Estimating the Evidence, Episode 1: On Ages and Pages

Intro/FAQ ⎜ Episode 1 ⎜ Episode 2 ⎜ Episode 3 ⎜ Episode 4 ⎜ Episode 5 ⎜ Episode 6 ⎜ Episode 7 ⎜ Episode 8 ⎜ Episode 9 ⎜ Episode 10 ⎜ Episode 11 ⎜ Episode 12 ⎜ Episode 13 ⎜ Episode 14 ⎜ Episode 15 ⎜ Episode 16 ⎜ Episode 17 ⎜ Episode 18 ⎜ Episode 19 ⎜ Episode 20 ⎜ Episode 21 ⎜ Episode 22 ⎜ Episode 23

[Editor’s Note: This is the first in a series of 23 essays summarizing and evaluating Book of Mormon-related evidence from a Bayesian statistical perspective. See the FAQ at the end of the introductory episode for details on methodology.]

The TLDR

It seems unlikely that a young man of Joseph Smith’s limited education could produce a book the length of the Book of Mormon as a first-time author.

Joseph Smith is a definite outlier among the nineteenth-century’s great authors, even without considering the extraordinary content of the book itself. The estimated probability that someone of Joseph Smith’s age and education would publish a book the size of the Book of Mormon as their first work is p = .0006.

Evidence Score = 3 (beliefs adjusted 3 orders of magnitude toward authenticity)

The Narrative

Imagine yourself on a dark, cold night in New England, 1835. Your hearth dances with faint light from a dying fire, and you huddle next to it with a thick wool blanket, trying to keep warm. As you stare at the coals you find your eyes wandering to a Bible, open on the table to where you’d last been reading. Dust skirts the wrinkles of the paper, catching the light from the fire. You turn away quickly, the edge of your cheek twitching with the hint of a grimace.

As you sit, a muffled knock works its way through the heavy wood of the cabin door. A moment’s silence hangs in the air, and you hope that silence will keep, but the knock repeats—a more desperate knock this time.

"What is it?" you yell out grumpily toward the door. "You picked a cold night for visiting."

The voice of a young man responds with deference. "My apologies. I was told in the village that you had an interest in rare and unusual books. I have one that I think you might like to see."

Your eye edges again to the Bible on the table, and your exhaling breath turns to an audible sigh. "You’re mistaken, young sir. I’m not in the habit of entertaining booksellers on my doorstep, let alone at this late hour."

"Please", the voice says, quieter this time. "The night is cold, and I have no friends in this place. If you would allow me to warm myself by the fire a moment, it would help speed me on the road back to town."

You take another moment before pulling yourself off your hard wooden chair. You pull the door open and do your best to put on a more welcoming face. "Thank you", the young man says, though a creeping baldness at the edges of his dark hair tells you he’s not as young as he sounds. You move another chair by the fire and motion him to sit. He does, his eyes grateful. "The Lord bless you for your kindness."

You keep your eyes on him as he watches the coals, rubbing the chill from his hands. He doesn’t seem as keen to talk as a bookseller might be. "Well then," you say, "as long as you’re here you might as well pull out that book."

He looks back at you almost in surprise, but dutifully moves his stiff hands to his satchel. Those hands pull out a book, small but thick, its cover red in the light of the fire. You can’t quite read the title in the dim light. "And what is that?" You ask.

"This," he says, "is the Book of Mormon."

The words hold no meaning for you, but you listen as he tells you about the book. He says that it’s a volume of scripture, one that tells of the ancient inhabitants of the American continent and their visit by Christ following his resurrection. He says that the book is evidence that God has called a new prophet—a modern Moses—to restore the Church of Jesus Christ to the earth.

You can’t help but let out a chuckle at that last part. This Joe Smith wouldn’t be the first rabble-rousing prophet you’d heard of, and he wouldn’t be the last. Still, none of them had a book like this. You take the book in your hands, running your fingers the length of the spine. You open it and flip through the pages—hundreds of them filled with a tightly packed script. You know that writing such a thing would be no mean feat.

