Inspired by this fascinating study of vocabulary in rap lyrics, by Matt Daniels at Polygraph, my colleague Derek Greene decided to take a similar dive into our own data. Which of our 46 novels includes the widest selection of unique words? I’ll let Derek explain this chart in his own words: I looked at the…
Tag: novels
Insult of the Week: Fops
From one gendered insult to another: this week we’re looking at literary fops, or gentlemen that are – in some way or another – a bit too concerned with manners of dress, elegance and fashion. Our featured image (by the wonderful C. E. Brock) comes from John Galt’s 1821 novel The Annals of the Parish…
The Art of Beauty: To rouge or not to rouge
Throughout our corpus of nineteenth-century novels, there are numerous references to the transformative power of cosmetics. As well as striving to survive the noxious levels of lead and arsenic in your potions and pastes, you are also tasked with achieving socially acceptable levels of rouging. According to Madam Lola Montez’s 1858 book The Art of Beauty or…
How One Author’s Bankruptcy Changed the History of the English Novel Forever
In the teens of the 19th century, Walter Scott was enjoying a wave of financial success as a novel-writer that was perhaps unprecedented in the history of literature. His series of historical novels, published under the pseudonym “The Author of Waverley”, were selling in huge numbers, and his fans were legion, including – among others…
Works in Progress: our collection
This year’s IASIL conference was fascinating and thought-provoking, as well as being a whole lot of fun, and I think we’re all still processing the excellent feedback we received! Many things to think about! One specific request we received was for there to be a list of the works that we’ve analysed so far. Which…
5 Mega-Bestsellers from the 19th Century (That You’ve Probably Never Heard Of)
Pssst: If you’re here because you’re interested in nineteenth-century bestsellers, you may like our more recent post series on the subject! I started putting together the figures for this post more than two years ago, when we were in the early stages of compiling our list of works that we wanted to look at on…
Insult of the Week: inferior poets are absolutely fascinating
Ah, poetry. One of the great literary forms, with a history stretching back as far as the earliest written word! Beloved genre of such giants as Sappho, Homer, Chaucer, and the anonymous author of The Poetic Works of a Weird (1827). Being writers themselves, surely our novelists must have a healthy respect for the poetical…
A Net of Influence: interreference between 18th and 19th-century novels
As a taster of the content that’s going up on our shiny new website, here’s an image that I put together earlier: This, as you can probably tell, is a draft version, but what it shows is a map of interreference between novels and novelists in our corpus. Writers, unsurprisingly, are generally people who enjoy…
Image of the Week: A beautiful fiend
This week’s image is inspired by an early scene in M.E Braddon’s huge sensational hit Lady Audley’s Secret 1862. While the duplicitous Lady Audley is out and about, George Talboys and Robert Audley enter her private boudoir to look at the impressive collection of paintings stored there. The lads take a look around the “glittering toilette”…
A little light political commentary
“How very suddenly you all quitted the European Union in June! It must have been a most agreeable surprise to Mr. Farage to see you all join him so unexpectedly; for, if I recollect right, he has been at odds with the EU for many a year. He and Mr. Johnson, and his fellows…
Insult of the Week: A “stiff-necked, arrogant imbecile, pig-headed numskull”
This week’s insult is brought to you by Charles Dickens’ Bleak House. During an ongoing feud between Mr Lawrence Boythorn and Sir Leicester Dedlock over “the green pathway by the old parsonage-house” (that neither man actually seems to want), Boythorn explains their exchanges on the subject “The fellow, by his agent, or secretary, or somebody,…
Dowries and Dowagers; or, Conjectures on Why Lady Catherine de Bourgh is So Rude
It’s one of Pride and Prejudice‘s pivotal and iconic scenes. Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who’s incensed at “an alarming report” about her nephew’s likelihood of marrying “a young woman without family, connections, or fortune”, travels to Longbourn to confront Elizabeth, confident of being able to persuade or bully her into dropping any matrimonial ambitions in…
The Sea of Books 