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1807Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'
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1811Jane Austen letter
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1811Guide to fashion and etiquette
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1815Alphabet books
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1815Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo
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1816Jane Austen, Persuasion
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1817P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'
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1817Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy
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1818Mary Shelley, Frankenstein
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1818Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare
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1819Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'
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1819Lord Byron, Don Juan
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1821Confessions of an English Opium-Eater
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1824Grammar for children
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1825Yorkshire dialect
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1825Punctuation for children
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1826Anti-slavery poem
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1827Diary description of London
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1829Execution of a 12 year old boy
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1835Modern Flash Dictionary
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1837Dickens, Oliver Twist
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1837London dialect in Dickens
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1838Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby
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1842Browning, Dramatic Lyrics
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1843Dickens, A Christmas Carol
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1846Lear's Book of Nonsense
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1847Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre
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1847Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights
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1848The Communist Manifesto
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1850'How do I love thee?'
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1852Poverty and the workhouse
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1854Poor Letter H
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1854'The Charge of the Light Brigade'
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1855Get your ‘air cut!
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1855Cookery for the poor
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1857Mary Seacole's autobiography
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1857Mary Seacole newspaper article
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1858Nursery rhymes
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1860Florence Nightingale letter
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1860Coal mining
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1860The Woman in White
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1861Mrs Beeton
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1861Mrs Beeton's Christmas
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1861Melodrama: East Lynne
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1862Alice's Adventures in Wonderland
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1864The Queen's English
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1866Letter from Charles Darwin
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1867Text message poetry
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1871George Eliot, Middlemarch
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1872Music Hall
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1875Victorian fashion
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1875Freakshow posters
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1876Street sellers
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1878Invention of the telephone
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1878Illusionists and conjurers
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1879Oxford English Dictionary
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1883Afrikaans novel
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1885Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn
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1886Anglo-Indian dictionary
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1886Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
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1887Circus poster
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1888Jack the Ripper murders
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1888Match Girls Strike
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1891Babu English
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1891Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles
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1894Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest
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1895H G Wells, The Time Machine
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1898English 'down under'
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Intro
Conditions were appalling for the 1,400 women and girls who worked at Bryant and May's match factory in Bow, east London. Low pay for a 14-hour day was cut even more if you talked or went to the toilet, and 'phossy jaw' - a horrible bone cancer caused by the cheap type of phosphorus in the matches - was common.
An article by women's rights campaigner Annie Besant in the weekly paper, The Link, described the terrible conditions of the factory. The management was furious, but the workers refused to deny the truth of the report. When one of the workers was then fired, an immediate full-scale strike among the match girls was sparked. Public sympathy and support was enormous, surprising the management: it was an early example of what we now call a PR disaster. A few weeks later, they caved in and improved pay and conditions. A dozen years later they stopped using the lethal form of phosphorus. This article from Reynolds's Newspaper on 8 July 1888 reports on the start of the strike.
Shelfmark: British Library Newspaper Archive.
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