University of Virginia Library

Analysis

It was first necessary to ascertain three things: whether the known Godwin material and the pamphlets in question fell within similar boundaries; where both the known pamphlets by Godwin and the ones in question fitted in with Godwin's other writings; and whether any other pamphlet writers of the time offered alternative authorship possibilities. To begin with, a selection of known-author pamphlets on the Regency Crisis, by William Cuninghame of Enterkine, Capel Lofft, Jean Louis de Lolme, and Sir James Mackintosh, were found, scanned, and analyzed.[9] In addition, a sermon by Towers, a Dissenting

minister and author of political tracts, who was, like Lofft, an acquaintance of Godwin's in the late 1780s,[10] was included in the study. Then, during an Internet search for materials suitable for comparison, full electronic versions of Godwin's A Defence of the Rockingham Party (1783) and Instructions to a Statesman (1784) were discovered, together with an extensive quantity of his other writings. The processing of all this material allowed the data comparison shown in figure 1.

This graph shows a division point of around 900 in lexical richness scores between Godwin's known writings and the works of other pamphlet writers in the lower left quadrant. That is, Godwin consistently uses more words only once in a text than any of the other writers. It also reveals a division between Godwin's earlier material at the top and his later material at the bottom. In addition, the longer works tend to form groups, with a separation between

the essays from Thoughts on Man (1831) on the lower right and the chapters from An Enquiry concerning Political Justice (3rd ed., 1798) in the middle. The six books of Imogen: A Pastoral Romance (1784) occupy the upper right, though with a similar spread to the chapters from Enquiry. The known Godwin pamphlets are to the right and left of Imogen, with the two directly addressing constitutional or legal matters, Defence and Cursory Strictures (1794), sharing lexical richness values similar to the chapters from Enquiry.

Although the other Regency pamphlet authors cluster together, this graph tells us nothing about how they normally write, since we have only one or at most three samples of each. What we can see is that Godwin's texts, which cover a wide span of his writing career, do not overlap or cluster with the other candidates for authorship. We can also see that none of the other writers immediately appear as plausible candidates for the authorship of either Law or Reflexions. Only Letters 1 and 2 of Lofft's pamphlet exceed Law in lexical richness, and both Law and, especially, Reflexions stand at some distance from what is otherwise a distinctive group. (Both Cuninghame and Mackintosh argue against the case for Parliament's right to appoint a Regent proposed in Law, so are unlikely alternative authors on those grounds as well.) Towers and De Lolme stand furthest from any known Godwin material. Lofft's pamphlet is later than Law, comprising three letters dated 8, 13, and 14 December 1788, each reacting to the latest developments in the parliamentary debates and all supporting the underlying position set out in Law and Reflexions. But, as already noted, the Lofft scores have more in common with the other Regency pamphlet writers than with known Godwin material of the time. Lofft's pamphlet also displays a distinctive feature in the way that he refers to kings and dukes: he adopts abbreviations, such as "H.III," "R.II," and "D. of York;" but these are entirely absent from Law. Perhaps most significantly, Lofft adds in a footnote to a passage cited from the parliamentary debates, "I substitute only the word KING instead of MONARCH: as an English constitutional word, more parliamentary, and more consonant to the occasion" (Letters2 32); whereas the word "monarch" appears without comment ten times in Reflexions and twice in Law.

As for the relationship between Law and Reflexions and Godwin's known writings, Reflexions sits firmly within the Imogen books and just to the right of Defence and Strictures. Law is within the hapax dislegomena boundaries of the Godwin material closest in chronology, but has the lowest lexical richness score. From this analysis, it appeared that there was a higher probability that Reflexions could be attributed to Godwin than Law. This finding prompted a further stage of comparison between Law and Reflexions, Godwin's known writings, and texts by other authors writing on political and philosophical subjects in the same period.

