Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Lawrence Goldman

Abstract

This is a commanding book. Having maintained an interest in Victorian statistical thought for nearly forty years, Lawrence Goldman must have been tempted to produce an encyclopaedia. Instead, he has delivered a (relatively) compact, closely argued monograph. Specialist historians of statistics and social science will have plenty to say about it, but they are only a subset of the book’s intended audience. The arguments made by Goldman about the rise and fall of statistical modes of thinking hold general significance for our understanding of the Victorian mind, and the character of nineteenth-century liberalism. There is a vast existing scholarship on matters statistical in nineteenth-century Britain and Europe, as Goldman’s full-to-bursting footnotes underline. His book challenges it in several ways. Goldman’s methodology, in the first place, is ‘largely sociological and contextual rather than discursive’ (p. xxxv). He asks how and why specific individuals and groups sought to develop and deploy statistical modes of reasoning. The protagonists include Charles Babbage, William Farr, Ada Lovelace and—as part of a significant international cohort—the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet and the German Alexander von Humboldt. Beyond these headline names, and other figures of middle rank, Goldman also draws deeply on the well of scholarship on lesser-known statistically minded Victorians that he helped to dig as editor of the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. The point of adopting this approach is to reconnect internal developments in statistics with their wider environments. The result is a fresh, newly tangible picture of the social networks within which statistics came to appear the discipline of the future.