19th century language sources

Exactly what are you looking for? Do you want sources for broken English by people of various backgrounds?

I spend a lot of time on etymonline.com checking idioms and things when I'm writing my regency books. It's very good for single words, less useful for phrases, but it's saved my butt a number of times when words I would swear are period for 1811 turn out to have first shown up in 1820 or so. /gnashing of teeth

Other than that I'd say hit archive.org and read books published in the era in which your book is set. That will give you more of a feel for the language than a reference text ever could. You need to be able to hear whether it sounds right or too modern, without having to look everything up.

Dickens
Austen
George Eliot
Trollope
the Brontës
Thackeray
Wilkie Collins
LeFanu
Gissing
Conan Doyle

caw

InAPeriodPiece said:

ANY sources are good for me. IF it helps my characters backgrounds are:

Wealthy English man
Edison and Westinghouse (That'll give you an idea of their position in society, and upbringing)

But I'm basically looking for ANY sources so I don't have to, in rewrites, literally spend the whole time rewriting the dialogue because it's too modern. Spending the time reading, researching and writing the dialogue at least slightly correctly now would save me a lot of time in the future.

I'm just not sure where to start the research.

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TessB, has some excellent advice.

You can't go wrong with archive.org.

Other writers do not seem to appreciate the wealth of information available on it. Books once locked away in university and college libraries on specialty subjects are now available for free downloads.

Books from all college libraries in the United States, Harvard, Princeton, Rutgers, Yale, UCLA, etc., etc.

Just to illustrate, I just took a look and here's just one book of a selection of thousands:

Folklore Of West And Mid-Wales, which is full of cultural information from the 1800's.

Like:
Chapter 1 Love Customs
Chapter 2 Marriage Customs
Chapter 3 Funeral Customs
Wherein, you learn about Customs like "Bundling".

There are lots of books of 1800's vernacular up for grabs and lots of localized information like specific Parish Registers.

There are thousands of books on archive.org full of regional speech.

Look into the many non-fiction volumes for true stories, letters to the editor. Newspaper articles, court transcripts, regional digests, religious sermons, essays on an endless variety of subjects and political debates.

Archive.org is a one-stop shop for everything historical.

Castles, wooden tenements, feudal arrangements and everything architectural.
Furniture and transportation, every aspect of daily life and recreation.
War and weapons, culture, high and low.
Commerce, medicine and veterinary medicine.
Rural and urban life and life at sea.
Occupations and service industries, hunting, trapping and cook books all for free download.
Hawking, keeping a kennel, fox hunting and its culture, which means manners, vocabulary and dress.
Sciences as they understood them back then, printing, binding and language.
The histories of inks, paints and dyes, farm life and animal husbandry.
Textiles, trades, and merchant guilds, deserts, lakes and jungles.
Insects, serpents, lizards and spiders, forestry, poaching, smuggling and gardening.
Predators, prey and botanical nomenclature.
Minute details of the Spanish Inquisition, insider information of the clergy and the private diaries of monks.

Etc., etc...

Any writer who wrote in the vernacular would work: Mark Twain, Ambrose Bierce, Charles Dickens, etc.

Alessandra Kelley said:

Your best bet may be immersion into books of the time and trying to emulate them.

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For sure. Primary sources are the way to go. Though in this case I'd recommend plays over novels, because they're all dialogue. No purple Victorian prose to sift through.
Wikipedia has a list of some popular plays of the 1890's. I'm sure you could track down the full scripts online https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:1890s_plays

Some American fiction writers active in the 1890s include:
Stephen Crane
Kate Chopin
Henry James
Edward Everett Hale
Mark Twain
Frank Norris

Extend the range a couple of years and you also get Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Upton Sinclair and Edith Wharton.

The 1890s also saw the birth of pulp magazines as a medium for popular short fiction (the functional equivalent of television). Argosy was one of the first.
Snafu1056's notion of plays is a good one. Theater was very popular and diverse. Go find some scripts!