Thinking Contingently

What links stray Victorian tabby cats, Adam Bede, Victorian board games, and Darwin's account of species? What connects Maxwell's demon and Daniel Deronda? The answer, it turns out, is contingency. In this thoughtful and well-researched interdisciplinary account, Tina Young Choi ranges far and wide to find examples of the Victorian assimilation of contingency and related ideas of probability and risk. Darwin's work, as Gillian Beer and others have shown, provided writers with a model of a master narrative in which there was no guiding hand of providence; minor happenstance variations in a species could generate dramatic differences over time. But this book argues that Darwin's 1859 On the Origin of Species was itself part of a sea change in the ways in which people began to think about life chances, the aleatory, and the probable. From the rise of nineteenth-century insurance companies, to the deep historical narratives of Lyell and Darwin, to the contemplation of individual life trajectories and hesitant choices in the novels of George Eliot, we can see the embrace of ideas of risk, contingency, probability, and statistical distribution. Literary history has sometimes tended to see Victorian literature as providing a staid contrast with the modernist embrace of the aleatory and the contingent, but this study makes a good case for seeing that break with providential plotting happening much earlier. (Researchers of the eighteenth-century novel will no doubt resent that their century is now presented as providing a contrast with Victorian contingency.)After a short introduction, the meat of the argument is given in four chapters, which trace the spread of the idea of the contingent and the erosion of older forms of teleological thinking and ideas of providence. Combining New Historicism and New Formalism, along with more than a pinch of science history, each chapter offers richly detailed accounts of a series of key figures and texts. Chapter 1 looks at the career of Charles Babbage, using his early actuarial work for the Protector Life Assurance Society, A Comparative View of the Various Institutions for the Assurance of Lives (1826), to illuminate his later interest in series and his labors on two calculating machines. His difference engine was designed to eliminate the need for repetitive mathematical labor, but his never-to-be-realized analytical engine was to be able to go a step further and factor in the contingent in its deliberations. In a nice move, Choi also brings in Babbage's late scrapbook, which features, inter alia, seemingly random personal ads about lost cats ("LOST, on Monday evening, a TABBY CAT with a brass collar") and lost persons, to argue that these curious cuttings resonate significantly with his work in mathematics (131). The narrative fragment of the ad, like a number in a series, is a frozen moment in time, its past and future temporarily suspended. Like some free-ranging Victorian ancestor of Schrödinger's cat, that tabby might show up none the worse for its adventures, but then again, it might not.Chapter 2 moves to what at first glance seems like very different territory, the geological work of Charles Lyell—author of Principles of Geology (1830–33)—and its echoes in the writings of Charles Darwin and George Eliot. Rejecting catastrophism and providential narratives, Lyell recognized the significance of contingency, coming to anticipate Darwin's insights into slow historical change. However, as Choi is careful to show, Lyell did not simply jettison biblical accounts in doing so, instead, "repurposing the signature elements of biblical rhetoric and the familiar components of the deluge narrative" (61) for his own persuasive ends. Thus, in Principles of Geology, he retains the biblical flood narrative but uses comparative accounts of great floods from other cultures to displace it from its privileged position and deploys the geological record itself to point to indeterminacies, gaps in our knowledge, and other historical possibilities. After exploring contingent thinking in Darwin along related lines, the last part of the chapter turns to Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) as likewise rewriting a providential narrative, this time not that of the Bible, but of inherited melodramatic narratives of the fallen woman. Through some impressive close reading of the novel, Young Choi shows how Eliot thickens, as it were, certain historical moments in the trajectories of her characters, seeming to point to the other possibilities, the other futures inherent in any given moment. Dramatic irony here turns into something quite different, an acknowledgement of the aleatory in lives and the endless possibilities for narrative forks.Readers who, like myself, have a weakness for Victorian ephemera will be particularly interested in the third chapter, which explores the narrative dimension of Victorian board games and optical toys. (There is also a discussion of Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass, but it seems somewhat out of place in a chapter that is otherwise so focused on ephemeral material culture.) Where other historians of Victorian games have stressed their relatively rigid qualities, or their pedagogical and even propagandist qualities, Choi explores their use of contingency. Drawing on narratology, film theory, and recent work on graphic novels, inter alia, she follows the thread of contingency through board games of exotic geography like New Game of Wanderers in the Wilderness (1844) (in which players embarked on adventurous journeys through a two-dimensional South America), suggesting that these games are quite different in their use of narrative possibility compared to the ones that preceded them. I was pleased to see so much attention paid here to the work of William Spooner, who enriched the visual world of well-to-do Victorian children with a whole array of board games, optical toys, and illustrated books. Here we see how the contingent narratives of his board games, where