The following graph and word clouds show which words Sir Michael Audley uses most frequently in the novel. This research has been carried out on Voyant-tools.org, which is a tool that reads and analyzes digital texts, and on Wordclouds.com, a tool for creating word clouds. In order to simplify the search on Voyant, each chapter has been assigned a number. The following table shows the correspondence between the chapters and the numbers on the abscissa.

Both the graph and the word clouds clearly show that lucy is the word Sir Michael uses the most (thirty-nine times), which demonstrates his love for his wife. However, a closer look at figure 2 reveals that the frequency of lucy as well as of all the terms of endearment Sir Michael uses to talk about her, i.e. darling, dear, love, little, girl, wife, significantly drops after chapter XXXIV (2.0 in figure 5), that is to say right after he finds out who Lady Audley really is (the last instance of dear refers to his nephew Robert Audley (You will require money, my dear Robert, for such arrangements). A similar pattern can be seen in George Talboys' speech (figure 5).

As figure 6 shows, compared to lucy, alicia, the name of Sir Michael’s daughter, is a lot less frequent (only six instances). Its frequency is especially low in the first part of the novel, where Lady Audley has Sir Michael's undivided attention. Only towards the end of the story does alicia resurface, but it is still quite sporadic.

It is therefore safe to conclude that Sir Michael Audley, just like every other main character of the novel, is not static: his characterization changes as the story unfolds. Another sign of such change is the fact that at the beginning of the novel he is not only depicted as happy, having married the girl of his dreams, but he also uses the word happiness quite a few times. Not surprisingly, he stops using it once his happy bubble bursts.