Checking Some Wellesley Index Attributions by Empirical ‘Internal Evidence’: The Case of Blackie and Burton

Authors

  • Alexis Antonia University of Newcastle
  • Ellen Jordan University of Newcastle

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v1i1.775

Keywords:

attribution, Wellesley Index, Victorian, Periodicals, Burrows Method, Alexis, Antonia, Ellen, Jordan

Abstract

Since its inception, the Wellesley Index has been a great resource for scholars wanting to know the identity of the numerous anonymous contributors to the nineteenth-century periodicals. However, when all the available external evidence was exhausted Wellesley attributors began to rely on internal evidence, and some of these attributions are now being queried as unduly speculative. This is the case with the attribution of certain articles in Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine to John Stuart Blackie and John Hill Burton, two Scottish contributors in the 1830s and 40s, where the evidence is, as Eileen Curran noted in The Curran Index, often ‘tenuous.’  Developments in computational stylistics over the last thirty years now offer statistical techniques for testing such doubtful attributions. Use of the Burrows Method, based on an author’s relative usage or non-usage of common function words, allows the researcher to isolate an author’s distinctive stylistic traits and to use these to compare his known articles with others of more doubtful provenance and to make informed judgments about the likelihood of his authorship of these. These methods were used to test the authorship of eight articles attributed to Blackie and eight attributed to Burton. The use of function words in the doubtful articles was compared to that in six articles reliably attributed to Blackie and ten reliably attributed to Burton and then to that by contemporaries also writing for other major periodicals. It was found that only four of the Blackie articles tested and two of those by Burton appear to have been correctly attributed in the Wellesley Index.

Author Biographies

Alexis Antonia, University of Newcastle

Alexis Antonia' s academic background encompassed an interest both in Early English Literature and Linguistics. She has been associated with the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing at the University of Newcastle since its inception in 1989, assisting both its Directors -- John Burrows (until his retirement) and Hugh Craig. In this capacity she has been able to participate in a plethora of projects which have sought to use the methods of computational stylistics over the years. Having been introduced to the field of the Victorian periodicals by Ellen Jordan, Alexis undertook a doctoral dissertation which enabled her to use computational stylistics, and in particular the methods pioneered by John Burrows, to explore various aspects of the genre, including questions of authorship. 

Ellen Jordan, University of Newcastle

Ellen Jordan is a conjoint senior lecturer at the University of Newcastle, Australia. Since 1987 her main area of research has been women's work in nineteenth century Britain on which she has published two books and more than 20 articles. Since 2003 she has focused on the professional careers of women authors, in particular Anne Mozley and Charlotte M. Yonge. The interest in Yonge has involved a collaborative project of searching out, transcribing and annotating her surviving letters, which are now available on an internet website. The work on Mozley, much of whose journalism was published anonymously, led to collaboration with members of the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing at the University of Newcastle in attempts to identify her authorship of certain articles published in the periodical press.  This in turn led to collaboration with Alexis Antonia, a long time member of the Centre, on investigation of the authorship of other significant articles published in major Victorian Journals.

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Published

2011-11-25

How to Cite

Antonia, A., & Jordan, E. (2011). Checking Some Wellesley Index Attributions by Empirical ‘Internal Evidence’: The Case of Blackie and Burton. uthorship, 1(1). https://doi.org/10.21825/aj.v1i1.775

Issue

Vol. 1 No. 1 (2011)

Section

Articles

License

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