Analyzing Thomas Carlyle’s Writings with Voyant

A useful and user-friendly tool for basic digital analysis of texts is Voyant. I used it to analyze five works of Thomas Carlyle, taken from Project Gutenberg. The works chosen were:

Sartor Resartus (1834)

The French Revolution (1838)

On Heroes, Hero-worship and the Heroic in History (1841)

Past and Present (1843)

Latter-day Pamphlets (1850)

These were partly chosen as they are perhaps Carlyle’s most important works, but also because Gutenberg doesn’t have all Carlyle’s works. For example, I would have considered Chartism (1840) had it been there, but it wasn’t (though it can be accessed online via Google Books). Similarly, the massively influential Critical and Miscellaneous Essays (1838) were not there.

There are a couple of other minor caveats:

1) The version of Latter-day Pamphlets used was not the complete version. Like many versions, it consists of only five essays, omitting the final three.

2) The Gutenberg pages analyzed contained not only the texts of the works, but also various paratexts: title and publication details, Gutenberg’s copyright statement, and so on. This is most important regarding Past and Present, which contained an introduction by Ralph Waldo Emerson from the first US edition of the work. For a proper academic analysis, one would have to work on finding or creating a webpage or file with no such paratexts, but for the purposes of this blog, the superfluous material wasn’t enough to seriously upset the findings.

So, I simply copied and pasted the five links to the relevant pages on Gutenberg, then Voyant did the rest, returning a page filled with analysis of Carlyle’s works. First is a word cloud:

This can be adjusted to include from 25 words up. The adjustment bar, however, is very fiddly (at least on my iPad), and it’s hard to adjust the number of words with accuracy or tell what number of words are being shown. The cloud above has about 100 words, the 100 most common words across the texts. The larger the text, the greater the frequency. A quick look tells you that the most frequent word across all the texts is man. Still more pointedly, the second most frequent word is men. By clicking on the words in the cloud, we find that man gets 2293 mentions, men 1815. This tells us already a lot about Carlyle’s writing: he was interested in the male experience, he was troubled and obsessed by ideas of manhood, constantly working through these ideas. The words women and woman get only 182 and 56 mentions respectively. Already we see how Carlyle’s thought is out of kilter with these times.

We can toggle between cloud view and list view of most popular words, and while the former is perhaps more immediately striking and certainly more redolent of digital humanities, the latter view is better for a more exact picture. It allows us to ascertain for certain that he third most popular word is world. This presence illustrates the grandeur of Carlyle’s ambitions. He was a wide-gazing sage, not the narrowly focused expert that is valued in the 21st century. The frequency with which the word world occurs defines perhaps the most important difference between the Victorian intellectual and the contemporary scholar: he is not an expert an any particular thing, but rather strives to comprehend the world as a totality.

Shall is also in the top five. By clicking on the word, we can also see which work it is most popular in. In this case, it’s The French Revolution by quite a distance. This work is ostensibly one of history, but Carlyle is using shall to slip back and forth in time, to predict the future of the past, such as in the word’s very first appearance. This comes in a passage which is very typical of Carlyle, an address to the poverty-stricken masses of pre-revolutionary France on the occasion of a police crackdown on public protests/riots:

O ye poor naked wretches! and this, then, is your inarticulate cry to Heaven, as of a dumb tortured animal, crying from the uttermost depths of pain and debasement? Do these azure skies, like a dead crystalline vault, only reverberate the echo of it on you? Respond to it only by ‘hanging on the following days?’ –Not so: not forever! He are heard in Heaven. And the answer too will come,–in a horror of great darkness, and shakings of the world, and a cup of trembling from which all the nations shall drink. [My italics and underlining]

The cup of trembling was of course the French Revolution itself, which struck fear into the rich and privileged of all countries, and Carlyle is here tapping into the fear among his British readers that the Revolution could spread. So the use of shall here and in other parts of this work is a function of Carlyle’s particular mode, which might be called retroactive prophecy. It harnesses the power of the prophetical voice, with little of the epistemological risk (that is, it can hardly be wrong, because the things prophesied have for the most part already happened).

