English & Creative Writing

Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO) is a vast eighteenth-century library at your desktop—a fully text-searchable corpus of books, pamphlets and broadsides in all subjects printed between 1701 and 1800. It currently contains over 180,000 titles amounting to over 32 million fully-searchable pages.*

ECCO is a digitization of the eighteenth-century section of the works catalogued in the English Short-title Catalogue (ESTC). The ESTC project has been recording all works published or printed in Britain, Ireland, territories under British colonial rule, and the United States. It also catalogues material printed elsewhere which contains significant text in English, Welsh, Irish or Gaelic, as well as any book falsely claiming to have been printed in Britain or its territories.

In terms of languages, the vast majority are in English with several thousand in French or Latin, smaller numbers in Ancient Greek, German, Italian, Scots Gaelic, Spanish and Welsh, and a few in other languages.

In this library you will find all eighteenth-century knowledge and discover eighteenth-century lives, as well as what they did, thought, said, hoped for, believed, and the events they lived through. There are government documents and writings by people of all professions and classes with the lower classes often found in legal documents or six-penny broadsheets such as Elizabeth Canning, a maidservant, who became one of the most famous English criminal mysteries of the eighteenth century.

The works themselves vary from multi-volume encyclopaedia—so you can find out what was thought of as "knowledge" in the eighteenth century—to dictionaries, law books, histories, poetry, novels, and plays, biographies, works of science, philosophy, theology, religious books, tracts and sermons, royal, government or local proclamations, letters, journals and diaries, almanacks, acts of parliament, works on art, architecture, and auction catalogues, music, petitions, schoolbooks, to name a few.