Comparison of Godwin's texts with a selection of writings by Paine, Price, Priestley, and Wollstonecraft, together with one text by Mary Shelley, not only allowed a confirmation of the distinction between Godwin and the others at the lexical richness/hapax dislegomena levels, but also revealed a

definite feature in respect of Godwin's individual use, or rather lack of use, of the core vocabulary, as shown in figure 2.

The great majority of Godwin's texts fall into the lower half of the graph, showing that, in all but one of his texts, less than 23% of the lexical content is formed by the core vocabulary and most contain less than 20%, and that this is very much a feature of his writing throughout his career. The majority of the other authors collect at the top, inhabiting the 22% to 33% range. The only author with a higher lexical richness score than Godwin is his daughter, Mary Shelley. Paine's texts group in the upper left quadrant. Among the known authors on the Regency Crisis, Lofft shares with Godwin a tendency for low use of the core vocabulary. De Lolme, who was a native of Geneva, shows a much higher usage of the core vocabulary than any text except Paine's Common Sense (1776). De Lolme's method of argument is also different from that of the other Regency pamphlet authors, being much more narrative than polemical. It may be that there is common ground in the upbringing and education of the other writers, which influenced their use of language, but that is beyond the scope of this paper.[11] The fact that Godwin

is not alone in his low usage of the core vocabulary does not diminish the force of the observation that this characteristic is a strong feature of his writing. The scores of Thoughts, for example, are similar to those of Defence, Instructions, and Strictures.

The only other work examined here which scores less than 22% for core vocabulary is Price's Additional Observations on . . . Civil Liberty (1777). Though the other Price text used, A Discourse on the Love of our Country (1789), appears in higher areas of the graph, the proximity of Add.Observ. to Law on both scores measured here suggests that Price might offer an alternative authorship for Law—a possibility explored further below. At present the important factor is that both Law and Reflexions sit firmly within the area occupied by all the known Godwin material in the core vocabulary scores. This finding provides additional support for the case that Godwin is the author of Reflexions and suggests that he remains a possible author of Law.

To confirm the difference between Godwin and other writers of the same period, more data was required. The only relevant contemporary author for whom a substantial amount of electronic data could be found for comparative purposes was Paine. Figure 3 shows the results of comparing all the

Godwin material with a selection of Paine's writings, Law, and Reflexions.

This chart shows a division between Paine and Godwin from left to right at the 900 mark similar to the division noted in figure 1. Paine's works, with the exception of Rights of Man: Part the Second (1792), are grouped in the same way that Godwin's writings are grouped in figure 1. Chapters 1 and 2 of Rights are each much shorter than all the other samples, which may account for their separation from chapters 3 and 4, but they were included for the sake of completeness and to show that, while the hapax dislegomena percentage is being affected by the difference in length, the lexical richness scores are grouped within similar boundaries to other related sets of texts. Since the works selected cover a period of many years in the case of both authors, we can have some confidence that the measurements are indicating distinctive differences in the use of vocabulary between the two writers. Given that the more limited material from other authors can also be recognized as different from Godwin's, we can be reasonably sure that we have identified a further stylistic feature of his writing in a high lexical richness score. Price is included here because he has already been identified as a potential alternative author of Law. His two works straddle the 900 boundary on the lower limit of Godwin's identified levels. These works were written 12 years apart and on different subjects, so there is no reason why they should cluster any more closely than they do.

It can further be seen from figure 3 that Reflexions is firmly on the Godwin side and Law equally firmly on the Paine side, and that Price's Add. Observ. is even closer to Law than any of Paine's work. We also have an indication that Paine was writing differently from his norm in chapters 3 and 4 of Rights, since the other texts sit in the lower/middle part of the graph. If either Paine or Godwin were the author of Law, it is evident that this work shows divergence from what might be called their normal style, as identified by the statistics. If Price were the author, we would expect a similarity in style, since both works are found in the upper right region, closer to Godwin's material. So the task was to see which of these possibilities was most likely.

