CHAPTER 5

THE LARGE NOVEL AND THE LAW OF LARGE NUMBERS: DANIEL DERONDA AND THE COUNTERINTUITIVE

Realist novel narrative, then, works to bridge the space between the internal and the external, the individual and the social, by suggesting that there never really was a gap in the first place. The force experienced as driving the novel forward becomes something associated with the reader: the production of the absent backstory leading toward Oliver’s transcendence, or the membership in the sensed community that motivates David. Novels’ narrative processes “feel right,” in other words, because they work toward an identification of the external world of realist depiction and the internal sensible world. They work, in other words, through ratification of the intuitive: making what ought to happen into what does happen. As the previous two chapters, on David Copperfield and the Bildungsroman, demonstrate, the means by which this intuition is implied is often through the suggestion of belonging in a community of tacit consensus.

But what if you cannot rejoin a community? This chapter deals with the counterintuitive: the ending that “feels wrong,” or that does not work out as it seems it should. Certainly, this could mean many things, from a poorly constructed novel to the (often banal) pedagogy implied by naturalist accident. The form of the counterintuitive that structures much of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda, though, and which enacts the novel’s stern moral lesson, develops from Eliot’s more social concerns. Eliot, throughout her writing career, worked with an idea of narrative intuition, and formal morality, connected with the model I sketched out above: a working out of the identity between an individual and the larger group. In Deronda, though, with its consistent concentration on ideas of probability and statistical significance, we see a conceptual shift in Eliot’s thinking about the relation of the one and the many.1 In short: though the larger workings of human interaction indicate that a certain state of affairs shall certainly come about at the largest levels, this offers no indication of how or when this might resolve in the individual case.

Deronda does, of course resolve, after a fashion—but it famously defers its resolution to the future: “It is better—it shall be better because I have known you.”2 Here, after seventy chapters of arduous moral education, Daniel Deronda’s narrator seems content to let Gwendolen Harleth’s final line speak for itself. The novel reproduces Gwendolen’s letter to Daniel verbatim, and moves on without comment to a description of his preparations for leaving England. But given this line’s status as the final testament of Eliot’s fraught portrayal of her heroine, its meaning remains rather opaque. The dash in the middle of the sentence: does Gwendolen catch herself overstating the case and rephrase? Or is she saying that it—whatever “it” may be—is now better, and that is because “it” will be better with her in the future? Either way, any satisfaction that the reader may take in these lines is predicated on the belief that things will, in fact, be better for Gwendolen in the future. Gwendolen herself shall become a better person, as Daniel has assured her she would: “one of the best of women, who make others glad that they were born.” The indecision over tenses in this line mirrors an ambiguity in the novel’s resolution, which takes out a sort of narrative loan against its own indefinite future. At some point, though we do not know when, it shall be better for Gwendolen, she shall make us happy we were born. And from that, we can find resolution in the novel now.

It is not uncommon, of course, for novels to have forward-looking conclusions. What is notable about Deronda’s ending, though, is how little excitement, even interest, Gwendolen seems to show for this future. This does makes some narrative sense; after all, her husband has died, her wealth is gone, and she has been rejected by the man that she thought she would marry. There is a sense of inevitability to this future, emphasized by Gwendolen’s recurrent use of the word “shall” in novel’s final chapters. “I shall live,” she tells her mother, “I shall be better” (807). Compare these lines to her earlier “self-confident” statement: “I will do something. I will be something. Things will come right” (226). At the novel’s end, the verb “will,” which in proper Victorian usage had the meaning of “wish,” is replaced by “shall,” which carried the meaning of a “command or obligation.”³ The novel’s conclusion relies on a necessary future for Gwendolen—but it is one that will come about regardless of Gwendolen’s agency or desire. This neutrality finds a corollary in the reader’s experience. On the one hand, the reference to a better future is necessary for the novel’s conclusion. On the other hand, the ending does not seem to prompt a desire to see this future realized, better though it may be. The novel’s resolution, that is, rests on a sense that even though things are not yet as they should be, it is enough simply to say that they will be. Narrative resolution does not require literary realization of this future better state.

In this chapter, I will argue that Eliot’s developing view of the relation between the individual and the larger social group forced her, in Deronda, to reconsider the desire to see a better state of affairs realized, and thus to reconsider the connection between moral feeling and narrative structure. The novel’s depiction of Gwendolen in particular moves away from the structure common to much of nineteenth-century fiction—David Copperfield offered a good example, as does much of Eliot’s earlier work—in which the narrative impulse is toward a resolution of internal moral intuition and external reality. Deronda instead imagines two nearly separate realms: in one, we find individual characters and actions; in the other, the large-scale movements of social aggregates.

As this last term might indicate, I will be arguing that Deronda shows an increasing interest and unease in the counterintuitive explanatory power of statistics and probability, and particularly in one of their key concepts: the so-called law of large numbers. The precise meaning of the term, introduced by the French mathematician Siméon-Denis Poisson in 1835 is the subject of philosophical and mathematical debate, but its intuitive meaning is clear enough. Given a sufficient number of trials, events will conform to their probabilities, even if every event is itself random. If we flip a coin enough times, in other words, eventually the results will end up fifty-fifty—but that does not tell us anything about the outcome of any individual toss. Critics such as Douglas Lane Patey, Neil Hertz, and Leland Monk have shown the ways in which understandings of chance influenced the novel form throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries;4 what is distinctive about Eliot’s work in Deronda, though, is that it sees laws that operate at the large scale coexisting with unconditioned autonomy at the individual scale—yet with an insurmountable breach between them. Contemporary thought on this issue affected Victorian understandings of a host of concerns that reads like a list of Deronda’s motifs: gambling, physics, population, the progress of history. Eliot’s examination of these themes throughout the novel shows a radical departure from her earlier work, with its emphasis on the interdependence between individual elements and the larger group.

Perhaps the most telling way in which Eliot examines the law of large numbers, though, is through the large novel, Deronda itself. For the novel presents us with a wide variety of individuals, seemingly detached from one another, and yet together moving under the sway of the narrative itself. Deronda has produced debate between critics who believed the novel’s separate plots could be easily pulled apart⁵ and those who followed George Eliot’s insistence on the necessary unity of a novel in which “everything … is related to everything else.”⁶ In this chapter, I will suggest that Eliot’s statistical interests offer the means for seeing a novel in which these two impulses are unified. One spin of the roulette wheel is utterly independent of the next, and yet both, together with a suitably large number of subsequent spins, will tend toward a unified outcome. The larger narrative structure of the novel can offer a unity that is not apparent, or even particularly meaningful, as a way of describing the novel’s individual subplots and characters. Such a rethinking of the relationship between narrative and its elements also requires a reconsideration of narrative’s moral sensibility. For if an individual’s moral intuitions describe a different sort of experience than that described by the large novel as a whole, we cannot expect the novel to realize those intuitions. The “ought” of the individual will not become the final “is” of the large novel.

These are difficult ideas to work with, for Eliot and for readers both. For that reason, I will follow Eliot through the different models that she offers—almost experimentally, it seems—to help illustrate these ideas: statistical laws, populations, thermodynamics, and, most importantly, gambling. I will argue that each of these ideas offers Eliot new ways of explaining the relation between part and whole in her fiction. I will hold these against Eliot’s conception of the Jews in her novel, which I take to be a holdover of ideas of community more familiar from her previous novels. Even in this case, it will turn out that Eliot’s imagining of the Jews is based just as much on ideas of large and small numbers as it is on culture or religion. To set the stage for this argument, though, it will be useful first to look briefly at more familiar novelistic trajectories and their means of representing the relation between the individual and the larger group.

CALCULUS OF THE BILDUNGSROMAN:
DIFFERENTIATION AND INTEGRATION

Gwendolen ends the novel “forsaken” and alone (805). The hope that the novel offers for the future is not simply that she will become better, but what this means: that she will improve the lives of “others” (810). The actual moment of this resolution is suspended in the novel’s future, but even the promise of a resolution of the lonely self with others enacts the conventions that underlies so much of the novel: those of the Bildungsroman. Deronda, as a novel of moral education, follows the conventions of the Bildungsroman—until the conclusion, which defers the resolution typical of the form. In this section, I will discuss the form of the Bildungsroman, and particularly Eliot’s own Middlemarch, to show that the methods usually employed for narrative resolution rely implicitly on a method of induction, building up from a single character to represent the larger social group. Such an inductive connection between the individual and the large number is, ultimately, the sort of resolution that Deronda refuses to offer to Gwendolen.

Traditionally, the resolution of the Bildungsroman depends on the protagonist’s ability to recognize herself in the social world. For Georg Lukács, in The Theory of the Novel, this recognition is the essential move that makes “reconciliation between interiority and reality” possible.7 Lukács’s argument proceeds along straightforward dialectical lines. First step: the individual—let us call her Dorothea—realizes that she is separate from the larger world. Second step: the individual is set in opposition the external world. Third step: the individual realizes that the external world is social in nature, made of other individuals who are each in a similar state of opposition. What started out as difference, then, becomes similarity and, ultimately, the means of what Lukács calls “reconciliation.” He describes this last step, in which we realize that reality is in fact “society,” a mass “community” of similar souls:

Such community is not the result of people being naïvely and naturally rooted in a specific social structure, not of any solidarity of kinship (as in the ancient epics), nor is it a mystical experience of community, a sudden illumination which rejects the lonely individuality as something ephemeral, static and sinful; it is achieved by personalities, previously lonely and confined within their own selves, adapting and accustoming themselves to one another; it is the fruit of a rich and enriching resignation, the crowning of a process of education, a maturity attained by struggle and effort. (133)

Lukács’s assumption, then, is that a resolution between internal and external can only come about if the external is itself a collection of other human beings, all with the same goal. The world may be external, but the protagonist is already part of it; successful development lies in realizing this. A final reconciliation with the world, when it comes, is compromise on a grand scale, for it involves not only the protagonist but also all of the other characters who make up her world.

