Probable Histories: Novel Recoveries of the Past by Margaret Kolb A

Probable Histories: Novel Recoveries of the Past By Margaret Kolb A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Ian Duncan, Chair Professor Kevis Goodman Professor Catherine Gallagher Professor Paolo Mancosu Summer 2016 Abstract Probable Histories: Novel Recoveries of the Past By Margaret Kolb Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Ian Duncan, Chair The eighteenth and nineteenth centuries witnessed the simultaneous rise of two discourses that promised to explain the past and predict the future: probability and the novel. The two were not merely historically coincident. In dialogue from the start, “Probable Histories” argues that probability and the novel were also mutually constitutive. Drawing on standard histories of each, I summarize their respective “rises” in the eighteenth century and analyze their interdependence. I then turn to a series of case studies, investigating the novels of Henry Fielding, Charlotte Lennox, Walter Scott, George Eliot, Charles Dickens, and Thomas Hardy as points of intersection between the concerns of probability and those of the novel. The project reveals how these two modes of temporal projection extend and inform one another as modes of prediction. In so doing, “Probable Histories” offers a new account of the novel’s shared role in conceptualizing causation. 1 Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………….……………………… i Introduction……………………………….……………………... 1 Chapter 1……………………….………………………………… 6 Chapter 2 ………………………..………………………………... 23 Chapter 3……………………….…………………………………. 43 Chapter 4 ……………………….………………………………… 61 Chapter 5 ……………………….………………………………… 76 i Acknowledgements Thanks to the Mabelle McLeod Lewis Foundation, the UC Berkeley English Department, and the Hart Summer Grant for providing financial support. Thanks also to the Thomas Hardy Association, Harper’s Magazine, the British Library, and the Victoria and Albert Museum for permission to reproduce images. A version of Chapter 5 was published in Victorian Studies, where suggestions from Ivan Kreilkamp and anonymous readers greatly improved the essay. “Probable Histories” began with a reading of Daniel Deronda in Ian Duncan’s course. The project would not have begun without him; nor could it have been completed. It took root entirely thanks to his encouragement, good humor, and intellectual generosity. Paolo Mancosu—who gave me precious time during a busy semester—taught me how to read the philosophy and history of mathematics. A perpetual model for scholarship and pedagogy, Kevis Goodman applied her transformative intellectual rigor to my work with unfailing kindness. Cathy Gallagher offered wise advice at the right times. Her comments continue to guide the project as they unfold. Wendy Xin kept deadlines, and kept me in the program. Laura Kolb and Jocelyn Rodal have been sounding boards and sympathetic readers. Serena Le hummed out the tune of my thoughts whenever I lost hold of it. Daniel Kolb, Eisha Matsubara, and Joe Tuman taught me that reflection and running go hand in hand, and Reinhard Stoewe reminded me that this holds true even when it happens to be hot outside. Nick Halpern, my most loyal reader, helped me mail my graduate school applications long ago. He has been part of every adventure since. ii Introduction A traveler, long expected home, has not returned. Who might begin a story in this way? Not Homer or Defoe, Dickens or Hardy, but a mathematician. In illustrations of the probability computations in the final section of his seminal Ars Conjectandi (1713), Jacob Bernoulli joins a lofty literary company by offering an account of a traveler’s extended absence. Probability, Bernoulli explains, can help us uncover “causes that are entirely hidden,” even those as inscrutable as the traveler’s whereabouts (327). In predicting what has befallen him, Bernoulli advises, we should attend “not only to those arguments that serve to prove a thing, but also to all those that can be adduced for the contrary” (319). As Bernoulli models them, such arguments consist of a series of stories. “Perhaps he was taken captive by barbarians so that he could not write,” Bernoulli offers, transporting the traveler to “the ends of India,” before considering the homeward draw an expected inheritance might exert. As these speculations draw to a close, we’re reminded that “we know that many who have been away longer have returned uninjured in the end,” a truth derived as much from the fictional traveler’s penchant for return, as his historical counterpart’s. In closing his example, Bernoulli reflects that “[a]nyone, from daily life, could formulate for himself many more axioms of this kind” (321). Briefly, this argument