At this point, the statistical analytical tools were replaced with vocabulary and phrase analysis tools. The total length of the Paine and Godwin texts used (approximately 50,000 words for Paine, and approximately 100,000 words for Godwin) was sufficient to allow a limited investigation into the function words used by each, with a view to observing potential marked differences, so that such apparently distinctive words could be looked for in each of the pamphlets in question. This investigation, though insufficient to be conclusive on its own, held the possibility of providing supporting evidence for our other findings. It revealed that three function words showed marked differences in usage: both "or" and "on" were used relatively infrequently by Godwin, while he showed a marked preference for "upon" in comparison to both Paine and Price. These patterns were also found in both Law and Reflexions, as shown in table 1.

TABLE 1 Normalised occurrences per 10,000 words

       

	Godwin	Law	Reflexions	Price	Paine
Or	28	33	16	85	64
On	15	19	12	51	48
Upon	41	44	44	5	15

This finding was then checked against the other data examined and the low use of "on" and the high use of "upon" was found to be particular to Godwin. The incidence of "or" was generally similar as well. It would appear that in a wider test of functional vocabulary markers, these two items would be clear candidates as Godwin discriminators.

Next, file comparison at vocabulary and phrase level was undertaken between all three known Godwin pamphlets and the two pamphlets in question. The greatest vocabulary overlap was between Law and Reflexions, which was not unexpected because of similarity in material, but which produced a sufficiently high score to have caused an investigation into potential sharing of material if that level had been reached by two different students in the present-day university setting for which the program, CopyCatch, is intended.[12] CopyCatch is the diagnostic element of the tools used above, which is specifically designed to look for shared vocabulary in work on the same topic which is supposed to have been produced independently. The greater the proportion of shared vocabulary which appears in two apparently related texts, the greater the possibility that the texts were produced by plagiarism, collusion, or undesirable co-operation. But CopyCatch can also indicate a tendency of one or both authors to repeat themselves, since such repetition, particularly on the topic or sub-topics, will cause the proportion of the shared vocabulary to increase. It was this practice which was highlighted by the initial examination of Law and Reflexions using this program.

In addition, CopyCatch allows comparison of phrase use between any two files it has examined, enabling us to ascertain whether repetition is occurring at the phrase level. In the cases of Law, Defence, and Strictures, this analysis showed a great deal of direct or related phrasal repetition within each of those texts, with relatively little phrasal similarity observable within any of the other texts used for purposes of comparison. Table 2 presents only some of the extraordinary amount of direct phrasal repetition in Law. It is not the phrases themselves but the number of times they appear which makes this text so different from all the others examined.

In addition, there are in Law 20 instances of the phrase, "the duke of [Bedford/Gloucester/York]."

We find similar repetition over distance in Strictures, though not on such a wide scale, as shown in table 3. (The numbers following the examples indicate which sentences are being identified to show the distances between occurrences.)

TABLE 2 Phrases repeated in Law, showing number of occurrences

               

"a parliament was summoned"	7
"the two houses of parliament"	6
"was virtually in the hands of the king's uncles"	2
"a council of regency"	7
"the regency of a single person"	5
"the king alone"	5
"in the reign of king [X] the [Y]"	14
"king [X] the [Y]"	43

TABLE 3 Repeated phrases in Strictures, with sentence number identified

       

"guilty of High Treason"	(Strictures 97 and 116)
"Justice implicitly confesses himself"	(Strictures 73)
"Justice implicitly confesses, that"	(Strictures 67)
"overawe the legislative body"	(Strictures 79 and 189)

This phrasal repetition demonstrates a similarity of technique between the author of Strictures and the author of Law, though such repetition is much more markedly evident in Law than in Strictures or Defence, being especially concentrated around the historical sections. The author's method in Law was to name each king in full, discuss the nature of the incapacity, the circumstances in which parliaments were summoned and the outcome, so the vocabulary repetition was occasioned by the chosen structure of argument. One effect of this technique was to reduce the lexical vocabulary substantially in comparison to the other texts of similar length. The other effect was to reduce the normal occurrence of hapax legomena within this text, resulting in a lower percentage of once-only occurrence and hence a lower lexical richness score, which, as noted above, uses this percentage as one of its components.

