Did Dickens write "Temperate Temperance"?: (an attempt to identify authorship of an anonymous article in All the Year Round)

This article is the result of a collaborative exercise carried out by the Dickens Journals Online (DJO) project and the Centre for Literary and Linguistic Computing (CLLC) at the University of Newcastle, Australia.1 It presents the findings of an attempt to establish authorship of a short article published anonymously on 18 April 1863 in the weekly magazine All the Year Round under Charles Dickens's editorship, using computational stylistics in tandem with internal clues (in themselves far from conclusive) as to author. The reporting of the results forms part of a series of new attributions to be presented by DJO following its public launch in 2012, but merits, we hope, more elaborate discussion because the findings challenge an existing form of attribution, as well as offering a further demonstration of how the so-called "Burrows method" of establishing authorship can be configured for work with Victorian periodicals.