GUARDIAN: …“Who has not been outraged by observing that cheerfully patronising mode of dealing with poor people which is in vogue at our soup-kitchens and other depôts of alms?,” runs the article, which was published anonymously on 18 April 1863 in the weekly magazine All the Year Round, under Charles Dickens‘s editorship. “There is a particular manner of looking at the soup through a gold double eye-glass, or of tasting it, and saying, ‘Monstrous good – monstrous good indeed; why, I should like to dine off it myself!’ which is more than flesh and blood can bear.”…
Dickens edited two weekly journals for more than 20 years, All the Year Round and Household Words, in which serialisations of his novels Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations were published. Although an office ledger for Household Words remains, showing who wrote what, the ledger for All the Year Round was lost. Scholars at Dickens Journals Online have been working for years to develop open-access digital editions of the journals, which run to 30m words, aided by over 3,000 volunteers – including Guardian readers – who have worked to correct mistakes in machine-read transcriptions of the 30,000 pages.
With the digitisation project now complete, Dickens Journals Online are starting to send articles to the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing (CLLC) at the University of Newcastle, Australia, which uses computational stylistics to attempt to pinpoint the unknown authors’ identity. The short opinion piece “Temperate Temperance”, which urges readers to “get it into our heads – which seems harder to do than many people would imagine – that the working man is neither a felon, nor necessarily a drunkard, nor a very little child”, is the first to be analysed, and has been identified as the work of Dickens himself… (more)
