Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain by Lawrence Goldman (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain by Lawrence Goldman
• Dominic Rainsford (bio)

Lawrence Goldman. Victorians and Numbers: Statistics and Society in Nineteenth Century Britain. Oxford UP, 2022. Pp. lxiii + 371. £40.49. ISBN 978-0-19-284774-4 (hb).

One might be forgiven for expecting this to be a very dull book. That is certainly the impression created by the unsmiling faces of Ada Lovelace (datalogical prodigy and Byron’s daughter), William Farr (of the General Register Office; subsequently President of the Statistical Society of London), Florence Nightingale, Prince Albert, and Charles Babbage (computer pioneer), which ponderously adorn the dust-jacket. However, it contains a wide range of information and ideas, much of it potentially useful to Dickens scholars, and the good news is that Goldman’s reader will require no “technical knowledge of statistics” (xxxviii).

Following a long Prologue, which jumps ahead to the “Zenith” of Victorian statistics in 1860, the book retreats chronologically and settles into a methodical five-part structure. In Part I, Goldman describes the background to Victorian statistics in the rudimentary “political arithmetic” of the late-seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Part II, he describes the establishment of influential statistical societies in the 1820s and 1830s in Cambridge, Manchester, and Clerkenwell. Part III is devoted to chapters on the principal “intellectual influences” on the turn to statistics, including Babbage and Lovelace, Richard Jones (professor of Political Economy at King’s College, London), William Whewell (Cambridge polymath and inventor of the term “scientist”), Adolphe Quetelet (Belgian statistician [End Page 127] and reformer), Alexander von Humboldt, and – as “opposition” – Disraeli, Ruskin, Carlyle, and our man Dickens. Part IV, on “Statistics at Mid-Century,” describes the growing acceptance and practical use of statistics, and especially in the field of medicine – where it could demonstrably be linked to saving lives. Part V contrasts “Conservative Nationalism” with “Liberal Internationalism” at the International Statistical Congresses of the 1850s, 60s and 70s. “Conservative Nationalism” is thereafter shown to develop into something more sinister, and for a time at least this is “The End of the Statistical Movement,” as Francis Galton introduces a far higher level of mathematical sophistication but reveals his “moral inadequacy,” turning from the desire to use numbers to understand and ameliorate society to eugenics, racism, and speculative social engineering. A brief concluding chapter takes us from the nineteenth century to our own time, “From Statistics to Big Data, 1822–2022.”

Throughout the book, Goldman’s focus is divided between exceptional individual thinkers and collective initiatives, such as the formation and dissolution of statistical societies, and the holding of international congresses. Perhaps the most vivid and exciting passages occur already in the Prologue, “Statistics at the Zenith: The International Statistical Congress, London 1860.” Here, Goldman discusses Prince Albert’s speech to the Congress (his last and perhaps best “public oration” [xlv]). He “display[ed] considerable intellectual bravery” in discussing “whether the study of statistics encouraged philosophical determinism, or what the age sometimes termed ‘fatalism’” (li). Albert “pointed out that recurrent events were not ineluctable laws governing nature and behaviour, but probabilities only”; “nature allowed for uncertainty; men and women could exercise free will and volition” (li). He spoke, at this international gathering, of “the mutual dependence of nations for their progress”; his speech “was liberal, improving, internationalist, universalist. As such it was statement of the aims of the statistical movement itself” (lii). Part of this may be attributable to the teenage Albert having had Adolphe Quetelet as his mathematics teacher (lii–liii). In any case, he stands as a paragon of the Victorian statistics that Goldman wants us to appreciate: rational, outward-looking, idealistic, honest, and humane. Moreover – in what I think may be a subtle undercurrent throughout this book – he also stands as an implicit rebuke towards 21st-century Britain’s parochial and illiberal tendencies.

Florence Nightingale was also at the Congress, or almost: “she invited leading participants to breakfast at her London home before the day’s debates. They talked among themselves as she listened from the other side of a drawn curtain, neither seen nor heard except by a select few whom she received upstairs” (liv). Goldman does not fully...