Whether Lukács describes the English Bildungsroman accurately in the general case, his formulation seems tailor-made to describe Eliot, and Middlemarch in particular.⁸ The novel starts off with Dorothea seeing her moral and intellectual ambitions thwarted by rural opinions and limited possibilities. Though she might have the potential to be a modern Saint Theresa, we are led to wonder, as she does, “How can one ever do anything nobly Christian, living among people with such petty thoughts?”⁹ She is not just any person, or just any woman—as the novel’s protagonist, she steps forward from the general type and becomes an individual. For a description of the rest of the novel’s process, I defer to Catherine Gallagher’s concise account:

As Dorothea herself is realized by departures from type, so too does she learn to realize others by imagining their particularity instead of pressing them into categories. From a dark night of the soul that all readers of the novel will recall, the heroine awakens to a sympathetic understanding of errancy itself. She finds what heroism is left over for women in the modern world by an empathetic envisioning of the suffering of the very people who have just wounded her, Rosamond and Will Ladislaw. In short, realizing in others what the narrator calls “equivalent centers of self” is the supreme ethical act in Eliot’s novels.10

The drive toward an undefined heroism that particularized Dorothea at the novel’s beginning, then, reaches its goal through the realization that others—even those others who were seen as the oppositional forces that the heroism had to overcome—are particularized in their own right.¹¹ Gallagher’s reference to Rosamond and Will is particularly useful here, since it is through her rapprochements, amiable and amatory respectively, with Rosamond and Will that Dorothea is able to fulfill some form of her heroic ambitions.¹² She does this, of course, by marrying Will, and moving to the city as a politician’s wife. This conclusion, with its assertion of nuclear-familial roles as narrative conclusion, is famously unsatisfying for many critics. It is no more satisfying for many of the inhabitants of Middlemarch, who think it “a pity that so substantive and rare a creature should have been absorbed into the life of another, and be only known in a certain circle as a wife and mother” (836). But this is the nature of reconciliation in the Bildungsroman: resignation in the face of a world of other people or, as Middlemarch’s narrator describes it, “the mixed result of a young and noble impulse struggling amidst the conditions of an imperfect social state” (838).

Satisfying or not, Middlemarch’s conclusion demonstrates not only an ethics of individuation but also a narrative drive toward reintegration. This, as Lukács describes it, is central to the genre. The marriage plot offers the most obvious example: the protagonist, having removed him- or herself from the nuclear family for the sake of particularization (not just a Bennet, but Elizabeth) ultimately returns to and reasserts that structure. Middlemarch takes the larger step of integrating Dorothea into that unrepresentable collection of individuals: the city, London. The language is first that of personal disintegration: her “full nature” breaks into “channels”; her effect is “incalculably diffusive” (838). Yet that disintegration only leads to greater reintegration. We lose Dorothea, but we gain a society that is full of Dorotheas—“the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life”—and shows traces of Dorothea’s influence throughout.

What I want to stress here is that a novel like Middlemarch solves the problem of the unrepresentability of a society of individuals through a process of induction.¹³ Dorothea learned from her own example that other people had equivalent internal lives, but we do not see those. We just assume—as Dorothea must as well—that they are like her. The extreme case of this comes in a redemption of the anonymity of the city through the claim that, in some sense, everyone there is Dorothea. The narrative drive toward reintegration proceeds along inductive lines: we can represent society through the individual case. But this is not just an expedient means to represent something that is difficult to put into words; it is also the novel’s narrative resolution. That is to say, the plot that follows Dorothea’s desires to balance her ideals with the possibilities of the world is resolved by the realization of the similarity of Dorothea to others. For that reason, society is no longer a mysterious exterior presence, because we know what it looks like; it looks like Dorothea. The novel’s final “reconciliation between interiority and reality” thus requires a society that we can understand the same way that the novel’s protagonist understands it: as built up from the individual case. The traditional Bildungsroman, as exemplified by Middlemarch, thus shows an implicit reliance on the ability to represent society as compiled inductively from individual units. This is not the case in Deronda; there is little sense at the end of Deronda of an England that can in any way be understood inductively through the figure of Gwendolen. Hence her interiority remains at a divide from the social reality of others. Deronda, on the other hand, certainly does succeed in his reintegration back into the Jewish community, to an almost hyperbolic extent. But this successful resolution is not simply a result of Deronda’s moral character or Eliot’s romantic beliefs in his messianic potential. It also offers an example of how reintegration and its attendant narrative resolution require the novel to build groups up from their individual elements—a representational strategy, we shall see, that is closely tied to the novel’s imagining of large and small numbers.

A COUNTABLE RACE

Reintegration is denied to Gwendolen, as I have said, but not to Daniel. Or rather, it is not denied to Daniel once he discovers that he is Jewish. This discovery of identity leads to an ending similar to Dorothea’s, in that they both leave the novels for an unrepresentable place, where acts of heroism are possible. Of course, the endings strike rather different tones. A pre-existing London requires a compromise that tempers Dorothea’s conclusion, while Daniel’s messianic role as the founder of a new state offers the possibility of an uncompromised heroism.14 Dorothea is a moderately successful Teresa, while Daniel at least has the capacity to be a wholly successful Moses. In fact, as George Levine has suggested, Daniel and Mordecai are the only characters in Eliot’s work that are allowed such heroism: “in all the novels but Daniel Deronda, heroism takes the shape of resignation exclusively.”¹⁵ Even Mordecai’s death, at the novel’s end, is presented as a triumphant return to the fold, as Daniel and Mirah embrace him while he utters the shema: “the confession of the divine Unity, which for long generations has been on the lips of the dying Israelite” (811). The possibility of reintegration, in the Jewish section of the novel, would seem to be a largely spiritual business.

Yet, at least part of the success of reintegration in the Jewish plot derives from a rather more profane consideration: there are simply not that many Jews. It is much easier to integrate into a society, or conceptually build a society from an individual, if the society is smaller in number. This term, “smaller,” is more complicated than it may at first appear; in Eliot’s literary imagination, I will argue, any conception of a number is in some sense a small number, insofar as it allows for inductive representation. Recall the conclusion of Middlemarch, and Eliot’s description of society as understood inductively through Dorothea: “the number who have lived faithfully a hidden life.” Even though she is not specific about what that “number” might be, the fact that society has been built up from the individual case requires that it be seen as a multiple of the individual. It is thus presented as being made up of discrete units, and not as a continuum.

Eliot consistently imagines Jewish society, diasporic though it might be, in terms of such numbers. Mordecai, at his most messianic, makes repeated numerical reference: “Thousands on thousands of our race …” (527); “The heritage of Israel is beating in the pulses of millions” (536); “Ours is an inheritance that has never ceased to quiver in millions of human frames” (536); “that I may keep in mind the spiritual poverty of the Jewish millions” (571). Such lines are understandable enough in light of a Zionist rhetoric which would use population numbers as a way of drawing unity across political borders. Still, what is notable in Deronda is how unique such language is to the novel’s Jews. With only rare exception, numbers serve three purposes in the novel. First, they mark short, easily conceptualized times and distances, such as “fifty miles” or “seven weeks.” Second, and most frequently, numbers are used for monetary amounts: dowries and inheritances. And, finally, numbers are used to count Jews. When Deronda first wanders through London’s Jewish quarters in search of Mirah’s family and comes across Ezra Cohen’s shop, the narrator points out, “There might be a hundred Ezra Cohens lettered above shop-windows, but Deronda had not seen them” (382). Embedded in this line is a reminder of the providence that trails Deronda throughout the novel—what are the odds?—but its quantification also allows for that providence to pass without too much comment. A hundred Ezra Cohens, after all, is not so many.