Table in Voyant showing relative frequency of “shall” in Carlyle’s works.

Voyant also supplies word count for each text. The French Revolution is the longest; Latter-day Pamphlets the shortest – though it is, as noted above, missing part of the originally published material. Not much to analyze there. Potentially more interestingly, there is considerable variation in vocabulary density across the works. Vocabulary density refers to the ratio of different words used to total word count. Carlyle’s highest vocabulary density occurs in Sartor, indicating that it is a more linguistically varied text, perhaps a more demanding and difficult text. As a particular admirer of Sartor, I think it also indicates that this work is the product of a more supple and questioning mind than the other works. The least vocabulary density is found in On Heroes. When one remembers that this work began as a series of lectures, this seems a deliberate choice by Carlyle, streamlining his vocabulary to make his ideas more accessible to a listening audience without the possibility of going back and reading over difficult parts.

Average words per sentence is another indicator of complexity. Here On Heroes has lowest wps, showing it again as the least complex text. The highest wps, though, is Pamphlets. This is an interesting development, as Carlyle’s wps had previously fallen from the heights of Sartor, but here hit a new peak. This anomalous situation warrants more developed study than I can give it here.

In the screenshot above, the final category is Distinctive Words. This means the words which characterize individual works but rarely or never appear in the other texts analyzed. Most of the words involved are proper nouns, generally the names of the works’ main characters: so Teufelsdrockh is the most distinctive word in Sartor, because Diogenes Teufelsdrockh is the book’s protagonist; abbot is the most distinctive word in Past and Present, because Abbot Samson is that book’s focus. Thus, this category seems too predictable to be really insightful, at least in the examples here.

I have only scraped the surface of the many possibilities of Voyant, not only for studies of a single author, but also, and perhaps especially, for comparison between authors. Thus I will undoubtedly return to this tool sooner rather than later, perhaps to compare Carlyle’s texts to those of some of his contemporaries. The most impressive things about the tool, in my opinion, are its astonishing ease of use (fiddly bar accompanying word cloud aside) and user-friendliness, and the fact that it is, as of now, totally free.

Sherlock Hound The Four Signatures: Dogs, Blondes and Lestrade as Saviour

The Italo-Japanese animated series Sherlock Hound produced 26 episodes in 1984-5 (production actually started in 1981 and was held up because of disputes with the Doyle estate). The series looks like a cousin of the better known Spanish-Japanese 80s cartoon series Dogtanian and the Muskehounds and Around the World with Willy Fog. The Great Detective is, in Hound, an anthropomorphic dog, but characterologically broadly similar to standard Holmeses. The series was aimed at children, so there are some differences in character and theme from other avatars. This is clear in the first episode, rendered in English as “The Four Signatures”, obviously based on Doyle’s The Sign of Four (1888). Several of the episodes in the series were directed by the great Hayao Miyazaki, but this is not one of them.

The title slide, reproduced here in the Spanish-language version (as this version, and not the English, is readily available online), pays obeisance to the fetishistic nature of Sherlock Holmes. More than an individual, the Holmes of screen adaptations is a clutter of objects that hang together to form the outline of a Great Detective: a deerstalker cap, a magnifying glass, a curved pipe.

The first episode opens with an idyllic rural scene, as Sherlock Hound drives contentedly along a quiet country road amidst rolling greenery and distant hills. Above are blues skies with wisps of cloud. The setting reflects the classical perception of the “green and pleasant land” of England.

Hound himself looks younger than other avatars. In so far as one can age an anthropomorphic cartoon dog, he looks to be in his twenties. This youth is especially evident in scenes where he take off the deerstalker to reveal a spiky hairstyle.

