Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus, 1854-1906

The 3.5-million-word Victorian Anti-Vaccination Discourse Corpus (hereon VicVaDis) is intended to provide a (freely accessible) historical resource for the investigation of the earliest public concerns and arguments against vaccination in England, which revolved around compulsory vaccination against smallpox in the second half of the 19th century. It consists of 133 anti-vaccination pamphlets and publications gathered from 1854 to 1906, a span of 53 years that loosely coincides with the Victorian era (1837-1901). This timeframe was chosen to capture the period between the 1853 Vaccination Act, which made smallpox vaccination for babies compulsory, and the 1907 Act which effectively ended the mandatory nature of vaccination.