Reviewed by: Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play by Tina Young Choi John Macneill Miller CHOI, TINA YOUNG. Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2021. 264 pp. $65.00 hardcover. There is something counterintuitive about reviewing Tina Young Choi's new monograph for Studies in the Novel because the book is not particularly invested in the novel at all. That is, in fact, one of its great strengths. Studies of contingency and alternative histories often reserve a special place for fiction, treating it as a unique tool for imagining counterfactual possibilities. Andrew H. Miller's On Not Being Someone Else (2020), for example, highlights the power of fiction to showcase individuality as a partly contingent, partly willed process of rejecting alternative paths to selfhood. Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't (2018) examines an analogous phenomenon at the collective level, looking at how modern historiography depends on imagining fictional alternatives to the present. Choi enriches these understandings of contingency's relation to fiction by showing how counterfactual possibilities surfaced in a wide variety of nineteenth-century documents that do not fit comfortably within the categories of narrative or fiction. In the process, she suggests just how saturated modern life became with contingent speculation during the Victorian era, situating fiction's supposed uniqueness within a much broader set of discourses that encouraged people to imagine alternate worlds for scientific, economic, and psychological ends. The book begins very remote from literature proper as it charts the connection between early life insurance advertising and Charles Babbage's calculating engines. Babbage's fascination with automatic computation began, Choi suggests, during his early work in life insurance. Selling insurance policies depended both on the emerging [End Page 113] science of actuarial tables and on advertising that highlighted the incalculable aspects of individual futures. The rise of insurance thus indicated both a public recognition of contingent futures and a concomitant attempt to tame such unknowability through rigorous computation. Babbage's attempts to construct calculating engines that allowed for contingency emerged out of these developments, performing what was in essence a numerical transformation of narrative that tried to account for the unforeseeable through a new form of computational storytelling. Contingency plays an equally central role in Choi's discussions of the less commercial sciences. Her second chapter juxtaposes the work of nineteenth-century naturalists with the representation of contingency in the early fiction of George Eliot. She argues that one of the revolutionary contributions of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) was its imagination of contingent, alternate pasts that nevertheless fell within the constraints of uniformitarian natural law. This injection of possibility into a past whose outcomes we know helped redefine what scientific work looked like in the nineteenth century, as Lyell used counterfactuals to argue for his own theories and to wrest meaningful conclusions from incomplete data sets that had been subject to eons of geological erasure. Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) undertook a similar project at a more human scale. This historical novel returns readers to a past setting that is curiously ahistorical: her turn-of-the-century Hayslope is unmarked by the excitements of warfare or regime change that typify our sense of historical significance. Unlike Lyell's work, Eliot's fiction encourages readers to develop a kind of subjectivity enhanced by the regular practice of thinking through possible futures regardless of whether or not they leave a lasting geopolitical mark. The novel's emphasis on the value of contemplating possibility for its own sake unites Adam Bede with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species (1859); both books embrace the world as an ever-expanding set of potential paths rather than laying emphasis on the finality of closure or a pre-ordained plan. A similar acceptance of playful possibility unfolded in nineteenth-century board games. In the Victorian era, parlor games diverged from an older convention of depicting progress along an established track, replacing drearily straightforward courses with a ramifying garden of forking paths. The process of exploring such paths became a defining feature of play itself, which turned away from an emphasis on winning or losing toward more...
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