Research help, please!

I googled "travel during the Victorian era" and got quite a few pertinent results. Does that help?

Try...

looking up Fishguard and Hollyhead (Welsh towns) under Victorian shipping companies - the trains ran there and you then walked off the train and onto the ferry and crossed to Ireland.

Go the the National Railway Museum website and ask there too.
http://www.nrm.org.uk

This is a site I used to use for London resources, don't know if it's of any use;
http://www.victorianlondon.org/
I see what you mean about the google thing though. I did find this site by chance, not sure how reliable it is but it might have something useful for you;
http://www.nytimes.com/books/first/b/brown-yeats.html
I'd've thought Southampton or possibly Bristol might have had ships heading towards Ireland as well, but nothing to back that up at present. All my Victorian books are tidied away.

Oops, just to add, try searching 'nineteenth century travel london to dublin' or 'nineteenth century railways' or thereabouts instead of Victorian, and you might cut out the Australian stuff.

Also try Google Books, search string "London to Dublin" date: 1840-1850.

http://books.google.com/books?as_q=...&as_drrb=c&as_miny=1840&as_maxy=1850&as_isbn=

Fifty-nine hits. While some are about sending letters, it looks like others are discussing the best way to do it, their own experiences on the journey, the time it takes, etc., all primary sources.

Train from London to Liverpool or Plymouth, ferry to Dublin.

There was no train to Holyhead until the mid-1840s, although ferries did run regularly from Holyhead to Kingstown (present-day Dun Laoghaire), and a train line from Kingstown to Dublin was completed in 1834.

But it wouldn't make sense to go by stage to Holyhead and then by ferry to Kingstown and then by train to Dublin.

On edit: I misread your original question as 1835. Still, construction didn't begin on the Holyhead rail line until autumn 1845, according to this site.

So you're safer with Liverpool.

choppersmom said:

Wow, thanks guys! These are all terrific responses. I'll be Googling for all I'm worth for a while!

Click to expand...

Change trains at Birmingham Curzon Street station

Please excuse me as...

I'm a total technophobe but what is a Google book search exactly? I followed your link, Pup, and was impressed, but how do I access it and use it?

Er, words of one syllable and please explain everything as to someone who doesn't even know how to turn the computer on!

pdr said:

I'm a total technophobe but what is a Google book search exactly? I followed your link, Pup, and was impressed, but how do I access it and use it?

Click to expand...

Start here:

http://books.google.com/advanced_print_search?ie=UTF-8

That's the advance search engine page. The database focuses heavily on U.S. and English books from about 1800 to the present, with a few foreign language books.

The blue "find results" section at the top is where you type in the words you're looking for. In this case, I would have put London to Dublin in the box labeled "with the exact phrase" but of course there are lots of possibilities to explore this particular topic. The box labelled "with all of the words" searches for books that have the words near each other.

If you're looking for primary sources, the next most useful box is "Return books published between the years of," and you type in the relevant years. Then click on "Google search" or hit the enter key and it'll give you the results page I linked to, and you can click on the individual results to see the actual books. You can also then search within the individual books.

It's great for practical facts like laws, routes, locations, etc. but also for social history. For example, for my current research, I can put "poor" in the first box, "Five Points" in the exact phrase box, "1865-1870" in the date boxes, and come up with dozens of contemporary people talking about, complaining about, visiting, trying to help, and describing the social class at the time and place of my WIP.

I almost always use it for primary sources, but if you can't find something in a primary source, leaving the date boxes blank will include modern books in the search as well. Some of them are restricted access and require registration with google, and only a few pages will be visible.

Edited to add: Not all of the primary source texts are viewable either, but most are. Also, publication dates are occasionaly wrong, so if it's important, I tend not to trust that the book was actually published on that date unless I actually click on the title page to double-check.

Ah ha!

Wonderful explanation. I can follow that!
I prefer libraries but this will be useful in Japan.

pdr said:

Wonderful explanation. I can follow that!
I prefer libraries but this will be useful in Japan.

Click to expand...

Another advantage to the Google Books pages is that works out of copyright can quite often be downloaded as pdf files, so you can take them with you wherever you are, without the need for an internet connection. That's been particularly helpful to me for the times I spend in hotels abroad where I refuse to pay £5 an hour for internet access.