How Many Siblings Had Philip Pirrip?: Counting Brothers and Sisters in the Victorian Novel

Abstract:In this paper, following a midrange methodology that combines insights from narrative theory with human and machine reading, we gather data from fifty domestic realist novels. We find that while the average mid-Victorian family hovered just below six children, the average family in the Victorian novel has 2.8 children, and more than a third are only children. Novelists responded to the demands of the narrative when constructing their sibling sets: certain quantities and gender configurations of siblings are wrought from formal necessity. We identify several patterns stemming from our data in the composition of the novelistic Victorian sibling set, including orphans, heiresses, brother-sister pairings, and the long family as a joke. We find that the Victorian novel's focus on lineage leads novelists to prune the long families of history quite aggressively, representing them vaguely if at all. We conclude by offering our methodology, which relies on a combination of minimal computing and close reading, as an example and provocation to scholars seeking to embark on more empirical projects, and to see familiar texts anew.