Hard times and statistics

Abstract

Hard times is a satire against mid-Victorian statisticians, those whom Dickens called ‘the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time’. Historians of mathematics have seen the novel as a cruel parody of statistical determinism, a fatalistic movement which swept the continent in the 1860s and 1870s. But to see it as such is to credit Dickens with a better understanding of contemporary mathematics than he in fact possessed. The statistics in Hard times are not the probabilistic theories of continental academics. They are the mundane facts and figures of the much more prosaic English statistical movement.

Notes

¹James Harthouse's job as a ‘hard Fact fellow’ is clearly meant to be that of a regional officer for the Statistical Department of the Board of Trade, as we shall see. In fact, the Board of Trade was reliant for its publications on returns from the local chambers of commerce—it had no regional officers. It was the Registrar General's department that had local offices (see Cullen 1975, 19–27). But whether Dickens deliberately gives responsibility to the wrong department in order to strengthen his storyline or whether he simply didn't know is immaterial. What Harthouse personifies here is a mixture of dilettantism, politics, and statistics.

²References to Hard times are to page numbers in the Penguin edition, 1995, unless otherwise stated.

³ Household Words, 2 (1851), 273–279.

⁴Other novels that I analyse for my DPhil include George Eliot's Middlemarch and Daniel Deronda and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbevilles and Jude the Obscure. This list is by no means exhaustive, however.

⁵Edward Cocker was a seventeenth-century arithmetician whose name had passed into common parlance: ‘According to Cocker’, Dickens's first choice for a title for Hard times, meant ‘it's a fact’. See, for example, the Wordsworth Classics edition of Charles Dickens, Hard times, Ware, 2000, 237, or the Oxford World Classics edition, Oxford, 1991, 416.

⁶Dickens claimed: ‘It does not seem to me to be enough to say of any description that it is the exact truth …  [especially] … in these times, when the tendency is to be frightfully literal and catalogue-like – to make the thing, in short, a sort of sum in reduction that any miserable creature can do’. From John Forster's The life of Charles Dickens, quoted in Hard times, xiii.

⁷As far as McCulloch was concerned, the British Empire at this date meant only England, Ireland, Wales and Scotland. Ironically, the part of the empire that would ultimately generate the most statistics was not included in his survey: India.

⁸Despite being more than thirty years old, this is still the best review of the subject and the one to which I am most indebted.

⁹We are told that Bounderby had reached the age of ‘seven or eight and forty’ by the time the novel was written and that his friend was ‘a year or two’ older (p. 21). Kay and Langton were born in 1804 and 1803 respectively.

¹⁰For a discussion of the philanthropic contributions of the founders of the Manchester Statistical Society to the factories that they owned, see Cullen 1975, 05–117.

¹¹Asa Briggs lists Porter's Progress of the nation (1836) and McCulloch's Descriptive and statistical account of the British Empire (1837) as the two great statistical publications of the decade (Briggs 1973, 84). Porter's statistical reports were used as the basis of articles in Household Words: see unsigned review, ‘Cheerful arithmetic’, Household Words, 3 (1851), 240–245.

¹²Throughout the nineteenth century, there was a drive towards the quantification of economic theory, just as there had been a drive to quantify the natural sciences.

¹³The Registration Act came into effect in 1836 and the General Register Office was set up in 1837 to deal with the information it generated. A series of articles in Household Words suggest that Dickens was ambivalent at best, and arguably even antagonistic, to its work—see, for example, unsigned review, ‘A visit to the registrar-general’ Household Words, 5 (1851), 37–49. A broadside attack on the department is reserved for a later novel. With its false names and faked deaths, Our mutual friend can be read as a plot to defraud the Registrar General.

¹⁴An article in The Times from 14 November 1837 announced: ‘The second number of the Statistical Journal has just made its appearance. We bore testimony to the usefulness of this publication when it first came out’. Source: Times Digital Archive. The report on the first edition has proved elusive.