Thus far we have examined various episodes in the history of social numbers that elicited an enthusiastic reaction, or at least acceptance of, this extension of quantitative thinking. But concurrently, many abhorred the introduction of numbers into discussions of human affairs.
The Chartists of the 1840s in England called for political reform to benefit the working class—universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, payment for members of Parliament. Most of the English establishment opposed the movement and its goals as radical and unnecessary, citing government statistics that showed that the workingman had nothing to complain of. But the writer Thomas Carlyle (1795–1881) believed the Chartists had right on their side, that official statistics misrepresented the real condition of the people, and that the government used these statistics to prevent reform.
“Tables,” he wrote, “are like cobwebs … beautifully reticulated, orderly to look upon, but which will hold no conclusion. Tables are abstractions.” Even if statistics showed general prosperity, the workingman’s “discontent, his real misery may be great. The labourer’s feelings, his notion of being justly dealt with or unjustly; his wholesome composure, frugality, prosperity in the one case, his acrid unrest, recklessness, gin-drinking, and gradual ruin in the other,—how shall figures of arithmetic represent all this?”1 Carlyle was far from alone in his conviction that statistics robbed their subjects of their humanity. His critique was soon amplified by a voice even more powerful than his own; indeed, by perhaps the most famous writer of his era.
Charles Dickens (1812–1870), strongly influenced by Carlyle, agreed and incorporated Carlyle’s ideas, which appear in many of Dickens’s works. In the preface to A Tale of Two Cities, Dickens expresses his respect:
Whenever any reference (however slight) is made here to the condition of the French people before or during the Revolution, it is truly made, on the faith of the most trustworthy witnesses. It has been one of my hopes to add something to the popular and picturesque means of understanding thatter rible time, though no one can hope to add anything to the philosophy of Mr. Carlyle’s wonderful book.
Dickens opposed statistics on two grounds. He found that political leaders too often used statistics to block social legislation that would help the London poor and the factory workers. Additionally, statistics tended to concenterate on averages rather than individuals. Dickens saw himself as the spokesman for the individual and he took issue with the dehumanizing aspect of statistics that reduced human attributes to a set of impersonal numbers.
Of course, Dickens also used numbers when they favored a position he held. Thus his two periodicals—Household Words and All the Year Round—would use numerical data to spice their articles even though the negative attitude toward statistics was evident to every reader. Thomas Carlyle also would use statistics if considerations of numbers helped him to make a point.
In the present context both men serve to alert us to the fact that the new numerical science cut both ways. Antagonism, for instance, is symbolized by the statement attributed by Mark Twain to Lord Disraeli, “There are lies, damn lies, and statistics.” It is a curious fact of history that no one has been able to find this apothegm in Disraeli’s novels, speeches, or correspondence and scholars now assume that this saying was invented by Mark Twain. Never mind! As the Italians say, “Se non e vero, e ben trovato!”
THE MUDFOG ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF EVERYTHING
Among Dickens’s earliest writings is a series of articles written for Bentley’s Miscellany in the early 1830s when he was in his late twenties. These articles poke fun at the recently founded British Association for the Advancement of Science (BAAS), which held its inaugural meeting in York in 1831. The very name invited satire, since it implied that the advance of science would be a British affair and would be made by the scientists banded together in the new organization. To a critical layman like Dickens, the speeches at the meetings had an aura of pomposity and self-congratulation that invited satire.
Let it be noted that at least one British scientist also recognized the pomposity of the BAAS. James Clerk Maxwell, one of the most important scientists of the nineteenth century, could not help making fun of the British Association, which he playfully converted into “The British Ass.” Its members became “British Asses.” In a serio-comic poem he addressed the members as “Ye British Asses, who expect to hear/ Ever some new thing.”2
Dickens’s parody purports to be a “Full Report of the First Meeting of the Mudfog Association for the Advancement of Everything.” The three scientists whose opinions and activities are reported are “Professors Snore, Doze, and Wheezy.” Among the famous savants in attendance were “Mr. Slug, celebrated for his statistical research.” Dickens’s heavy-handed humor is manifested in the names he gives to the learned men attending the meetings. The vice-president of the statistics section, for example, is “Mr. Ledbrain.” Among the useless statistics was a report on the number of skewers of dog-meat sold in London per annum. So even from this early start Dickens makes his views concerning the “value” of statistical studies quite clear. He never wavered in this judgment.
One of the bitterest condemnations of statistics published in Dickens’s magazine Household Words was an article written by Henry Morley, a close associate. The article, published in 1855, was grimly titled “Death’s Ciphering Book.” There can be no doubt that as editor Dickens would never have published an article that did not express his own point of view.
“Death’s Ciphering Book” purports to be an account of a meeting of manufacturers who were opposed to a recent government regulation that would require them to fence off dangerous machinery that might cause injury or death to the workers.
