The Victorian era witnessed a profound preoccupation with the body, extending beyond physical appearance to encompass etiquette, class, and gender. John Tosh highlights the heavily polarized understanding of gender during this period, with character and sexuality sharply defined along gender lines. This "hyperbolic gender difference" (Michie, 1999) is reflected in depictions of lower- and middle-class bodies in medical and popular discussions. The body, a "confluence of sensate and cultural processes" (Lewis, 2008), played a crucial role in Victorian notions of subjectivity, particularly within debates surrounding gender antagonisms. Scholarly examination of the body often adopts a fragmentary approach, focusing on individual parts like hands, feet, and eyes. Charles Dickens, a significant figure in Victorian literature, offers invaluable insight into the embodiment of the Victorian human body. While traditional close reading excels in detailed analysis of specific bodily details, it may not simultaneously address other body parts. This study employs distant reading, complemented by computational methods, to analyze the portrayal of the body in a large corpus of text, aiming for "the explanation of general structures" rather than "interpretation of individual texts" (Moretti, 2005). The study uses a corpus-driven approach to analyze the vocabulary, specifically focusing on nouns and verbs, to reveal Dickens's conscious or unconscious representation of the body at the lexical level. This innovative approach involves meticulous classification of body-related vocabulary based on parts of speech and the application of appropriate research tools for each word category.

The introduction cites several scholars who have discussed the Victorian understanding of the body and gender. Tosh (1999) notes the stark gender polarization of Victorian culture. Michie (1999) describes this as a period of "hyperbolic gender difference." Lewis (2008) views the body as a confluence of sensate and cultural processes. Mann and Gavin (2019) highlight the fragmented approach often taken in analyzing bodily representation in literature. Cregan (2009) discusses how the study of anatomy allowed for a more detailed and abstract representation of the body. The authors also draw upon Moretti (2000, 2005) to justify their use of distant reading and computational methods for analyzing large corpora of texts. Williams (1965) is cited regarding the sheer volume of 19th-century novels, highlighting the limitations of traditional close reading. Unsworth (2013) provides evaluative criteria for assessing the value of computational methods in humanities research, emphasizing the importance of interactivity. Fairclough (2001) is referenced in the context of how ideological differences are coded in vocabulary, and Goss (2012) discusses how the body can reflect varying epistemological structures. Sinclair (2000) and Louw (1993) are cited regarding the concept of semantic prosodies, which reveals aspects beyond conscious intention.

The study uses two corpora: one comprising 33 works by Charles Dickens and the other consisting of 356 Victorian novels (excluding Dickens). Data processing involved text standardization, tokenization, stopword removal, stemming, lemmatization, noise removal, annotation, named entity recognition, and the creation of bags of words. AntConc was used to identify the ten most frequently mentioned body parts in Dickens's corpus (hand, head, eye, arm, foot, shoulder, ear, finger, breast, mouth). For each body part, a sub-corpus was created with a context size of five words before and after the central word. The Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK) library in Python was used for text processing and tokenization. The corpora were then divided into lexical bundles of nouns and verbs. For nouns, TF-IDF (Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency) vectorization and K-means clustering were employed to identify clusters of related terms. The optimal number of clusters was determined using the silhouette score and Calinski-Harabasz index. Gephi was used for network visualization. For verbs, the corpora were divided into sub-corpora based on gender (using pronouns "his" and "her"). The frequency of verbs was counted, and a context size of ten was used. The NLTK library was again used for verb tagging. The frequency of verbs was analyzed separately for male and female characters. The "pandas" library was used for word frequency analysis. The study focused on the three most prevalent body parts (hand, head, eye) to analyze gender differences in verb usage. The male-to-female ratio for each body part was calculated. Specific examples from Dickens's novels were analyzed to illustrate findings.

Analysis of nouns revealed that both Dickens and his contemporaries frequently used words associated with time and space (e.g., right, left, time, side) when describing the body. Dickens's unique nouns included words like "gentleman," "lady," "child," "chair," "door," "pockets," and "hat," reflecting his focus on social class, gender roles, and the interaction between the body and its environment. The analysis of pockets revealed a significant disparity in their mention in relation to male and female characters, reflecting societal norms. Quantitative analysis of the co-occurrence of "pocket(s)" with "his" and "her" showed a tenfold higher frequency of "his pocket(s)" demonstrating the limited access women had to property and resources. Analysis of verbs showed similarities and differences between Dickens and his contemporaries in their depictions of body parts. For "hand," the top verbs were similar, but Dickens uniquely used verbs like "give," "clasp," "look," and "press." The verb "kiss" was more frequently used with male hands. The analysis of "fold hands" revealed a greater frequency in female characters, especially in the portrayal of Betsy Trotwood in *David Copperfield*. For "head," verbs like "shake," "say," "turn," and "look" were common in both corpora; however, Dickens uniquely used "toss" and "bend," often associating "toss head" with female characters and conveying defiance, pride, or slyness. Regarding "eye," verbs like "say," "raise," "look," "fix," "turn," "see," and "have" were common. Dickens used "keep" and "open" more often with male eyes and "dry" and "wipe" more frequently with female eyes, reflecting gendered stereotypes about emotional expression. The analysis of "dry eyes" revealed a ratio of 43:13 for women to men. The example of Mrs. Chick in *Dombey and Son* illustrates how this action helps in developing her character. The usage of "cast" with eyes was also notable in Dickens's works, highlighting eye communication. The study noted that the methodology used by Dickens and other contemporary writers in describing the body parts reflected gender politics and societal etiquette.

The findings demonstrate that both similarities and differences exist in how Dickens and his contemporaries portrayed the body in their writing. The similarities reveal broader Victorian conventions concerning the depiction of the body, including the use of spatial and temporal language and emphasis on etiquette. The differences, however, highlight Dickens’ unique style and his explicit representation of gender politics. Dickens’ use of specific nouns associated with social class, gender roles, and clothing items like pockets and hats further illustrates how his depiction of the body reinforced Victorian gender ideologies. The analysis of verbs provides a nuanced understanding of the different actions performed by male and female characters. This reinforces the idea that the body was a site of gendered performance and societal expectations. The significant disparity in the usage of the verb ‘kiss’ in relation to male and female hands signifies the social and cultural values associated with male hand etiquette during the Victorian era. The results offer a multi-faceted interpretation of how language shaped gender representation in Victorian literature. The analysis reveals unconscious biases and conscious choices in how Dickens portrayed gendered bodies. The study's findings contributes to the existing literature on Victorian literature, gender studies, and corpus linguistics.

This study used qualitative and quantitative methods to analyze the lexical choices in Dickens’ works compared to his contemporaries. Examining different parts of speech offered a multi-dimensional understanding of how the body was portrayed, revealing both shared Victorian conventions and Dickens’ unique approach. Victorian society emphasized the body's role in signifying social status and gender, and this study shows how that emphasis is reflected in literary language. Future research could expand the corpus to include works from other periods, providing more comprehensive insights into the evolution of bodily representations.

The study acknowledges that the selection of the reference corpus involved discarding some data due to unavailability of the texts. While efforts were taken to ensure the reference corpus was representative of the Victorian era, biases might exist due to the limited accessibility of certain texts. The study also focuses primarily on lexical choices and doesn't delve deeply into other aspects of literary style or narrative structure that could affect the representation of the body. The selection of specific body parts and verbs for detailed analysis might not fully capture the complete picture of body representation in the corpus. Future research may benefit from exploring a broader range of linguistic features and methodologies.