Did Dickens write "Temperate Temperance"?: (An Attempt to Identify Authorship of an Anonymous Article in All the Year Round)

This article is the result of a collaborative exercise carried out by the Dickens Journals Online (DJO) project and the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing (CLLC) at the University of Newcastle, Australia.¹ It presents the findings of an attempt to establish authorship of a short article published anonymously on 18 April 1863 in the weekly magazine All the Year Round under Charles Dickens's editorship, using computational stylistics in tandem with internal clues (in themselves far from conclusive) as to author. The reporting of the results forms part of a series of new attributions to be presented by DJO following its public launch in 2012, but merits, we hope, more elaborate discussion because the findings challenge an existing form of attribution, as well as offering a further demonstration of how the so-called "Burrows method" of establishing authorship can be configured for work with Victorian periodicals.

To deal with the existing form of attribution first: a clear distinction can be made between the way in which articles in Household Words under Dickens's editorship (1850-59) are attributed, and the operation of this process with All the Year Round (1859-70; hereafter AYR). With the former, modern readers have to look no further than the definitive table of contents and contributor list published by Anne Lohrli in 1973, which derives its authority from the original Household Words "Office Book" of the journal, held in the Morris L. Parrish Collection of Victorian Novelists, at the University of Princeton Library.² The Office Book was scrupulously compiled by the journal's sub-editor, W. H. Wills, and recorded, in addition to each article's title, its author(s), date/place of insertion, the price paid, date of payment, and any additional memoranda Wills deemed necessary. No equivalent ledger for AYR has survived, though it is presumed one existed. Thus, while there is a Descriptive Index and Contributor List to AYR, compiled by E. A. Oppenlander and published in 1984, it is not a transcript of a complete record, but rather an incomplete compilation of attributions based principally on external evidence, such as the subsequent republication of individual items under an author's name.³ Authorship of something over two thirds of AYR articles is still unidentified in this Index. Thus, if an article is among the unascribed items in Oppenlander, the way is usually left clear for a positive attribution based on internal and/ or external evidence. However, where the suggested author is Dickens himself, there is a significant obstacle, in the guise of a rather unusual form of negative (or non-)attribution, for which an early Dickensian scholar called Frederic G. Kitton is responsible.⁴

Sometime before March 1900, as he reports in The Minor Writing of Charles Dickens, Kitton was given access to something he calls "an 'office' set" of AYR, which is described on two occasions in his book, as follows:

[B]y great good fortune, I discovered in the possession of Mr. W. H. Howe an "office set" of [the] journal, in which had been inscribed against each article, etc., the name of the author thereof—satisfactory and conclusive proof as to its origin.

I have fortunately been able to examine a complete "office" set of All the Year Round, in which each article has appended the name of the author, written by a member of the printing staff, so that any doubt that may have risen in respect of authorship has thus been satisfactorily disposed of.⁵

However satisfactory this all may have seemed to Kitton at the time, it is certainly frustrating now that he should have omitted to record and publish anything other than a listing of those 126 items (including instalments of serial fiction) against which we are to presume he found Dickens's name.⁶ The identity of W. H. Howe is uncertain,⁷ the whereabouts of this "office set" is unknown,⁸ and an ideal opportunity to create a comprehensive author index for AYR has been lost.

Given that "Temperate Temperance...