Much of Eliot’s works explore the tension between subjectivity and objectivity – the interplay between personal emotions, perceptions, and biases, and the objective reality of the external world. This theme is intricately woven throughout her novels in various ways.

Collectively, these keywords reflect a range of psychological, emotional, and cognitive elements that contribute to the complexity of human thought and behaviour. What does running a concordance search on them tell you about how to present the subjective experience of alternating characters? How does Eliot use these words to highlight the interpretive nature of human experience? See, for example, ‘seemed’, ‘something’, ‘reasons’, ‘if’ and ‘resolve’.

What surprises do you run into along the way? Take the word ‘ardor‘, for example. In Middlemarch this word is frequently used by Lydgate, not to refer to his romantic inclinations but in reference to his medical career.

What does running a concordance search for words like ‘self’, ‘egoism,’ ‘memories’, ‘life,’ ‘inwardly,’ and ‘notion’ tell you about how the concept of selfhood and identity may have differed from its modern equivalent?

See, for example, the words that preface ‘self’: collocates like the and that indicate existential concern; others introduce a temporal dimension (past, earlier, former); emphasise a sense of authenticity (specific, real); introduce a comparative element (better, worse, worst); or bring a character’s emotions to the fore (passionate, ardent).

Most noticeable in Eliot’s works are collocates of self that differentiate between an internal and external self (inward, inner, persistent); imply a holistic or definitive view of the self (whole, complete); or emphasise moral evolution (another, new, different).

What can you glean from these concordance searches regarding how individuals in the past many have conceptualised their own identities?

You can group these words together using the KWICGrouper.

Keywords related to religion vs science and / or tradition vs modernity:

new, fact, hospital, spiritual, knowledge, medical, judgment, vicar, belief, ideas, rector, religion, clergyman.

In her works, Eliot often delved into the tension between tradition and modernity, as well as the clash between religion and science, most notably in Middlemarch which explores the changing economic landscape of England during the Industrial Revolution.

How does Eliot present a nuanced exploration of the interplay between tradition and modernity, and religion and science?

What can you learn about how individuals may have grappled with these issues in the past?

Think about the ways in which certain words are used – how do they reflect the complexity of the societal changes occurring?

Take note, for example, of what different collocates of the word ‘religion’ imply.

Your, my, his, and her indicate a sense of ownership or individual relationship with one’s faith; father’s points to the generational nature of religious identity; while national, our and people’s link religion to a sense of communal or cultural identity.

Words like, no, other, Jew’s, Hebrew, and high, on the other hand emphasise the distinctions and tensions between different religious beliefs, while adjectives like fundamental, purified, spiritual, true, and vital can give us insight into the perceived qualities of religion itself during this time.

You can group these words together using the KWICGrouper.

Keywords related to patterns of speech:

allays, rather, bit, might, hinder, beforehand, seemed, something, should, niver, chiefly, eh, lest.

What can you learn from running a concordance search on the above terms and examining the context in which they were used? Does this inform how you might use the term yourself?

Words such as ‘rather,’ ‘bit,’ and ‘might’, for example, introduce a level of uncertainty or reservation to a conversation, indicating that the speaker is not expressing something definitively. Likewise, words like ‘might,’ ‘should’ and ‘lest’ introduce a conditional aspect in which one’s opinions or statements are contingent on certain conditions or possibilities.

You can use the CLiC Web App to run a concordance search to trace how these keywords are used in conversation by selecting the subset ‘quotes’. In CLiC, quotes represent the passages of text enclosed within quotation marks, indicating direct speech by fictional characters. Can you detect differing patterns of speech according to a character’s gender, age, marital status, occupation or social class?

Note for example, which characters tend to use qualifiers like ‘rather’, ‘bit’ and ‘might’ or how Eliot makes use of regional or colloquial expressions like ‘niver’ and ‘eh’. How might you go about making such linguistic differentiations in your own writing?

A full list of keywords in our Eliot corpus (generated using our 19thC reference corpus, excluding Eliot’s texts) is available here.

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You can note down your findings in the handout provided, and, if you’d like, post them on X (formerly Twitter) under the hashtag #CLiCCreative, or by tagging us @CLiC_fiction.