This review is contributed by Mads Golding, a playwright, writer, and independent scholar who focuses on Charles Dickens and the long 19th century. She is a staff writer for The Dickens Society.

Dr. Michaela Mahlberg spoke at the 28th annual Dickens Society Conference to announce the launch of CliC, a new virtual project designed to use linguistic data to help academic and creative researchers approach their texts more efficiently. CliC is a project designed in collaboration between the University of Birmingham and the University of Nottingham. It’s a piece of software that identifies word patterns and usage in novels to better understand the worlds created by the Victorian writers in question (in this case, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, and Bram Stoker, amongst others), whom we cannot consult because they are long dead.  Dr. Mahlberg’s lecture tackled one of the age-old questions facing education;

How do we teach creative writing?

(Michaela Mahlberg, “Can Dickens Help Us Teach Creative Writing?” – (Lecture, The Dickens Society Symposium, University Rochester, New York, July 17, 2023))

In the context of the Dickens Society conference, how can we use Dickens to teach creative writing? Dickens had multiple simultaneous careers; he worked as a philanthropist, a charitable contributor, a journalist, and, most famously, a creative writer. Dickens is known for using floral, creative, and visually evocative language. Dr. Mahlberg and her team believe that by analyzing the vocabulary that Dickens used to anchor his creative narratives in reality, researchers and creatives can learn about the key concerns of the characters and, by extension, the author and audience. Dr. Mahlberg elaborated on the importance of analyzing linguistic patterns to better understand the world generated by each of Dickens’s novels. Researchers can explore Victorian themes and vocabulary using CLiC to comprehend what kinds of social concerns occupied writers of the era:

“Words are at the heart of the matter we read – and we must assume that the fictional world we read about reflects our world until we are told otherwise. If the reader does not trust the rules of the fictional space, they cannot relate to the characters. Creativity requires convention in order to remain legible to its audience.”

(Michaela Mahlberg, “Can Dickens Help Us Teach Creative Writing?” – (Lecture, The Dickens Society Symposium, University Rochester, New York, July 17, 2023))

“Who lights the candles? How do urban working-class folks wake up when there are no roosters crowing? What (technically) is the difference between a butler and a footman?”

(Michaela Mahlberg, “Can Dickens Help Us Teach Creative Writing?” (Lecture, The Dickens Society Symposium, University Rochester, New York, July 17, 2023))

I began experimenting with the search tool using single words linked to common themes in two different nineteenth-century novels; Bleak House and Dracula. In the example below, I used the word “law”, to see how many times the word “law” appeared, and where in the narrative the subject appeared.  

Dracula, at 450 pages, is only half the length of Bleak House, which clocks in at 890 pages. However, the tool indicates that the law plays an important role in both books since the word “law” appears in similar positions in the narrative arc.

I changed tactics and searched for: “starvation,” “food,” and “cold,” the combination that frequently led to death in the Victorian era. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this trio appeared frequently in Bleak House, Little Dorrit, Our Mutual Friend, and Daniel Deronda. Daniel Deronda was included to provide a novel similar in length to Little Dorrit and Our Mutual Friend that could provide data from a Victorian novel outside the Dickensian canon. The following figure includes works by Brontë, Makepeace Thackeray, and Gaskell to show the breadth of the database. All of these novels deal with city-dwelling characters trying to survive the class system in environments wherein resources are scarce and extreme weather conditions can lead to terminal illness:

I then pivoted and searched for “sew,” “spoon,” and “cook,” all of which are vocabulary words associated with daily house chores. I did this to try and create a vocabulary sample to explore how many 19th-century novels mention some of the daily chores of working-class characters. It’s important to note that the vocabulary describing mundane, daily chores does not necessarily encompass the multifaceted experiences of working-class characters. Equally, words like this might well reflect the number of domestic scenes (or lack thereof) in a novel. Because Dracula is an epistolary novel written from the perspective of a young clerk, the above sample shows that the books that had fewer instances of these words had more domestic scenes at the beginning and the end of the novels, and those that featured them more heavily scattered throughout the narrative, which suggests that some narratives follow the plots concerning working-class characters more closely.

Any industry that wishes to communicate its discoveries or developments to the outside world needs to use some form of language to communicate to its given audience. The vocabulary of a novel can tell you which social region is being explored, and which stories have the privilege of being published.

Dr. Mahlberg emphasized that this project represents a milestone in using empirical data in a humanities setting. The project covers novels from the Regency, Victorian, and Edwardian periods to explore linguistic shifts and analyze the implications of the subsequent lexical results. Creative writing is not an activity relegated to the often arguably subjective space of the humanities.

CliC could enhance historical writing projects of authors of historical fiction who are trying to make their narratives sound authentic by mimicking language used by authors of the age.  

To learn more about CliC and explore its possibilities, visit: https://www.birmingham.ac.uk/schools/edacs/departments/englishlanguage/research/projects/clic/index.aspx 

Work Cited

Mahlberg, Michaela. “Can Dickens Help Us Teach Creative Writing?” The Dickens Society Symposium, 17 July 2023, University of Rochester, New York, Lecture.