User Guide
The core of this bibliography is records for over 23000 books of poetry, written in or translated into English and first published in the years 1770-1835. Users should consult the Introduction for more about the project and for detailed information about the categories included in each bibliographic record. What follows is a guide to retrieving the records.
Searching begins from the homepage. The search function allows for searching by author, title, publisher, city of publication, date of publication, and holding library of the specific copy identified by the bibliographic record. With the 2020 relaunch, it is possible to refine searches by the region where a book was published (Canada, England, Ireland, USA, Wales, and the rest of the world) and by the author’s sex where known. In the case of anonymous or pseudonymous works, searches can also distinguish between attributed and unattributed authorship.
Searches are not case sensitive.
KEYWORDS:
This will yield results where the word(s) appears anywhere in the bibliographic records.
Keyword searches can be narrowed using the buttons below the search box. For example, searching for “Princess Charlotte” and clicking the “all words” button will give a list where both words appear but not necessarily together in the record; “any words” will include items where one or both words appear in the record; “phrase” will give a list of items where the words appear together. Note: searching on keywords will pick up instances of words within words (for example, “fancy” will include results with the word “infancy”).
Use the keyword box to search for an author by his or her pseudonym.
If you are searching for the author of prose in a book that includes poetry by a different author, use a keyword search. Authors of prose in books are not tagged as authors--see below under Authors. An example is Studies of Chess where the prose is by A. D. Philidor and the verse by Sir William Jones. Philidor can be found through a keyword search but only Jones is tagged and can be searched as an author; Philidor will not be found through an author search.
Do not use quotation marks in keyword searches.
AUTHOR:
Normally an author search is by surname. Other names can be included in the order first name/ surname or surname [comma]/first name. Searches can also include initials. The website links all items by a particular author to all possible iterations of the author’s name: for example, searching for “R. P. Gillies” will yield items where the author’s name is so given on the title page but also items where the name is given as “Robert Pearse Gillies.” Punctuation is not required, including for searches using Mr/ Mrs/ Miss.
Refine Author searches by using one or more other search fields. For example, to know what works by Thomas Moore were published in the USA, enter “Thomas Moore” in the author field, and “USA” in the drop-down menu under “Search by one or more countries.”
Note that only authors of poetry are tagged as authors and therefore searchable through the Author box or Author tab. A writer who contributed only prose to a book containing poetry can be found using a keyword search.
Biographical headnotes can be found through the "Authors" tab or through a link in the individual book records.
The names of translators who also produced original verse included in the database will appear in this field with the name of the original author.
AUTHOR SEX:
Use these boxes to refine the author search or, for example, to identify how many women authors were published in a particular region or city. As far as possible, authorial sex has been identified. The exceptions are works where the author’s forenames are known only by initials and no additional evidence (for example, information in a preface) has made possible a confident identification of the author’s sex.
UNATTRIBUTED AUTHORSHIP:
This includes anonymous and pseudonymous works where no author attribution is currently possible. Refine searches by using one or more of the other search boxes. For example, a search with “1800” under “Publication Year,” and “Edinburgh” under “City of Publication” would generate a list of unattributed anonymous and pseudonymous works published in Edinburgh in 1800. (The list would not include works originally published anonymously or pseudonymously but where the authors’ names are now known.)
EDITOR/TRANSLATOR:
Search this field by entering names in normal order: William Stewart Rose, not Rose, William Stewart. To ensure that searches produce all of the desired results enter surnames only: Rose.
TITLE:
Leading words (the, an, a) can be omitted but not connecting words (flowers of fancy NOT flowers fancy).
PUBLICATION YEAR:
Search for a single year within the span of the bibliography (1775-1835), or for a range of years. Separate the range with “-”: for example, 1775-1800.
PUBLISHER:
Publishers are identified in the bibliographic records by their imprint on title pages. Because the imprints used by publishers vary, searches will be more complete if surnames only are used--“Murray” rather than “John Murray”--although they may also turn up items referring to a different publisher (James Murray). Items published “for the author” can also be searched.
CITY OF PUBLICATION:
Search here for place of publication, as given on title pages.
COUNTRIES:
Use the dropdown menu. Items are categorised under the place of publication, not the author’s nationality.
LIBRARIES:
The bibliographic record for each item in the database was created from a unique copy in a library; the holding libraries can be searched here using the dropdown menu. Users should consult WorldCat to identify other copies where these exist.
SUGGESTIONS FOR SEARCHING;
The search function of the Jackson Bibliography is designed to be multiply flexible. We hope that users will find it easy to locate entries for the books and authors in which they are particularly interested. But we also encourage experimentation with the search options to learn more about the now little-known or unknown authors and books that were published and read alongside those now deemed canonical. For example, a search for books published in London in 1798 generates a list of 139 titles—books that would have jostled with Lyrical Ballads for the attention of readers and reviewers. A search with “Lyrical Ballads” in the Title field gives some surprising results: the title is not used before 1798 but after that year there are several instances and versions of that title. Walter Scott's Ballads and Lyrical Pieces first appeared in 1806 and was reissued numerous times. Stephen George Kemble published Odes, Lyrical Ballads, and Poems on Various Occasions in 1809. Thomas Haynes Bayley's Fifty Lyrical Ballads appeared as late as 1829. And in Boston an anthology called The Minstrel: A Collection of Ballads and Other Lyrical Pieces was published in 1810. Entering words for other verse forms—sonnets, odes, elegies, etc.—in the Title or Keyword search boxes can also yield intriguing results.
Searching can also be used for statistical analysis of the growth during the period of regional and international publishing or of increasing participation in the literary marketplace of women authors. For example, in the years 1770-79 just 80 books of verse are known to have been published in America (given as USA in the drop-down list of countries). By 1820-29 this had grown to 1402 titles. We can also see that in 1770-79 women authors published just 87 books of verse, compared to 1106 by men; this is 7.29% of the total. But by 1820-29 this had increased to 658 or 16.26% of the 4045 titles published in those ten years. (A caveat: while these figures indicate a trend they are not exact because of because of the number of works that appeared in multiple editions and books published anonymously or where the author's sex is unknown.)