The Lives of Mistresses and Maids: Editing Victorian Correspondence with Genealogy, Prosopography, and the TEI

In this paper, we explore the material conditions of scholarship and digital editorial work that make uncovering nineteenth-century women’s lives possible in the twenty-first century. Taking our project, Digital Dinah Craik, a TEI-edition of the letters of the bestselling Victorian author, as a case study, we discuss research methods that combine digital scholarly editing with genealogy and prosopography. We argue that by combining research tools aimed at scholars, such as the Text Encoding Initiative (TEI), and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, with research tools aimed at a more general audience, such as Ancestry.com and the British Newspaper Archive, we can develop more creative and inclusive research methods and in turn, gain a fuller picture of women’s and working-class lives.