You close the book and face the young man, who you know can see your skepticism. “This Smith fellow, how old was he when this book was published?”

He eyes turn upward in thought. “That was five years ago now, which would have made him 24.”

“And where was he educated? Harvard? Princeton?”

The young man’s head gives a shake, and a laugh comes with it. “If you had ever seen him write you wouldn’t have asked. He saw enough school to learn his letters, but he didn’t learn them very well.”

“Hmm,” you say, continuing to run your fingers along the book’s spine. “I suppose it does seem unlikely that a young man with so little schooling could have written something like this.”

The Introduction

That last statement is the sort of thing I could imagine anyone saying to themselves the first time they encounter the Book of Mormon. Those that early missionaries approached on the American frontier certainly thought similar things. Judging by the arguments they make, many critics of the Book of Mormon think it rather strongly. Its why so many have searched for so long (and so unsuccessfully) for someone else on whom they can pin the book’s authorship. And phrased as it is above, I think it’s something everyone on all sides should be able to agree on—it does seem unlikely. The question is, is it actually unlikely, and how unlikely is it?

That’s a big question. I’m only going to tackle a part of that question here, and it’s the most basic part. Given Joseph’s age and education, how unexpected would it be for him to write a book the length of the Book of Mormon, with no prior history of publication (or of, you know, coherent and well-worded letters). As hopefully you know by now, given the introductory episode, we’re going to use Bayesian analysis to help answer that question.

Now, to clarify, when I talk about “length,” I mean it literally—we’re going to base our analysis on the word count within the Book of Mormon and within other nineteenth-century works—but I also mean something more than that. The Book of Mormon is much more than just a large collection of words. It’s a complex web of history, narrative, and sermon that gives it a deserved place in literature’s great epics. That narrative complexity is much more difficult to quantify than word count, but it’s a point on which few seriously contend, and it’s worth noting as we leave that complexity behind to focus on its raw size.

The Analysis

I know this is the first episode where I actually get into some Bayesian analysis, but I really recommend taking a glance at my FAQ in the introductory episode before you go much further. It should help you get your bearings on the type of analysis I’m trying to do here and what all these terms and formulas mean. I also know that no one ever clicks on links, so I’m going to try to take things slow here, but you can’t say I didn’t warn you.

First, we have to think clearly about the evidence we have at hand—in this case, the sheer size of the Book of Mormon along with Joseph’s age and education at the time it was published.

The Evidence

The Book of Mormon is about 268,163 words long, taking up 531 (very dense) pages in its current edition. You’re not likely to get through it in a breezy afternoon reading session. It was also the first written work he ever produced, which is relevant given that most authors have early projects that prepare them for their eventual masterpieces. Joseph Smith’s magnum opus came out of nowhere and, aside from scattered revelations (including the Joseph Smith Translation), sermons, and the relatively brief Book of Abraham, his writing career ended almost as quickly. We could potentially account for these additional works in his word count, but what we’re most interested in here is the debut production of an author. Similar analyses could be done for other aspects of an authors’ writings, such as lifetime composition, but that would be unlikely to help the critics’ case, given how unique Joseph’s writing career is in that regard. We’ll keep it simple and stick with the Book of Mormon itself.

The publication of the Book of Mormon was completed when Joseph Smith was 24, though its dictation took place when he was 23. We’ll go with 24 just for the sake of argument, though. It’s commonly claimed that Joseph Smith had three years of formal education, and if we’re trying to align it with an equivalent public school education today, that’s probably not far off. If we’re trying to be technical about it, though, there were seven distinct years in which he received some sort of schooling, including a season in high school when he was 20. We’ll stick with seven years of education for this particular analysis.

If you’re interested in a more in-depth discussion of additional literary characteristics (e.g., reading level; lifetime composition) of the works attributed to Joseph Smith, this one by Brian Hales is a fantastic place to start.

So that’s the evidence as we seem to have it, and on which reasonable people can likely agree. Now, what explanations do we have for that evidence?

The Hypotheses

Joseph Smith as author of the text—According to this theory, Joseph Smith was the sole author of the text and, having produced it, should be considered among the great literary talents of the nineteenth century.

