:Karl Pearson: The Scientific Life in a Statistical Age

Abstract

To most historians, Karl Pearson is known primarily as the author of The Grammar of Science (1892) and of a voluminous biography of Francis Galton, as a pioneer of statistical analysis, and as one of the founders of eugenics. Despite its subtitle, Theodore M. Porter's intellectual biography pays much less attention to these achievements than to tracing the curious late Victorian byways that eventually led Pearson to advocate social reformation on the basis of statistical analysis. Consequently, scholars of late Victorian literature and culture will find this important volume every bit as interesting as historians of mathematics and science. Born in early 1857, Pearson spent the first three and a half decades of his life moving through intellectual and emotional experiences that one might have expected to mark the career of an early nineteenth-century romantic. Indeed, Porter points repeatedly to the manner in which German thought from the Sturm und Drang era onward influenced Pearson's early self-understanding. The young Pearson was a late Victorian who, like the earlier generation of the 1840s, found personal, spiritual guidance in the writings of Thomas Carlyle, most particularly Sartor Resartus. Although he studied mathematics at Cambridge University and would later hold various academic positions in mathematics, Pearson was deeply concerned with coming to an ethical understanding of life. To that end he became what Porter terms an “Apostle of Renunciation.” During these years of his life, Pearson wrote his own version of a new novel about Werther and a passion play about the life of Christ as well as exploring medieval German history.