Evidence, Coincidence, and Superabundant Information

Maurice S. Lee

Victorian Studies, Volume 54, Number 1, Autumn 2011, pp. 87-94 (Article)

Published by Indiana University Press

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/468196

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Evidence, Coincidence, and
Superabundant Information

Maurice S. Lee

“I must trust to chance, Mr. Varden.”

“A bad thing to trust to, Joe.”
Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge

M
y grandfather used to get uncomfortable when the grand-
kids fiddled with his VCR. He used the machine regularly
enough, but it still felt mystical and fragile. I feel a bit like
my grandfather when I see students slinging around their laptops or
using them as food trays in the student union. It’s not that they under-
stand the technology better than I (though many do); it’s more that it
has been so integrated into their lives as to inspire little wonder or fear.
Something similar appears to be happening with literary critics and
databases. The digital humanities for literary scholars was once the
domain of pioneering specialists doing seemingly alien work, and
much research in the field still emphasizes technical questions of
informatics and database construction. The digital humanities may
remain a foreign land represented by a handful of ambassadors, and
yet databases have become so basic to mainstream critical practices
that even non-technical scholars of a certain age can begin to take
them for granted. What follows attempts to reclaim some discomfort
and wonder by asking what is gained and lost by using search engines
to gather evidence, a question that can turn us toward Dickens and
Poe, who both confronted the problem of identifying evidence during
their own information revolution.
Well before the digital humanities 2.0 was offered to the
public, Jerome McGann and Katherine Hayles signaled what in retro-
spect might be called the domestication of the digital humanities,
arguing that the future of the field depended on discipline- and media-
specific interpretation. As predicted, the digital revolution in literary
studies now seems less PC and more Mac, less directed by technical

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specialists and more driven by ordinary end-users. Among the greatest

beneficiaries of the digital humanities are historically minded scholars
of nineteenth-century literature. The explosion of transatlantic print
culture, coupled with the fact that most published work from the
period is already in the public domain, means that an inconceivable
quantity of texts are accessible through Internet databases. More
­practically—which is to say, more importantly—the vastness of nine-
teenth-century print culture is profoundly usable in digitized form as
search engines drive targeted research and data mining of unprece-
dented efficiency, specificity, and scope. For critics who build interpre-
tations on links between literary and historical texts, searchable
databases can feel almost too powerful, particularly under the influ-
ence of New Historicism.
New Historicism was initially most controversial for finding
ideology everywhere, though its most unsettling legacy at this moment
is its broad construal of what constitutes evidence. Under a New Histor-
icist anecdotal logic that has been largely naturalized today, any single
cultural artifact can be a basis for interpretation as New Historicist
methods expand the range of potential evidence beyond authorial
intention and source study, while at the same time shrinking the
amount of evidence required to make a case. New Historicism
unleashes myriad interpretive possibilities, though the worry is that it
lacks falsifiability insofar as it becomes theoretically impossible to
exclude any meaning from a text. New Historicists in the mid-1980s
and 1990s theoretically justified such methods (Fineman 49–76; Galla-
gher and Greenblatt 1–19), though my sense is that the persuasiveness
of New Historicist arguments depends mainly on an implicit belief that
connections made between texts are not arbitrary. When Mary Poovey
took an 1862 National Review essay to represent “an entire social orga-
nization” enforcing gender roles, her excerpt’s language was so pitch
perfect as to convince beyond its rightful evidentiary weight (2). Or
when Eric Savoy examined Henry James’s “In the Cage” (1898) along-
side the Cleveland Street affair, the parallels were so striking that it
seemed hardly to matter what precisely James knew of the scandal. For
New Historicist interpretation to work—then and now—homologies
cannot be coincidental, though how one might determine such things
remains difficult to say.
Here databases can provide a supplementary, though hardly
definitive, quantitative perspective. In 1983 Michael Rogin leveraged a

