Concert Life in Nineteenth-Century London Database Project: Phase II (Leeds) - the 1830s

The aim of this project is to study large-scale change in the nature of concert life and in the development of repertoire in London during the 'long 19th century', drawing on contemporary newspapers, periodicals, and concert programmes. The database, which was programmed in ORACLE and designed by Civic Computing, Edinburgh, is housed at the School of Arts and Humanities, Oxford Brookes University, and supported by its Computer Services Department. Our methodology is based on a technique called ‘slice history’, which was developed by a group of Australian social historians and involves the deepest possible investigation of one-year slices of history, a generation apart. For this project our ‘slice’ years are 1815, 1835, 1855, 1875, and 1895, which were deliberately chosen to ‘stand for’ their respective decades. Different issues emerged in our selection and treatment of the sources for each of these years, however, principally because of the explosion in print culture. So while at the beginning of the century it was possible to index the principal surviving newspapers, by the end of the period, we had to be far more selective and abandon ideas of comprehensive coverage.