The Book of Mormon as an authentic ancient text—If this theory is correct, Joseph Smith was not the author of the Book of Mormon. The book was instead written by two-dozen authors over a period of a thousand years, and was edited and abridged by an ancient scribe who made doing so his life’s work. There would be no reason to expect the length of the Book of Mormon to align with nineteenth-century literary works.

In addition to these two theories, many have made arguments over the years that some other individual, such as Sidney Rigdon, was the author of the text. Though the available primary evidence doesn’t align well with that theory (and arguments for Sidney’s authorship seem particularly weak), it would be possible to adjust my analysis for any given author by replacing Joseph’s age and education with theirs. As we’ll see, though, age and education don’t end up making much of a difference. Theories that suggest multiple nineteenth-century individuals collaborating to create the book have similar evidentiary problems, and would probably require a different analysis (comparing the Book of Mormon to other collaborative works of fiction, which might be a bit tougher to track down). I’ll be focusing this analysis on Joseph, and let others take up alternative torches if they so desire.

So, given those two competing theories and our background knowledge, how probable would we consider those hypotheses at first blush, before considering any of the evidence?

Prior Probabilities

*Note: If we were doing a complete Bayesian analysis, we would spend more time trying to produce reasonable estimates for these values. But given that no one will ever agree on the likelihood of stuff like angels or seer stones, I’ve opted to use prior probabilities to demonstrate a type of faith journey. As we consider more evidence, both for and against the Book of Mormon, we can track how those beliefs change. Starting with a position of extreme skepticism and having the evidence alter that probability allows us to see that change in action.

PH—Prior Probability of Ancient Authorship—We start with the assumption that the probability of ancient authorship is low to the point of vanishing (1 in 10^40, or p = 1.0 x 10-41).

PA—Prior Probability of the Alternative (Joseph Smith Authorship)—If we assume the probability of ancient authorship is low, then that means we’re assuming that the probability of Joseph Smith authoring the document is high (i.e., extremely close to 1, or, if you want to be a bit more precise, p = 1 – 1.0 x 10-41).

Consequent Probabilities

CH—Consequent Probability of Ancient Authorship—How likely would it be for the Book of Mormon to be its size if it was authored anciently? Well, if Joseph Smith didn’t write the Book of Mormon, then his own age and education aren’t relevant, so we can just leave those factors out. We would instead expect the length of the book to look much more like a collection of scriptural texts than a nineteenth-century work of fiction.

So how does the Book of Mormon compare to that type of collection? The Bible seems like a pretty useful reference in this case, and it makes sense to take a look at it at the level of individual books within the Bible and Book of Mormon (see Table 1 in the Appendix). The average book in the Book of Mormon has 17,989 words, which is obviously more than the Bible’s 11,943 words. However, the word count in the books of the Bible has quite a range, and the standard deviation is 12,352. That would put the Book of Mormon’s count well within a single standard deviation of the Bible’s average, which suggests that the Book of Mormon fits comfortably with what we’d expect for books of scripture.

We can go a step further, though, and estimate a more exact probability that the books of the Book of Mormon fall on the same distribution as the books of the Bible. Since the word counts of the books of the Bible and the Book of Mormon clearly don’t follow a normal distribution, that limits us a bit. But we can use a statistical test like the Independent Samples Mann-Whitney U Test to get what we need. When we conduct that particular test, the probability that the word count distribution differs between those sets of books is p = .535.

Now, that probability is likely too far on the low side—you could argue that the Book of Mormon is structured more like the Old Testament than the New (i.e., as weighted more heavily toward lengthy scribal abridgements than toward brief personal letters). If you only include the books of the Old Testament, the Book of Mormon would look even more similar to the Bible. But we’ll give the critics the benefit of the doubt and stick with our .535 value.

And that fits what would likely be our gut expectation here—if we had a volume of ancient scripture like the Book of Mormon, it wouldn’t be guaranteed to be the size the Book of Mormon actually is, but that sort of length wouldn’t be unexpected by any stretch.

