Data

Data was not a word that the Victorians used regularly. The British English corpus of the Google NGram viewer, which visualizes word frequency across the corpus of books scanned by Google as of 2012, shows a slow increase in the use of the word “data” in the nineteenth century, with a dramatic spike around 1990 (see fig. 1). The Oxford English Dictionary ties the rise of “data” specifically to the rise of computing and computers in the mid-twentieth century. Data is collective. Now typically used as a mass noun, data signifies related bits of information, usually numbers, considered collectively. Informally, data means any sort of digital information.

Figure 1. Frequency of the word “data” in British English literature from 1800 to 2000. Graph created using Google NGram viewer, Google Books Ngram Viewer: http://books.google.com/ngrams.

In this essay, I use digital humanities methods to collect data about the Victorian novel. Concentrating on Anthony Trollope's third Chronicle of Barsetshire, Doctor Thorne, I examine what social media traces on Goodreads, a popular social cataloguing site where users review and recommend books to friends, can tell us about the way we read Victorian literature now. In doing so, I hope to uncover information about a collective everyday Victorianism. While previous work in reader response theory suffered from the difficulty of obtaining data on how people read, for the first time, Goodreads offers us “a large-scale network of serious readers and their readings with the attendant metadata” in James English's words.¹ Lisa Nakamura remarks that “scholars looking to study reading culture ‘in the wild’ will be rewarded by a close study of Goodreads.”²

Doctor Thorne is an interesting case study at this cultural moment because Julian Fellowes chose to dramatize Trollope's novel in the wake of his enormously popular period drama, Downton Abbey. Fellowes's announcement that he would adapt Doctor Thorne provoked an immediate spike in tweets about Trollope in May 2015.³ However, it was not until Doctor Thorne actually aired, in March 2016 on ITV in the U. K. and on Amazon Prime in May 2016 in the U. S., that Goodreads saw an increased number of users reviewing the novel.⁴ Eighty of the top 300 reviews of Doctor Thorne appeared in 2016, as opposed to 23 to 25 reviews per year each of the previous three years. Those who read Doctor Thorne generally liked it, of 4,095 users who rated the novel, 76% gave it four or five stars out of a possible five, while only 4% gave it two stars or less.⁵

For a general audience, Trollope, with his focus on marriage and money and his smooth prose style, seems to be a natural successor to Jane Austen, who has been endlessly adapted in the past 25 years. Austen was by far the author that reviewers most frequently compared Trollope to; she is mentioned 49 times in the top 300 reviews, followed by Charles Dickens at 26 mentions, and George Eliot at 9. Users also included Doctor Thorne on lists devoted to “What to Read After You've Finished Jane Austen” and “More for the Jane Austen Purist,” where they collaboratively ranked Trollope's novel as 157 out of 334 books and 47 out of 98 books respectively.⁶ As one reviewer put it: “How am I almost 35 and just experienced the wry fun of a Trollope novel? Seriously, next time you see a nerdy thirteen-year-old clutching Austen and Dickens, be sure to put some Trollope in her hands as well.”⁷

Despite the strong connection between Austen, Trollope, and adaptation, it would be a mistake to presume that general readers are only in it for the costume drama. Although the 2016 miniseries seems to have prompted many to read the novel, this was not what they focused on in their reviews. Only forty-one, or 13.67%, of the top 300 written reviews mentioned the adaptation. By contrast, 151, or 50.33%, of reviewers expressed familiarity with Trollope's oeuvre in general, either intimating (“I do really enjoy Trollope; there is something quite soothing and stimulating both in watching his novels march along to their ordered ending”) or directly stating that they had read or were at least familiar with some of Trollope's other novels (“I've read 99 percent of the trollopes, even the obscure ones, and this one is my absolute favorite”).⁸

Love (of Trollope, of his characters, or of the book in general) was the main theme that came up in written reviews. Yet, reviewers were actually about as likely to mention Trollope's style (which they compared to “butter” and “silk”) as love of his characters (the “marvellously irreverent” Miss Dunstable, mentioned 29 times, was universally liked).⁹ Delving deeper into Trollopian style, many readers found Trollope amusing, with 65 of 300 reviewers mentioning enjoying his humour. By contrast, the narrator alternately amused and infuriated readers. As one reader put it, “even with all his Victorian mansplaining, Trollope and I might be friends after all.”¹⁰ And of, course, many readers found Trollope dull, though not everyone thought this was a bad thing: “The plot is like taking a familiar train ride: one knows where one is going to wind up, and one knows where all the stops are going to be. The pleasure is in watching the scenery (i.e., the characters) go by.”¹¹

Some scholars have theorized that literature which enters the canon becomes depoliticized over time, appreciated for its aesthetic qualities rather than its political commentary.¹² This is not so with Doctor Thorne, which many read as a form of social critique. Eighty-nine reviews mentioned Trollope's skewering of the British class system, money, and marriage; many of these readers wondered whether Mary's inheritance undermined Trollope's criticism of the class system, others were disturbed that Scatcherd's downfall seemed to be a punishment for his social ascendancy. Fewer readers made a direct connection to the present day, but it seems that Trollope functioned equally well as an escape from and a critique on the 2016 U. S. election. Readers commented that “it was the perfect escape from post-inauguration depression.”¹³ One reviewer wrote that rereading the novel “provides great insight into the carnival of politics today”;¹⁴ another compared Sir Roger Scatcherd, “a boorish construction tycoon who uses his new wealth to buy a seat in Parliament,”¹⁵ to Donald Trump shortly after he announced his candidacy for president.

Reading Trollope by the numbers, a mode the highly regimented novelist surely would have appreciated, reveals an appreciation amongst general readers of not only the marriage plot and his characters, but also of his style and his social commentary. Numbers may be on the upswing as evidence in literary studies; Andrew Goldstone and Ted Underwood point out that after a century of decline in mentions of number words in scholarly articles, there appears to be an upturn in the use of numbers.¹⁶ Social media data has the potential to transform the way we read Victorian literature now, illuminating the way our objects of study are read outside the classroom.