I came here via Luzula's journal, and I'm glad I found this post. I love this sort of "text analysis statistics" or whatever the proper name for it is. Thanks for posting!

It's also interesting to see the confirmation that novelists writing in the 18th century *did* use quite a lot of contractions. Some modern authors of historical fiction seem to have decided to follow the rule "never ever use contractions under any circumstances", which can be quite painful to read :D