Internet based search interface for the Burney Collection digital archive.
TheBurney Collection consists of over 1,270 17th-18th century newspapers and other news materials, gathered byCharles Burney, most notable for the 18th-century London newspapers. The original collection, totalling almost 1 million pages, is held by theBritish Library.
The financial scandal of the 1720s, the South Sea bubble, with reports in theWeekly Journal orSaturday’s Post of how Parliament decided that if they left the country, the directors of the South Sea company "shall suffer death as a felon without benefit of clergy and forfeit to the King all his Lands, Goods and Chattels whatsoever."
First advertisement forThe Memoirs of Fanny Hill in theWhitehall Evening Post, 6 March 1750, and then, in the issue of 17 March, a report of how the publisher was taken into custody and all copies were seized.
Insight into English attitudes to contemporary events, such as when theEnglish Chronicle, or, Universal Evening Post used the unusual device of a headline – FRENCH REVOLUTION!! – for a whole page article on 18 of July 1789. It reported sympathetically on the fall of the Bastille four days earlier, including how the officers were decapitated in ‘a sad but necessary spectacle...a solemnity worthy of the highest admiration.’
The collection begins with Parliamentary papers from 1603, and newspapers from the early 1620s. 18th-century London newspapers are the richest part of the collection.
The following is an incomplete list of titles covering some of the most popular.
Parliamentary papers from 1603
London Newspapers
TheDaily Courant * (1702-1735), the first daily newspaper published in London
Due to rapid deterioration of the collection, a decision was made to microfilm the collection and restrict access to physical copies. The success of the microfilm project led to many other book collections being preserved on film.[4]
Hartmut Walravens (2006),International newspaper librarianship for the 21st century, Walter de Gruyter, pp. 92–93,ISBN978-3-598-21846-0
Terras, Melissa M. (2008),Digital images for the information professional, Ashgate Publishing, Ltd., p. 114,ISBN978-0-7546-4860-4
Studer, Patrick (2008),Historical corpus stylistics: media, technology and change, Continuum International Publishing Group, p. 29,ISBN978-0-8264-9430-6
