Writing the Victorian City: Discourses of Risk, Connection, and Inevitability

Abstract

A n essayist writing in the 1860 All the Year Round reflected that it concerns a man more to know his risks of the fifty illnesses that may throw him on his back, than the possible date of the one death that must come (Registration of Sickness 228). This seemingly unimpressive statement about the value of statistics is remarkable for a number of reasons. The editor, Charles Dickens, had himself famously caricatured and critiqued statistical studies with his early depictions of the Mudfog Association in Sketches by Boz (1833-36) and later in Hard Times (1854). The Mudfog Association's self-important and pointlessly detailed statistical reports, and Sissy Jupe's inability to comprehend, much less to pronounce, the term held dear by the unforgivingly utilitarian Gradgrind and the schoolmaster M'Choakumchild, asserted the emptiness and meaninglessness of statistical inquiry in comparison with what Dickens's novels celebrated: individuals, families, daily lives, and domestic feeling. But the author of this essay, expressing at once a specu