Thanks to JISC, we now have free access to one series of 19th Century UK Periodicals Online.
From the JISC Collections website http://www.jisc-collections.ac.uk/
“This resource, subtitled New Readerships: Women’s, Children’s, Humour and Leisure/Sport, consists of almost 100 academically selected titles and approximately 1.2 million pages. It focuses on the birth of modern magazine publishing in the UK between 1800 and 1900.
Titles included cover the spectrum of women’s writing, from Hearth and Home to the suffragist The Vote via Women and Josephine Butler’s The Dawn, and also chart the rapid rise of children’s entertainment and education, with titles including Boys’ Own and Little Folks.
The explosion in popular sports and hobbies, from gardening and horse racing to cricket and cycling, is well covered, and there is a broad spread of satirical and comic titles such as Punch, Fun, Judy, and Figaro in London.
This collection presents primary source periodical content allowing full text searching in addition to an extensive library of newly captured images, including approximately 8,000 in colour.”
To access 19th Century UK Periodicals Online please use the A-Z list of Online Resources or see the Publishing Studies or History Subject Research Guides.
A word of caution: we do not have access to the ‘Empire’ series, despite what you see on the database’s home page.