Or, to be more precise: it is not a question of whether “hundred,” “thousand,” or “million” signify large or small numbers of people, or even whether they signify any specific number at all. Rather they signify a characteristic of a group of people: that it is countable. The term comes from the mathematician Georg Cantor, in a series of works written throughout the 1870s—the first published in 1874, the same year Deronda began publication—that are considered the point of inception of modern set theory. A set is countable if its elements can be put in one-to-one correspondence with some subset of the integers (one, two, three …). This is little more than a rigorous definition of what we already mean by counting. What made Cantor’s work a breakthrough is that he showed that a set could be “countably infinite” if its elements could be placed in correspondence with the infinite set of all integers.16 Such a set can be counted, in other words—even if that counting should go on forever. This is to be distinguished from “larger” infinities, such as the “number” of points on a continuous line. This latter sort of infinity, known as the “continuum,” is not countable; choose any two points on a line, and you will never be able to count all the points between them. The significance of this distinction for the purposes of our discussion is that it suggests that a group may be understood as countable, even if the actual count of its elements is unknown or unknowably large. Of course, there is not an infinite number of Jews, nor of gentiles. But the point is less about the specific numbers and more about the way that the social body as a whole is imagined. In this sense, there is not just a difference of degree—not just more gentiles—but also of kind. The English group is of a different, larger sort; as far as their representation in Daniel Deronda is concerned, they cannot be counted at all.¹⁷

In fact, to be enumerated among the English, even metaphorically, is to be removed from the larger group: “We English are a miscellaneous race, and any chance fifty of us will present many varieties of animal architecture or facial ornament; but it must be admitted that our prevailing expression is not that of a lively, impassioned race” (102). The English are most English, in other words, at the level of “prevailing” societal characteristics. To enumerate—in this case, the number is fifty—is to see the particularities that do not fit the generalization. Eliot’s method of imagining what it means to be English seems to be based on going beyond such particularities, through the statistical cancellation of exceptions. Any enumerable group of English individuals will be just that: individuals, possessed of “miscellaneous … varieties.” Now, fifty is a small number when compared with Mordecai’s “Jewish millions.” Isn’t it possible that given a larger number, of the sort that Mordecai uses, the English could be represented in countable fashion as well? Possible, perhaps—but in Deronda, we find that this is not the case. There is no use of enumeration to imply the great number of the English. A countable group, whether fifty English or a thousand Jews, is of a different qualitative type than that which the novel imagines for the English as a whole.

Gwendolen’s failure of reintegration at the novel’s conclusion, then, can be traced to the noninductive way in which the novel imagines the English, in contrast to the way the English are imagined in Middlemarch, or the way the Jews are imagined in Deronda. In Middlemarch, as we have seen, induction succeeds; a “number” of Dorotheas is built up from the individual case and, for the sake of representability, can offer that individual case as synecdoche. The same process is evident in Deronda’s discovery of his Jewish identity. The first time he goes into the Jewish quarter, he is in search of one Ezra Cohen, and discovers two Ezra Cohens, which offers the possibility of “a hundred Ezra Cohens.” When one of those Ezras (Mordecai) explains why he lives with the other Ezra, he says it so that he “may keep in mind the spiritual poverty of the Jewish millions.” Jewish consciousness, at its most high-flown, is still built from the individual case. Daniel enters the Jewish quarter to find Ezra Cohen, and he finds a nation: a nation that can be expressed as a million Ezra Cohens. No matter how large a number may be, it can be made up from—or broken down into—smaller numbers. Thus we have, for example, the almost interchangeable usage of “thousands on thousands” and “millions.”

Mordecai’s frequent recourse to numerical language, colloquial though it may be, reflects Eliot’s own method of imagining the Jews. Her notes for the novel refer on four different occasions to population numbers: how many Jews in Russia, Poland, Austria, France, Ireland, and other countries. She revises her own earlier numbers—1,300,000 in Russia instead of 200,000—and even attaches a clipped article titled “Jewish Population of the World” to the inside front cover of one of her notebooks.18 Repeatedly, she notes the world’s Jewish population, finally settling on seven million. We see this number again in her later essay, “The Modern Hep! Hep! Hep!,” when she refers to “the seven millions scattered from east to west.”¹⁹

This insistence on Jewish enumerability is not unique to Eliot. In fact, part of the reason that Eliot was able to find so many ready numbers is that, as Ian Hacking points out, “the number and distribution of Jews was a regular topic” in nineteenth-century discussion.²⁰ It would not be going too far to suggest that this interest mounted almost to a fixation, among anti-Semites, philo-Semites, and ostensibly neutral social scientists alike. On the anti-Semitic side, population numbers were being used in Prussia to stir up fears of mass Jewish immigration.²¹ Meanwhile, statistics played a large part in the emerging “‘respectable’ scientific racism” of the nineteenth century, which, after emancipation, frequently focused on classifying, enumerating, and pointing out the social place of European Jewry.²² In response to such social-scientific objectification, European Jews “became subjects, or participants, as well as objects within the social sciences, empowered to construct their own narratives around the statistics about the Jewish present and future.”²³ In Germany, Salomon Neumann published The Fable of Mass Jewish Immigration: A Chapter in Prussian Statistics, to refute the fears of Jews pouring over the German borders. In the Hebrew press, articles were published with titles such “Counting the Sons of Israel” (in Ha-Asif), “The Counting of the Sons of Israel” (in Ha-Tsefirah), and “The Wisdom and Benefits of Numbering (Statistics)” (also in Ha-Tsefirah).²⁴ In England, Joseph Jacobs—a great fan of Eliot, and deeply influenced by Daniel Deronda—published papers such as “Studies in Jewish Statistics” and “The Comparative Distribution of Jewish Ability.” His work details everything from the relative birthrates of Jews and Christians in Tuscany,25 to the incidences of “genius” and “lunacy” among Jews.²⁶ A newspaper article in 1850 suggested “that there are hardly more than from 4,000,000 to 5,000,000 Jews in the whole world,” while one in 1885 offered the absurdly specific “6,377,602.”²⁷ Both broke the number down into smaller national populations, and both bore the same name: “Statistics of the Jews.”²⁸

The evident motivations and countermotivations here make it difficult to assign a single root cause for the Jewish numerical obsession, but Eliot seems to have been particularly drawn to the way in which these discussions allowed for an inductive view of society. These discussions led to an image of a society that could be built from individuals, precisely because they were concerned with literally producing a new society, in the form of a Jewish homeland. As Mitchell Bryan Hart puts it, “Jewish statistics was, conceptually, the child of Jewish nationalism.”²⁹ For Hart, this follows from the observation that “the creation of a vital and viable ‘Jewish culture’ … was an essential condition for, and component of, Jewish national life” (29). The nature of such a “Jewish culture,” though, had to be compiled from the nature of the Jews, themselves. One commentator in Ha-Tsefirah poses the question: “What will the builder do without materials, without tools? He was not given straw, and was told to make his own bricks! There are no statistics for Israel. There is no one who is is gathering materials for building.”³⁰ This trope, of statistics providing the “bricks” for building a new state, was repeated with only slight variation throughout the period, and into the early twentieth century: “We must know with greater precision about the national material with which we have to work. We need an exact anthropological, biological, economic and intellectual statistic of the Jewish people.”³¹ For Eliot, and for Mordecai, this “greater precision” is not as necessary as the ability to imagine, in some comprehensive way, the nature of Jewish life, in its various individual facets. For this, the model was Leopold Zunz. Zunz, whose work Eliot quotes in the epigraph to chapter 42,³² had written his Outline of Future Statistics of the Jews (Grundlinien zu einer küntfigen Statistik der Juden) in 1823 as part of his attempt to develop a new “Jewish Science.” His statistics were not numerical in nature, being instead based on the German notion of the “science of states.”³³ As we shall see in the next section, though, this science would soon become numerical. Indeed there was enough of a continuum between Zunz’s Statistik and later statistics that Neumann would later in the century dedicate his tables of Jewish birthrates to Zunz.

Nineteenth-century discussions of the Jews, then, imagined a culture—especially insofar as it was a nascent national culture—that had the characteristic of countability. Zunz, whom Eliot cites, is an important example of this, in his belief that a Wissenschaft des Judentums must contain a Statistik der Juden. For Eliot, as for Zunz, the two are joined together. This is perhaps best encapsulated in one of the many notes Eliot makes on population in her notebooks: “7,000,000 .”34 Here Eliot departs from the tool of her trade, Roman letters, to write out “seven million yehudim” (“Jews”) in Arabic numbers and Hebrew script. These appended symbols of countability and culture serve as a concise statement of Eliot’s imagining of the Jews. The ability to imagine a Jewish community, after the fashion of the rural communities from her earlier novels, depends on the ability to imagine the community as built up from its individual elements.

Surprisingly, then, it is precisely in the novel’s plot of foreignness that we find ourselves on native Eliotic ground. That is to say, it is in the Jewish part of the novel that we find the organic principles of society that have been consistently associated—and rightly so—with Eliot. Drawn from the social theory of Comte and Spencer and the physiological theory of Lewes, Eliot’s organicism is based on a strong interdependence between individual and society.³⁵ As Eliot puts it in one essay, “society stands before us like that wonderful piece of life, the human body, with all its various parts depending on one another.”³⁶ The organism in question need not always be the human body, but the essential idea of society as a powerful system of mutual dependencies provides one of the most characteristic markers of Eliot’s work. As Steven Marcus puts it:

Society, in [Eliot’s] novels, is represented as a living whole, composed or articulated of differentiated members, each of which fulfills or possesses a special function. As a consequence, the individual person is not separable from the human whole; and in turn the social whole is equally dependent on each individual person, since each contributes to the common life. Society and individual persons, then, are not separable or distinct phenomena, but are in reality the collective and distributive aspects of the same circumstance or thing; one expresses the group as a whole, the other the members that compose it.³⁷

The organic metaphor requires, then, not only that we understand the individual in terms of the social whole but also that we understand the social whole in terms of the individual. Marcus’s phrasing lingers on this essential reversibility; the particular and the whole are the “collective and distributive aspects of the same … thing” only when we can work from one to the other. The metaphor obtains, in other words, only when society is seen to be a collection—even a seemingly infinite collection—of individuals. The “pulses of millions” are each separate, and yet together they produce community: “the heritage of Israel.”

