Donate Now

Victorian Blogging

Our National Lottery Heritage Funded project – The Pamphleteers Who Dared to Dream of a Better World. Find out about the conservation and digitisation of 19th century radical pamphlet collection.

This post was written by Conway Hall Library & Archives volunteer, Katarina, providing some interesting background to ‘Down Stream’, a pamphlet of the Rossetti poem that is part of our namesake Moncure Conway’s own pamphlet collection. This is just one of over 1300 nineteenth-century pamphlets we are making freely available online through the Heritage Lottery funded digitisation […]

On the 13th of July we ran a zine-making workshop as part of the Heritage Lottery funded project, Victorian Blogging, taking our collection of nineteenth-century activist pamphlets as inspiration to create contemporary zines. Participants in the workshop have kindly allowed us to share their work. Our collection of over 1300 Victorian pamphlets covers topics such […]

Conway Hall’s library and archive collections bring together the words of many progressive individuals, but the phrase ‘a man ahead of his time’ has never been more fitting than when used to describe Edward Carpenter. The poet, writer and socialist promoted gay rights at a time when homosexuality was a criminal offence, advocated for recycling […]

The 8th May 2018 marks ten years since the blasphemy laws were abolished in England and Wales through the Criminal Justice and Immigration Act, following hundreds of years of campaigning. The offence of blasphemy has its roots in late medieval canon law, which allowed ‘heretics’ to be imprisoned and burnt to death under ecclesiastical authority. In the seventeenth […]

Dr. Moncure Conway (1832–1907) was an American, after whom Conway Hall is named. He settled in South Place Chapel from 1864 until 1897 with a break (1885-1892) when he returned to the United States to write his definitive biography of Thomas Paine and edit his letters. During his ministry in London he steered his rationally […]

Having begun working at Conway Hall as Digitisation Coordinator for the Victorian Blogging digitisation project at the end of last year, I am already experiencing the full array of goings on here and enjoying the early stages of the project. My interest in this project stems from my background in studying both Victorian social history and archives […]

Today, Conway Hall in Red Lion Square, Bloomsbury, has received £88,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) for an exciting project, Victorian Blogging – The Pamphleteers Who Dared to Dream of a Better World.

Victorian Blogging

Victorian Blogging – A Pre-Raphaelite Pamphlet

Victorian Blogging – Zine Workshop

Victorian Blogging – Edward Carpenter: ‘fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal wearer and sex maniac’

Victorian Blogging – Ten years since the abolition of the blasphemy laws

Victorian Blogging – The Conway Tracts

Victorian Blogging – Introduction to the project

Victorian Blogging – The Pamphleteers Who Dared to Dream of a Better World