Significant themes in 19th-century literature

•We model hundreds of themes in a corpus of some 3200 19th-century novels.•We analyze the statistical significance of these themes, heeding gender especially.•We consider impact of external factors on use of themes and words within themes.•We offer a robust method of exploring literary themes at scale. External factors such as author gender, author nationality, and date of publication can affect both the choice of literary themes in novels and the expression of those themes, but the extent of this association is difficult to quantify. In this work, we apply statistical methods to identify and extract hundreds of topics (themes) from a corpus of 19th-century British, Irish, and American fiction. We use these topics as a measurable, data-driven proxy for literary themes and assess how external factors may predict fluctuations in the use of themes and the individual word choices within themes. We use topics not only to measure these associations but also to evaluate whether this evidence is statistically significant.