Victorian periodical text corpus

The initial collection was assembled as the working corpus for a research higher degree entitled "Anonymity, Individuality and Commonality in Writing in British Periodicals between 1830 and 1890: A Computational Stylistics Approach" (http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/802334 ). It was intended that there should be a sufficient number of articles to provide a good representation of the repertoire of discursive prose as it stood at the time. The 200 texts were all published in periodical journals during the sixty year period from 1829, when the three major quarterlies were dominating the scene, through the 50s 60s and 70s, when the monthlies came into their own and challenged the quarterlies for reader loyalty, through to 1890, after which both began to decline in popularity. Though most of the articles were anonymous at the time of publication, they all appear to have been reliably attributed thanks largely to the invaluable work of the Wellesley Index. In the years following the completion of the research higher degree a number of additional texts were added to the collection for various reasons: (i) in order to pursue a particular research enquiry; (ii) because of intrinsic interest; or simply (iii) because they were available in electronic form. The corpus itself was used as one of two large corpora for testing the relative merits of different size word n-grams in authorship attribution.