Reviewed by:

• Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science, and Play by Tina Young Choi
• John Macneill Miller

There is something counterintuitive about reviewing Tina Young Choi's new monograph for Studies in the Novel because the book is not particularly invested in the novel at all. That is, in fact, one of its great strengths. Studies of contingency and alternative histories often reserve a special place for fiction, treating it as a unique tool for imagining counterfactual possibilities. Andrew H. Miller's On Not Being Someone Else (2020), for example, highlights the power of fiction to showcase individuality as a partly contingent, partly willed process of rejecting alternative paths to selfhood. Catherine Gallagher's Telling It Like It Wasn't (2018) examines an analogous phenomenon at the collective level, looking at how modern historiography depends on imagining fictional alternatives to the present. Choi enriches these understandings of contingency's relation to fiction by showing how counterfactual possibilities surfaced in a wide variety of nineteenth-century documents that do not fit comfortably within the categories of narrative or fiction. In the process, she suggests just how saturated modern life became with contingent speculation during the Victorian era, situating fiction's supposed uniqueness within a much broader set of discourses that encouraged people to imagine alternate worlds for scientific, economic, and psychological ends.

The book begins very remote from literature proper as it charts the connection between early life insurance advertising and Charles Babbage's calculating engines. Babbage's fascination with automatic computation began, Choi suggests, during his early work in life insurance. Selling insurance policies depended both on the emerging [End Page 113] science of actuarial tables and on advertising that highlighted the incalculable aspects of individual futures. The rise of insurance thus indicated both a public recognition of contingent futures and a concomitant attempt to tame such unknowability through rigorous computation. Babbage's attempts to construct calculating engines that allowed for contingency emerged out of these developments, performing what was in essence a numerical transformation of narrative that tried to account for the unforeseeable through a new form of computational storytelling.

Contingency plays an equally central role in Choi's discussions of the less commercial sciences. Her second chapter juxtaposes the work of nineteenth-century naturalists with the representation of contingency in the early fiction of George Eliot. She argues that one of the revolutionary contributions of Charles Lyell's Principles of Geology (1830–33) was its imagination of contingent, alternate pasts that nevertheless fell within the constraints of uniformitarian natural law. This injection of possibility into a past whose outcomes we know helped redefine what scientific work looked like in the nineteenth century, as Lyell used counterfactuals to argue for his own theories and to wrest meaningful conclusions from incomplete data sets that had been subject to eons of geological erasure. Eliot's Adam Bede (1859) undertook a similar project at a more human scale. This historical novel returns readers to a past setting that is curiously ahistorical: her turn-of-the-century Hayslope is unmarked by the excitements of warfare or regime change that typify our sense of historical significance. Unlike Lyell's work, Eliot's fiction encourages readers to develop a kind of subjectivity enhanced by the regular practice of thinking through possible futures regardless of whether or not they leave a lasting geopolitical mark. The novel's emphasis on the value of contemplating possibility for its own sake unites Adam Bede with Charles Darwin's On the Origin of the Species (1859); both books embrace the world as an ever-expanding set of potential paths rather than laying emphasis on the finality of closure or a pre-ordained plan.

A similar acceptance of playful possibility unfolded in nineteenth-century board games. In the Victorian era, parlor games diverged from an older convention of depicting progress along an established track, replacing drearily straightforward courses with a ramifying garden of forking paths. The process of exploring such paths became a defining feature of play itself, which turned away from an emphasis on winning or losing toward more...

审核人：

• 维多利亚时代的突发事件： Tina Young Choi 的文学、科学和游戏实验
• 约翰·麦克尼尔·米勒

评论 Tina Young Choi 的小说研究专着有些违反直觉，因为这本书根本没有特别关注小说。事实上，这是它的一大优势。偶然事件和另类历史的研究常常为小说保留一个特殊的位置，将其视为想象反事实可能性的独特工具。例如，安德鲁·H·米勒 (Andrew H. Miller) 的《不再是别人》 (2020) 强调了小说的力量，它展示了个性是一种部分偶然、部分自愿的拒绝通往自我的其他途径的过程。凯瑟琳·加拉格尔 (Catherine Gallagher)说得好像不是(2018) 在集体层面研究了一个类似的现象，研究了现代史学如何依赖于想象虚构的替代品。Choi 通过展示反事实的可能性如何出现在各种 19 世纪的文件中，这些文件并不适合叙事或小说的范畴，从而丰富了对偶然性与虚构关系的理解。在这个过程中，她暗示了现代生活在维多利亚时代是如何因偶然的投机而变得饱和，将小说假定的独特性置于更广泛的话语体系中，这些话语鼓励人们为了科学、经济和心理目的想象另一个世界。

这本书一开始就远离文学本身，因为它描绘了早期人寿保险广告与查尔斯·巴贝奇的计算引擎之间的联系。Choi 表示，Babbage 对自动计算的着迷始于他早期在人寿保险领域的工作。销售保单既取决于新兴的[End Page 113]精算表科学和强调个人未来不可估量方面的广告。因此，保险的兴起既表明了公众对或有期货的认可，也表明了通过严格计算来驯服这种不可知性的伴随尝试。Babbage 试图构建允许偶然事件的计算引擎，从本质上讲是对叙事的数字转换，试图通过一种新的计算叙事形式来解释不可预见的事情。

偶然性在 Choi 对商业性较低的科学的讨论中扮演着同样重要的角色。她的第二章将 19 世纪博物学家的作品与乔治·艾略特 (George Eliot) 早期小说中的偶然性表现并列。她认为，查尔斯·莱尔 (Charles Lyell) 的《地质学原理》(Principles of Geology , 1830–33)的革命性贡献之一是它对偶然的、交替的过去的想象，但这些过去仍属于均变论自然法则的约束。这种将可能性注入我们知道其结果的过去有助于重新定义 19 世纪科学工作的样子，因为莱尔使用反事实来论证他自己的理论，并从不完整的数据集中得出有意义的结论，这些数据集受到了亿万年地质学的影响擦除。艾略特的Adam Bede (1859) 在更人性化的尺度上进行了一个类似的项目。这部历史小说让读者回到了一个奇怪的非历史背景：她在世纪之交的《干草坡》中没有表现出我们对历史意义的典型感受的战争或政权更迭的兴奋。与莱尔的作品不同，艾略特的小说鼓励读者培养一种主观性，这种主观性通过经常思考可能的未来而得到增强，而不管它们是否会留下持久的地缘政治印记。小说强调为自身利益而思考可能性的价值，将亚当·比德与查尔斯·达尔文的《物种起源》结合起来(1859); 这两本书都将世界视为一组不断扩展的潜在路径，而不是强调关闭的最终性或预先制定的计划。

在 19 世纪的棋盘游戏中也出现了类似的对好玩的可能性的接受。在维多利亚时代，室内游戏不同于描绘沿着既定轨道前进的旧惯例，用分叉小径的分支花园取代了单调乏味的简单课程。探索这些路径的过程成为游戏本身的一个决定性特征，它从强调输赢转向更多......