Natural History's Hypothetical Moments: Narratives of Contingency in Victorian Culture

This essay focuses on the ways in which works by Robert Chambers, Charles Darwin, and George Eliot encouraged readers to imagine the future as contingent. But where Chambers alludes to Charles Babbage's computational engine and the period's life insurance industry to hint at the role of contingency in natural history, Darwin insists on the importance of contingently determined outcomes to speciation. The Origin consistently exercises the reader's speculative energies by generating conditional statements, causal hypotheses, and diverging alternatives. Adam Bede constitutes its characters' interior lives around the proliferation of such contingent narratives. To reflect on the future or on the past, these works suggest, demands a temporal, moral, and narrative complexity in one's thinking.