CA—Consequent Probability of Modern Authorship—Now how likely would it be for the Book of Mormon to be its size if it was the product of a single nineteenth-century author of Joseph Smith’s age and education? To figure that out we have to take a close look at some other nineteenth-century authors. I’m not the first to do so, but there may be a few things I can add to what’s come before.

To do that, I relied on this handy Wikipedia list of prominent literary works produced in each decade going back to 1500. It provides a useful sample of highly respected authors within Joseph Smith’s timeframe and, sure enough, Joseph Smith and the Book of Mormon are right there on the list. I took the 116 authors with works published between 1800 and 1860 and used their individual Wikipedia entries (supplemented by Encyclopedia Britannica, when necessary) to keep track of three things: how old they were when they published their first fictional work (of greater than 50 pages), how long that work was (in pages), and how many years of formal education they received (see Table 2 in the appendix).

Now, there are some limitations there to keep in mind. Because I was working with page counts rather than word counts, it was important to get a comparable page count for the Book of Mormon. The Book of Mormon’s pages are quite a bit denser than the average book. If it did have the average number of words per page (which readinglength.com calculates at about 306) it would have 876 pages instead of 531. I also didn’t have precise publication dates for the books, which meant I calculated age at publication by subtracting the birth year from the publication year for each author. Education was tricky as well—some entries didn’t include exact information on formal schooling (particularly for the female authors). I picked the lowest number of years I could justify based on the information available.

All told, it was a horrifically interesting Wiki-binge. A couple things stood out pretty clearly by the end. First, 24 is young for a first-time author, but not horrendously young, and even turned out to be the modal age. The average age at publication was 30, but there were some as young as 16. (In all of the following charts, the red bars indicate where Joseph and the Book of Mormon fall in the distribution of data.)

Second, many of the authors were university educated, and those who weren’t had the benefit of extensive private tutoring. None of them could be plausibly labeled as a country bumpkin. Even those with more spotty education were described as voracious readers as children and were recognized early for their precocious talents (very much in contrast to Joseph Smith). For those with private tutoring, I assumed (conservatively) they had the equivalent of a sixth-grade education.

It’s important to keep in mind, too, that the primary argument about Joseph Smith’s education isn’t that he was too uneducated to write a book. It’s that he didn’t have the very specific education required to produce some of the book’s more impressive (and ancient) literary features. Demonstrating that some other prominent authors had even less education than he did does nothing to counter that argument.

And if we just look at page counts, Joseph Smith is clearly exceptional as a first-time author. Only one comes close to matching his output, and that’s the incomparable Charles Dickens, who seemed to do little else other than write his brain to pieces. I should note, though, that Dickens was about the same age as Joseph at the time his first novel was published, and himself had an atrocious education.

Now, before any critics get too excited, it’s important to keep a few things in mind. Dickens was one of those precociously talented, voracious readers mentioned above. He also wrote his first novel in monthly installments as a serial, being paid for each installment, over a span of 20 months. That may sound quick, but it’s got nothing on Joseph’s 65 working days. Dickens was exceptional in his own right, in part due to a medium that incentivized producing a ton of material. I wouldn’t use him as proof that Joseph could’ve written the Book of Mormon.

Once I had that lovely little dataset, though, I used a form of outlier analysis using a measure called the Mahalanobis Distance to estimate how likely it is that Joseph Smith belonged in the group of nineteenth-century literary masters. When I conduct this sort of analysis in my research, I’m generally looking to see if there are any odd ducks in my data—anything that doesn’t seem to “fit” with the rest of what I’m looking at. The analysis shows me the probability that a particular case belongs to the same distribution of data as the rest of the cases in the dataset. Usually, if that probability is less than 1 in 1000, I’ll toss it aside so it doesn’t mess up the rest of my analyses.

All told, Joseph is a clear outlier. He was younger than average, had substantially less education than average, and, taking all that into account, produced a work far larger than anyone would have guessed. He had a Mahalanobis Distance of 17.5, which, when plugged into a chi-square test with three degrees of freedom (for the number of variables in the analysis), reveals a probability of p = .00055. In other words, we would expect about 55 in 100,000 first-time authors of his age and education to publish a work with the length of the Book of Mormon.

