Nineteenth-Century Fiction Holdings from Circulating Libraries in Southern Hemisphere British Settler Colonies

This dataset comprises 5,012 unique fiction titles from thirty different library catalogues pertaining to twenty-three circulating libraries located in British settler colonies in the southern hemisphere, including representation from urban centres such as Melbourne, Cape Town, Auckland, and Singapore, as well as from non-metropolitan locations such as gold-field towns within colonial Australia. Across a timespan of fifty years (1820-1870), these titles are listed more than 18,000 times in the thirty catalogues. The dataset is derived from an archive of extant English-language book catalogues produced in the nineteenth-century British settler colonies: Book Catalogues of the Southern Hemisphere (BCSH). Compiled by Lara Atkin, Sarah Comyn, Porscha Fermanis, and Nathan Garvey, this archive provides bibliographic records and digital versions of over 400 library, auction, book-seller, and private catalogues. It is part of the European Research Council-funded project, SouthHem: https://www.ucd.ie/southhem/catalogue.html