The Bronte Sisters and the Christian Remembrancer : A Pilot Study in the Use of the "Burrows Method" to Identify the Authorship of Unsigned Articles in the Nineteenth-Century Periodical Press
Ellen Jordan, Hugh Craig, Alexis Antonia · Victorian periodicals review · 2006
The nineteenth-century literary scene in Britain, as readers of the Victorian Periodicals Review are well aware, was notable for the number of serious quarterly and monthly periodicals dealing with political, literary, historical, and scientific subjects of the kind that now have their own specialised academic journals.It was, however, the custom for these articles to be unsigned, and this has meant that what the editors of the Wellesley Index to Victorian Periodicals have called the "most basic questions" of the "careful scholar" -"Did So and So write on such and such a topic, and if he did, when and where was it first published?'-have often proved difficult to answer. 1 For more than sixty years 2 both literary scholars and historians have been trying to provide answers to these questions, and a large number of indexes have been published, including the multi-volume Wellesley Index itself, where the authors of unsigned contributions to 43 nineteenth-century periodicals have been identified.3 Thus a very substantial database now exists for identifying both the literary journalism of interesting figures and commentary by the less well-remembered on major literary, social, and political issues.The task is, moreover, still ongoing, as the Curran Index and Rosemary T. VanArsdel's Victorian Periodicals: Aids to Research: A Selected Bibliography demonstrate.4 Most of this research has, however, involved the use of what Harold Love calls "external evidence': scholars have concentrated on combing surviving publisher's records, memoirs, and letters from the period for information on contrib-Editor's Note: This experiment in using the Burrows method for tentative authorship identification of journalistic prose opens a suggestive area of research.