©2015 The Research Society for Victorian Periodicals Six Authors and the Saturday Review: A Quantitative Approach to Style HUGH CRAIG AND ALEXIS ANTONIA The Saturday Review, founded in 1855, was the most controversial weekly journal in mid-Victorian England. Looking back in 1890, Eliza Lynn Lin- ton, one of its contributors, spoke of the Saturday in these terms: “If the most formidable, it was also the freest paper of its time. [. . .] Sharp- tongued and hard-hitting as the journal was, and by no means sensitive to tender skins, it was absolutely and proudly independent.” 1 John Jump describes it as “younger, fiercer, livelier, and more cocksure than its rivals,” with a “talent and taste for slashing and debunking.” 2 It set out to be the “scourge of vulgarity, of bohemianism, of Grub Street, of Dickens, and perhaps most of all of religious enthusiasm,” making the powerful Times its special target. 3 The Baptist preacher C. H. Spurgeon, who felt the sting of its attacks, declared that “every good man is born for the love of God and the hatred of the Saturday.” 4 Indeed, it was widely referred to as the “Saturday Reviler.” 5 While the Saturday Review was not the only journal seen as subsuming the individual identities of its contributors, it is often singled out for its “unified voice, the voice of the educated upper middle class.” 6 Christopher Kent describes its special quality as something which “began to take on an independent and imposing identity of its own . . . forcing the journalist to subordinate his own personality to that of the journal.” 7 Merle Mow- bray Bevington finds a remarkable uniformity in the style and ideas of the Saturday Review’s writers, noting that “it presented the paradox of men of marked independence and individuality merged into a unity and consistency of tone and point of view so remarkable that it is possible to refer to what the Saturday said rather than to what a particular writer said in the Saturday.” 8 Contributors felt that they consciously changed their style when writing for the Saturday Review. Indeed, their experience seems to exemplify John Morley’s remarks about the effect of anonymity