For those who are curious, there was only one other actual outlier in the analysis, but he was an outlier for a different reason. Johann David Wyss wrote his first novel, The Swiss Family Robinson, at the ripe age of 69. If you take out Joseph Smith, then Dickens himself becomes an outlier with a probability of p = .0002, but he makes somewhat less of a splash (p = .001) in a world where the Book of Mormon exists. None of our other candidates even comes close to being an outlier.

(And if it seems like it would be possible to fiddle with the analysis and change the results depending on which books we included, you’re right—it would. Which is why it’s important that I’m not hand-picking—or, if you prefer, cherry picking—which books make it in and which don’t. Basing my sample on Wikipedia entries helps avoid that kind of tom-foolery.)

We can do some further analyses to get a sense of which of those three characteristics—education, age, and length—are contributing most to Joseph’s outlier status. We can remove each of those variables from the analysis, one at a time, and see what happens to the probability when we do. As we might expect from the figures above, removing education and age doesn’t change much—in fact, the probability gets lower (p = .00016 and .00031 respectively). That means the Book of Mormon’s length is what’s setting it apart as an outlier. When we remove length from the analysis, it doesn’t seem like much of an outlier at all (p = .65). It turns out that considering his age and education actually worked a little in favor of the critics, which is a bit surprising given how often the faithful tend to play those things up.

Overall, however, it still seems quite unlikely that any nineteenth-century author would have produced a book with the length of the Book of Mormon as a first-time work. And my estimate, again, is a conservative one—the real probability is probably even lower than that. The power to detect outliers increases as the sample size increases, so odds are good the probability would decrease further if I considered more authors.

Posterior Probability

So what does all this mean for our beliefs about the Book of Mormon? Now we get to plug all those values into Bayes’ formula and see what happens:

PH = Prior Probability of the Hypothesis (1 in 10^40 chance of ancient authenticity, or p = 1.0 x 10-41)
CH = Consequent Probability of the Hypothesis (the probability of an ancient collection of records being as long as the Book of Mormon, or p = .535)
PA = Prior Probability of the Alternate Hypothesis (1 – 1.0 x 10-41 chance of Joseph Smith as author, a very very high initial estimate)
CA = Consequent Probability of the Alternate Hypothesis (our estimate of the probability of a first-time nineteenth-century author publishing a book as long as the Book of Mormon, given his education and age, or p = .00055)
PostProb = Posterior Probability (the new probability of Book of Mormon authenticity)

PH = 1.0 x 10-41

PostProb =

PH * CH

(PH * CH) + (PA * CA)

PostProb =

1.0 x 10-41 * .535

(1.0 x 10-41 * .535) + ((1-1.0 x 10-41) * .00055))

PostProb =

9.99 x 10-39

We can also calculate the “likelihood magnitude,” or an estimate of how many orders of magnitude the probability changes when we consider this evidence.

Lmag = Likelihood Magnitude (an estimate of the number of orders of magnitude that the probability will shift, due to the evidence)

Lmag = log_10(CH/CA)

Lmag = log_10(.535/.00055)

Lmag = log_10(972)

Lmag = 3

Conclusion

It may not look like much happened there. At first glance, you might think that we started with an incredibly small probability of an authentic Book of Mormon and ended up with an incredibly small probability of an authentic Book of Mormon. But after reviewing the evidence, our extreme skeptic would have increased his estimate of an authentic Book of Mormon almost a thousand-fold—a change of about three orders of magnitude. If we were dealing with someone less skeptical—say, someone who gave the Book of Mormon only a 1 in 100 chance of being ancient, just the length of the Book of Mormon alone could be enough to move them to over 90 in 100 odds that it was ancient. That’s not nothing. And that’s all before we even consider what’s actually in the book, or even how the book was translated.

