The Dickens signal - investigating the authorship of "The Two Brothers", a ghost story transcribed from shorthand

Our investigation into what we call the "Dickens signal" brings together digital humanities (DH) and a new forensic linguistic methodology in order to verify whether Charles Dickens is the author of a dictated ghost story - "The Two Brothers" - which was transcribed from the shorthand of his pupil, Arthur Stone, as part of the Dickens Code project. We ask two questions: is there a Dickens signal in the "The Two Brothers" story and is it strong enough to identify Dickens as the author? We first set out the literary and historical background of the "The Two Brothers" text and a similar predecessor in Dickens's "To Be Read at Dusk". We then describe the forensic methodology and the process of construction and analysis of the corpora in detail. In the final part of the article, we present the quantitative results of the analysis and make the case for a Dickens signal in "The Two Brothers", taking account of literary and historical information alongside the results of the authorship analysis. In the conclusions, we discuss the interdisciplinary study of the idea of "Dickensiness" and whether technological advances in authorship verification have widened the gap between the disciplines of stylometry and stylistics.