Click Here to Connect to Eighteenth Century Collections Online

Use Eighteenth Century Collections Online to access the digital images of every page of 150,000 books published during the 18th Century. With full-text searching of approximately 26 million pages, the product allows researchers new methods of access to critical information in the fields of history, literature, religion, law, fine arts, science and more.

The collection will include every significant English-language and foreign-language title printed in the United Kingdom, along with thousands of important works from the Americas. The collection is an ongoing project based on The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC), a machine-readable union list of the holdings of the British Library, as well as those from more than 1,500 university, private, and public libraries worldwide.

Eighteenth Century Collections Online captures the essence of the Enlightenment in Great Britain between 1701 and 1800. As the eighteenth century opened, the expiration of the strict controls that previously existed over printing, coupled with the birth of the Industrial Revolution, resulted in the proliferation of printing operations across the country—and in turn, created an explosion of literacy. For the first time, a large segment of the population was exposed to a vast array of printed material. Social and economic criticism flourished; theories on man and society were set forth and debated. A variety of materials is included—from books and broadsides, Bibles, tract books and sermons to printed ephemera—with works by many well-known and lesser-known authors, all providing a diverse collection of material for the researcher of the eighteenth century. A centerpiece of this collection is the complete works of twenty-eight major eighteenth-century authors including:

• Henry Fielding
• Edmund Burke
• Alexander Pope
• Thomas Paine
• Benjamin Franklin
• Jonathan Swift

Also included are significant collections of women writers of the eighteenth century, collections on the French Revolution, and numerous eighteenth-century editions of the works of Shakespeare. Where they add scholarly value or contain important differences, multiple editions of each individual work are offered (including all 500 editions of Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe) to enable scholars to make textual comparisons of the works.

(From the website.)