17th & 18th Century Burney Collection
The digitisation of the Burney Newspaper Collection, the largest single collection of seventeenth and eighteenth century English news media available from the British Library, alongside the Burney Additional Newspapers collection, and includes pamphlets, proclamations, newsbooks, and newspapers from across the period. This collection includes pamphlets, proclamations and newspapers from the period, covering more than 200 years of accounts from England, Ireland, Scotland and a handful of papers from British colonies. You can read contemporary accounts of:
- George Washington’s election as the first president of the United States;
- The English reaction to the French Revolution;
- Accounts of the voyages to New Zealand and the Boyd massacre;
- The Irish push for home rule.
Burney Collection
17th and 18th Century Burney Newspapers Collection
Part I
Gathered by Reverend Charles Burney (1757-1817), a notable scholar and son of a well-known music historian of the same name, the Burney Newspaper collection, held at the British Library, covers more than two hundred years of accounts, explanations, and points of views. More than 700 bound volumes of newspapers relate political, educational and economic situations chosen from more than three dozen cities—including English provincial, Irish, Scottish and a handful of papers from British colonies, in the Americas and Asia.
These rare and restricted documents are now available online, and students and academics can conduct full-text searches of nearly 1 million pages from approximately 1,270 titles spanning from Parliamentary papers and the London daily news to the latest English humor of the 1600s.
Part II
Adds the Burney Additional Newspapers, also held by the British Library, to this digital archive. With additional material from around 200 titles, including newspapers, newsbooks and broadsheets from this period, newly digitized from high quality images, the Additional newspapers contain new titles or further issues of already digitized titles, similar in content but with a different provenance to those in the Burney Newspaper Collection. The collection is distinct and separate to the Burney Collection and provides valuable additional material.
You can search this resource through Gale Primary Sources which allows you to simultaneously search many other historical newspapers at the same time including the 17th and 18th Century Nichols Newspapers Collection.
