My frustrating experience searching for aging-related primary source…

Since DH seminar this week is for moving images and I’m not one of those people who’ll be diving into that… I want to record my frustrating experience I am having for a few weeks now and also a few happy moments searching for aging-related primary text in eighteenth-century.

Age studies is a relatively new field having its first significant rise in the 70s and the intersection of age studies and literature has only began to take good shape. In addition to it still searching for possible texts for analysis, the fact that there has been a terminology change in how people expressed what we consider as now “aging” is giving me a difficult time finding just the right source. But of course, this is the challenge for anyone doing a historical research or anyone searching for primary text in general.

(Paul Sandy, ‘Wine Seller’ 1759: an apparently low-class old woman selling wine looks healthy and happy)

Since I was blocked by ECCO (Eighteenth Century Collection Online)–which said there is no interesting reference to aging in eighteenth century literature (I love you ECCO but I don’t trust you…), I started searching for university libraries that lists some databases for long eighteenth century primary source sites.

Memorial university libraries: early modern Britain – 15th to 18th C

Unique English Imprints, pre-1800: US National Library of Medicine

London Lives 1600 to 1800:Crime, Poverty and SocialPolicy in the Metropolis ☆

Early Modern Resources

British History Online

EuroDocs

Early English Books Online

USC Libraries

William Hogarth: Links to Online Image Archives of Paintings and Prints by Hogarth ☆

MSU

17th and 18th Century Burney Collection Newspapers  ☆

Gale News Vault ☆

Eighteenth-Century Journals Parts I through IV  ☆

Periodicals Archive Online ☆

Eighteenth Century Journals, Part I-V ☆

British Periodicals, Collections I and II ☆

British Newspapers 1600-1950  ☆

Empire Online

London Low Life  ☆

British History Sources 1500-1900 ☆

Early English Prose Fiction  ☆

Eighteenth-Century Fiction  ☆

English Drama

English Poetry Database

English Poetry (2nd edition)

Eighteenth Century Drama: Censorship, Society and the Stage ☆

Jane Austen’s Fiction Manuscripts ☆

Proceedings of the Old Bailey London 1674-1913 ☆

The Gazette ☆

English Historical Documents ☆

I hope there could be a search engine or a software program that enables me to type in a key word and pulls up all the record from various sites.

For spring break, I plan to visit these sites and to write down the summary of their usefulness and categorize them also. For now I have a little star next to the link to mark the sites that was useful.