Reading Numbers by Numbers: Digital Studies and the Victorian Serial Novel

What observations can we cull from a critical analysis of these parts in relation to the greater whole of a novel written and read over nineteen months, the usual schedule of Dickens’s part-number issue of novels, including Martin Chuzzlewit, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Little Dorrit, and Our Mutual Friend? The program aims to help readers see representational patterns in texts; it was originally designed to provide fast statistical comparisons of student papers for composition/rhetoric classes. Jonathan Hope and Michael Witmore have used DocuScope to show that the repeated use or disuse of low-level function words contributes to high-level textual features such as genre.2 Collaborations between Witmore, Franco Moretti, and the Stanford Literary Lab have demonstrated DocuScope’s accuracy in identifying Victorian genres in particular.3 In our analysis, we apply DocuScope’s statistical readings to a different aspect of the novel: its originally written, published, and read form. In an experiment on seriality, the provenance of the digital text is crucial since authors who wrote for serial publications (as Dickens did with Oliver Twist for Bentley’s Miscellany, or with The Old Curiosity Shop and Barnaby Rudge for Master Humphrey’s Clock) often added or eliminated sections of their novel, or even combined chapters across original serial divisions when they prepared them for publication in the triple-decker or single-volume form.