Dating Victorians

The writing style of a number of authors writing in English was empirically investigated to detect stylistic patterns in relation to advancing age. The aim was to identify the type of stylistic markers among lexical, syntactical, phonemic, entropic, character-based, and content ones most able to discriminate between early, middle, and late works of the selected authors, and the best classification or prediction algorithm most suited for this task. A pilot examination of personal letters and poetry by Christina Georgina Rossetti and Edgar Allan Poe suggested that authors and genres vary inconsistently. Examination of selected variables on Shakespeare's plays which emphasised their predictive power, led to four experiments on personal correspondence and poetry from Edna St Vincent Millay and William Butler Yeats. The methods used were stepwise multiple linear regression, regression trees, ordinal logistic regression and artificial neural networks. Prediction was found influenced by method, authorship, and genre whereas classification was found sensitive to all factors. Given the current experiments, generalizable conclusions for the wider author population have been avoided.