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Article ID: CBB000831565

Hard Times and Statistics (2007)

Bayley, Mel (Author)

British Society for the History of Mathematics Bulletin
Volume: 22
Pages: 92--103

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Probability and statistics Science and literature Mathematics Vital statistics Science and society 19th century England Dickens, Charles

Hard times is a satire against mid-Victorian statisticians, those whom Dickens called 'the representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time'. Historians of mathematics have seen the novel as a cruel parody of statistical determinism, a fatalistic movement which swept the continent in the 1860s and 1870s. But to see it as such is to credit Dickens with a better understanding of contemporary mathematics than he in fact possessed. The statistics in Hard times are not the probabilistic theories of continental academics. They are the mundane facts and figures of the much more prosaic English statistical movement.

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Description On the the type of statistics that Charles Dickens criticized in his novel.

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