Adam Mazel, “The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge” (pp. 374–401) This essay introduces the verse culture of the Victorian-era University of Cambridge. While Cambridge verse covers a range of matters and manners, time is its master-theme and rhyme is its master-scheme. Seemingly sophomoric, Cambridge verse is significant as a case of verse doing social work for its writers and readers: versifying helped distinguish students and alumni as refined, cultivated members of the Victorian elite. In Cambridge verse, the social meanings of versifying condensed above all in the versifier’s facility with form, which implied the versifier’s refinement. For Cambridge men, rhyme play was a form of display, a performance of class.

Throughout her life, Christina Rossetti was an enthusiastic writer and player of word games in verse. When she was seventeen, for instance, she spent the summer of 1848 in Brighton playing bouts-rimés sonnets with her brother, William. Together they timed themselves to see how fast they could write lines of verse to a given set of end rhymes: “emotional devastation in ten minutes or less,” Anne Jamison wittily puts it (145). Two years later, Rossetti published under her initials instances of different word games – an enigma (“Name any gentleman you spy”) and a charade (“My first is no proof of my second”) – as part of a series of riddling word games in verse by various authors in the Marshall's Ladies Daily Remembrancer: For 1850. They count among Rossetti's first poetic publications. These popular riddling genres, while perhaps less familiar to readers today, were immediately recognizable to Rossetti's contemporaries. In his 1872 riddle anthology, Guess Me, F. D. Planché defines an “Enigma” as a riddle in verse, or “the most ancient form of Riddle . . . often a real poem as well as a question for solution” (3). In the 1891 Cornhill Magazine, the article “Riddles” glosses a “charade” as a riddle that “turns upon the letters or syllables composing a word” (518). By publishing an enigma and a charade in Marshall's Ladies Daily Remembrancer, an inexpensive pocket book for women, Rossetti capitalized on the association of these genres as written by and for middle-class women, a point that I will argue in more detail later.

This poster displays the results of preliminary computational analyses of the writing of Aphra Behn, a Restoration‐era woman of letters who wrote in a variety of genres. We analyze a selection of her diverse corpus via term frequency and topic modeling to consider how theme and genre relate in her writings: did Behn express similar themes in the many genres in which she wrote, or did she explore certain themes in certain genres, suggesting that her thematic interests determined the genres in which she wrote and vice versa? Analyzing the relationship between theme and genre in her writing offers insight into whether Behn adhered to the longstanding classical aesthetic concept of decorum: the belief, widespread when Behn wrote, that certain genres require certain themes and vice versa. Our preliminary analysis suggests both that she adhered to decorum and that computational text analysis is useful for studying theme and genre in individual authors.

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