Weak Negative Correlation between the Present Day Popularity and the Mean Emotional Valence of Late Victorian Novels
Abstract
Despite the recent upswing of computational research on Victorian novels, it has largely overlooked insight from cultural evolution and the cognitive sciences. This study aims to contribute to this incipient scholarship by testing the hypothesis that novels containing content with a lower mean emotional valence are more likely to trigger recommendation-based transmission chains, and as a result tend to have greater cultural longevity. This study performs a correlation analysis between the mean sentiment and the contemporary popularity (using the number of user ratings from Goodreads) of a selection of late Victorian novels published in the United Kingdom between 1891 and 1901, taken from Project Gutenberg (n=846). Moreover, the study looks into the implications of this correlation for the differences between novels that were bestsellers at the time of publication and those that can be considered canonical today (that have recently had Broadview, Oxford University, or Penguin Press editions). The results show a weak negative correlation between the present day popularity and the mean emotional valence of the novels, which nevertheless holds true for both the bestselling and canonical novels. Moreover, canonical novels tend to have a lower mean emotional valence than the bestsellers.