Did I just use Wikipedia to prove that the Book of Mormon is ancient? No. It would be very easy for the actual content of the Book of Mormon to betray itself as a fraud. This is just one piece of a very large corpus of evidence, both scholarly and less so. But it shows how it would be reasonable for someone to pick up the Book of Mormon and get the sense that they should take it seriously. It sets the first block in a foundation of reasoned skepticism—not skepticism of the church’s truth claims (there’s plenty of that to go around), but a skepticism that questions the claim that the Book of Mormon is a modern artifact of nineteenth-century origin.

Skeptic’s Corner

Just so I don’t give you the impression that my analyses are law, with each essay I’ll be taking a minute to more explicitly play the role of skeptic, discussing aspects that I think could be improved or that deserve a bit more investigation. In this case, if I was a critic, I’d wonder how the Book of Mormon stacked up against twentieth- and twenty-first-century authors, to know whether Joseph is still an outlier in that context. It’d also be useful to get a sample of amateur rather than professional authors—perhaps the book’s length could be attributable to his lack of taste or his unrefined literary sensibilities (though whether that supposition would line up with the book’s other qualities is a separate question). And of course, using actual word counts instead of estimated page counts would be helpful as well.

It’s worth noting, too, that considering things like reading level or lifetime composition has a real shot at making this type of evidence much, much stronger. It seems very unusual for someone to have produced so much by the age of 24 and then to write little else to compare to it. It wouldn’t take much to statistically compare authors’ lifetime trajectory of work, similar to how Brian Hales plotted them in his Interpreter article, but we’ll leave such questions for another time (or for others to tackle at their convenience).

Next Time, in Episode 2:

Next week, our skeptic will encounter Joseph’s multiple accounts of the First Vision, and we’ll estimate the probability of producing highly disparate and even contradictory accounts when telling a story years apart in different settings.

Questions, ideas, and sharp objects can be flung in the direction of BayesianBoM@gmail.com or submitted as comments below.

Appendix

Table 1. Scriptural Word Counts

Number

Book

Word Count

1

Genesis

38262

2

Exodus

32685

3

Leviticus

24541

4

Numbers

32896

5

Deuteronomy

28352

6

Joshua

18854

7

Judges

18966

8

Ruth

2574

9

1 Sam

25048

10

2 Sam

20600

11

1 Kings

24513

12

2 Kings

23517

13

1 Chron

20365

14

2 Chron

26069

15

Ezra

7440

16

Nehemiah

10480

17

Esther

5633

18

Job

18098

19

Psalms

42704

20

Proverbs

15038

21

Ecclesiastes

5579

22

Song of Solomon

2658

23

Isaiah

37036

24

Jeremiah

42654

25

Lamentations

3411

26

Ezekiel

39401

27

Daniel

11602

28

Hosea

5174

29

Joel

2033

30

Amos

4216

31

Obadiah

669

32

Jonah

1320

33

Micah

3152

34

Nahum

1284

35

Habukk

1475

36

Zephen

1616

37

Haggai

1130

38

Zechariah

6443

39

Malachi

1781

40

Matthew

23343

41

Mark

14949

42

Luke

25640

43

John

18658

44

Acts

24229

45

Romans

9422

46

1 Cor

9462

47

2 Cor

6046

48

Galatians

3084

49

Ephesians

3022

50

Phillip

2183

51

Collos

1979

52

1 Thess

1837

53

2 Thess

1022

54

1 Tim

2244

55

2 Tim

1666

56

Titus

896

57

Philem

430

58

Hebrews

6897

59

James

2304

60

1 Peter

2476

61

2 Peter

1553

62

1 John

2517

63

2 John

298

64

3 John

294

65

Jude

608

66

Revelation

11952

B01

1 Nephi

26498

B02

2 Nephi

30789

B03

Jacob

9476

B04

Enos

1209

B05

Jarom

773

B06

Omni

1468

B07

Words of Mormon

889

B08

Mosiah

32408

B09

Alma

88358

B10

Helaman

12288

B11

3 Nephi

30060

B12

4 Nephi

2036

B13

Mormon

9865

B14

Ether

17271

B15

Moroni

6454

Table 2. Early 19th Century Authors

Author

Book

Years of Formal Schooling

Age at Publication

Pages

Comments

Joseph Smith

Book of Mormon

7

24

876

Maria Edgeworth

Castle Rackrent

7

32

176

Friedrich Schiller

Die Rauber

13

22

168

Walter Scott

Waverly

14

43

528

Francois Rene de Cautaubriand

Atala

10

33

160

Germaine de Stael

Could not locate.

