The Hopkins-Hamedoe Identity

The mass digitization of nineteenth-century periodicals and keyword-based searching algorithms have produced new ways of reading Pauline E. Hopkins in the twenty-first century. Our essay brings an experiment in digital stylistics together with traditional methods of authorial analysis to investigate an unexplored facet of Hopkins's authorship and compositional style. Hopkins is well-known for her penchant for pseudonyms. She contributed many unsigned editorials to the Colored American Magazine, and it was not unusual for issues to feature her work alongside articles and fiction that she penned as Sarah A. Allen and J. Shirley Shadrach. Might Hopkins have also published under other, as yet unattributed pen names? This essay takes as its case study a writer identified as S. E. F. C. C. Hamedoe or Hammedoe, a purported Professor of "F.G.S.I.," who remains one of the most enigmatic of regular Colored American Magazine contributors.