Since there were delays in getting text mining data back, I have been using WordHoard to run experiments about Victorian deathbed scenes for a chapter in my dissertation. There is perhaps no other scene as quintessentially Victorian as the deathbed scene, which permeates the novels of the period. Deathbed scenes are sentimental scenes, but they are a subset of sentimentality. Because of this, I was able to work with smaller amounts of data, and WordHoard proved very useful. I created a training set consisting of 16 of the most-talked-about deathbed scenes in Victorian literature, and I used WordHoard to examine the lexicon of these scenes. I broke the results down by part of speech and looked at the top 20 adjectives, verbs, and nouns. Here's an excerpt describing what I found:

The words that appear in the list seem to stress this convention of describing death as bittersweet. You might expect the word "dead" to appear in the top list of adjectives, but you might not expect to find "happy," for example. Moreover, there is a reflection of the idea of the "good death" even in the vocabulary: "good," "better," and "great" all appear. The lists also indicate the ways that authors stress youth: "young," "child," and "boy." There is a physicality in the list of nouns, which includes the specific parts of the body, the "hand," the "face," the "heart," and the "eye." Finally, in both the list of nouns and the lists of verb, words that reflect an interest in last looks and words stand out: "word," "speak," "tell," "look," "see," "say," "hear," and "eye." These lists form the beginning of the ways that micro-patterns parallel the larger thematic patterns in the texts.

I then ran a comparison between these deathbed scenes and the testbed set of eighty novels to obtain a statistical measure (the log likelihood ratio G²) of which words were over-represented and which were under-represented in the deathbed scenes.

Here's the list of words that are over-represented in deathbed scenes:

It's certainly not the most cheerful of lists, but it corroborates our expectations, given the thematic patterns that we have identified. We would expect to find words that set the scene - descriptions of the bed, the room, the chamber, the nursing, the physician. We also would expect to find words that convey emotion - sobbing, tears, and exclamations. Likewise, this list is a reminder of how death is a domestic affair. Not only is there an emphasis on that most domestic of spaces, the bedroom, but the vocabulary emphasizes the most intimate relationships - child, mamma, papa, darling. We also see in this list a reflection of the thematic importance of last words - watching the lips for a whisper given with a dying breath. Finally, we again see evidence here in the vocabulary of the deathbed scene of the idea of a "good death" - the dead are sent to that "fable-land" having obtained or granted "forgiveness" and so they are finally at "peace."

On the other side, the words that are under-represented in deathbed scenes include words that have to do with class - "lord," "gentleman," "money". I also found a trend in the list toward generalities. While the words the were over-represented had specific pronouns like "he" and "she," this other list covers general groups of people - "people," "gentleman," "woman," "person." And even though "family" makes the list of under-represented words, it also is a generic term as opposed to the more familiar "mammas" and "papas."

I'm very interested in the ways that Dickens both creates and re-creates topoi in Victorian fiction, and so I used one of the most notorious scenes in Victorian fiction, the death of Little Nell, (a scene that literally defines sentimentality in The Glossary of Literary Terms) as a point of comparison. I combined the two chapters that describe Nell's death and used WordHoard to run a comparison of overall document similarity between those chapters and the chapters from the testbed set of eighty novels. I was aiming to see which chapters were most similar to Little Nell's death on the basis of lemmata, and I looks at the binary cosine similarity measure.

Predictably, Dickens is most similar to Dickens. Of the top 100 chapters (out of 4,477 total chapters) that most closely resembled the two chapters from The Old Curiosity Shop, seventy-seven were chapters written by Dickens. Of these seventy-seven, eighteen were other chapters from The Old Curiosity Shop, which is as expected. Dickens has set a tone and a pattern in the novel, and it makes sense that the most frequent matches should thus come from the same novel. The top five chapters included, in order, chapter 58 of Nicholas Nickleby, chapters 55 and 54 from The Old Curiosity Shop, chapter 16 of Dombey and Son and chapter 14 from Little Dorrit.

Thirty-three of the top 100 chapters were written by other authors, including all three of the Brontë sisters, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell, Mrs. Henry Wood, Margaret Oliphant, George Eliot, Frederick Farrar, Elizabeth Charles, and Frances Trollope. Some of the scenes from my original workset of deathbed scenes appeared in the list, including Lady Isabel's death in East Lynne and Russell's death in Eric, or, Little By Little. Other chapters describe sickbeds rather than deathbeds: the chapter in Shirley in which Caroline thinks she will die, but recovers after Mrs. Pryor reveals the secret that she is her mother and the chapter in which Susan is recalled from the "trance of death" by her mother's arms in Salem Chapel. The two authors whose chapters were most often ranked as similar to Dickens' chapters were Charlotte Mary Yonge (eight chapters), Wilkie Collins (eight chapters) and Elizabeth Gaskell (seven chapters). Of the three, Yonge perhaps is with whom Dickens would cringe at an association. In Household Words, he criticized Guy of Morville's death as "absurd," accusing Yonge of "a lack of experience of human nature" (qtd in Holubetz 15). For Collins and Gaskell, however, Dickens had a respect borne out by their working relationship. Wilkie Collins' associations with Dickens are so strong that he has been called the "Dickensian Ampersand" (Victorian Web).

