Common Library 1.0: A Corpus of Victorian Novels Reflecting the Population in Terms of Publication Year and Author Gender

Research in 19th-century book history, sociology of literature, and quantitative literary history is blocked by the absence of a collection of novels which captures the diversity of literary production. We introduce a corpus of 75 Victorian novels sampled from a 15,322-record bibliography of novels published between 1837 and 1901 in the British Isles. This corpus, the Common Library, is distinctive in the following way: the shares of novels in the corpus associated with sociologically important subgroups match the shares in the broader population. For example, the proportion of novels written by women in 1880s in the corpus is approximately the same as in the population.