British Library Photostream: Sketches of England

Recently the British Library released over a million images to the public domain. They were taken from 17th, 18th and 19th century books that Microsoft digitized and released via Flickr Commons. These images should be free of copyright restrictions although it doesn't hurt to consult a lawyer if there are any concerns.

When I was looking through the collection, one book caught my notice pretty quickly, Sketches of England. By a Foreign Artist, Mons. Myrbach ... and a Foreign Author, Mons P. Villars, etc. Published in 1891, the book features a number of sketches from England, including a fair number of crowd scenes. What caught my eye was the number of women in them. For example:

From what I can tell from just the images (I haven't had time to read the book yet), women make up a decent percentage of the crowd scenes and a number of the smaller group pictures. While I realize this is just one book, I still found it interesting in comparison to a recent report that among the 101 top grossing G-rated movies from 1990 to January 31st, 2005, just 17% of the crowds were female. That would be approximately 1 in 6. While I haven't sat down and counted every person represented in these sketches, it seems like women constitute a much higher proportion of the crowd than that. In my quick count of the first 19 images with people in them, I counted approximately 60 people who appeared to be male and 47 that appeared to be female.

For more info on the research on the numbers of female characters in media aimed at children, check out this video by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media.

I think these images could be useful in a number of gaming encounters set in the 1890s, especially in England. They also can serve as inspiration for people seeking to draw more gender inclusive crowd scenes.