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  • Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic
  • John D. Baird (bio)
Chance and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: Realism, Probability, Magic by Jesse Molesworth Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. x+276pp. US$90. ISBN 978-0-521-19108-1.

It is widely held that the English eighteenth-century novel is an Enlightenment project, a rendering in prose narrative of the world as it really is, guided by reason and influenced by other contemporary investigations of actuality, among them the development of probability theory. In this learned and lucid book, Jesse Molesworth lays out reasons to doubt this comfortable belief; his findings have implications far beyond the eighteenth century.

From Blaise Pascal in the early seventeenth century to Abraham De Moivre in the early eighteenth, mathematicians worked out the theory of probability, progressively showing the larger regularities that underlie the randomness of life. Their methods found practical application in such matters as the pricing of annuities and the selling of life insurance. Thus the universe became a little less mysterious as rational calculations of risk displaced surrender to the inscrutable will of God. It became harder to discern special providence in the fall of a sparrow when one was aware that sparrows, like human beings, have calculable life expectancy. But while eighteenth-century men of business adopted probability theory in the counting-house, there is ample reason to think that they left it there after working hours.

Molesworth's first section, "Chance, Plot, Magic," opens with the English national lottery, an extremely lucrative institution that began in 1694. Since rational probabilists do not waste money on lottery tickets, its success is in itself cautionary. But stories about lottery ticket buyers are even more revealing, since they focus not on the typical case—ticket buyer wins no prize—but on the highly atypical case, the lucky winner. Readers' interest in the winner is intimately connected with the fantasies of winning the grand prize that impel people to buy tickets in the first place. Readers in the early eighteenth century wanted what Ian Watt defined as formal realism in their fiction. They wanted to read about people like themselves in surroundings like their own (typical cases), but—an important refinement of Watt's theory—they wanted plots based on atypical cases: the story of one heroically virtuous Pamela, not the story of one of ten thousand ruined Molls and Bets. Formal realism combines with highly atypical plots to facilitate fantasizing for middle-class readers.

The second section, "Epistemologies of the Eighteenth-Century Novel," presents readings that illustrate resistance to probability theory and typicality. In Daniel Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year the narrator [End Page 276] H.F. establishes repeatedly that the probability of becoming infected rises with exposure, so that flight is the only rational course of action, but he stays in London for the duration. He beats the odds, and so has an interesting tale to tell; had he not accepted the risks he denounces as overwhelming, the book would not exist. Defoe's Roxana comes to an awkward end when the protagonist's daughter enters the story and turns out to be potentially more exceptional and thus more interesting than her mother. The daughter is obscurely eliminated, but the narrative has been compromised and cannot be resumed.

The best-known application of the mathematics of probability to practical affairs in the period was Edmond Hoyle's Short Treatise on the Game of Whist (1742). Hoyle supposes that you hold certain cards and instructs you how to play these cards in order to minimize risk and maximize potential advantage. Henry Fielding's introductory chapters in Tom Jones resemble Hoyle's instructions: the characters are the cards that must be played in a certain order for the game to reach the desired conclusion, and the narrator explains to the reader the rules he is playing by as he proceeds. Like a deck of cards, the plot is a closed system that depends on each character behaving in a consistent manner. But even as Hoyle's little book went through edition after edition in the 1740s, a very different approach to reality was being promoted by David Hume's...

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