Keywords: text analysis; bibliography; Victorian literature
Abstract:
This paper will discuss a digital literary research effort to study influence and intertextuality in the works of Victorian poet, novelist, and critic Algernon Charles Swinburne. This line of research is particularly relevant for Swinburne, a poet whose work and life are steeped in books, documents, and literature. Swinburne’s friend William Morris wrote in an 1882 letter: “I never could really sympathize with Swinburne’s work; it always seemed to me to be founded on literature, not on nature.” Morris draws a sharp distinction between literature and nature, but Swinburne recognized no such distinction. For Swinburne, poetry is omnipresent in the natural world, and books are— like a flower, a child, or his beloved sea—living things. In a poetic manifesto, the “Dedicatory Epistle” that introduces his collected Poems (1904), Swinburne writes:
The half-brained creature to whom books are other than living things may see with the eyes of a bat and draw with the fingers of a mole his dullard's distinction between books and life: those who live the fuller life of a higher animal than he know that books are to poets as much part of that life as pictures are to painters or as music is to musicians, dead matter though they may be to the spiritually still-born children of dirt and dullness who find it possible and natural to live while dead in heart and brain. Marlowe and Shakespeare, Aeschylus and Sappho, do not for us live only on the dusty shelves of libraries.
Swinburne’s own library was sold at auction, the catalogs for which were published in volume 6 of Sales Catalogs of Libraries of Eminent Persons (1972), edited by John Woolford. We transcribed these auction catalogs to compile a digital encoded bibliography—populated with links to full-text sources from the HathiTrust Digital Library and other repositories—of the works in Swinburne’s library. Using the full-text sources, we will compile a corpus of the contents of Swinburne’s library, apply text data mining and computational analysis to the corpus, and compare the results to a similar analysis of Swinburne’s own works. This comparative analysis will, we hope, reveal similarities in vocabulary, syntax, and diction and identify similar passages or paraphrases that might otherwise escape detection. Our paper will provide an overview of the project and our findings to date.