As mentioned in the discussion of vocabulary measurements, the formula used for calculating lexical richness expects a degree of regularity of occurrence of lexical items throughout a given text. Thus the presence of this feature needs to be confirmed to establish that this is in fact the case. An examination of all the pamphlets, together with examples of works by Paine and Price, demonstrates that there is a clear difference in pattern between the known pamphlets by Godwin and Reflexions on the one hand, and the examples by Paine and Price on the other, with Law revealing its idiosyncratic construction, as shown in table 4.

Here it can be seen that the three known Godwin pamphlets start with, and generally maintain, a high quantity of hapax legomena, while the two works by Price and chapter 4 of Paine's Rights start with a much smaller quantity, which chapter 4 of Rights maintains but the works by Price increase. Both Law and Reflexions share the high opening and closing quantity found in Godwin's other works, but Law has a substantial drop in the middle segment, which is in fact much wider than simply this segment. This is |

TABLE 4 Hapax legomena IN FULL TEXT SHOWN FOR THEIR OCCURRENCE IN THREE 1000-WORD SEGMENTS PER TEXT

       

	Instructions	Defence	Strictures	Law	Reflexions	Rights 2.4	Discourse	Add. Observ.
First 1000 words	131	134	178	134	129	70	106	59
Mid 1000 words	124	146	128	96	130	93	124	114
Last 1000 words	166	132	114	140	123	71	133	132

where the lengthy laying-out of historical precedents is placed. So the opening and closing sections in both cases are not only close to Godwin's known pamphlets, but also distinct from Paine and distinct from Price. The drop can be explained only by heavier repetition of vocabulary, and the question then is whether this repetitious style is similar to that used by the other two authors, or of a distinctive nature.

The presence of a distinctive repetitious effect in Godwin's writing was confirmed by a detailed vocabulary analysis, summarized in table 5.

TABLE 5 Word frequency occurrences and percentages of lexical items they represent

         

Words	Law	Instructions	Defence	Strictures	Reflexions	Add. Observ.	Rights2.4
21+	17	3	6	8	2	11	5
6+ % of Lex Items	138	121	87	80	73	123	101
21+	14%	5%	5%	11%	1%	12%	8%
6+	41%	26%	28%	32%	20%	39%	38%

This investigation found that Law contained an unusually large number of words repeated 21 times or more, and an even more unusually large number of words occurring 6 times or more. In comparison, Instructions, which is 30% longer than Law, had only 3 words occurring 21 times or more and 121 words occurring 6 times or more. Chapter 4 of Rights shows a higher 6+ rating but also a much lower 21+ rating, indicating a different vocabulary spread through the text. This lowering of overall lexical vocabulary usage in Law, together with the tendency to repeat entire phrases, also affects the hapax dislegomena percentage, since, even though the proportionate number of hapax dislegomena in the full text remains much the same, the percentage they form of the lexical vocabulary increases. These two factors imply a twoway

shift, leftwards and upwards, from what might be called a normal position, if the repetition were not so marked. It would appear that the heavy repetition is a major contributory factor in placing Law where it is in figure 2. This being the case, the expected position for a less repetitious text would be much closer to the Imogen books.

As already noted, chapters 3 and 4 of Rights mark a move away from the rest of Paine's material, but in this case the movement is largely the result of the dominance of a single vocabulary item, "government," which occurs over 100 times in one chapter and over 80 in the other. Such phrasal repetition as can be observed in Paine is very rarely exact, compared with the numerous examples of exact repetition in Law noted in table 2. The move in Paine is simply a gentle rise above the normal pattern. From this combination of factors, it would seem very unlikely that Paine offers an alternative authorship for Law.