As I have been arguing, though, Eliot’s conception of the English in Daniel Deronda is of a quite different sort, with the result that the commonplace of the organic seems a good deal less apt. While the organic in Eliot is based on the mutual reference of the part and the whole to one another, we have in the case of the English, a part that, in being removed from the whole, is contrary to it. Recall that it was not a specific fifty that would disprove the general case, but “any chance fifty.” In the case of Grandcourt, one is enough. Upon Grandcourt’s first appearance in the novel, the narrator offers far more minute physical description of him—height, hairline, hair color, even the angle of his whiskers—than of any other characters in the novel, save the central two. She then launches on a long sentence that seems to be further description but turns out to be quite the opposite:

The correct Englishman, drawing himself up from his bow into rigidity, assenting severely, and seeming to be in a state of internal drill, suggests a suppressed vivacity, and may be suspected of letting go with some violence when he is released from parade; but Grandcourt’s bearing had no rigidity, it inclined rather to the flaccid. (111)

The sentence’s conclusion may provoke a giggle—did Eliot write that?—but it also likely provokes some semantic surprise. For it is difficult not to read the sentence as opening with a continuation of the steady description of Grandcourt, as if it read “This correct Englishman.” Grandcourt, after all, is nothing if not “correct,” and “rigidity” recalls the word “perpendicular,” already used twice in the preceding sentences to describe him; he is in the process of introducing himself to Gwendolen, and no doubt straightening himself from a bow. The sentence, until the semicolon, seems to simply utilize a descriptive noun in place of the male pronoun or proper name: “Grandcourt, drawing himself up from his bow. …” Her description thus inherits the dim outlines of character, even though, as we learn at the end of the sentence, she is not talking about any individual at all. She is rather describing the English homme moyen, the embodiment of the English “prevailing expression.”38 Thus, to backtrack on my earlier claims a bit, it is not quite correct to say that the English are not conceived as a group made up of individuals. They are so conceived, after a fashion, but the individual in question is not one that exists. He is instead a statistical aggregate, the embodiment of the continuum. Any actual individual, or “any chance fifty” individuals, will become so only by their negation of this figure. Thus, when Grandcourt steps forth from this bowing aggregate, he does not, to use Marcus’s terms, express the group as a whole. Instead, by virtue of his individuation, he is separated from it.

Separation through characterization, though, is a necessary part of novelistic narrative; the problem, as Gwendolen will discover, is how difficult it is to reinsert oneself into the group. As much as Eliot might imagine the possibilities that the Jews—and their conceptually smaller number—might offer, she seems to worry over the problem of the English one and many throughout the novel. Take, for example, the young Anna Gascoigne, and her desire to leave England and go with her brother to Canada: a sort of juvenile version of the Deronda impulse, minus the nation-building. The novel suggests that this desire was really an opposition to the trappings of English feminine life: “gloves, and crinoline, and having to talk when I am taken out to dinner—and all that” (88). The narrator then offers a self-conscious attempt to reintegrate Anna back into the general course of English events:

I like to mark the time, and connect the course of individual lives with the historic stream, for all classes of thinkers. This was the period when the broadening of gauge in crinolines seemed to demand an agitation for the general enlargement of churches, ballrooms, and vehicles. But Anna Gascoigne’s figure would only allow the size of skirt manufactured for young ladies of fourteen. (88)

The quote opens with a statement of narratorial predilection. But the narrator is not simply explaining what she likes to do, as if readers have never seen it before. Deronda, after all, was released to a public that knew what to expect from an Eliot novel, and this sort of drawing back is a stock Eliotic move.39 “I like,” then, should be read as making reference to what she would normally do in this situation: “connect the course of individual lives with the historic stream.” And, indeed, that is what seems to be happening; this is the age not only of large crinolines but also of the very material effects that fashion would have on “churches, ballrooms, and vehicles,” that is, the worlds of religion, leisure, and transportation. These lines, at first, read like a primer on Eliot’s understanding of the individual in history. We move, in short order, from Anna’s peevish comment about crinolines to the nearly world-historical. Or, rather, we would, if it were not for that final “But.” That connection of Anna with the historic stream is what the narrator would normally do, and it is what she likes to do. The only problem is that the clothes do not fit the individual.

Eliot’s more familiar methods may work with Jews—and, as I have suggested, she may have chosen the Jews in part because they allowed her to imagine some continued existence of the organic in the contemporary world—but they do not work for the relation of the English individual and that larger continuous “stream.” Both elements are there for Eliot, but there is now a breach between them. The group is somehow too large to be countable; it cannot be built up from its individual elements. Conversely, the individual elements cannot be extracted from the group, other than as exceptions. The necessary reversibility of the organic model, upon which rests so much of its explanatory utility, does not obtain. How then to describe the English? Eliot’s thought requires a new model, one that offers a way of describing the way groups work in the realm of large numbers. That model will prove to be statistics.

ELIOT’S DEMON

When Zunz’s words open the novel’s chapter 42—the chapter in which Mordecai most explicitly states the novel’s Zionist ideals to a pub full of amateur “philosophers”—there is no mention of his Statistik der Juden. Yet the very sort of statistical questions that Zunz was himself considering quickly assert themself in the chapter. In fact, the entire evening’s discussion occurs under the sign of statistical thought. When Mordecai and Daniel first enter the pub, they are greeted by a man named Miller, who catches them up to speed with the discussion so far:

This is what I call one of our touch and go nights, sir. … Sometimes we stick pretty close to the point. But to-night our friend Pash, there, brought up the law of progress, and we got on statistics; then Lilly, there, saying we knew well enough before counting that in the same state of society the same sort of things would happen, and it was no more wonder that quantities should remain the same than that qualities should remain the same, for in relation to society numbers are qualities—the number of drunkards is a quality in society—the numbers are an index to the qualities, and give us no instruction, only setting us to consider the causes of difference between social states. … (524)

This speech is a mouthful, to be sure, and the fact that it is prefaced as a wandering away from “the point”—whatever that might be—seems designed to make Mordecai’s single-minded purpose stand out in bas relief. This does not mean, however, that the “statistics” that they had “got on” before Deronda and Mordecai’s entrance should be read simply as intellectual riffing. Instead the discussion that precedes Mordecai’s pronouncements offers a glimpse of Eliot’s understanding of the more intellectually daring elements of European thought at the time. The fact that most readers will forget the specifics of the “phlegmatic discussion” under the weight of Mordecai’s “high-pitched solemnity” (538) allows her the possibility, further, of offering these statistical ideas in a tentative fashion. Still, it is these statistical notions, and the different ways that they address the nature of large collective bodies, that will come to offer an alternative model for imagining the English in the novel.

Miller’s summary of the statistical discussion actually offers a good introduction to the ideas that were developing at the time. One thing that should be noted here is that statistics are not understood in the sense that we today would understand them: as an abstract science of error approximation. Instead, the quantitative content of statistical discussion acts as a means of qualitatively describing society: “in relation to society numbers are qualities—the number of drunkards is a quality in society—the numbers are an index to the qualities.” The “numbers,” then, are not important, in and of themselves, so much as they are a means to an end, “an index of qualities.” In fact, as statistics developed, numbers were a relatively late addition. Statistics, at the end of the eighteenth and well into the nineteenth century, was the province not of statisticians but rather of statists: those who investigated the nature of the political state.40 This was particularly true in Germany, where statistics continued to be taught in this form well into the nineteenth century. The science became more strictly quantitative with the rapid increase—detailed throughout Foucault’s work—in census data, medical records, and police reports in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From these developments, the statists had their raw material. Population could indicate the state’s power or health, suicide rates could indicate its overall unhappiness or pathology, and so on.⁴¹ Even as the science became numerical, in other words, it was still a science that was first and foremost about the political and social body.

Statistics in nineteenth-century England and France, though, were not just descriptive; they became prescriptive and, often controversially, predictive.⁴² John Sinclair, who wrote the twenty-one-volume Statistical Account of Scotland at the end of the eighteenth century, offers the following account of the nature of German statistics and how he believed that his work had improved on them:

Many people were at first surprised at my using the words, Statistics and Statistical . … In the course of a very extensive tour, through the northern parts of Europe, which I happened to take in 1786, I found that in Germany they were engaged in a species of political inquiry to which they had given the name of Statistics. By statistical is meant in Germany an inquiry for the purpose of ascertaining the political strength of a country, or questions concerning matters of state; whereas the idea I annexed to this term is an inquiry into the state of a country, for the purpose of ascertaining the quantum of happiness enjoyed by its inhabitants, and the means of its future improvement.⁴³

Sinclair’s work makes use of a good deal of numerical surveys, but it does not employ many of the mathematical methods that would come to be considered statistical in England over the next half-century. What is important here is that already Sinclair suggests that the role of statistics is not only to offer some way of measuring qualities—using numbers to show, in Deronda’s terms, society’s “qualities”—but also to show how society may be improved.