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Theodore Parker abolitionist sermon figuring the biblical King Ahab

as a slaveholder to argue that Moby-Dick (1851), through its own Captain
Ahab, critiques American slavery and capitalism. New Historicism
makes it unnecessary to prove that Melville knew Parker’s text, for the
uncanny echoes between Moby-Dick and the sermon stand in for a
larger cultural discourse associating Ahab and slavery. Though Rogin’s
discovery evinced time well spent in the stacks and the homologies he
drew were scintillating, ten minutes on Google Books offers up
evidence that was practically unobtainable in 1983.
Restricted to texts between 1830 and 1850, “Ahab” and
“slavery” appear together in what feels like a whopping 351 texts,
though we might wonder if this implies a broad discursive formation
given that a similar number of correlations exist between “Ahab” and
“key” (316), “beards” (332), “trains” (336), and “banks” (414). Out of
the roughly 25 million texts between 1830 and 1850 that Google Books
has indexed, “Ahab” appears independently in about 32,000 and
“slavery” in about 260,000. If the two words had no meaningful discur-
sive link at the time—that is, if their appearances in the same texts
were merely coincidental—we would expect their correlation to be
around 250, though whether the actual number of hits (351) is statisti-
cally significant is a matter of probability and interpretation. The
correlation between “Ahab” and “slavery” based on the number of
Google Books hits can be quantified with a “strength of associativity”
(SA) statistic that turns out to be inconclusive. Experimentation with a
set of 30 pseudorandom words renders a Z-score of .42 for the SA of
“Ahab” and “slavery,” well within a standard deviation and indicating a
modest correlation at best. By way of comparison, the Z-scores are
lower for “banks” (-.14) and “key” (.33) and higher for “trains” (1.3)
and “beards” (1.9), while “Ahab” and “Jezreel” (the biblical Ahab’s
city) has a Z-score of 4.64, confirming the sense that it is extremely
unlikely that the two words are randomly associated.1
This is not to say that Moby-Dick is about beards, or even to
argue against Rogin’s position, which involves more than the Parker
homology. It is to point out that what seems like a meaningful correla-
tion can result from sheer quantity and chance, particularly under
conditions of mass information in which seemingly unlikely coinci-
dences are highly probable and easily targeted by bias-confirming
searches. Blunt quantitative analysis may help to contextualize New
Historicist anecdotal evidence, and still a literary critic might wonder

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and worry: how does one differentiate between an arbitrary and a

meaningful connection, between coincidence and evidence?
Dickens and Poe ask similar questions under conditions not so
different from our own. As calculating authors and editors working at
the forefront of their era’s print culture revolution, both men negoti-
ated superabundant data and sprawling informational networks.2
More generally, the question of arbitrary versus meaningful connec-
tion—of chance versus design, random versus causal relations—
became increasingly pressing in the mid-nineteenth century across a
range of disciplines as advances in probability theory (Pierre-Simon
Laplace; Charles Babbage; John Venn) and statistics (Adolphe
Quetelet) made probabilistic thinking increasingly visible in biology
(Charles Darwin), physics (James Clerk Maxwell), political theory
(John Stuart Mill; Herbert Spencer), philosophy (the pragmatists),
and political economy. Quantitative approaches to insurance, gaming,
weather, and financial speculation also reflected the spread of proba-
bility and chance. And the possibilities of coincidence had implica-
tions for writers such as Dickens and Poe, who feared the randomness
and disarticulation of their era’s information revolution, even as they
wondered at the infinite potential of finding evidence amid intercon-
nected masses of people, cityscapes, documents, and facts.
In his 1841 preface to Barnaby Rudge, Dickens insists that his
historical representations are founded in “Truth” and that “any file of
old Newspapers, or odd volume of the Annual Register, will prove this
with terrible ease” (3). Like a New Historicist, Dickens leverages histor-
ical anecdotes unmethodically gathered and thickly described, though
in Barnaby Rudge the status of evidence is difficult to stabilize, if only
because its narrative logic resists orderly causation (Chittick 172). The
novel is not Bleak House (1853), but it is pervaded by what Dickens called
the “idea of multitudes” (xxx): London’s “labyrinths of public ways and
shops, and swarms of busy people” (33); the profusion of anti-papist
handbills that circulate beyond official channels; the roving mobs with
their “chance accessions” and “no definite purpose or design” (429).
Such random superabundance can be threatening, as with Dickens’s
chaotic descriptions of the riots, or when Barnaby Rudge Sr. suffers an
alienation “which the solitude in crowds alone awakens” (155). Yet the
masses of the novel also allow for what Jay Clayton has called “hidden
connections” (149), as if Dickens anticipates the paradox that in our
Internet age disarticulation and connectivity are simultaneously

