The Corpus of English Novels
The Corpus of English Novels (CEN), compiled by Hendrik De Smet, has been designed to allow tracking of short-term language change and comparing usage across individual authors. It consists entirely of novels, written by twenty-five novelists, both British (including Irish) and North American. All novels are written between 1881 and 1922. All authors are born between 1848 and 1963 and represent roughly one generation of novelists. The following table summarises the contents of the corpus.
| AUTHOR | NR. OF NOVELS | YEAR OF PUBLICATION | NR. OF WORDS | |
| Andy Adams (1859-1935) | 5 | 1903-1911 | 450,564 | |
| Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) | 18 | 1888-1913 | 1,566,987 | |
| Edith Nesbit (1858-1924) | 8 | 1899-1907 | 537,969 | |
| Edith Wharton (1862-1937) | 11 | 1900-1922 | 872,824 | |
| Emerson Hough (1857-1923) | 9 | 1900-1922 | 751,315 | |
| Frances Burnett (1849-1924) | 11 | 1881-1922 | 974,948 | |
| Francis Marion Crawford (1854-1909) | 13 | 1882-1903 | 1,396,223 | |
| George Augustus Moore (1852-1933) | 10 | 1885-1901 | 996,682 | |
| George Gissing (1857-1903) | 20 | 1884-1905 | 2,408,767 | |
| Gertrude Atherton (1857-1935) | 10 | 1888-1922 | 634,864 | |
| Gilbert Parker (1862-1932) | 16 | 1893-1921 | 1,398,355 | |
| Grant Allen (1848-1899) | 8 | 1884-1899 | 590,205 | |
| Hall Caine (1853-1931) | 4 | 1885-1913 | 665,937 | |
| Henry Rider Haggard (1856-1925) | 25 | 1885-1910 | 2,556,621 | |
| Henry Seton Merriman (1862-1903) | 12 | 1892-1913 | 988,647 | |
| Humphrey Ward (1851-1920) | 17 | 1881-1916 | 2,252,823 | |
| Irving Bacheller (1859-1950) | 8 | 1892-1922 | 511,064 | |
| Jerome Kapla Jerome (1859-1827) | 10 | 1886-1919 | 706,389 | |
| Kate Douglas Wiggin (1856-1923) | 14 | 1893-1915 | 677,656 | |
| Lyman Frank Baum (1856-1919) | 14 | 1900-1916 | 622,700 | |
| Marie Corelli (1855-1924) | 11 | 1886-1921 | 1,719,829 | |
| Ralph Connor (1860-1937) | 11 | 1898-1921 | 974,840 | |
| Robert Barr (1850-1912) | 10 | 1893-1910 | 731,329 | |
| Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-1894) | 9 | 1881-1893 | 676,472 | |
| Stanley John Weyman (1855-1928) | 6 | 1890-1901 | 563,418 | |
| TOTAL | 292 | 1881-1922 | 26,227,428 |
To download the corpus, you can obtain a free password and user-id by contacting Hendrik De Smet. If you already have a password and user-id, simply click here to download or access.