The rest of my chapter focuses on a comparison between Dickens's deathbed scene of Little Nell and Gaskell's death of Ruth, an unmarried mother (one of the most scandalous characters in Victorian literature). I explore the political implications of how Gaskell uses the "Little Nell" formula for the death of this more controversial characters. It is through Ruth's death, as critic Garrett Stewart would argue is the case with any death scene, that Gaskell is able to write Ruth's identity. And it is in the scene of her inevitable death that Ruth, the fallen woman, is raised to most resemble the virtuous woman-child, Nell.

On a linguistic level, the chapters describing the deaths of the two heroines bear similarities. Again, I used WordHoard to generate corpora for the two scenes and sorted the results by part of speech and frequency. The most frequent adjectives Gaskell uses in the chapter that describes Ruth's death include "still," "even," "dead," "other," and "poor," which ranked 4th, 6th, 4th, 6th (a tie), and 11th respectively in The Old Curiosity Shop's chapters. The top nouns used by Gaskell had to do with time, place and relationships: "mother," "time," "room," "bed," "eye," "world," and "day." The same can be said for Dickens, with a few exceptions: "man," "hand," "time," "day," "child," "life," "night." The lemma "man" seems to be so frequent in Dickens because it is a group of men who come to Nell's bedside, while in Ruth, it is her adopted family and her son who gather around to hear her final words.

It is in her description of the moment of Ruth's death that Gaskell is most Dickensian. Dickens emphasizes the "peace and perfect happiness" (540) that was written on the dead girl's face, and this is echoed in Gaskell's description of how, in the end, Ruth "was happy and at peace." In both descriptions, the location of the deathbed is stressed as having played a part in the heroine's life. Dickens reminds us of how "the old fireside had smiled upon that same sweet face" and how she had "seemed to fill with life" the "ancient rooms" (540). Gaskell puts Ruth to rest in "the attic-room in which her baby had been born, her watch over him kept, her confession to him made." Neither heroine holds any rancor in the end for how they were treated. Dickens says that Nell's mutterings "were of no painful scenes, but of those who had helped and used them kindly," and that "she had never murmured or complained" (541). Gaskell likewise describes how Ruth "displayed no outrage or discord even in her delirium." Music plays a roll in both scenes. Nell, like Ruth "wandered in her mind" and hears "beautiful music" (541). Ruth, in a "sweet, child-like insanity" sang the songs that her mother had taught her: "one childish ditty without let or pause." Both heroines are surrounded by loved ones who watch quietly. The group of men at Nell's deathbed whispered and "moved so gently, that their footsteps made no noise" (540). At Ruth's deathbed, her loved ones "stood around her bedside, not speaking, or sighing, or moaning; they were too much awed by the exquisite peacefulness of her look for that." At the very end, Nell "opens her eyes at last" and dies with "a lovely smile upon her face" (541). Similarly, Gaskell describes how "suddenly Ruth opened wide her eyes, and gazed intently forwards, as if she saw some happy vision, which called out a lovely, rapturous, breathless smile" (PG). Leonard, Ruth's child, lets out "a cry heard through the house," and Gaskell describes him as "one refusing to be comforted." Nell's grandfather, who is characterized as childlike throughout Dickens' novel, "uttered a cry never to be forgotten" and refuses to believe that she is dead, "waving off" the comfort that his brother offers (536, 538). Finally, both authors use stark repetition in their scenes of pathos. Dickens repeats over again the phrase "she was dead" (538-540), and Gaskell first has Mr. Davis declare, "She is dead!" before ending the chapter in a bleak fragment: "But Ruth lay dead."

Even a character like Ruth, who is flawed, who has committed an unspeakable sin in the eyes of Victorian society, deserves the dignity of a good death. For Gaskell, death is less a reminder of social status or even moral status than a reminder of human status. In her use of the topos here, Gaskell is guiding the reader through the "appropriate" emotional response. The pattern, which had been established through Dickens, is re-employed.

Catherine and I are talking about the possibility of using the program that Tanya is working with to explore the parts of speech that occur n words away from major characters. It will be a tag cloud around the characters - I would like to compare the clouds around Ruth, Paul Dombey, Little Nell, Russell, Lady Isabel, etc. I also would love to just focus on Dickens' major sentimental characters and the tags around them.