


Wordsworth, 'Daffodils'

Jane Austen letter

Guide to fashion and etiquette

Alphabet books

Soldier's letter: Battle of Waterloo

Jane Austen, Persuasion

P B Shelley, 'Ozymandias'

Sir Walter Scott, Rob Roy

Mary Shelley, Frankenstein

Coleridge's notes on Shakespeare

Keats, 'Ode to a Nightingale'

Lord Byron, Don Juan

Confessions of an English Opium-Eater

Grammar for children

Yorkshire dialect

Punctuation for children

Anti-slavery poem

Diary description of London

Execution of a 12 year old boy

Modern Flash Dictionary

Dickens, Oliver Twist

London dialect in Dickens

Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby

Browning, Dramatic Lyrics

Dickens, A Christmas Carol

Lear's Book of Nonsense

Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre

Emily Bronte, Wuthering Heights

The Communist Manifesto

'How do I love thee?'

Poverty and the workhouse

Poor Letter H

'The Charge of the Light Brigade'

Get your ‘air cut!

Cookery for the poor

Mary Seacole's autobiography

Mary Seacole newspaper article

Nursery rhymes

Florence Nightingale letter

Coal mining

The Woman in White

Mrs Beeton

Mrs Beeton's Christmas

Melodrama: East Lynne

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

The Queen's English

Letter from Charles Darwin

Text message poetry

George Eliot, Middlemarch

Music Hall

Victorian fashion

Freakshow posters

Street sellers

Invention of the telephone

Illusionists and conjurers

Oxford English Dictionary

Afrikaans novel

Mark Twain, Huckleberry Finn

Anglo-Indian dictionary

Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Circus poster

Jack the Ripper murders

Match Girls Strike

Babu English

Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles

Wilde, The Importance of Being Earnest

H G Wells, The Time Machine

English 'down under'
Rob Roy is one of Sir Walter Scott’s most famous novels. Its title character is based on a real person: the folk hero Rob Roy McGregor, sometimes referred to as the Scottish ‘Robin Hood’, an outlaw and a rebel whose story embodied for Scott an ideal of courage, independence and romance. The novel recounts the adventures of its narrator, a young Englishman called Frank Osbaldistone, who encounters Rob Roy after being sent to the Highlands to collect a debt that is owed to his father. The action takes place against the backdrop of the Jacobite Rebellion of 1715, and is set in various locations including Northumberland, Glasgow and the beautiful countryside around Loch Lomond. It is notable for being told partly in Scots dialect, and for its depiction of the living conditions endured by many Scots in the early 18th century.
Robert Louis Stevenson considered it the best of Scott’s novels, and said that he would never forget ‘the pleasure and surprise’ he felt on first reading it as a child.