Long Essays
Approach
Long essays are not longer short essays.
Instead they allow greater depth of analysis and (possibly) some primary source research
Choose a broad topic and then narrow it down
Add question later once research in secondary literature has been undertaken
Typical Structure
Introduction setting out aims and objectives/research questions
Literature review setting out key themes/debates of relevant historiography and how these
may frame the analysis.
Analysis of themes/case studies/people/events etc. Here is an opportunity to make your
essay original
Conclusions bringing your analysis back to the wider literature and how this
challenges/supports other debates
Write to length as you will be penalised if you go over 4500 words
Topics
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Domestic violence
Prostitution as a social evil
Why women got the vote
Women and industrialisation
Victorian family
Women and socialism
Rights restricted by class
Philanthropy
Homosexual subculture
Crime and gender
Unmarried mothers and the poor law
Motherhood and the state
Maternal crime
War and gender roles
Anti-suffrage movement
Masculinity and war
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Domestic servants
Marriage and divorce
Female friendship
Secondary Sources
Use seminar reading as starting point
There may also be reading lists on other relevant modules (eg Britain in the Twentieth
Century; Feminism and Social Change; Crime and Punishment etc)
Use the Bibliography of British and Irish History for further research and an overview of what
has been written on the subject
Primary Sources
There are rich digitised primary sources for this module:
Modern Records Centre Extracts
See digitised archives from the Modern Records Centre here
Electronic Resources
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ECCO - Eighteenth Century Collections Online, an online corpus of texts published in
Britain from 1700-1800
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Historical Texts – EEBO, ECCO and Nineteenth Century Books
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Nineteenth-Century Pamphlets
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Women Writers Online, 1400-1850 Full text searchable copies of texts from a range of
women writers.
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Defining Gender 1450-1910
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British History Online http://www.british-history.ac.uk/
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Women, War and Society, 1914-18
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Old Bailey Online, a searchable site which gives the proceedings of the London court for
the period after 1674 and is a wonderful source of the social history of the period:
http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/
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Oxford Dictionary of National Biography
Newspapers, periodicals and other prints:
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The Times Digital Archive
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The Guardian and Observer
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British Library Nineteenth Century Newspapers
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Daily Mail
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John Johnson Collection of Early Ephemera
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See also the collection of broadside ballads
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The British Museum's prints and drawings:
http://www.britishmuseum.org/research/search_the_collection_database.aspx
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British Periodicals Collection
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Nineteenth-century UK Periodicals
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The Burney collection of newspapers
Parliamentary:
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House of Commons Parliamentary Papers 1801-2003
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Hansard in the Nineteenth Century