From Georgic Poetry to Statistics and Graphs: Eighteenth-Century Representations and the "State" of British Society

This essay examines the emergent science of statistics in eighteenth-century Europe as a mode of representation and demonstrates its connections with more conventional literary representations in the period. The essay focuses on two central questions: how statistics, charts, and graphs functioned as modes of representation and what it is they were thought to represent. Statistics and graphs, it is argued, bear significant affinities with some major literary forms in the period, in particular, the novel and the topographical or georgic-descriptive poem. These seemingly disparate representational forms share important features that reflect underlying cultural and epistemological assumptions common to them all.