Old Familiar Faces: The Library and Works of Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton

Abstract

Stylometrics is a discipline that aims to mathematically determine the style of an author by examining the placement or co-occurrence of particular words and phrases in that author's body of written work. It is typically used to try to attribute authorship to an anonymous piece of text by matching the stylistic "fingerprint" of an author or set of authors to the stylistic fingerprint of that text. This project, however, examines known-author works to draw connections between two sets of volumes: the published works of Victorian author Walter Theodore Watts-Dunton, and the many books he received as gifts from his lifelong friend, celebrated author Algernon Charles Swinburne. One might expect that the volumes in the latter set would have some stylistic influence on the former, and the project ultimately finds a pair of volumes with significant stylistic overlap: Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon", and Watts-Dunton's "The Coming of Love", and "Other Poems".