A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, viewed via Word Cloud Plus
![Profile image of Ray Poynter](/_next/image?url=https%3A%2F%2Fcms.wordcloudplus.com%2Fcontent%2Fimages%2F2023%2F04%2Fray-poynter-wide.jpeg&w=3840&q=75)
Ray Poynter
I downloaded a text copy of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol from Project Gutenberg. The story contains just over 29,000 words.
I started with the default word cloud (50 items, Combination Counting, max phrase length 4 words, standard English stop words). This produced the map below.
![Word cloud from A Christmas Carol](https://cms.wordcloudplus.com/content/images/2022/12/Christmas-Carol.png)
To be honest, I feel I could probably have stopped at this point. The word cloud tells us that this is a story about Scrooge, that it is set at Christmas, and that the key players were the Ghosts, Scrooge’s nephew and family.
By clicking on ‘cried scrooge’ I can read the occurrences of that phrase in the book, as shown below.
- remember it! cried scrooge with fervour i could walk it blindfold
- there's the parrot! cried scrooge
- cried scrooge
- no more! cried scrooge
- to-night! cried scrooge
- have they no refuge or resource? cried scrooge
- cried scrooge
- i don't know what to do! cried scrooge
- there's the saucepan that the gruel was in! cried scrooge
- what's to-day? cried scrooge
- i shall love it as long as i live! cried scrooge
We can see that Scrooge starts confident, moves into anguish, and emerges reconciled.
However, to make this post a little more interesting, I will highlight a few tweaks that I will apply to the text.
In the word cloud, we see references to ghost and also to spirit. When I look at the references for spirit, I see that they are primarily substitutes (in this particular book) for the word ghost. For example,
- spirit must have heard him thinking
- finding that the spirit made towards
- said the spirit
- the spirit gazed upon him mildly
- you recollect the way? inquired the spirit
I used the Replace function to change all the instances of “spirit” with “ghost”.
To help highlight the themes, I used colour coding for topics such as Scrooge, the other people, ghosts, and Christmas and moved the words to show these groupings.
![Word Cloud for A Christmas Carol after processing](https://cms.wordcloudplus.com/content/images/2022/12/Christmas-Carol--1-.png)
So what?
The word cloud does not tell the story of Charles Dickens’ Christmas Carol. If I were in a hurry to understand the key elements of the book, I would now have a good starting point for skim-reading the book to find out what the real story was. Or, if I knew the story, this word cloud might help me articulate the components that Charles Dickens used in telling his story of redemption.