In Sinclair’s account, at the very beginning of the century, statistics could point a way forward. What came to be much more troubling as the discipline developed, however, was the idea that there were “statistical laws.” The most famous statement of such laws would come at the end of the century, with Emile Durkheim’s 1891 Suicide, in which he noted the consistent “collective tendencies” in what is commonly seen as an unpredictable and individual act. Durkheim viewed these tendencies as acting on the individual like a natural law: “Collective tendencies have a reality of their own; they are forces as real as cosmic forces.”44 Others noted the odd regularity of dead letters at post offices, a result that is based not only on an individual choice but on accident. If statisticians took greater care to explain the nature of such laws as the century went on, it did not stop people from believing in, objecting to, and above all, being troubled by the notions of such laws. Percy Fitzgerald, in his biography of Dickens, tells of his concern with the “tyrannical power of the law of averages.” When the number of people killed in one year was beneath its annual average, Dickens said, “is it not dreadful to think that before the last day of the year some forty or fifty persons must be killed—and killed they will be.”⁴⁵

Even more disconcerting to many Victorians was what Miller explains to Deronda as the “law of progress.” The idea of such a law was most associated with the historical determinist Henry Buckle, who, in his massive two-volume History of Civilization in England, attempted to replace, as the object of historical analysis, the individual with the statistical law. In the introduction to his work, Buckle discusses the regularities of suicides, murders, marriages, and dead letters, finally concluding:

To those who have a steady conception of the regularity of events, and have firmly seized the great truth that the actions of men, being guided by their antecedents, are in reality never inconsistent, but, however capricious they may appear, only form part of one vast scheme of universal order, of which we in the present state of knowledge can barely see the outline,—to those who understand this, which is at once the key and the basis of history, the facts just adduced [i.e., suicides, etc.], so far from being strange, will be precisely what would have been expected, and ought long since to have been known.⁴⁶

We not only can understand seemingly arbitrary events in terms of necessary statistical laws; we can also understand the very “universal order” of which they are all a part. As Helen Small describes Buckle’s project, “Human actions might wear the appearance of arbitrariness, individuals might assert their free will, but in the aggregate, and across time, they were subject to fixed mathematical laws.”47 To completely disregard the possibility of free will as Buckle did, of course, could not be expected to sit well with Eliot, who confessed in a letter, “he is a writer who inspires in me a personal dislike.”⁴⁸ Such dislike, though, along with Lewes’s scathing reviews,⁴⁹ suggests a familiarity with his work and with his idea of statistical laws. Whether or not Eliot agreed with his conclusions, the public-house conversation shows a commitment at least to attempt to work through these distasteful concepts.

A seemingly offhand remark in the pub offers the model for these ideas. One of the speakers, Marrables, who had been conveniently introduced by the narrator as a “laboratory assistant” upon Daniel’s entrance, makes the point that ideas may spread “by changing the distribution of gases” (525). Such intrusions of natural science mark Eliot’s writing throughout her career—Henry James once criticized Middlemarch for being “too often an echo of Messrs Darwin and Huxley”⁵⁰—and have drawn a great deal of critical attention in recent decades, most of the discussion focusing on the scientific bases for Eliot’s idea of the organic. Yet the odd tentativeness of this particular scientific interjection should make us take notice. The character of Marrables exists in the novel only to offer this line about gases. In fact, after being introduced with his credentials, and then saying his line, the character is never heard from again. Such blunt functional treatment is out of keeping for Eliot and suggests an idea that she was still attempting to work out. If she forces it in here, though, she does so with good reason; the discussion of gas provides a scientific figure for society that will replace the organic model.

The science of gases, at the time Eliot was writing, was a specifically statistical idea. Or, at least, it had recently become so. James Clerk Maxwell had first introduced his kinetic theory of gases—in which the thermal qualities of a gas are due only to molecular motion—in 1865. Eliot had already been somewhat familiar with the basic elements of the discussion about molecular theories, having been introduced to them by her and Lewes’s friend, the physicist John Tyndall, and Eliot was familiar with Tyndall’s Heat as a Mode of Motion.⁵¹ She also had attended Maxwell’s lectures and read his articles on gas molecules, and she makes reference to one of these articles in her notes for the novel.⁵² Meanwhile, Lewes was making repeated reference to Maxwell’s molecular theories in his Problems of Life and Mind.⁵³ Eliot would thus have had some knowledge of Maxwell’s refinements of Tyndall’s theories.⁵⁴

These refinements made what had previously been a more conventional scientific view of the nature of collective bodies into a statistical one. Maxwell had noted that it was impossible to follow the motion of any one molecule: “the working atomists have therefore adopted a method which is … new in the department of mathematical physics, though it has long been in use in the section of Statistics.”55 This method is the one that Maxwell noted had proved so successful in studies of “age, income-tax, education, religious belief, or criminal convictions”—namely, the application of statistical methods of error approximation.⁵⁶ Buckle’s writings were a key influence; Maxwell would later write that “Buckle demonstrated statistically that if only a sufficient number of people is taken into account, then not only is the number of natural events like death, illness, etc., perfectly constant, but also the number of so-called voluntary actions—marriages at a given age, crimes, and suicides. It occurs no differently among molecules.”⁵⁷ Maxwell’s breakthrough in his kinetic theory, in other words, was to claim that the methods that had been developed for the study of large groups of people over long stretches of time could also be used to understand the physical world. In this, Maxwell is exemplary, but not unique. As Theodore Porter puts it, “Seemingly without exception, those who applied statistical thinking to any of the sciences during the second half of the nineteenth century thought in terms of analogies with the social sciences.”⁵⁸ Statistical thinking transformed the social world into a laboratory of sorts, but its introduction into natural sciences required precisely the opposite move: thinking of the laboratory in terms of the social world.

Social theory was thus never too far removed from Maxwell’s thought in the development of his statistical theory of gases, even as he introduced the notion that is, thanks to Thomas Pynchon’s Crying of Lot 49, probably most associated with his name among literary scholars: “Maxwell’s demon.” Maxwell himself never used the term “demon,” but he did imagine “a being whose faculties are so sharpened that he can follow every molecule in its course.”⁵⁹ Such a being could distinguish faster-moving particles from slower-moving particles in a chamber, and allow only the faster ones to pass to another chamber. The chamber with the faster particles will rise in temperature without, technically, any work being expended, and the second law of thermodynamics would thus be broken. What is the purpose of this thought experiment? The being was in fact little more than an ideal physicist. Existing theories of gas essentially relied on a dynamic billiard-ball model of molecules; statistical approximations of molecules were necessary, but only because of our inability to observe closely enough. If we could overcome such limitations, and could see each individual molecule as we could each billiard ball, there would be no need for statistical method. Maxwell’s point in his introduction of the demon is that if we had such observational powers, something so fundamental as the second law of thermodynamics would not apply. As Maxwell goes on to say:

This is only one of the instances in which conclusions which we have drawn from our experience of bodies consisting of immense numbers of molecules may be found not to be applicable to the more delicate observations and experiments which we may suppose made by one who can perceive and handle the individual molecules which we deal with only in large masses. (329)

This is the key point at which Maxwell’s theory diverges radically from the organic models so familiar in Eliot. To understand the law of the body as a whole, the observer not only must make do with the fact that she cannot observe the individual elements. Instead, even the idea that the individual elements could ever be seen, given sufficient observational capacity, must be thrown out. Maxwell reiterates this point: “In dealing with masses of matter, while we do not perceive the individual molecules, we are compelled to adopt what I have described as the statistical method, and to abandon the strict dynamical method, in which we follow every motion by the calculus” (329). The dynamical model, in which the whole is built up of mutually interacting and interdependent elements, has been replaced with the law of “statistical method.”60

We cannot see every individual element of the whole, and if we could, the whole would no longer make sense. We should remember, of course, that Maxwell developed his statistical theories after reading Buckle, so his molecules always bear some analogical relation to individuals within a social whole. This social corollary will no doubt be familiar to readers of Eliot, because it lies behind Middlemarch’s famous evocation of the social sublime: “If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.”⁶¹ This “we” we can take to be Eliot’s “demon”—the hypothetical “being whose faculties are so sharpened” that it can see and hear every particle of the social whole. That this demon would necessarily perish can be taken, at the character level, as a statement on the limits of sympathy. We could also read this sentence, though, in the context of the pier-glass metaphor and the other narratorial discourses on the method that occur throughout Middlemarch. By this reading, “we” would really be “I,” the narrator, expressing her inability to extend her observation to its extreme. This reading gains credence from the shift, occurring right before these lines, from the narrator’s usual first-person singular (“Nor can I suppose that when Mrs Casaubon is discovered …”) to a plural that seems more royal than inclusive (“we do not expect people to be deeply moved by what is not unusual …”). The narrator, with the expectation of certain reactions from her readers, fades into a larger group, with expectations of each other. Ultimately, though, it is the narrator who does not expect people to be deeply moved by Dorothea’s suffering, and it is the narrator who cannot express the feelings of every character that inhabits her world. The death from the roar that the narrator describes, then, is also the death of the narrator, the ultimate impossibility of narration, if its goal is the description of every motivation and sentiment. Maxwell’s demon, if it existed, would break the second law of thermodynamics; Eliot’s demon would deny the possibility of narration.

