The Bengal Annual: A Digital Exploration of Non-Canonical British Romantic Literature

Full Text of The Bengal Annual for 1830

You can read through the 49 literary texts yourself thanks to the efforts of Google Books, Hathi Trust, and Internet Archive. Because The Bengal Annual is very rare (only 20 rare book and archives have a copy with the closest at Claremont College and Pepperdine University according to WorldCat) we relied on this digital surrogate prepared by Google Books. 

Below is the Internet Archive's representation of The Bengal Annual, scanned from the New York Public Library's edition during the Google Books project. As with some scans in Google Books, some pages are merged or missing. For this project, when the digital surrogate had errors, we resorted to using Dr. Harris' edition of this rare volume, one of the very few available today.

For a closer look at particular elements, peruse our scan of the table of contents for a view of the mix of popular London authors, colonial British authors, and Indian authors. You might be interested in the wide variety of literary genres, gender and nationality of authors, or literary topics. Take a look at the 7 engravings that accompanied this volume; they were not the usual quality for London-based literary annuals. If you're unfamiliar with the nineteenth-century literary annual genre, take a look at our definition of "literary annual." Particularly prominent editors usually assembled the annual each year, but who was David Lester Richardson? 



 

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