Scientific Evaluation of Charles Dickens^∗

Abstract

I report the results of the test, where the takers had to tell the prose of Charles Dickens from that of Edward Bulwer-Lytton, who is considered by many to be the worst writer in history of letters. The average score is about 50%, which is on the level of random guessing. This suggests that the quality of Dickens’s prose is the same as of that of Bulwer-Lytton.

Notes

¹When I looked at the quiz results I noticed hundreds of cases when two or more scores came from the same IP address within a few minutes. In many of such cases the later score was 100%. This suggests that many people took several shots at the quiz. To eliminate this cheating I cleaned the data by selecting only the first score from each IP address. Afterwards I cleaned the data from the results, where one or more questions were skipped.

²I identified American, British, Australian, and New Zealand universities by Internet domains: edu, ac.uk, edu.au, and ac.nz.