UC Irvine

“Statistical Fictions: Nineteenth-Century Narrative and the Probability of Reform” explores the rise of statistically inflected narratives in the period spanning from 1826 to 1876. It interweaves nineteenth-century writings on mathematics and logic with novels and other works that rely on narrative to argue that mid-century statistical and probabilistic reasoning developed in dialogue with experiments in narrative form and projects of social reform. In statistical narratives, a range of literary forms such as science fiction, dialogue, detective fiction, and the realist novel provide the structures through which both authors and readers think through social problems involving populations. These narratives employ a particular version of statistical thinking that conceives of the world typologically rather than in temporal terms, and challenges the way that people were typically categorized into groups. By doing so, they expose how moralizing certain kinds of social forms, such as theories of character, allows prejudice to become incorporated into social structures and institutions.This project focuses primarily on the work of four women—Mary Shelley, Florence Nightingale, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and George Eliot—all of whom found in their literary writing a way of both disseminating and criticizing the claims of contemporary science while reaching a broad and inclusive audience. At the same time, all four were interested in using that science to think through the possibilities and limits of self-determination and the power of literature to effect practical social change. They all sought limits to the power of such forces as evolution, heredity, and contagion to determine the lives of individuals, and they designed their innovative literary versions of statistical modeling to reduce suffering in what they regarded as a society in need of healing.