Charles Dickens, 1843
A Christmas Carol word cloud
A word cloud of Dickens's A Christmas Carol: Scrooge, the spirits, the Cratchits and the phrases that recur across the five staves. With ideas for classroom use.
The source
Novella in five staves, first published 1843
A Christmas Carol is in the public domain. Project Gutenberg publishes the full text free, so you can paste it into WordCloud+ yourself.
Project Gutenberg eBook #46How we made it
Made in WordCloud+ from the text of the book. Single words and multi-word phrases are ranked together, which is why names such as tiny tim and phrases such as merry christmas appear as one term. The exact settings behind this image were not recorded. A closely matching cloud in Ray Poynter's post, linked below, used 50 terms, phrases of up to four words and standard English stop words.
Read Ray Poynter's look at A Christmas Carol in WordCloud+Read it carefully
Word size shows how often a word or phrase occurs. It does not measure how important a theme is, and ideas Dickens expresses in varied words can look smaller than repeated names and speech tags.
What this cloud can show
- Scrooge dwarfs every other term, and he recurs in phrases too: cried scrooge, asked scrooge, scrooge looked, scrooge knew. The narration follows him from the first stave to the last.
- The Cratchit family is prominent through tiny tim, bob cratchit, young cratchits and bob, a starting point for discussing poverty and family in the book.
- Of the three spirits, only the ghost of christmas present appears by full name, alongside marley's ghost, spirit and replied the ghost. Ask students why the others might be named less often, then check the text.
- Sensory words such as cold, fire, light, night and door give a way into how Dickens builds atmosphere.
Try this in class
- 1Create a separate cloud for each of the five staves and compare how Scrooge's language changes from the first stave to the last.
- 2Add scrooge to Stop Words so the other characters and themes have more room in the cloud.
- 3With Premium, use Coding to tag phrases for themes such as wealth, poverty, memory or generosity, then read the passages where each theme's phrases appear.
Start with a question, then read the text.
Use a cloud to find patterns worth discussing, then read the passages behind them.