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This four-volume collection contextualises primary sources related to nineteenth-century communications, including periodical articles, institutional and administrative records, material artefacts, and manuscript material such as correspondence, minutes, and memoirs. This resource contributes to knowledge in its own right as well as stimulates and facilitates future investigations, by students, academics, and other researchers, into the topic of the history of communications. The collections contributes to improving understandings of how nineteenth-century, especially Victorian, communication media, infrastructure, and technology have shaped the globalised, networked world in which we live today.

The collection draws on materials held in archives across Britain as well as internationally. Following a broad chronology within each volume, the collection gathers sources dating from the period between 1780 and 1918. It takes for its starting point John Palmer's proposal for a new mail coach design and ends with the demise of universal penny postage in 1918. The majority of sources, however, date from the years between the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 and the beginning of the First World War in 1914.