Contingency is not just a feature of modern politics, finance, and culture—by thinking contingently, nineteenth-century Britons rewrote familiar narratives and upended forgone conclusions. Victorian Contingencies shows how scientists, novelists, and consumers engaged in new formal and material experiments with cause and effect, past and present, that actively undermined routine certainties.
Tina Young Choi traces contingency across a wide range of materials and media, from newspaper advertisements and children’s stories to well-known novels, scientific discoveries, technological innovations. She shows how Charles Lyell and Charles Darwin reinvented geological and natural histories as spaces for temporal and causal experimentation, while the nascent insurance industry influenced Charles Babbage’s computational designs for a machine capable of responding to a contingent future. Choi pairs novelists George Eliot and Lewis Carroll with physicist James Clerk Maxwell, demonstrating how they introduced possibility and probability into once-assured literary and scientific narratives. And she explores the popular board games and pre-cinematic visual entertainments that encouraged Victorians to navigate a world made newly uncertain.
By locating contingency within these cultural contexts, this book invites a deep and multidisciplinary reassessment of the longer histories of causality, closure, and chance.
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Introduction
1. Anticipations of an Unpredictable Future: Nineteenth-Century Life Insurance and Babbage’s Calculating Engines
2. Past-Tense Futures: History and Temporality Rewrittenin Lyell, Eliot, and Darwin
3. Pivotal Moments, Diverging Paths: Visual Narratives in Board Games, Protean Views, and Carroll’s Alice Books
4. Two Experiments in Probabilistic Thinking: Maxwell’s ‘Demon’ and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
Epilogue: The Pleasures of Undetermined Futures
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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).
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