Who Wrote the Cry (1754)? New Evidence from NLP Tools

Wilbur Lucius Cross was to our knowledge the first scholar to assert without producing any biographical evidence in support of this claim that The Cry: A New Dramatic Fable published anonymously in March 1754 had been written by Sarah Fielding with her friend Jane Collier. Many critics have accepted this joint attribution despite contrary biographical evidence pointing to Sarah Fielding as the sole author. This essay uses corpus linguistics techniques and NLP software to compare the style of The Cry with that of Jane Collier’s only published work An Essay on the Art of Ingeniously Tormenting (1753) and explore the hypothesis of a joint authorship. It will be of interest to specialists in British 18th-century literature digital humanities and feminist studies.