Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Tina Young Choi. Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play. Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2022. 246 pp.

Review by Elizabeth Helsinger

2 February 2022

From life-insurance pamphlets, games, and Charles Babbage’s unbuilt Analytical Engine through the narratives in Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, Charles Darwin’s Origin of Species, and George Eliot’s first and last novels to the ludic logic of Lewis Carroll’s Alice books and the probability fields of James Clerk Maxwell’s dynamical theory of gases, Tina Choi tracks what she argues is a new Victorian form of thinking. This wide-ranging, thoroughly researched study describes the contemporaneous emergence of something that takes many different narrative, visual, and even material forms in natural histories and novels, tables and graphs, board games and visual devices. With the dramatic reversal of Napoleon’s fortunes and new work on the geological record, she argues, “operations of causality and contingency came under greater scrutiny than ever before” while “radical discontinuities between past and future became imaginable” (p. 3). Developments in statistics undermined faith in what had previously seemed certain (where what comes next follows in predictable linear fashion within a world governed by divine or natural laws) and stimulated Victorians to imagine multiple possibilities unfolding at any moment, even in ordinary lives. Thinking contingently at once contributed to an increasing sense of uncertainty and insecurity (encouraged by those in the life-insurance business) and freed Victorians to conjure for themselves, within a defined field of probabilities, alternative possibilities for living.

Choi’s study resembles other recent critical and theoretical work about the “infrastructures” of thinking in specific historical periods. Such work bears some relation to what earlier philosophers and intellectual historians described as conceptual schemes (William James), paradigms (Thomas Kuhn), epistemes (Michel Foucault), or styles of reasoning (Ian Hacking) that underlie cognate forms and structures to determine what can be written, thought, or made at a given moment. Infrastructural cultural critics, as the term implies, are often particularly interested in material artifacts: how the built and made underpin or derive from shared conceptual schemes much like narratives or images.

Choi does not venture into the theory or history of such critical approaches (other than a brief reference to Caroline Levine’s Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network). Each of her four chapters presents a wealth of material suggesting how thinking contingently happened in very different contexts, establishing linkages of (at least) similarity between the narratives and graphs of insurance publicity and Babbage’s calculating engines; between narrative approaches to historical change in Lyell’s geology, Eliot’s Adam Bede, and Darwin’s Origin of Species—and between the illogic and word games of the Alice books and William Spooner’s board games, cartoon narratives, and paper-based visual toys. (Spooner’s “protean views” allowed the user, like Alice with her pills and bites of mushroom, to effect sudden transformations like those experienced by Napoleon or Mount Vesuvius [p. 4].) The final chapter opens with an explanation of how Maxwell used new, probabilistic statistics to describe subocular molecules in dynamic states of constant movement. It goes on to relate this work to Eliot’s depiction, in the major characters (Daniel and Gwendolyn) of her last novel Daniel Deronda, of a sympathetic imagination that multiplies possible stories about others to encourage a form of agency for both characters and readers, devising alternative scenarios to accommodate the probable when it is not possible to know one’s own or another’s story. Throughout the book, Choi deploys an impressive mastery of secondary scholarship in multiple fields as she exercises a sympathetic imagining of her own to demonstrate these unexpected resemblances. 

If Choi does not always pin down what she means by contingency, it is partly because her book relies on the term’s elasticity. As one might expect, herein lie both its strengths and its weaknesses. Choi’s primary focus remains on the particular case, and hers are often fascinating in themselves. Choi is marvelously adept at making links between developments in science, mathematics, toys, and fiction. The thick particulars of the multiple instances examined in each chapter are arranged to reveal resemblances that suggest shared structures of thinking, however differently embodied in a diversity of forms and practices. Slow going in some parts (where there is much quoting, paraphrasing, and citing from both secondary and primary sources, some of it a bit repetitive, as when she is discussing insurance leaflets), in other parts the book quickens pace—as in the discussion of games or of Eliot’s novels—to provide pleasurable moments of recognition. One hungers, though, for more reflection on the reductive risks of infrastructural cultural histories more generally. Though Choi sometimes rightly expresses caution (correlation is not causation nor does contemporaneity mean identity), still, the overall effect of her densely particular four chapters is to imply a very strong connection indeed among her examples—to suggest that they are all forms of the same thing. Studies like Choi’s are refreshing, cutting through disciplinary barriers and disrupting overfamiliar narratives. But some readers will experience resistance to their broadest claims.