Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain by Tina Young Choi (review)

One of the pressing questions of our present moment, Tina Young Choi observes, is how, in a world lived in virtual and globalized networks of entanglement, do we conceptualize our individual and collective responsibilities toward nameless and distant others? In seeking grounds for a useable "ethics of social belonging," Anonymous Connections: The Body and Narratives of the Social in Victorian Britain turns to the multiple and complex strategies deployed by Victorian authors to forge models of social participation mediated by the body (1). In contrast to familiar accounts centered on discursive strategies designed to contain the individual and control collective wholes, Choi moves in the opposite direction, pursuing models of sociality—both productive and destructive—founded upon "the permeable, leaky, dispersive body" and "to the uneasy, unforeseen, and often unwanted intimacies" that it entails (5).

Choi's analysis starts with a compelling foundational chapter in which she runs the tension between subjective and physiological models of social connectivity through the emergent science of statistics. Choi draws on Lorraine Daston's account of the shift from an eighteenth-century version of probability, grounded in individuals' voluntarily-entered risk calculation, to a nineteenth-century version in which individuals are constrained to think of themselves—and to have their lives and well-being determined by—macro forces acting on them as aggregated populations. In so doing, Choi teases out surprising subtleties from both statistical and literary texts, such as in her analysis of William Farr's re-writing of Richard Price's late-eighteenth-century Northampton Table of Mortality. Whereas Price conceived his figures realistically (with numbers representing actual people), a century later Farr used various techniques—such as rounding up not only to simplify readers' calculations, but also to make them complicit in the hypothetical nature of his analysis—to shift the referent of Price's data from individuals (however numerous) to collectives understood as abstracted percentages and proportions. Turning to "Fictions of Risk," Choi focuses on the tensions between voluntarist and structural models of risk laid bare in Elizabeth Gaskell's Mary Barton (1848) (26). The novel, she argues, shifts gears at its midway point: the first half is driven by an actuarial social vision that, in focusing on industrial accident insurance, marginalizes the importance of individual agency, while the second half reverts, by recourse to a murder plot, to a more traditional vision of identifiable and morally charged causes.

The following three chapters cohere around a familiar set of themes in the social and literary histories of medicine and public health, but in Choi's hands classic texts gain fresh significance. Chapter 2 considers the miasma-centered sanitarianism of the 1830s and 1840s, with its relentless focus on contaminated air, overflowing cesspools, overcrowded dwellings, and the dangerous aftereffects of human, urban bodies that were considered the primary source of disease. For Choi, the writings of Sir Edwin Chadwick and his ilk did more than simply identify the sources of urban poison; they conjured a new model of (enforced) sociality based on "uncomfortable, involuntary intimacies between bodies," in which "a single inhalation might be a form of social participation" (34).

In chapter 3, Choi shifts the epidemiological ground from miasma to contagion, focusing not on "leaky" bodies in a continuous shared environment, but instead on discontinuous moments of ostensibly benign contact between persons and things across time and space (5). Unlike miasma's immediately discernible physiological effects, the contagious body operated covertly, leaving "immaterial signifiers of its presence—an undefined something on a piece of paper that another person might subsequently touch, an invisible trace of the self left on a blanket or box" (56). This model of discrete, multiple, and unforeseen pathogenic transmission, Choi argues, required a new narrative genre, one that abandoned a traditional single plotline in favor of what was destined to become one of the period's dominant literary forms: the "multiplot" (11). Here, as elsewhere...