Deerstalker, check; curved pipe, check; Inverness cape, check; dog face, check

Hound meets with a slight adventure on the journey when he tries to pass a carriage which blocks him and within which is a young lady who hurriedly closes the shades when she sees Hound trying to glimpse inside. Here are the initiating mysteries of the episode, elements of the hermeneutic code described by Barthes: Who is driving the carriage? Why are they driving it so fast and erratically? Who is the nervous-seeming young lady? And what lies behind the air of secrecy that surrounds the carriage and its occupants?

The young lady in the carriage

Having finally made the overtaking maneuver, Hound soon finds himself at the port from which he is to embark by ship. At the dock, he sees the young lady from the carriage, and its driver, a bulky older gentleman. He is behaving in a suspicious manner: “That man is hiding something”, Hound announces to himself.

As Hound embarks, we are introduced to Watson, who is also boarding. Watson is an apparently older man/dog, thickset where Hound is slender, and heavily moustached. It is Watson, not Hound, who quickly finds out extensive information on the mysterious young lady and her older man, who is her father and whose name is Lord George. The young lady’s name is Barbara, and she is 20 years old. Watson’s infodump prompts the following exchange:

Hound: When it comes to blondes, your spirit of observation is truly exceptional.

Watson: Don’t you always say that the deductive capacities improve in the presence of beautiful blondes?

Hound: Elementary, my dear Watson.

Thus H&W are given a rather surprising and certainly non-canonical preoccupation with blonde females, a theme in the series which I will return to later on.

[Important note: this exchange is translated from the Spanish-language version of the episode, which I found here. On watching the English version, I found that no such exchange was present, and the scene had been dubbed entirely differently! Neither English nor Spanish was the original language of the series, so I’m not sure which version best reflects the original. For now, then, I’m leaving it as I first found it in the Spanish version.]

Bluff and sturdy Watson

At this point, H&W’s reflections are cut short by a ship containing “Bengal Pirates”. H&W descend to Lord George and Barbara’s cabin, wherein Holmes effectively concludes the mystery element of the episode by explaining that the Bengal Pirates have come to kill Lord George, who was once part of their number, but betrayed them and stole their treasure. This plot line is very similar to The Sign of Four, including the presence of the beautiful daughter. In Doyle’s novel, Watson goes on to marry the daughter, named Mary Morstan.

Now mystery gives way to adventure, as the BPs attempt to board the passenger ship, leading to a chase between the BPs and H&W, who embark in a small boat (rigged up from Holmes’s car) with Lord George’s jewels. They lead the BPs into the treacherous waters around some pillars of rock.

But H&W are eventually cornered and it seems the game is up. Unusually, however, and certainly in marked contrast to the Ronald Howard Holmes I wrote on recently, Lestrade arrives to save the day. A naval battalion arrives, manned by a corpus of blue-suited policeman, their look clearly based on English policemen, fronted by Lestrade. For Lestrade to become the detective’s saviour is a very unusual development in a Holmes story, especially in an introductory episode to a series.

Finally, the episode ends with Watson declaring his intention to court Barbara [In Spanish. The English version includes no reference to any intended courtship. In its place is a line about H&W’s “future sports”.] Both Watson’s earlier admiring comments and comparisons with The Sign of Four made this a predictable outcome. It appears to provide a setup for the rest of the series.

The end of the adventure: Holmes and Watson shake hands, while Barbara and Lord George await them on the ship.

In fact, Barbara doesn’t appear or even get mentioned again, but her centrality here prefigures the most notable character change in this series: Mrs Hudson becomes Marie Hudson, another blonde woman/dog and a central figure rather than the peripheral figure she is in most adaptations. She is also much younger than most versions, and an object of romantic longing for most of the characters. Her lovableness forms the basis of one of the Miyazaki episodes, “Mrs Hudson is Taken Hostage” (Ep. 4), in which Moriarty kidnaps and then falls hopelessly in love with her, as do his two henchmen.

Mrs Hudson, angel in the house, and agent of justice in some episodes.

