What this is
Victorian Footnotes is a journal of small histories from the nineteenth century, written between 2011 and 2018. Its beat is the local and the overlooked: a Staten Island cricket ground, a forgotten agitator, a scandal in the papers, a Victorian argument that keeps repeating. The pieces are essays, not encyclopaedia entries, and they wear their sources lightly.
Why it is back
The site went quiet and, for a time, off the web. Because several of its pages are cited elsewhere as references, it has been rebuilt from its own archive so those citations resolve again and the essays stay readable. The text is the original author's, tidied where the archive had garbled it; nothing has been invented, and period quotations are kept as they were.
Sources
Each essay stands on the sources named within it — old newspapers, club records, memoirs and the like. Where a claim could not be confirmed against the archived text it was left as the author wrote it, not embellished. Corrections and additions are welcome, in the spirit of a footnote.
Questions
- Is Victorian Footnotes still being written?
- It is kept as an archive of its 2011 to 2018 run rather than a live blog. The essays remain, and the pages other sites cite still resolve.
- What does it cover?
- Nineteenth-century history with a local eye — much of it Staten Island and the wider New York area: sport, personalities, street names and the odd literary aside.
From the journal