Curated in partnership with the George Eliot Archive, this COVE edition of “The George Eliot Portrait Gallery: Perspectives on the Writer” features portraits of the writer Mary Ann Evans, known to the world as George Eliot. “The George Eliot Portrait Gallery” is remarkable in the number and scope of rare portraits that it presents. And as the editorial introduction discusses, the collection remains in an exciting state of flux, as a newly discovered painting of Eliot was authenticated as recently as 2017, and we anticipate a previously unpublished sketch of her being made public soon. Moreover, our project has expanded to include two galleries of illustrations from rare, antique sources, and we are already planning a second COVE edition to engage in a critical discussion about these images as well. “The George Eliot Image Gallery: Perspectives on the Writer’s Works” will feature two galleries, the “Selected Illustrations of George Eliot’s Works” and the “Original Illustrations of Romola.” Ultimately, it is our hope that making these scholarly resources available will evoke well-informed, scholarly engagement with the visual texts that can reflect and even influence how the writing—and the writer—are read.

Henry Mayhew is known for his investigations into the culture, labour, and suffering of poor London labourers and street-folk at the mid-nineteenth century. Mayhew and his collaborators produced a rich body of detailed material, but the complexity, disorganization, and sheer volume of the project make it a difficult text to work with. This selected edition foregrounds the collaborative, multimodal, and multivocal development of the collection of texts compiled under the London Labour and the London Poor name. The edition includes selections from the preceding 'Labour and the Poor' series in the Morning Chronicle, excerpts from texts by the Mayhew team which recycled material from the core text of London Labour, and a table of contents detailing the entirety of the London Labour project.