A Stylometric Analysis of the Ghost-Writing of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Bound to John Company in Belgravia: A London Magazine

• Janine Hatter
• Craig Johnson

This article seeks to uncover the ghost-writer(s) of Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s serialised novel Bound to John Company as published in Belgravia: A London Magazine from July 1868 to October 1869. Braddon began the novel’s serialisation, but fell ill, and another writer(s) finished the novel; to this date the other author(s)’ identity has not been disclosed. To achieve our aim, we used stylometry – computational analysis of writing style – with the R package stylo() to cross-compare relevant published authors and their works. Our corpus consists of 435 novels from 145 mid-Victorian authors who wrote in relevant genres and periodicals within a 10-year timeframe of Bound to John Company to establish potential ghost-writers of the serial. Our results revealed up to four potential ghost-writers for three different sections of the serialisation, each of whom had person¬al and/or publication connections with Braddon and John Maxwell. We also close read Braddon’s structural edits from the serialisation to volume format to reveal Braddon’s own writing, editing and publishing practices, and her relationship with her ghost-writer(s). Overall, this article contributes to the mapping of Victorian literary and periodical networks and author influences, while more broadly contributing to digital humanities literature that demonstrates the value of stylometry to Victorianists studying periodical and authorial networks.