Next the disproportionate number of words used frequently in Law in comparison to the other texts was further explored. It was found that in the other texts, once the main human subjects, Lord Rockingham and Lord Chief Justice Eyre, and the terms "Lord" or "Lordship" are set aside, the next significant items are low in all but Strictures, where the non-human subject is the law of treason, which accounts for the higher frequency of this term in the pamphlet. These items are all strongly topic-related and reflect the expected frequency of the main topic vocabulary. In contrast, though there are numerous human subjects in the list of kings and dukes referred to in Law, their use is supportive to the main topic of the role of Parliament in the appointment of a Regent. Only three of the four most frequent words can be strongly identified with this topic: "parliament," "regency," and "authority," together with "government." The most frequent, "king," though relevant to the topic, owes its high frequency to the number of times a specific king is cited in the discussion of historical precedents, as indicated by the examples above.

It can be seen that Price's Add.Observ. also has a substantial amount of vocabulary occurring more than 20 times in a similar number of words, but examination shows that all of this vocabulary is subject-matter related, so this marks a difference from rather than a similarity to the style of Law. The lower figure in chapter 4 of Rights is also strongly subject-matter related and dominated by the term "government," as noted above. There is no element of repetition of lists in either text, as found in Law. The 6+ percentages are also revealing. Godwin's known pamphlets and Reflexions are all noticeably lower than either the Paine or Price examples, and it is now apparent that the statistics for Law are heavily affected by the presence of non-topic related repetition, the absence of which would drop the 6+ level of 41% substantially. All this leads to the conclusion that the lexical richness positions of Paine and Price reflect their normal usage of vocabulary. The proximity of Law to their positions is a result of disruption caused by repetition. This implies that the author of Law has a normal lexical richness score substantially

higher than in this particular work, and this in turn suggests that the author of Law was neither Paine nor Price, leaving Godwin as the only likely candidate from those examined.

This being the case, it might be expected that some positive vocabulary or syntactic evidence would be found linking both Law and Reflexions with the known Godwin material, in addition to the function words identified above. Comparison of vocabularies across the files showed that such evidence certainly exists. First, the words "measure" and "measures," used almost always in relation to parliamentary procedures, appear in all three attested Godwin pamphlets and in both pamphlets under consideration, and in very similar frequencies: 13 times in Law, 8 times in Strictures, and 11 times in the other three. These words are not found in anything like such quantities in any of the other material examined (with the exception of Mackintosh's pamphlet, which puts forward an opposing argument). For example, Paine's Rights includes only 4 examples in 16,204 words, and there are only 2 instances in the full 10,756 words of Price's Add.Observ. This distinctive usage indicates at least a common interest in the pamphlets in question and Godwin's known pamphlets, and is most noticeable in reading the material as well as from the vocabulary analysis, so may be taken as additional evidence in favour of a common authorship. Second, there is a strongly related phrase in Law and Reflexions, which suggests that the author of the latter at least had seen the former, and which, added to the accumulating similarities, may also point to a common author. Though the reference to the imbecility of Henry VI is much more compact in Reflexions than in Law, both pamphlets contain a strikingly similar phrase in relation to the monarchy when describing the same case:

Third, the introductory phrase "Let it be," as in "Let it be remembered"/ "supposed"/"considered," is found only in Godwin's writings and the two pamphlets in question, apart from Mackintosh's Arguments (which addresses the same concerns as Law from a different viewpoint). While the phrase "Let it be" might be assumed to be a common rhetorical device of the time, its presence across the Godwin material and its absence from most of the other works examined offers further evidence in support of Godwin's authorship of both Law and Reflexions. Finally, phrasal analysis revealed the following construction, which again is found only in the three pamphlets indicated:

Taken together, these examples offer considerable support for an identification of Godwin as the author of both Law and Reflexions.