Keeping Count: Direct Speech in the Nineteenth-Century British Novel

In this paper, I employ large-scale data analysis to highlight trends in the use of direct speech across a corpus of 898 novels published in Britain between 1789 and 1901. The paper begins with a brief description of my quantitative method. Following this, it illustrates that an unexpected statistic—here the high number of speaking characters in Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre—can shed new light on individual novels. After this example, the paper argues for the usefulness of combining computational methods with literary analysis when studying direct speech in the novel. The paper then presents several corpus-wide facts about direct speech, and offers some hypotheses about what these statistics reveal about the role of speech in nineteenth-century British novels. Finally, the paper proposes ways in which the current corpus and data can be improved and considers how those improvements can shed further light on the use of direct speech in Romantic and Victorian novels.