Charles Dickens identified as author of mystery article

Charles Dickens has been identified as the author of a previously unattributed article which attacks the middle classes for patronizing the “working man”.

“Who has not been outraged by observing that cheerfully patronizing 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 serializations of his novels Hard Times, A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations were published.

Scholars at Dickens Journals Online have been working for years to develop open-access digital editions of the journals, which run to 30 million 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 digitization 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 analyzed, and has been identified as the work of Dickens himself.

“We supplied a mystery text to them and said ‘can you decide which known author this is most like?’” said Dr John Drew, project director of Dickens Journals Online and an English lecturer at the University of Buckingham.

The article comments in depth on the proposal to establish dining-halls and kitchens for the use of poor people – a move the author commends, as long as certain principles are adhered to. “The poor man who attends one of these eating-houses must be treated as the rich man is treated who goes to a tavern. The thing must not be made a favor of,” he writes.

Drew said he “very much doubted” that any new fiction by Dickens would be discovered in the journals, but hoped that around a dozen more articles by the author would be uncovered.

Original source here