Child Welfare in Victorian Newspapers: Corpus-Based Discourse Analysis

Corpus linguistics enables the analysis of patterns in large bodies of written material. The use of this approach to trace discourses about infant mortality in all of the text published by four newspapers in England and Wales between 1870 and 1900 detects systematic variations in views about infant welfare by locality. It also reveals some of the strengths and weaknesses inherent in interrogating digitized text with linguistic tools in historical research.