NORTH RICHMOND STREET, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers’ School set the boys free
This first sentence already raises some questions. What does it mean for North Richmond Street to be "blind" (sightless?)? And why is the Christian Brothers' School characterized as a prison from which boys are "set free"? We could explore the second question further by creating concordances and collocations with words associated with freedom and captivity.
We pleased ourselves with the spectacle of Dublin’s commerce—the barges signalled from far away by their curls of woolly smoke, the brown fishing fleet beyond Ringsend, the big white sailing-vessel which was being discharged on the opposite quay. Mahony said it would be right skit to run away to sea on one of those big ships and even I, looking at the high masts, saw, or imagined, the geography which had been scantily dosed to me at school gradually taking substance under my eyes. School and home seemed to recede from us and their influences upon us seemed to wane.
The narrator's description of the commercial ships, and his fantasy of sailing away from Dublin, briefly suspend the narrative, creating a temporal and spatial expansiveness that pressures the story's geographic containment. It would be interesting to track and investigate the language of imagination and fantasy throughout Dubliners with a concordance and collocations.
Even Charlotte and the girls were too much for him to-night. They were too... too... But all his drowsing brain could think of was—too rich for him.
I'm curious about what we would find by tracking the word "too" across the entire Mansfield short story corpus, mainly with word counts, word collocations, and n-grams. My hypothesis would be that the word "too" appears most frequently (perhaps exclusively) in stories with thematics of excess, both material and immaterial.
Meringues
The recurrence of "meringues" until this point warrants further examination. In addition to tracing this motif and performing contextual analyses, we can use word collocations and concordances to better understand the physical and figurative resonances of this dessert. This reading could then feed into a broader analysis of all of the story's ingestible substances.
beyond any reasonable doubt
With this key phrase of legal discourse, Cuff's takes on the role of a prosecutor in a courtroom, shouldering the burden of proof in the case at hand. What is the relationship between detective work and legal argumentation? How does the novel's language put various characters on trial, not only before other characters, but also before the novel's jury of readers? A word collocation analysis of words and phrases with legal significance would help us to determine whether or not legal language shapes standards of evidence in The Moonstone.
Here, again, there is a motive under the surface; and, here again, I fancy that I can find it out.
Once again, we encounter the language of detective work, which often involves the uncovering and probing of underlying motives. What distinguishes Betteredge's "detective fever" from Ezra Jennings's understanding of detection? We could operationalize this comparative question into a word collocation study of target words that are associated with detective work (e.g., "detective," "suspect," "motive," etc.).
And what of that?–you may reply–the thing is done every day. Granted, my dear sir. But would you think of it quite as lightly as you do, if the thing was done (let us say) with your own sister?
Mathew Bruff carefully anticipates the reader's objections, and tries to persuade him ("my dear sir") to reconsider his assessment of Godfrey Ablewhite. To better understand how and why The Moonstone's various narrators directly address readers, we could run a word collocation analysis and/or a sentiment analysis on each moment that features a narrator addressing a reader. Then, we would be informed enough to speculate about the extent to which such addresses prove effective.