The Hound of the Baskervilles (1959): Spicy Latinas, Class Exploitation and Excellent Steepling

Fresh from their success with Dracula, England’s Hammer studios re-engaged the acting talents of Peter Cushing (Holmes) and Christopher Lee (Sir Henry Baskerville) in their take on Doyle’s classic tale.

It had been 20 years since Basil Rathbone had initiated his Holmes career in Hound of the Baskervilles, so the story was due a revisit. Cushing’s Hound would be of another genre to Rathbone’s. Hammer was a horror studio so an accentuation of the gothic horror elements of Hound was on the cards: more hellhound, more ruined churches, more direct evocations of the horror of being immersed in Grimpen Mire itself.

For openers, though, Hammer went with a longish prologue (about 9 minutes) recounting the legend of Sir Hugo and the Hound. Doyle, as was his custom, opened with a long and not unamusing dialogue between Holmes and Watson in Holmes’s quarters. Most adaptations, however, stay away from Doyle’s talky openings. This film simply lifts the legend recounted by Dr Mortimer in Chapter 2 of Hound and presents it directly at the beginning.

Placement in the narrative aside, the legend is lifted almost intact from Doyle. There are a couple of changes: in the film, the young village girl who the “wild, profane and godless” Sir Hugo pursues flees to a ruined abbey on the moor and it is caught and murdered there by Sir Hugo; in Doyle, there is no church, and the girl dies “of fear and of fatigue” on the moor before Hugo can catch her.

Village girl hides out in a ruined abbey while being sought by Sir Hugo

This prologue works thematically as it sets up the ideas of class relations that plays a surprisingly large role in this adaptation. This opening shows Sir Hugo treating the local peasantry as objects for his exploitation and enjoyment, and milder forms of this upper-class arrogance echo through the film.

Hugo himself, of course, quickly gets his comeuppance, when, the legend says, the Hound appears and rips his throat out. And, thereafter, the Baskervilles are prone to sudden and mysterious death, still paying for the sins of their ancestor.

Such is the tale, my sons, of the coming of the hound which is said to have plagued the family so sorely ever since. If I have set it down it is because that which is clearly known hath less terror than that which is but hinted at and guessed. Nor can it be denied that many of the family have been unhappy in their deaths, which have been sudden, bloody, and mysterious. Yet may we shelter ourselves in the infinite goodness of Providence, which would not forever punish the innocent beyond that third or fourth generation which is threatened in Holy Writ. To that Providence, my sons, I hereby commend you, and I counsel you by way of caution to forbear from crossing the moor in those dark hours when the powers of evil are exalted. – The Hound of the Baskervilles, Chapter 2

In the context of Sir Hugo’s actions, our first introduction to Sir Henry Baskerville is notable. In a key early scene of the film, H&W enter Sir Henry’s hotel room and greet him. He is fixing his tie in the mirror and doesn’t bother to look around to acknowledge them. Instead, assuming he is speaking to the hotel manager, he begins to complain in an overbearing and arrogant manner about his (the manager’s) tardy arrival and the disappearance of a boot.

Sir Henry Baskerville (Christopher Lee) fixes his tie.

The superciliousness of Sir Henry’s behavior is of course accentuated by the choice of actor to play him: Christopher Lee. Lee had just played the archetypal upper-class predator in Hammer’s Dracula, and another recent role was as the villainous Marquis St Evremonde in A Tale of Two Cities (1958). In the latter, indeed, his character rapes a peasant girl in scenes very reminiscent of this film’s opening. Lee’s characteristic lordliness was used to effect in villainous roles, but in this adaptation the same lordliness is an element of a benevolent character.

When he finally realizes that he is not speaking to a member of the serving classes, Henry is appropriately apologetic, and he soon builds a friendly relationship with H&W. This close relationship is only threatened late on when Holmes makes a jeering remark about Henry’s “peasant friends”. Holmes is here being rude with a strategic purpose rather than making a straightforward expression of class prejudice, but the form his remark takes is also important. It annoys Henry greatly, getting at the root of his class consciousness, and that of the film.