Jane Porter

Thaddeus of Warsaw

—

26

267

No mention of formal education, but would have been tutored extensively.

Jean Paul

Gronlandische Prozesse

6

20

212

Charles Brockden Brown

Alcuin

6

27

106

Elizabeth Helme

Louisa; or the Cottage on the Moor

—

34

286

No mention of formal education, but would have been tutored extensively.

William Blake

Did not produce novel-length works

Jean-Baptiste Cousin de Grainville

Le Dernier Homme

10

59

400

Elizabeth Meeke

Count St. Blancard

—

34

100

No mention of formal education, but would have been tutored extensively.

Heinrick von Kleist

Die Familie Schroffenstein

9

26

114

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Gotz von Berlichingen

13

24

130

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Zastrozzi

13

18

138

Regina Maria Roche

The Maid of the Hamlet: A Tale

—

29

256

No mention of formal education, but would have been tutored extensively.

Lord Byron

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

15

23

128

Jane Austen

Sense and Sensibility

3

36

368

Johann David Wyss

Swiss Family Robinson

10

69

496

Carles Robert Maturin

The Fatal Revenge

10

27

448

René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt

Could not locate.

William Wordsworth

The Borderers

15

27

140

E.T.A. Hoffmann

Fantasiestücke in Callots Manier

11

38

220

Benjamin Constant

Adolphe

6

49

128

Mary Shelley

Frankenstein

—

21

288

No mention of formal education, but would have been tutored extensively.

Washington Irving

Letters of Jonathan Oldstyle

12

19

67

Alexander Pushkin

Ruslan and Ludmila

10

21

134

Thomas De Quincey

Confessions of an English Opium Eater

7

37

352

Clement Clarke Moore

Did not produce novel-length works

Alexander Griboyedov

Woe From Wit

12

28

204

James Fenimore Cooper

Precaution

11

31

317

Mary Russell Mitford

Watlington Hill

5

25

54

Alessandro Manzoni

Il Conte di Carmagnola

12

34

142

Alfred de Vigny

Éloa, ou La Sœur des Anges

11

27

62

Jane C. Loudon

The Mummy!

—

20

340

Heinrich Heine

Gedichte

11

24

64

John James Audubon

Did not publish fiction.

Thomas Love Peacock

6

30

112

Stendhal

Armance

7

44

170

Victor Hugo

Han d’Islande

8

21

332

John Richardson

Tecumseh

—

32

144

Carl von Clausewitz

Vom Kriege

3

50

142

Nikolai Gogol

Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka

8

22

190

Honoré de Balzac

Les Chouans

10

30

204

Edgar Allen Poe

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

11

29

288

Alexis de Tocqueville

De la démocratie en Amérique (Vol. 1)

12

30

270

Karel Hynek Mácha

Maj

15

25

100

Mikhail Lermontov

A Hero of Our Time

9

25

208

Charles Dickens

The Pickwick Papers

8

24

848

Charles Darwin

The Voyage of the Beagle

10

30

448

Taras Shevchenko

Kobzar

13

26

452

Richard Henry Dana Jr.

Two Years Before the Mast

13

25

190

John Ruskin

The King of the Golden River

7

22

52

Thomas Babington Macaulay

Lays of Ancient Rome

12

42

148

Hans Christian Andersen

Did not produce novel-length works.

Søren Kierkegaard

Did not produce novel length works.

William Harrison Ainsworth

Rookwood

12

29

430

Alexandre Dumas

Captain Paul

—

36

108

"Did not have much of an education."