movement through the board depends on the spinning of a wheel, carries through to his Protean Views, chromolithographic scenes that change dramatically when held up to a bright light: the Bay of Naples becomes Vesuvius erupting; the Houses of Parliament go up in flames. Again, this study suggests, we are in the realm of imagined contingency, with disaster always looming as the flip side of tranquility.The last chapter returns to the work of George Eliot, this time using the work of James Clerk Maxwell to explore Eliot's complex imagining of the lives of others. "Maxwell's Demon," a thought experiment in which James Clerk Maxwell posited a doorkeeper who cannily would sort molecules into two separate chambers according to their velocities, is usually read in terms of the second law of thermodynamics. It has also been interpreted in terms of information theory, as in Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1966). But Choi encourages us to imagine it in terms of probability and distribution. She uses this move to produce a sophisticated reading of Daniel Deronda and its treatment of character, desire, and coincidence; in a novel that famously opens with a group of people gathered around a roulette table, Eliot, Choi suggests, "tests the limits where subjective belief and statistical distributions might align" (174). This in turn allows us to consider the novel itself as a narrative form that deals more with deviations from the norm than with the statistical average.As will already have been grasped, this study of the interpenetration of Victorian science and Victorian cultural forms is largely aimed at readers who already have a sense of the work that has been done in these areas. There is an ongoing engagement here with the works of, for instance, George Levine, Gillian Beer, and James Secord, on the history of science side, and writers like Catherine Gallagher and Marie-Laure Ryan on the narrative side, with film theorist Mary Ann Doane making a cameo appearance. Contingency and probability are not the easiest of concepts to deploy, and those who, like me, have always struggled with the Monty Hall problem may find the more mathematical chapters quite challenging. These are hardly criticisms of the book but will give a sense of the readership to whom it is pitched, and perhaps also a reminder of the lingering effects of C. P. Snow's "two cultures."I found this study most persuasive when it stayed relatively close to the theoreticians of chance and probability, like Babbage, and perhaps a little less so when it moved to such cultural forms as optical toys and narrative fiction. It is not that the readings offered here of Eliot, Carroll, and Spooner's Protean Views are not interesting, for they are. But I found myself wondering if the hunt for the contingent and the dysteleological was a bit like the hunt for aporias in the glory days of deconstruction, and whether a reader as astute as Choi might well be capable of finding them in any suitably detailed text. It may seem unfair in this light to advance a slightly different quibble, which is that the examples of fiction that we are given are rather narrower than one might expect in such a wide-ranging study. In methodological terms, Eliot seems to be rather overrepresented here, providing much of the novelistic side of two chapters out of four. If contingency were being assimilated by Victorian writers of fiction in this period, absorbed into the cultural bloodstream, as it were, should it not have also registered in writers other than those whom we already know were closely attuned to scientific discovery and mathematics, as Eliot and Carroll were? And would not such examples have offered better proof of how much the ideas had traveled?Nonetheless, this is a thought-provoking book with obvious strengths, and like all good books, it suggests possibilities for further exploration. Choi's examples are largely confined to the writings and entertainments of the middle class, and it would be interesting to see how contingency could be traced with respect to other classes in the nineteenth century. The lingering passion of the aristocracy for games of chance, for instance, or the rise of stock market speculation, are two possible areas that might be tracked through Victorian fiction using the lens of contingency. To say that the imagination of sudden ruin and debt are pervasive in nineteenth-century culture is something of an understatement; it can be pursued through novels as different as Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and Anthony Trollope's The Way We Live Now. And what of the constrained life chances of the poor, whose life stories often contained more snakes and fewer ladders? Does it make sense to see Victorian Britain as an emerging risk society, in Ulrich Beck's terms, one in which natural disasters were being overtaken by anthropogenic ones? Some people could clearly reduce their exposure to risk more than others, by moving or by changing occupation, or could hedge against risk by taking out life insurance; the choices of others, especially the poor, were often more circumscribed, an idea explored in texts as different as Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853) and George Bernard Shaw's Mrs. Warren's Profession (1893).In Victorian Contingencies, Choi illuminates the spread of an idea and shows how a concept can be traced across multiple contexts, showing up in everything from personal scrapbooks to children's toys, and from the lucrative life insurance business to domestic novels. It is a study that will strongly appeal to those working on the history of science, but there is plenty to learn here for anyone working on the Victorian novel, Victorian visual culture, or even Victorian newspaper ads. Readers of Novel: A Forum on Fiction may be most interested in the chapters that touch on Eliot and Carroll, but the study as a whole contains interesting insights about how narrative works. I do hope that tabby returned home, with or without its brass collar.