The Victorian Archive and its Secret

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Notes

This essay was developed from my keynote address at the 2012 meeting of the INCS at the University of Kentucky. I am indebted to Phillip Stillman, whose work as my Research Assistant is evident throughout.

In “The Age of the World-Picture” (1938), Heidegger claimed that the nineteenth century produced the so-called world-picture as a way of strategically mapping any world, past as well as present.

Daniel A. Novak argues that the deindividualizing tendencies of Galton's composite photography to eradicate the singularity of bodily detail was for that very reason ultimately a failure: “When Galton discusses the results of his composites of violent criminals, his conclusions provide something of a surprise. Far from claiming to have distilled the essence of the criminal, Galton tacitly admits that the 'criminal type' has neither a proper body nor an ideal or scientific one: 'The special villainous irregularities in the latter have disappeared, and the common humanity that underlies them has prevailed. They represent not the criminal, but the man who is liable to fall into crime'” (“Composite Portraits” 135; qtd. in Novak 95).

On the rise of bureaucratic, fact-based expertise in nineteenth-century Britain, see Torrance on Sir George Harrison, first permanent secretary to the treasury; Steven J. Novak on Victorian public health administration and Chadwick's sanitary reports; and Doheny on Joseph Lancaster's role in the development of a bureaucratic system for managing the education of the poor.

On the content, publication and reception of Reynolds's Mysteries of London, particularly with regard to the facts and causes of its extraordinary popularity, see Rosenman.

Maxwell views the overwhelming amount of evidence as the distinguishing characteristic of the genre (188-9), and describes how in one volume of the Mysteries a classical tale of two brothers, one good and one bad, is expanded into a narrative in which these classifications are absorbed into the inexhaustible and therefore unclassifiable complexity of the city: “Thus the reassuring tale of the good brother and the bad becomes the framework for a more elaborate and elusive narrative: fifty or sixty interlocking stories, presenting ‘all that is most refined in elegance, or most strange in barbarism.’ The novel depicts the enigmatic complexity of a great city; London is perceived as a gigantic web of secrets” (190).

Maxwell uses the work of Georg Simmel to argue that bureaucracy not only increases information but also compromises the relationship between public documents and private letters, establishing an eerie continuity between individual consciousness and what is now called “the information explosion” (196).

In her reading of the thermodynamic laws governing the poetics of this novel, Gold observes that Guppy's “attraction to Esther and his response to the portrait are of a piece: both energize Guppy, for both women are considerable sources of energy” (218).

“If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use value may interest men, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values” (Marx 176).

It was surely Malthus who gave the term “population” its definitive nineteenth-century definition in his Essay on the Principle of Population (1798), but the story of how “population” became a common term for the national body politic begins much earlier. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “population” is first used to mean “a body of inhabitants” in Bacon's “Of the True Greatness of Kingdoms and Estates” (1612), where it pertains to a national culture of militarism, without which “there will be Great Population, and Little Strength” (93). Bacon strikes a more Malthusian note in “Of Seditions and Troubles” (1625), where he warns: “Generally, it is to be foreseen, that the Population of a Kingdom, (especially if it be not mown down by wars) does not exceed, the Stock of the Kingdom, which should maintain them” (47, adapted from archaic spelling). But even here Bacon imagines population as factions apart from the nations that can be strategically faced off against one another. Following on from Bacon's Essays and the political writings of Hobbes, John Graunt's and William Petty's work during the second half of the seventeenth century clearly anticipates Malthus's concerns with population. Also important to the history of the concept are Sir James Steuart, Robert Wallace, and Joseph Townsend, whom Marx accuses Malthus of having plagiarized (Marx 472-473n27). Finally, Foucault argues in Security, Territory, Population for the decisive role played by the eighteenth-century physiocrats in the emergence of nineteenth-century population-based governance (70).

Miller is best on just how Detective Bucket serves as the novelist's instrument: “As Tulkinghorn's fate exemplifies, amateur detectives run amok because they are motivated by personal desires for possession. Renunciation is thus for the professional detective a positive qualification, much as what Bucket appears to lament as his barren marriage shows a clear profit as an amicable and highly efficient business partnership” (95).

The expression “survival of the fittest” first appears in Spencer's Principles of Biology (1864), in his description of Darwin's theory, and was incorporated by Darwin himself in the fifth edition of The Origin, published in 1869.

On the structural distinctions and dynamic interdependency of rhizomes and trees, see Deleuze and Guattari's “Introduction: Rhizome” (3-25).

In Darwin's words, “[a]t each period of growth all the growing twigs have tried to branch out on all sides, and to overtop and kill the surrounding twigs and branches in the same manner as species and groups of species have attempted to overmaster other species in the great battle for life.… Of the many twigs which flourished when the tree was a mere bush, only two or three, now grown into great branches, yet survive and bear all the other branches; so with the species … very few now have living and modified descendants” (553).

Young argues that the term “selection” allowed readers to imagine an anthropomorphic form of agency.

According to Canguilhem, Darwin's attraction to the emerging discipline of geography—as practiced by its founders, Ritter and Von Humboldt, in the first decades of the nineteenth century—enabled him to redefine the “living” as that which exists in a reciprocally differentiating relationship with its surrounding milieu (14).

For a precise description of the genesis of this manuscript, see Duncan.

Sexual selection “depends, not on a struggle for existence, but on a struggle between the males for possession of the females; the result is not death to the unsuccessful competitor, but few or no offspring. Sexual selection is, therefore, less rigorous than natural selection” (Darwin 506).

In a number of places in her work on Darwin, Grosz reverses the priorities of natural and sexual selection and takes up the position that scholars give way too much credit to natural selection for the extraordinary variety of biological life. As she puts it, “[i]f species reproduced only themselves or in ever-diminishing numbers, natural selection would be unable to weed out the less fit and provide space for the selection and proliferation of the more fit, effectively preventing selection” (44).

This account of natural selection as a mindless algorithm comes from Dennett's Darwin's Dangerous Idea (1995), in which he argues that Darwin's most profound discovery was the notion of an algorithmic, creator-less process of creation.