anticipates Robinson Crusoe (1719), rather than what actually follows it: the law of large numbers. After this tale comes one of the more strange and wonderful tricks in Ars Conjectandi. Bernoulli returns to the classic example of an urn, filled with black and white tokens in unknown quantities. He will go on to prove a weak form of the law of large numbers—demonstrating that the proportion of the two colors can be obtained within the bounds of any pre-specified accuracy, in a certain number of draws. In other words, we can understand what’s inside the urn, even if we empty it only partially. Before his proof, Bernoulli first performs an important transubstantiation: he asks us to think about bodies as urns, holding within them “diseases just as an urn contains tokens” (329). Given enough observation, we could compute how many chances at plague lurk inside us, how many chances at dropsy, how many at fever. We can think of the urn as we calculate one individual’s particular chance of dying of plague, or use it equally feasibly to contemplate a population’s rate of disease. Through this metaphor and others like it, Part IV of Ars Conjectandi articulates probability as a technique that can explain a past, look inside the body, and knit together a nation.1 In the applications that proliferated after Ian Hacking’s hotly contested, yet heuristically useful, originary “moment” of the 1660s, probabilistic computations promised to mitigate uncertainties of all kinds: they could document public health, price annuities and insurance, consider murder cases, quantify the value of religious belief, evaluate financial ventures, and parametrize uncertainty in judicial cases. Given these massive ambitions, occasional frustration was inevitable. “The concern is to discover the truths of practice & in the usage of civil society,” probabilist Pierre Rémond de Montmort wrote of probability logic in a letter to Bernoulli’s nephew Nicolas in 1711, admitting that he could only uncover “trifles” (322). The eighteenth-century novel was also concerned with travelers’ whereabouts, the truths of civil society, daily life, who killed whom, and—though perhaps without Montmort’s chagrin—trifles. Probability and the novel shared eerily similar “rises” over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The publication of Ars Conjectandi marked a radical expansion of the 1 For the mathematical and philosophical implications of this metaphor for chance, see Lorraine Daston, “The Probability of Causes,” section 5.2, esp. p. 245-46. 1 bounds of probability logic, which trickled from gambling and mathematical circles into public discourse, solidifying in the 1740s when it was ushered into the drawing room with the publication of Edmund Hoyle's pamphlet on whist. Standard accounts of the novel trace a similar chronology, with solidification of the genre taking place in the 1740s. Historians of both fields often point to the same epistemic shifts as chief historical drivers: secularism, a broadening world, a turn from textual authority towards empirical methods of knowledge acquisition, and receptivity to provisional—or fictional—narrative. Catherine Gallagher has brilliantly argued that fictionality—a growing recognition in the eighteenth century of fiction as a category—depended on “(1) a conceptual category of fiction, and (2) believable stories that did not solicit belief” (340). Crucial to (2) is a measure for credit, a social faculty whose growing prominence derives, for Gallagher, from the broadening economic sphere. Necessary to “the kind of cognitive provisionality one practices in reading fiction” (347) was the concept that stories could be more or less likely, and a language for designating them as such. The novel is consistently theorized in terms of probability, albeit with varying engagement with the discipline. John Alcock boasts of “an air of Probability” in his novel The Life of Miss Fanny Brown (1760), which he claims to achieve via the use of “several well-known Christian, as well as Sur-names” (xxx). Others, like Henry Fielding, offer more nuanced reflections on literary likelihood, contemplating, for example, the problem of describing “a single Instance” of a rare character, when “we are writing to thousands who never heard of such a person, nor of any Thing like him” (404). By mid-nineteenth century, probability was the key feature of narrative fiction to be defended. Charles Dickens prefaces Bleak House (1852-53) with justifications for two central features of the novel—the length and cost of legal proceedings in Chancery, and spontaneous combustion—declaring “I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous Combustion of the

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