Victorian Contingencies

Tina Young Choi is Associate Professor of English at York University. She is the author of Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain (2016).

"In clear, accessible language and especially fine readings, Choi traces Victorians' awareness of contingency. Her astute analysis reveals the common thinking behind an array of cultural artifacts, showing a new consciousness of multiple future possibilities."—Laura Otis, Emory University "Smart, surprising and compelling, this book was a pleasure to read. Contingency turns out to be a remarkably capacious category that touches on numerous areas of Victorian life and thought, as Choi shows through a deft handling of a multitude of materials."—Barri J. Gold, Muhlenberg College "Choi is marvelously adept at making links between developments in science, mathematics, toys, and fiction... Studies like Choi's are refreshing, cutting through disciplinary barriers and disrupting overfamiliar narratives."—Elizabeth Helsinger, Critical Inquiry "Victorian Contingencies is an impressively well-researched contribution to Victorian literary studies and the history of science. As it moves from the novel to science to entertainment and play, it offers its readers a fascinating survey of the manifold engagements with chance and uncertainty across the nineteenth century. For all its resolutely historical focus, Choi's book is also timely... Not least among its points of interest is that Choi's study of the nineteenth-century encounter with contingency is good to think with as we pick our way forward into a very chancy future."—David Sweeney Coombs, Review 19 "Expansive in its conception and inviting in its execution, [Victorian Contingencies] generates a robust appreciation for how a diffuse yet palpable awareness of contingency radiated through nineteenth-century British culture." -Adam Grener, Nineteenth-Century Contexts "Choi finds the literary in scientific writing and the scientific in literary texts... Recommended."—M. E. Burstein, CHOICE "This book will still be essential to any scholar who wishes to chart a neat genealogy of contingency in the nineteenth century and to specify the particular role of the novel in teaching the public to think through such contingency. But it proves just as fruitful for readers who see inherent value in the mental work of exploring, lingering, and replaying bygone moments of interdisciplinary connection—moments that led, by one divagation or another, to the contingent worldview that underlies the history, science, and literature of our ever-evolving present."—John Macneill Miller, Studies in the Novel "Choi's attention to narrative technique shows that experiments with contingency transcended interpersonal influence; as artifacts of a common habitus, they thickened across authors and genres too often subject to critical quarantine.... By expanding the history of chance well beyond the precincts of mathematical and scientific specialization and into encompassing narrative domains, Victorian Contingencies is sure to find a broad and appreciative audience."—Michael Tondre, Victorian Studies

• Introduction1. Anticipations of an Unpredictable Future: Nineteenth-Century Life Insurance and Babbage's Calculating Engines2. Past-Tense Futures: History and Temporality Rewrittenin Lyell, Eliot, and Darwin3. Pivotal Moments, Diverging Paths: Visual Narratives in Board Games, Protean Views, and Carroll's Alice Books4. Two Experiments in Probabilistic Thinking: Maxwell's "Demon" and Eliot's Daniel DerondaEpilogue: The Pleasures of Undetermined Futures