Domingo Faustino Sarmiento

Facundo

5

34

288

Benjamin Disraeli

Vivian Grey

11

22

348

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Hyperion

14

32

158

Charlotte Brontë

Jane Eyre

7

31

492

Emily Brontë

Wuthering Heights

3

29

416

Frederick Marryat

The Naval Officer

—

37

288

"Son of a merchant prince and member of parliament", so it’s likely he was well educated.

Anne Brontë

Agnes Grey

4

26

192

Charles Kingsley

Yeast

17

29

184

William Makepeace Thackeray

The Memoirs of Mr. C. J. Yellow-Plush

14

26

474

Francis Parkman

The Oregon Trail

16

24

178

Robert Browning

Paracelsus

4

23

104

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Scarlet Letter

15

46

148

George Borrow

The Zincali

12

38

296

Elizabeth Gaskell

Mary Barton

6

38

464

Herman Melville

Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life

7

27

368

Ivan Turgenev

Rudin

18

39

88

Harriet Beecher Stowe

Uncle Tom’s Cabin

15

41

266

Matthew Arnold

The Strayed Reveller, and Other Poems

10

27

68

Charlotte Mary Yonge

Abbeychurch

—

21

268

Educated at home by her father studying latin, greek, french, Euclid, and algebra. Educated until she was 20.

Henry David Thoreau

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

14

32

368

Walt Whitman

Franklin Evans

5

23

208

Bozena Nemcova

Origin (including birthdate and identity) under dispute.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning

The Seraphim, and Other Poems

—

32

384

Educated at home and tutored.

Fitz Hugh Ludlow

The Hasheesh Eater

14

21

228

Thomas Hughes

Tom Brown’s Schooldays

15

35

466

Charles Baudelaire

Fanfarlo

12

26

80

Gustave Flaubert

Rêve d’enfer

13

16

311

George MacDonald

Phantastes: A Fairie Romance for Men and Women

15

34

158

Aleksey Pisemsky

Nina; The Comic Actor; An Old Man’s Sin

6

30

184

Was also tutored at home for several years. Couldn’t find his first novel, but I could find his second published a year later.

Alexander Ostrovsky

Did not produce novel-length works

Ivan Goncharov

A Common Story

14

35

264

George Meredith

The Shaving of Shagpat

8

28

252

Wilkie Collins

Iolani, or Tahiti as It Was; a Romance

5

20

250

Mary Anne Evans

Adam Bede

11

30

608

Eduard Douwes Dekker

Max Havelaar: Or the Coffee Auctions of the Dutch Trading Company

3

40

352

Antanas Baranauskas

Did not produce novel-length works.

Ellen Wood

Danesbury House

—

46

298

No mention of education or tutoring.

Anthony Trollope

The Macdermots of Ballycloran

5

32

364

Charles Reade

Peg Woffington

16

29

106

Sheridan Le Fanu

The Cock and Anchor

4

31

384

Studied law at Trinity College. Was tutored previously (though ineffectively).

Charles Warren Adams

The Notting Hill Mystery

—

32

176

No mention of education. Couldn’t find a good page estimate for Velvet lawn, his first novel.

Nikolay Chernyshevsky

What Is to Be Done?

12

35

464

Mary Elizabeth Braddon

The Trail of the Serpent

—

25

496

"Was privately educated."

Jules Verne

Un prêtre en 1839

12

19

249

Théophile Gautier

Mademoiselle de Maupin

12

24

400

Jorge Isaacs

Maria

9

30

336

Fyodor Dostoevsky

Poor Folk

10

24

112

Lewis Carroll

Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland

5

33

192

Algernon Charles Swinburne

The Queen Mother and Rosamund

11

23

234

Karl Marx

The Holy Family

12

27

116

Henrik Ibsen

Catiline

9

22

125

Bret Harte

Condensed Novels and Other Papers

7

29

332

"Formal schooling ended when he was 13"

Louisa May Alcott

Moods

—

33

178

Tutored by her father and Henry David Thoreau

Edward Everett Hale

The Brick Moon

14

47

232

R. D. Blackmore

Clara Vaughan

10

39

336

Comte de Lautréamont

Les Chants de Maldoror

8

18

342

Leo Tolstoy

Childhood

10

24

336

Contents