The argument against the government ruling was based on the fact that the number of such accidents was very small compared to the total number of workers in England. This was just the kind of argument that roused the ire of Dickens and Morley, who focused on individuals and not percentages, and on the fact that human beings actually suffered from contact with dangerous machinery. Morley seems to have enjoyed writing attacks on public figures who would quote statistics to preserve and exploit some condition of society. His argument was usually based on the assertion that no numerical calculation could take the place of “moral calculation.” Thus, in “Death’s Ciphering Book,” Morley argued from the following principle: “As for ourselves, we admit freely that it never did occur to us that it was possible to justify, by arithmetic, a thing unjustifiable by any code of morals, civilized or savage.”
Here is a sample of Morley’s invective:
We will not call it inhumanity—it is not that—but it is surely a strange illustration of the power of self-interest and habit, that a gentleman of high character, who well deserves all the respect attaching to his name, could think a point of this kind settled by the calculation, that four thousand accidents, great and small, yield only one to every hundred and seventy-five persons, and that the number of horrible deaths caused yearly being only forty-two—seven hundred thousand, divided by forty-two, gave a product of sixteen thousand and sixty-six, or, in round numbers, one in seventeen thousand.
Morley’s point is made explicit by the numbers: a total of 4,000 accidents is equivalent to one accident for every 175 people working in factories and mills; 42 deaths is equivalent to 1 death in 17,000. Note that Morley’s presentation of ratios and the arithmetic in the calculation is confusing!
Morley then asks:
What if you were to carry out this method of arguing by products? There is a kind of death which the law seeks to prevent, although it is scarcely found to be preventable, and that is by willful murder. Perhaps there may be about forty-two who suffer death in that way, annually, throughout Great Britain; and the population of the whole country is immensely greater than the population of the factory-world contained within it. Perhaps, also, there may occur in the year four thousand burglaries of greater or less moment, or some other number which would go certainly oftener than a hundred and seventy-five times into the whole population. Why, then, let it be asked, are honest men to be taxed for the maintenance of expensive systems of law and police when the per centage of burglary and murder, upon the sum total of men who are neither murderers or burglars, is represented only by such a ridiculous fraction as may be received at an aggregate meeting like the Manchester chairman’s with laughter and applause? He spoke of a third of a man per cent. Burglary and murder together do not touch of a third of a man per cent, or anything approaching it. What right then has the home government to concern itself about such trifles as burglary and murder? This is the sort of argument to which we are reduced when the moral element is exchanged for the arithmetical.
Once again, Morley’s expression of the calculation is confusing. By “product” he probably means “result,” and by “dividend” he probably means “quotient.”
Dickens’s disdain for arguments based on numbers and statistical averages is even displayed in his correspondence. For example, in a letter of 1864 to Charles Knight, one of the contributors to Dickens’s Household Words, Dickens stated plainly and unambiguously that he was “against those who see figures and averages, and nothing else.” Such people, according to Dickens, were “representatives of the wickedest and most enormous vice of this time.” Through “long years to come,” these statisticians will do “more to damage the real useful truths of political economy, than I could do (if I tried) in my whole life.”
Such people had “addled heads.” They “would take the average of cold in the Crimea during twelve months, as a reason for clothing a soldier in nankeen on a night when he would be frozen to death in fur.” (“Nankeen” is the name of a light cotton cloth originally made in Nanking, China.)
Such statistically minded people, according to Dickens, would “comfort the laborer in travelling twelve miles a day to and from his work” by telling him that “the average distance of one inhabited place from another in the whole area of England is not more than four miles.” Dickens added the comment, “Bah!”
Dickens’s letter was a response to his having received a copy of Knight’s book, Knowledge Is Power. According to Knight, Dickens “bore too hardly upon those who held that the great truths of political economy … were not insufficient foundation for the improvement of society.” Knight feared that Dickens would set him down as a cold-hearted political economist. The issue of temperatures had been raised by a letter to The Times in which data concerning isothermal lines and meteorological tables had been used to show that the temperature at Sebastopol was only a little lower than at Paris and at London and a little higher than at Dijon. A later letter by The Times Crimea correspondent dismissed this nonsense as the work of a “philosophical idiot.”
FACTS AND FIGURES: THE MESSAGE OF HARD TIMES
Published in 1854 and dedicated to Thomas Carlyle, Dickens’s Hard Times is a savage, bitter novel. Dickens was 42 years old when this, his fourteenth novel, appeared, basically a broadside attack on an economic system that crushes the workers, destroys individuality, and glorifies the rule of head over heart. While it is an undisguised condemnation of the factory system—and succeeds as such—literary critics generally agree that it is one of Dickens’s least successful works of art.
The theme is set in the opening pages, in which Mr. Thomas Gradgrind, a retired wholesale hardware merchant and the leading citizen of Cokeville, conducts a class in the local school. The quality of the school and the education it provides are made clear by the name of the schoolmaster, Mr. McChokumchild. In the opening sentences, Mr. Gradgrind sends his message, “Now what I want is facts.” In this life, he repeats, “we want nothing but facts.” And, of course, the simplest uncontestable facts are numbers.