The gas that Marrables introduces into the conversation thus provides a model for the English society that Eliot imagines, which, unlike Jewish society, cannot be described in terms of its individual elements. The gas model helps to move past the paradoxes of the organic, which finds itself up against the narratorial limits of its own claims about the interdependence of the one and the many. Eliot would continue to try to work out this molecular model in later works, such as her essay on the “Political Molecule” in Theophrastus Such, though she would never have a chance to realize it fully. Such a model, however, does not mean, as it would for Buckle, that the individual is simply an effect of greater social laws. Maxwell, after all, had explicitly moved away from determinism in the description of the motion of his molecules. He allowed for chance, for some sort of freedom, but not in a way that was reflected in the greater laws of the whole. If Maxwell translated the social into the scientific, the translation into the literary presented Eliot with a rather confusing state of affairs: the individual could be free, the social whole could be bound by laws, and each could seemingly exist independently of each other.

IN MEDIAS DOLORES

Daniel Deronda thus replaces the organic with the statistical, the web network with the gas—at least as far as the novel’s gentile characters go. But such societal metaphors are essentially spatial, while the process of reading a novel, and particularly a novel of education, is temporal. As far as the traditional Bildungsroman goes, this diachronic dimension is expressed through the accumulation of some sort of life experience. Given the social nature of the Bildungsroman, such experience will generally take the form of learning from other people and internalizing the lessons learned, all the while drawing links between one’s internal state and an external world made of other people. Franco Moretti describes this process as a series of encounters, each with the potential to add to the protagonist’s accumulated experience: the protagonist “prolongs the encounter, he probes into the conversation, he recalls it, he puts his hope in it. … The novelistic plot is marked by this curvature towards interiority, which dispenses meaning and thereby creates events.”62 Just as importantly, though, the protagonist must move past the experience “before personality becomes unilaterally and irrevocably modified” (46). The key Continental figure for this process tends to be the youth—think Wilhelm Meister or Eugène de Rastignac—facing the city and its myriad experiences. In its rural English form as well, though, we can see Dorothea grow through and away from Casaubon, through and away from Rosamond, and finally through and away from Middlemarch itself.

The process depends on the accumulation of experience, as represented by other characters. Yet, here too we find a reliance on a certain sort of literary induction. The protagonist meets with a finite number of other characters, and the experiences with these characters come to stand in for the external world. Rastignac not only completes Père Goriot on equal ground with Paris, but he himself becomes a synecdoche for Paris over the course of the Comédie,63 as a result of his accumulated experience with the various extremes that make up the city: Goriot, Vautrin, Mme de Beauséant. The underlying axiom here relies on the notion that an understanding of the larger social whole that Paris represents can be built up from a series of individual characters-cum-experiences, over the course of a novel.

Gwendolen’s temporal experience is not of this sort. But what sort is it? What is the temporal experience that corresponds to the statistical model that underlies so much of Deronda? We are in fact acquainted with this experience at the novel’s beginning, from the moment we see Gwendolen at the roulette table. As the remainder of this chapter will argue, the novel’s central motif of gambling provides a recurring attempt to think through a way of interacting with the world, in which a procession of individual moments do not coalesce to form a meaningful experience, as such.

Gambling—and particularly the gambling hall—may seem a rather grim choice for describing experience, since it is so clearly negative for Eliot. Not to put too fine a point on it: Eliot figures the gambling hall as hell. She never uses the colloquial “gambling hell” in Deronda, partially because it referred to lower-class establishments, but also most likely because she feared draining any semblance of subtlety from the thematic pun that opens the novel. In any event, she shows a good deal less discretion in her letters. Referring to the casino at Bad Homburg, the model for the novel’s Leubronn, she writes that “Hell is the only right name for such places.”⁶⁴ In another letter, she pushes the point further: the casino “is a Hell not only for the gambling, but for the light and heat of the gas,” which create a scene of “monotonous hideousness” (314). If this is hell to Eliot, then the opening scene certainly qualifies. Seeing it through Deronda’s eyes, the narrator describes “dull, gas-poisoned absorption” (9). The hellishness is only hammered home by demonic conjunctions of the elegant and the bestial: “the white bejeweled fingers of an English countess were very near touching a bony, yellow, crab-like hand stretching a bare wrist to clutch a heap of coin” (9). Even Gwendolen, in this context, is demonic: described as a “serpent” with a “Lamia beauty” (12).

What makes the scene hellish, though, is less its imagery and more its dull repetitions. The players are imagined as lotus-eaters: “there was a certain negativeness of expression which had the effect of a mask—as if they had all eaten of some root that for the time compelled the brains of each to the same narrow monotony of action” (9). Yet unlike Odysseus’s crew, it is not the case that the gamblers in the casino are doing nothing. They are doing something; it is just the same thing over and over again. It thus becomes almost mechanized; the only voice that can be heard in the casino is the croupier’s “occasional monotone in French, such as might be expected to issue from an ingeniously constructed automaton” (7–8). When, after flashing back eleven months, the novel works its way back to its opening scene, Sir Hugo reiterates the point: “I never cared for play. It’s monotonous. … I suppose one gets poisoned with the bad air” (161). The gas gives the scene its hellish tint and smell, but it is the repetition without completion, the image of gamblers as Sisyphus, that seems so central to Eliot’s horror.

For all the critical discussion of Eliot’s antipathy to gambling—on which, more later—it seems that it is this structure of repetition, rather than the gaslight and the avarice, that she looks on with the most distaste. For it is far away from the roulette tables that we find the novel’s more prolonged vision of hell, in Gwendolen’s marriage to Grandcourt. The marriage is shown to be iterative, an ongoing series of “shock[s] of humiliation” (423). After the wedding-night scene in which he forces Gwendolen to take off her pendant of emeralds and wear Lydia Glasher’s diamonds, the narrator states, “What had happened between them about her wearing the diamonds was typical” (426). The narrator offers, in support of this claim, the description of a strikingly similar scene in which he again insists that she wear Lydia’s diamonds. The nearly identical content of these scenes strengthens the narrator’s claim of typicality. Shortly after this, when the novel returns to the present, we are shown another scene, in which Grandcourt castigates Gwendolen for wearing the turquoise necklace, which Deronda had redeemed for her, with such cold cruelty that it produces the “bitterest mortification in her soul” and sends her into a “shuddering fit” that evening (447–48). Read in succession, this series of examples seem almost absurdly specific, as if Grandcourt’s cruelty were limited to an insistence that Gwendolen put on diamonds and remove all green gems. This repetition, though, should be taken more to indicate the uselessness of specifics in this context. All of these examples seem the same because Gwendolen’s repeated “shocks,” no matter what different forms they take, are the same: Grandcourt’s assertions of mastery over her. Of course, we are left to assume that each of the shocks must be different—otherwise they would not be shocking—but in their difference, they maintain an essential identity. That is, each one is new, unpredictable, and yet each one remains a repetition. None of this should take away from Grandcourt’s cruelty; but Eliot seems less interested in the specifics of that cruelty, and more interested in its iterative quality. The true horror of the situation lies in its monotony of shock.

The description of Gwendolen in her marriage, then, seems to bring Eliot’s figure of the Leubronn gambler, as a figure doomed to repetition, out of the casino and into the everyday. Walter Benjamin, in his discussion of Baudelaire, suggests that it is this repetition that makes the gambler, along with the factory worker, particularly emblematic of a developing nineteenth-century mindset in which experience itself becomes impoverished. Gambling, as Benjamin describes it,

certainly does not lack the futility, the emptiness, the inability to complete something which is inherent in the activity of a wage slave in a factory. … The manipulation of the worker at the machine has no connection with the preceding operation for the very reason that it is its exact repetition. Since each operation at the machine is just as screened off from the preceding operation as a coup in a game of chance is from the one that preceded it, the drudgery of the laborer is, in its own way, a counterpart to the drudgery of the gambler. The work of both is equally devoid of substance.65

Baudelaire, Benjamin admits, “did not have the faintest notion” of the facts of industrial wage labor. Yet that does not change the fact that Benjamin saw in Baudelaire’s scenes of gambling, as Richard Wolin puts it, “a parable for the disintegration of coherent experience in modern life.”⁶⁶ The passer-by jostled on the street, the worker at his machine, the gambler at the table—for each, there is no longer a continuous accumulation of experiences but rather a series of “shock experience[s]” (176). The paradox is that even while the shocks repeat, they never offer a connection between the past and the future; we cannot predict the next, and we cannot use the next to understand the last. Richard Shiff puts it well: “The shock experience tenaciously resists assimilation and may even repeat itself as if timelessly, neither acquiring referential meaning, nor exhibiting meaningful variation, nor assuming the easy familiarity of habit.”⁶⁷ It is not necessarily clear why, for Benjamin, the assembly-line worker would not be able to fall into a habit; but then, the essay on Baudelaire seems ultimately less concerned with material conditions and more concerned with urban crowds and gambling, the phenomenology of the flâneur. And on these topics, Benjamin describes an experience that is at once always the same, and—since there is no arc of accumulated life experience—forever new.