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amplified and subtended. Characters in Barnaby Rudge repeatedly

happen upon each other in urban mazes and dense crowds as evidence
builds unevenly toward the solution of the novel’s murder mystery. What
initially appear to be coincidences wind up pointing toward truth.
The problem for many readers (here and elsewhere) is that
Dickens’s plots feel encumbered with coincidences, a concern that
Barnaby Rudge addresses in its climactic scene. In an apparently arbi-
trary encounter, Sir John Chester says to Reuben Haredale:

“[W]hat an odd chance it is, that we should meet here.”

“It is a strange chance.”
“Strange! The most remarkable and singular thing in the world.” (678)

The earnest Haredale and ironic Chester voice Dickens’s competing

desires: an impulse to maintain the realism of the novel, and a meta­
critical urge that, through the plotting Chester, confesses the improb-
able constructedness of the plot. Dickens would continue to admit and
defend the fantastic fidelity of his fiction, and in Bleak House he uses
Inspector Bucket as a kind of personified search engine whose genius
is to extract evidence from masses of information and thereby justify
seeming coincidences. The dastardly Quilp, Rigaud, and Fledgeby can
be taken as cousins of Bucket, but Barnaby Rudge has no character who
masters superabundant data, which is why the novel remains a tenta-
tive experiment in the mystery or detective genre.
Barnaby Rudge only begins to hint at a method for finding
meaning in large numbers. After “the crowd [is] utterly routed,”
Dickens not only re-establishes moral order, he gestures toward a quan-
titative way to comprehend and bring closure to the Gordon riots
(605). We are informed that 200 rioters were shot dead, 250 wounded,
and 100 imprisoned, and that 72 homes and 4 jails were destroyed at
an estimated loss of £125,000. Though Dickens lampoons the rage for
statistics in his “Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Asso-
ciation for the Advancement of Everything” (1837), and though he
elsewhere uses Chuffey, Pancks, and the Gradgrinds to expose the
limits of statistical reasoning, Barnaby Rudge supplements its singular
coincidences with an explicit quantitative perspective. Later in Little
Dorrit (1857)—a novel involving bureaucracy, failed financial calcula-
tions, wild coincidences, and a relentless search for evidence—Dickens
twice repeats the not-quite-ironic injunction: “Consider the improba-
bility” (610–11). Even as he doubts statistical methods in Barnaby Rudge

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and beyond, Dickens recognizes the power of quantification and the