Thomas Gradgrind is a “man of realities,” a “man of facts and calculations, who proceeds on the principle that two and two are four, and nothing over.” He always has in his pocket “a rule and a pair of scales,” ready “to measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to.” It is “a mere question of figures, a case of simple arithmetic.”
Mr. Gradgrind even reduces the students to numbers rather than treating them as individuals. Thus he calls upon a girl as “girl number twenty.” He doesn’t refer to her by name or by her seat location (e.g., the girl in the back row). This is the introduction of Cissy, a major character who represents the values of Heart over Head. She can’t even get herself to pronounce the word “statistics.” The nearest she can get is “stutterings.”
In the course of the novel, Gradgrind suffers two tremendous emotional blows.
The first concerns his son Tom. In a dramatic moment toward the end of the novel, this leading citizen of the town discovers that Tom is a thief. Tom has not only robbed the local bank but he has also cleverly arranged that an honest workman be blamed for the crime. “If a thunderbolt had fallen on me,” said the father, “it would hardly have shocked me more than this.”
Tom excuses his base conduct by referring to the principles of statistical determinism, as expounded by Quetelet. “I don’t see why [you are shocked],” grumbled the son. “So many people are employed in situations of trust; so many people, out of so many, will be dishonest. I have heard you talk, a hundred times, of its being a law. How can I help laws? You have comforted others with such things, father. Comfort yourself!” We have seen in Chapter 7 that, as Quetelet wrote to Villermé in 1832, there was considerable doubt in his mind about individual responsibility for crimes. “Society,” he wrote to Villermé in 1832, “prepares the crime, and the guilty person is only the instrument.”
The second blow to Gradgrind concerns his beloved daughter Louisa. The stage is set for Louisa’s tragedy when Bounderby, the local banker and mill owner, asks Gradgrind for his daughter’s hand in marriage. Gradgrind’s presentation of this proposal to Louisa takes place in his office, a room of his home lined with blue books, government reports giving numerical data on all sorts of political and social questions. Dickens describes it as a “stern room” and compares it to an observatory, designed to shut out the real world of Coketown and its inhabitants. On the wall there hangs what Dickens calls a “deadly statistical clock.”
Gradgrind begins the conversation by remarking that he is confident that Louisa is not “romantic” or “impulsive,” that her education has conditioned her to “view everything from the strong dispassionate ground of reason.” To Gradgrind’s surprise Louisa’s reaction to the proposal is to ask, “Father, do you think I love Mr. Bounderby?” When Gradgrind gives an evasive answer, Louisa pursues the question. “Father,” she now asks, “does Mr. Bounderby ask me to love him?” Gradgrind is at a loss how to reply. Love is not a quantifiable term in his equations. Finally he responds to Louisa’s persistence with a parade of statistics on the number of successful marriages between people of different ages. These irrelevant data come from the “British provinces in India” and in Tartary and China. Three-quarters of such marriages, he reports, are successful and so “the statistics of marriage” favor Bounderby’s proposal.
Gradgrind then extends the discussion to life expectancy and recent studies of the “duration of life” that have been made by the “life assurance and annuity offices.” Gradgrind remarks that length of life “is governed by the laws which govern life in the aggregate.” Louisa agrees to marry Bounderby. But she cannot end the discussion without taking note that the education and training she has received have not included the human emotions, that she has never had “a child’s dream,” never had a “child’s heart.” As Dickens will describe this education later on, it has been based on “the rule of Head over Heart.”
Some time later, when the marriage has fallen apart, and when Louisa experiences a sensation which may be love, she returns distraught to her father’s house. It has been storming outside and she appears soaking wet and in an obviously distressed state. Once again she has an intimate conversation with her father. It takes place in that same observatory, with the “deadly statistical clock” ticking at its inexorable pace. In her agony of spirit Louisa tells of her despair, she reminds her father that he has trained her “from the cradle” to be rational only, and then cries out, “I curse the hour in which I was born to such a destiny.”
Louisa then asks him, “How could you give me life, and take from me the inappreciable things that raise it from the state of conscious death?” Specifically she bemoans the absence of what she calls “the graces of my soul,” “the sentiments of my heart.” In her distress she laments that her father never knew “that there lingered in my breast sensibilities, affections, weaknesses capable of being nourished into strength, defying all the calculations ever made by man, and no more known to his arithmetic than his Creator is.” Had her father not been limited by his statistical or numerical point of view, he would surely not have given her to the husband she now hates. This scene ends with Louisa, “the pride of his heart and the triumph of his system,” collapsed in a heap on the floor.
Gradgrind’s system of values has not prepared him for these disclosures of his favorite daughter. He tells her that the very “ground on which I stand has ceased to be solid under my feet.” The “only support” on which he “leaned, and the strength which it seemed, and still does seem, impossible to question, has given way in an instant.” He has been forced to admit that there is a “wisdom of the Heart” as well as a “wisdom of the Head.”
Here is Dickens’s rejection of a system of values that is based on numbers, on averages and statistics. This part of the novel concludes with Gradgrind’s system in disarray, with a recognition that the rule of numbers is not enough for the good life, that the rule of the head must be supplemented by the rule of the heart.