are generally interested in the health of this
peasant."
And as for
scandals, the British Chronicle in September 1790 had a ripe one about an
unnamed peer who fancied his valet's wife and sent the servant off on an errand
which would take him away overnight. The valet was suspicious, hid near his
wife's apartment and locked the couple in when he heard his employer enter,
before heading off to the peer's wife's chamber on a similar mission. "In
the morning gentle readers you may picture to yourselves the confusion of the
whole family: his lordship was found locked in the arms of Mrs Anne and her
ladyship was discovered in the same situation with Mr Thomas."
Here is the link
When I worked for British Telecom the Newspaper Library was in my ‘area’ and I
was fortunate enough to work there on several occasions and it was a fascinating place and of course in those days there were no ‘soft’ copies of the
newspapers, just the actual newspapers.
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