Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Rainsford, Dominic

Titel

Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain by Lawrence Goldman (review)

Ist Teil von

• Dickens Quarterly, 2024-03, Vol.41 (1), p.127-133

Ort / Verlag

Oxford: Johns Hopkins University Press

Erscheinungsjahr

2024

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Part III is devoted to chapters on the principal “intellectual influences” on the turn to statistics, including Babbage and Lovelace, Richard Jones (professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London), William Whewell (Cambridge polymath and inventor of the term “scientist”), Adolphe Quetelet (Belgian statistician and reformer), Alexander von Humboldt, and – as “opposition” – Disraeli, Ruskin, Carlyle, and our man Dickens. In any case, he stands as a paragon of the Victorian statistics that Goldman wants us to appreciate: rational, outward-looking, idealistic, honest, and humane. [...]in what I think may be a subtle undercurrent throughout this book – he also stands as an implicit rebuke towards 21st-century Britain’s parochial and illiberal tendencies. [...]it is significant that the Spectator did not see all statistical science as Gradgrindian, just the kind that overreaches itself and becomes reductive – in ways which, in Galton’s case, led to bigotry and an ambition for social control that was a lot more sinister than anything in Mr. M’Choakumchild’s schoolroom. The following is more or less Goldman’s last word on Dickens: “His soul rebelled against uniformity, authority, bureaucracy, and also fatalism – in novelistic form, the idea that his characters could have no control over their lives” (172).