This study was designed by a research group made up of literary scholars and psychologists, and it is meant to address important questions in and across both fields. Our chief working hypothesis is that novelists, as they construct characters in fiction, intuitively use the same motives and personality traits identified by psychologists as basic to describing “character” in everyday life. This study is a type of “census” of vital statistics about the population of “Victorian” literary characters -- the first of its kind. The “census-taker” is you, the individual coder sitting at his or her computer. Anyone who has read a Victorian novel is qualified to participate. We want to gather information that will allow us systematically to address questions like the following: What features of characterization do males, females, antagonists, protagonist, and other character types tend to share? What exactly makes them different? Do these characteristics change much as we cross historical boundaries? How do these characteristics vary by sex of author? How about by sex or age of the interpreter? What can consistent differences between protagonists and antagonists tell us about the moral universe that gave birth to the novels? Do people generally agree about interpretation of character? Or are there large subjective differences? Finally, can we do a better job of answering certain literary questions by systematically gathering data about reader response? And, on the flip side, can literary works be mined as rich sources of data for formal psychological studies? These are just some of the important questions we hope to address in our study.