necessity of acknowledging, if not exactly trusting, coincidence, prob-
ability, and chance.
More committed to the probabilistic interpretation of evidence
is Poe, whose relation to Dickens was marked by admiration, importu-
nity, and anxious influence. Before echoing Barnaby Rudge in “The
Raven” (1845), Poe wrote two reviews of the novel, the first of which
guessed the solution to the mystery early in the serialization process.
The reviews, which Poe probably showed to Dickens when they met in
Philadelphia in 1842, begin in praise but ultimately criticize Dickens’s
handling of evidence and coincidence. Whereas Poe complains in his
review of The Old Curiosity Shop (1841) that the “ultra-accident” of Quilp’s
death detracts from the story’s “poetical justice” (Essays and Reviews 214),
Poe’s first review of Barnaby Rudge carefully canvasses the evidence from
the murder, attributes to Dickens a brilliant overarching “design” (222),
and predicts that “poetical justice will . . . be fulfilled” when Barnaby Sr.
is revealed as the killer (219). Poe lauds Dickens for abjuring coinci-
dence: Barnaby Jr.’s ramblings “are not put into his mouth at random”
(221); events only seem to occur “as if by accident” (222); “almost every
word spoken . . . will be found to have an under current of meaning”
(222). Yet after finishing Barnaby Rudge, Poe in his second review
condemns the “coincidences” (241) that have “no necessary connection
with the story,” even as he chastises Dickens for revealing his design by
offering evidence too early and too explicitly (236). The problem Poe
represses here is the necessity of red herrings, for in order to disguise its
design, a mystery or detective story must include seeming evidence that
turns out to be coincidental.
It is probably no coincidence that Poe published his first detec-
tive story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), three months
after Barnaby Rudge began appearing in Master Humphrey’s Clock. No
single text has done more than “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to
establish the conventions of detective fiction. Poe’s Dupin is a master of
superabundant information (much of it disseminated through the
popular press), and readers are challenged to separate evidence from
coincidence (a bank employee happens to deliver a large amount of
gold prior to the killings; there happen to be multilingual witnesses
who report hearing various foreign tongues). Such red herrings help
hide Poe’s improbable design, and yet Poe feels obligated to justify
them, if only to exonerate himself from the charge of coincidence he

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levels at Dickens. “Coincidences,” Dupin explains, “happen to all of us

every hour of our lives. . . . Coincidences, in general, are great stum-
bling-blocks in the way of that class of thinkers who have been educated
to know nothing of the theory of probabilities” (Poetry and Tales 421).
Coincidence as a narrative device and statistical concept would
continue to occupy Poe. In “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842–43),
Dupin worries that the “Calculus of Probabilities” is still susceptible to
“coincidences” (553–54). As if echoing Dickens’s metacritical defenses,
“The Gold-Bug” (1843) confesses its own “accidents and coincidences,”
the primary one being that the titular gold bug is ultimately extraneous
to the mystery, suggesting that evidence probabilistically considered can
never escape the shadow of chance (585). Under conditions of mass infor-
mation, the potential for evidence and coincidence is everywhere, leading
not only to a paranoid style of reading that characterizes the mystery and
detective genres (particularly in their postmodern forms), but also
encouraging probabilistic literary analysis, inconclusive though it may be.
Aristotle in the Physics defines chance as coincidence, citing
the example of a man who goes to the marketplace for other reasons
and happens upon an acquaintance he wishes to see. According to
Aristotle’s Poetics, plots should not feel “random” (17), even though “it
is probable that improbable things will happen” (45). Dickens and Poe
share with Aristotle a desire to separate design from chance and litera-
ture from coincidence, even as they dramatize more forcefully than
Aristotle the statistical likelihood of improbable connections. Dickens
and Poe lacked the statistical expertise of specialists in the digital
humanities, just as they lacked the powerful search engines available
to literary critics today. Yet the very newness of probabilistic methods
and the explosion of nineteenth-century print culture made them
especially sensitive to the challenge of determining evidence in the
face of mass information. It may matter that, according to Google
Books Ngrams, the frequency of “wonderful intelligence” and “fearful
intelligence” peaked in the mid-nineteenth century.
Boston University

NOTES

1. Note that the Google Books data are approximations based not on compre-
hensive index searches but on Google’s algorithmic predictions. The total number of
texts is based on searches for “the.” The expected correlation of “Ahab” and “slavery”

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(253) is not generated by simply multiplying instances of each and dividing by the total
sample number, but rather by applying a more accurate strength of associativity
formula pioneered by Jonathan Lansey and Bruce Bukiet that accounts for the different
sizes of documents. Z-scores are a standard statistical tool for measuring deviations
from a mean. Many thanks to Jonathan Lansey for the statistical expertise he brought
to this essay.
2. See Patten; Irwin; Whalen; Clayton 148–64; McGill 109–37, 141–217.

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