Image from the Wikipedia entry for Jane Welsh Carlyle

While browsing through my bookmarks looking for letter corpora, I re-encountered a great resource: The Carlyle Letters Online. This digital archive contains over 10,000 of the collected letters of the important Victorian couple Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle.

The content of The Carlyle Letters Online is based on the Duke-Edinburgh edition of The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle and presented by Duke University Press. This video provides some background on the project. The Carlyle Letters website contains interesting information on a variety of topics including how to search and cite material from the digital archive.

Image from the Wikipedia entry for Thomas Carlyle

I found the possibility of browsing through the letters by recipient particularly attractive as the Carlyle’s ‘correspondents of interest’ include Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and John Stuart Mill – among many others. This unique corpus will delight those who enjoy the language of letters, Victorian culture, or epistolary things more generally.