This experience, for Benjamin as for Eliot, is hell. He offers “gambling” as one of his “keywords of hell,”⁶⁸ and writes that the experience of gambling is like the experience of “time in hell”: “the province of those who are not allowed to complete anything they have started.”⁶⁹ At the same time, since for him the gambler was a figure of the “modern”—a slippery term that should be taken here to mean Baudelaire’s mid-nineteenth-century Paris—the experience of the modern itself became an experience of hell:

The “modern,” the time of hell. The punishments of hell are always the newest thing going over in this domain. What is at issue is not that “the same thing happens over and over.” … It is rather that precisely in that which is newest the face of the world never alters, that this newest remains, in every respect, the same.—This constitutes the eternity of hell.70

We should note here the double meaning of the term “modern” for Benjamin. On the one hand, it is the period easily associated with a time, place, means of production. On the other hand, what makes the “modern” modern for Benjamin is the fact that it is always “that which is newest.” And it is this latter meaning that seems to have the most resonance. It is for this reason that the odd conjunction of Eliot with Baudelaire—moralist and immoralist together—makes sense. I am less concerned here with the question of whether or not Daniel Deronda is in some sense a “modern” or—which term has even less utility here—a “modernist” novel, and more concerned with the way that it portrays the experience of “now-ness.” Benjamin I take not only to be a critic of modernity but also an original thinker on this experience. So too is Eliot; Nicholas Dames has described Deronda’s effect as “the depiction of characters who live outside of time in a constant ‘now.’”⁷¹ In both cases, we have a monotony of shock that disconnects the individual from the past and the future. Again, the gambler at the roulette wheel or the trente et quarante table becomes the figure for this disconnected present. In Benjamin, instead of the arc of a lifetime of accumulated experience, all drawn toward fulfillment in the future, there is instead only “the ivory ball that rolls into the next compartment, the next card which lies on top” (179). In Eliot, this present structures the form of the overdetermined gambling scene that starts the novel, the “now” produced by in medias res.

That Deronda is remembered, somewhat erroneously, as Eliot’s “only novel with a present-day setting”⁷² suggests this double effect of the figure of gambling: both a mark of now and of “now-ness.” The novel in fact takes place over a stretch of roughly two years starting in October 1864⁷³—that is, a period of time roughly a decade before the novel was published. Of course, this is closer to the time of publication than any other of Eliot’s novels, but a decade is still a notable length of time, and the impulse to brush over the lag should strike us as a curious one. Eliot explicitly marks her temporal setting by references to the American Civil War (90), and the Austro-Prussian war (622). Perhaps the most interesting marker is the casino itself. Rhine gambling halls were officially closed at the end of 1872.⁷⁴ Eliot knew this, and it was presumably why she went out of her way to visit the casino at Homburg, while she still could, in 1872. She writes: “I get some satisfaction in looking on from the sense that the thing is going to be put down.”⁷⁵ Had Eliot not set her novel in the past, she would have been forced to do without one of her central symbolic motifs. And had she not set it a decade in the past, the tone of ongoing monotony at the casino would have been lost. For though she does not mention it explicitly in her letters, the upcoming closure of the casinos was a significant topic of discussion around the tables.76 Interestingly enough, it is this central metaphor, available only in the past, that is in large part responsible for the commonplace of the novel’s “present-day setting.”⁷⁷

One somewhat obvious way that gambling has this effect is through its role as an indictment of wild speculation in late-century England. This appears early in the novel, when Gwendolen returns from losing her money by gambling to learn that the firm of Grapnell and Company has lost her family’s money by speculating. This would likely remind readers of the 1866 failure of Overend and Gurney⁷⁸—another marker of the past decade—but it also makes a larger claim about the state of England’s economic system. When a specific firm failed is less important than the implication that such imprudence is still going on at this very moment. Recall the title of Trollope’s great work on gambling and speculation, written only a year before Deronda: The Way We Live Now.⁷⁹ Much has been written on the analogies between speculation and gambling in late-nineteenth-century England⁸⁰—it comes so easily that Eliot seems almost to want to get it out of the way and move on—but what I wish to point out is how it makes the novel seem a contemporary concern. There is little point, after all, in drawing analogies in order to rail against something ten years in the past.

At the same time that gambling invoked the present thematically, though, it was the experience of gambling—what I have been calling its monotony of shock—that produced in the novel a formal “now-ness.” This formal quality, I believe, was every bit as important for the novel’s claims to contemporaneity. To support this claim, it will be useful to look at a species of rather less rarefied works of the same period: sensation novels, like those Wilkie Collins and Mary Elizabeth Braddon. Discussions of these novels hammered on the fact that, unlike the gothic or the ghost story, they described the present moment. H. L. Mansel characterized the sensation novel as “usually a tale of our own times.”⁸¹ Mansel claims that this is essential to the novel’s nervous effects: “a tale which aims at electrifying the nerves of the reader is never thoroughly effective unless the scene be laid in our own days.” Henry James agreed, suggesting that the true innovation of the sensation novel was that it “introduced into fiction … the mysteries which are at our own doors.” The “novelty” of Braddon’s Lady Audley, for example, “lay in the heroine being … an English gentlewoman of the present year, familiar with the use of the railway and the telegraph. … Modern England—the England of to-day’s newspaper—crops up at every step.”⁸² As with Deronda, though, these claims for the contemporaneity of sensation novels often overstate the case. The Woman in White, for example, is actually set in 1851, eight years prior to its publication⁸³—not ancient history, by any means, but hardly the present moment either.

Such insistence on the immediate contemporaneity of sensation novels is due, I believe, to a combination of two effects. First, there is sensation itself: sensation novels are stocked with nervous characters, and they work to make their readers feel these sensations as well. In D. A. Miller’s formulation, the sensation novel “renders our reading bodies, neither fighting nor fleeing, theaters of neurasthenia.”84 The desired effect of the sensation novel, in other words, is to produce the same sensation in its readers that it describes in its character. It may have taken place in the past, but it is playing out in the reader’s body—the novel’s “theater”—right now. Related to this presence of sensation is the second effect: the element of forgetting. Characters in sensation novels tend to forgetfulness or even amnesia, as a result of their repeated shocks and sensations. As Dames puts it, Collins’s novels “are often constructed out of momentary amnesias produced by sensation.”⁸⁵ And just as with the sensation that produces the forgetting, the readers follow the characters’ affect: sensation novels were understood to produce forgetfulness in their readers through their rapid appearance and perceived disposability. Sensation novels were seen as a series of immediate, and yet repeated, shocks at the level of both the sentence and the installment. In both cases, the shocks would combine to cancel out the accumulation of experience. Unlike the Bildungsroman, whose narrative arc of development is based on such inductive accumulation, the sensation novel does not really go anywhere. This was the backdrop for James’s and Mansel’s insistence on contemporaneity. When time is marked by the repetition of shock, it is always right now.

Deronda, it has been suggested, owes some debt to the sensation novel. Barbara Hardy sees the mark of Collins’s Woman in White in Gwendolen’s “nervous equipment”: “she is afraid of being alone, she is afraid of being loved, she is afraid of certain changes in the light, she is afraid of large open spaces.”⁸⁶ Still, let us not underestimate the presence of Collins-esque sensation throughout the novel. Gwendolen’s fear might be a psychological characteristic—she “is” afraid—but it manifests itself in the physical. When she is alone, for example, the fear surfaces as a “tremor” (63); large open spaces do not only terrify her, but also “set her imagination at work in a way that [makes] her tremble” (64). Then, of course, there are her repeated bouts of screaming. Gwendolen’s “nervous equipment” has the capacity to assert itself at any time. And it does, in a manner at once regular and unpredictable. Ultimately, though, it is in Gwendolen’s marriage to Grandcourt that the hellishness of the monotony of shock becomes evident. As Ann Cvetkovich points out, Gwendolen’s interiority becomes contested ground, as Grandcourt seeks to control her.⁸⁷ Consider the following passage, which would seem equally at home in Deronda or The Woman in White:

Why could she not rebel and defy him? She longed to do it. But she might as well have tried to defy the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart. Her husband had a ghostly army at his back, that could close round her wherever she might turn. She sat in her splendid attire, like a white image of helplessness. (447–48)

All the necessary thematic elements are there: the manipulatively cruel husband, the specter of sadism and psychological control, the country house that looks respectable to the world and is, in fact, a prison without bars. Just as important, though, is the fact that Grandcourt’s power over Gwendolen is paralleled by “the texture of her nerves and the palpitation of her heart.” The horror is made physical, and is communicated to the reader, in terms of nervous sensation.

This domestic horror is also where the novel most insists on the formal “now.” The reader does not dive directly into Gwendolen’s hell. Like the novel’s opening scene, her suffering is first glimpsed through Deronda’s eyes, and only then are we given the backstory of the object of his gaze. The result is that when the narrator returns to Gwendolen’s interiority, after describing the marriage from Daniel’s viewpoint, it is supposed to come as something of a revelation that Gwendolen is, and has been, suffering “miseries” (423). If this claim is not quite as surprising to an actual reader as the narrator might imply—we have, after all, already glimpsed Gwendolen’s guilty fits and Grandcourt’s cruelty—she makes up for it by employing the rhetoric of surprise.88 The first use of “miseries” ends a paragraph, and the next paragraph begins with rhetorical affirmation: “Yes—miseries.” The break between paragraphs, it seems, was the space in which the implied reader was to have responded with some sort of incredulity. Such insistence on the unexpected fits a basic Eliotic argument: that we cannot know the pain being suffered by others, all around us. The formal move is one that we are familiar with from Eliot’s previous novels, and especially her treatment of heroines like Hetty Sorrel and Dorothea Brooke: joining a character, and particularly a female character, in the midst of her ongoing sufferings. In Deronda, Eliot breaks new ground by joining Gwendolen in medias res, but she has already well accustomed her readers to joining her characters in medias dolores. When we enter Hetty’s point of view at the full term of her pregnancy,⁸⁹ or meet up with Dorothea on her honeymoon to find her “sobbing bitterly,”⁹⁰ their stories suddenly extend backward, as it is made clear that the the characters’ unhappiness has been going on all this time—in Hetty’s case, for months⁹¹—without our having known about it.

