Accidents at Home in the Victorian Novel: Auguries, Probability, and Charlotte Yonge's Household Advice

Abstract

This article explores the narrative functions of domestic accidents in Victorian fiction. Taking Charlotte Yonge's The Pillars of the House (1873) as a case study, it critically parses how popular fiction engaged with competing explanations of how or why accidents occur. As a new understanding of chance, risk, and statistical likelihood in the nineteenth century began to reshape the representation of accidents, narratives navigated shifting concepts of personal misfortune, of providence and poetic justice, as well as of probability. In Yonge's novel, domestic accidents demonstrate risk-management at home, promoting a concept that complicates narrative expectations both of divine punishment and of conventional conversion patterns.