Peter Cushing is seen by many as one of the best Holmeses and physically he fits the role very well: tall, slim, grave expression, keen eyes, ghostly pallor, sharp features. Intelligent and alert but slightly otherworldly. He may also have been reading up on Holmes’ physical mannerisms, for he makes copious use of the steepled fingers pose, a favorite of Holmes and one in which he engages in Hound among other of Doyle’s works.

Sydney Paget illustration from Hound showing Sherlock Holmes in finger-steepling mode.

Cushing with steepled fingers, index of intellectual engagement.

If Cushing is a classical Sherlock Holmes, the most radical character change in the film is that of the novel’s Beryl Stapleton, Henry’s love interest in novel and film. Her first name is now Cecile, she is Stapleton’s daughter, and the central emphasis is on her having Spanish blood and being a variation on the spicy Latina/Latina spitfire stereotype. (Doyle mentions at the end of HOTB that she has Costa Rican blood.) As such, she is deeply sexualized but emotionally volatile, and ultimately as dangerous as the murderous Stapleton himself. It is his lust for her that brings Henry into danger, and it is implied by Cecile herself that lust has been the curse of all the Baskervilles, from Sir Hugo onwards.

Sir Hugo died here. His throat was torn out because of a girl. And Sir Charles, your dear uncle. He died here, didn’t he? Died because he wanted me, like you!

Cecile mocks Henry as she waits for the hound to tear his throat out. Her triumph, alas, is short lived.

Cecile is a product of the prurient, even perverse, attitude to sexuality in Hammer films: these films are predicated on the indulgence followed by the harsh punishment of sexual impulses. The viewer can watch with voyeuristic enjoyment, then join the gentlemanly protagonists in condemning with puritanical vigor.

Our first glimpse of Cecile Stapleton, a sullen yet passionate young lady of Spanish extraction.

Somewhat in line with this Puritanism, perhaps, is the portrayal of Bishop Frankland (Mr Frankland in the novel). The Bishop is an eccentric, treated with amused indulgence in the film. The Hound of the Baskervilles thus answers to Žižek’s definition of cynical ideology, wherein the dominant ideology is reinforced not by strict enforcement of strict obedience, but by toleration of and encouragement of an attitude of cynical but resigned distance to it. In this context, the real political danger is the true believer, the one who takes it all too seriously. (I also discuss this here with regard to Joseph Conrad’s Chance.) When things get serious, Holmes becomes more straightforwardly ideologically aligned to Frankland. He asks him rhetorically:

Will it help if I tell you I am fighting evil? Fighting it as surely as you do.

Holmes and Bishop Frankland have an important conversation.

Organized religion and its representatives, then, can’t always be taken seriously, but must be respected at moments of crisis. (The 1954 War of the Worlds performs a similar ideological repositioning of H.G. Wells’ text.) Hammer thus strives for a delicate balance in tapping into a conservative strain of their audience while also being purveyors of horror and sex. They foreground sex in the story, but make it Spanish. They foreground class tension, too, and hint at a regret for the loss of the old days of aristocratic domination. But even here, perhaps rather than adding their own spin, they are picking up on a thread from Doyle. Recall Watson’s reflections as he gazed upon the visage of Sir Henry:

[A]s I looked at his dark and expressive face I felt more than ever how true a descendant he was of that long line of high-blooded, fiery, and masterful men. There were pride, valour, and strength in his thick brows, his sensitive nostrils, and his large hazel eyes. If on that forbidding moor a difficult and dangerous quest should lie before us, this was at least a comrade for whom one might venture to take a risk with the certainty that he would bravely share it. (HOTB, Ch. 6)

It would take Hammer to take this strain of the original and run with it, turning this film into an intriguing and distinctive addition to the extended Holmesian corpus.