MATTHEW STEPHENS

I’m a PhD student at Edge Hill University and the British Library, working under:

Dr Bob Nicholson, Reader in Public History and Digital Humanities, Edge Hill University

Dr Andrew McInnes, Reader in Romanticisms, Edge Hill University

Dr Beth Gaskell, Lead Curator, News and Moving Image, British Library

Dr Mia Ridge, Digital Curator, Western Heritage Collections, British Library

You can find me on X, LinkedIn (links below)and Bluesky Social, where I’m also known as Nineteenth-century Newshound.

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I’m always happy to hear from anyone with an interest in my research, so do please put quill to parchment.

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FROM THE BLOG

Latest News

  • A Prickly character!

    It’s not unusual to see facsimile newspapers as props in period dramas, both on television and in film. Quite often, these don’t make any serious attempt to emulate the form taken by papers of the relevant era. This…

    Read more: A Prickly character!

  • Local Hero

    The Liverpool Heroes Memorial, Abercromby Square, Liverpool. Image by Bill Sergeant. * One hundred and sixty-nine years ago today, 29th January, Queen Victoria introduced a new military medal to honour acts of conspicuous valour in the Crimean war.…

    Read more: Local Hero

  • A wake-up call for the English Language

    https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?search=bugle&title=Special:MediaSearch&go=Go&type=image I was doing some work recently on a Victorian newspaper with an undeniably laudable social purpose. It was called the Fonetic Nuz (Phonetic News) and appeared in January 1849. It was the brainchild of one Alexander Ellis…

    Read more: A wake-up call for the English Language