To be continued . . .

As was the case in Britain, America and elsewhere, 19th-century Australian newspapers contained a great deal of fiction. Indeed, due to their cheap price and availability – combined with the low levels of book ownership and of access to lending libraries in Australia at this time – newspapers were the major source of fiction for early Australian readers. Despite the importance of these publications, the size of the newspaper archive has meant that we know very little about this fiction, including what titles, authors, genres and themes were published, and their production, circulation and reception.

The National Library of Australia’s Trove database changes this situation profoundly. In offering the largest mass-digitised collection of historical newspapers in the world, Trove makes it possible to search for fiction in Australian newspapers for the first time in a reliable and systematic ways. This project employed digital humanities methods (including data- and text-mining, topic modelling and network analysis) as well as established bibliographical, book historical and literary critical approaches to identify and analyse fiction over 9,000 novels, novellas and short stories in 19th- and early 20th-century Australian newspapers.