Setting aside for the moment the implications for sympathy and its limitations, we can see that the application of this technique in Deronda has a significant effect on the sense of time in the novel. At the time that Daniel comes to visit Gwendolen and Grandcourt, and we learn of her miseries, the two are still newlyweds, having only been married seven weeks before. This at least is how Deronda, who is seeing them for the first time together, experiences the marriage. It is not, however, how Gwendolen experiences it: “Already, in seven short weeks, which seemed half her life, her husband had gained a mastery …” (423). These weeks may be “short” for the outside world, certainly for Deronda, who has all but forgotten about Gwendolen. For Gwendolen, though, they seem to take years. At a relatively early point, the marriage seems to extend back for Gwendolen, as if it had been a constant state. The novel’s method of joining her mid-suffering emphasizes this point. The starting point becomes irrelevant; the important thing is that her suffering is going on now, and that it has been ongoing. And since, like gambling, the marriage offers no arc—Gwendolen is as miserable when we first join her as she will ever be in the marriage—it seems as if it can continue forever. If each “shock of humiliation” is different, and yet each is somehow the same, how can there be any narrative progress?

The answer lies in a certain sort of suspense. This is not to use the term in its usual form, however, in which narrative is carried along by a series of posed and resolved enigmas.92 This form of suspense plays little role in Eliot’s fiction; Caroline Levine goes so far as to suggest that Eliot shows a consistent suspicion of the mechanics of suspense throughout her career.⁹³ With characters like Hetty, Dorothea, or Gwendolen, we almost seem to have the converse of suspense; as soon as we know that something has been hidden from us, we know what that something is.⁹⁴ The suspense that underlies Gwendolen’s marriage is of a different sort: a sense that, though we might not know how or when, something has to happen. Gwendolen feels the same thing within herself: “When my blood is fired I can do daring things—take any leap; but that makes me frightened at myself”; “if feelings rose—there are some feelings—hatred and anger—how can I be good when they keep rising? And if there came a moment when I felt stifled and could bear it no longer—” (452, 453). She does not finish the latter sentence. Are the “daring things” suicide? Murder? Running away to the Continent? It does not really matter, so long as she knows, and the reader knows, that something will happen. What makes hell ultimately unbearable, in both its classical and Christian presentations, is that its monotony of shock can continue for all eternity. Gwendolen predicts that the moment will come when she can “bear it no longer.” At some point, in some form, the monotony will have to break.

If Gwendolen’s marriage brings the experience of gambling into the domestic narrative, then the suspense underlying her marriage brings with it the gambler’s intuition. This intuition tells us that over the long haul, the odds will even out. Take, for example, the opening scene of Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. The two are placing wagers on whether a coin will come up heads or tails, and it has come up heads seventy-five times in a row. As Guildenstern describes this seeming denial of the laws of probability: “There is an art to the building up of suspense.”⁹⁵ At the level of the law of large numbers, where deviations cancel out, there will eventually be a return to some sort of equilibrium. The case, or so the reader senses, must be the same in the large novel.

THE GAMBLER’S FALLACY

The remainder of this chapter will argue that this form of expectation is an essential part of the novel’s understanding of experience, but one that the novel ultimately critiques. Before that, though, it will be useful to take a moment to separate the metaphor of gambling, as it plays throughout the novel, and the literal act of gambling, as we see it in Leubronn at the novel’s opening. The reason such a distinction is necessary is that Eliot so consistently applies the metaphoric language of gambling in Daniel Deronda that it is tempting to think that most every character in the novel is a gambler, and every choice a gamble. Gwendolen is a gambler, of course. The Davilows and Gascoignes are gamblers for investing with Grapnell and Company. Deronda is a gambler of a different, more admirable sort, “invest[ing] his luck” to help Hans Meyrick in school (183), and finally, as Wilfred Stone puts it, “risk[ing] his whole inheritance for a visionary ideal.”96 In fact, one moral conclusion the novel offers is that we are all of us gamblers in our everyday lives: “There are enough inevitable turns of fortune which force us to see that our gain is another’s loss:—that is one of the ugly aspects of life” (337). Actually to play at roulette, Deronda suggests, is simply a difference of degree, “exaggerating” this fact of life. Gwendolen’s decision to marry Grandcourt, we are told, is “like roulette” (692). But a metaphor tells us little without some sort of literal referent. So, in order to glean some meaning from the blanket application of this metaphor, we need to understand what the novel has to say about gambling itself.

First, let us look at the novel’s presentation of an inveterate gambler. There is only one in the novel—and it is not Gwendolen. Lapidoth, the prodigal father of Mirah and Mordecai, is the very embodiment of the gambler. His most human sensibilities have been replaced by a desire for gaming. As Mordecai tells him, “you have become a gambler, and where shame and conscience were, there sits an insatiable desire” (776). The narrator then offers illustration of this. After the “lightning” of Mordecai’s admonishments has passed, he falls to thinking about roulette: Mordecai “passed like an insubstantial ghost, and his words had the heart eaten out of them by the numbers and movements that seemed to make the very tissue of Lapidoth’s consciousness” (778).⁹⁷ Gambling here is not just an action; it is an ontology. Lapidoth is a gambler.

No one else is, though. Deronda’s antipathy to roulette is made abundantly clear; Sir Hugo has “never cared for it” (161). Grandcourt plays but finds it a “confounded strain” (161), and the narrator makes a point of stating, before he arrives at Diplow, that no one believed him to be a gambler (93). And what about Gwendolen, the “fair gambler, the Leubronn Diana”? She is quite different from Lapidoth, in that the “insatiable desire” that makes up his being remains always external for Gwendolen. In the novel’s opening set piece, she is surrounded by other players gripped by the “gambler’s passion” (8). Yet Gwendolen plays “not because of passion, but in search of it” (17). More importantly, she never plays again. Even her fantasies of what might have been, while married to Grandcourt, show a separation from the world of the casino: “she had heard stories at Leubronn of fashionable women who gambled in all sorts of ways. It seemed very flat to her at this distance, but perhaps if she began to gamble again, the passion might awake” (429). Gwendolen daydreams herself in the role of the gambler, desiring the “gambler’s passion.” But desire is a relation with something separate from oneself. Though Gwendolen, like Grandcourt or Sir Hugo, might play at gaming, she lacks the passion that would make it part of “the tissue of her consciousness.”

This “passion” is not just some sort of disease, brought on by avarice or, as Sir Hugo would have it, bad air. What differentiates Gwendolen from a real gambler is her intuitive understanding of the role played by chance. After finding out the full extent of her losses, she considers going back to the tables: “With ten louis at her disposal and a return of her former luck, which seemed probable, what could she do better than go on playing for a few days?” (17). Gwendolen had been winning before, after all, and then she began to lose. Judging by the past, the first thought that comes to her mind is that a return to winning—that is, to her “former luck”—would be the probable next step. In deciding against returning to the tables, though, she shows her awareness that she is just as likely to go on losing:

Gwendolen’s imagination dwelt on this course and created agreeable consequences, but not with unbroken confidence and rising certainty as it would have done if she had been touched with the gambler’s mania. She had gone to the roulette table not because of passion, but in search of it: her mind was still sanely capable of picturing balanced probabilities, and while the chance of winning allured her, the chance of losing thrust itself on her with an alternate strength. (17)

To be touched by the “gambler’s mania,” then, is to be unable to see “balanced probabilities.” By contrast, what makes Gwendolen “sane” here is that she realizes that nothing that has happened in the past—her earlier winning streak, her later losing streak, her family’s crushing loss—will in any way influence the turn of the wheel.

Lapidoth, the novel’s figure for the “gambler’s mania,” takes the opposite approach to the issue of chance as a determining factor. Rather than see balanced future probabilities of good fortune and bad, he believes that fortune is a self-correcting system: “Luck had been against him recently; he expected it to turn” (774). This is known as the “gambler’s fallacy,” and Eliot understood it to be at the heart of the gambler’s mistaken understanding of the nature of chance. In preparation for her work on the novel, she had read an article entitled “Gambling Superstitions,” which discussed the paradoxes of gambler’s fallacies at length. In particular, the author, Proctor, dwelt on the “the theory of the maturity of chances—‘the most elementary of the theories of probability’”98 This “theory” suggests that the law of probability dictates that a run of bad luck will be followed by a run of good luck: if red comes up ten times in a row, then you should bet on black. Such a belief, the author writes, “might safely be termed the most mischievous of all gambling superstitions.” The paradox in this theory, and the reason that it is therefore so mischievous, is that results do tend toward their probabilistic outcomes, and yet the gambler can still know nothing about the outcome of the next roll of the die or spin of the wheel. This, it seems, is what fascinated Eliot. She summed it up well in her notebook: “True that results will right themselves but not over any given number of localized chances.”⁹⁹ The gambler’s superstition lies in the belief that he can be systematically able to predict the outcomes of any specific—or as Eliot calls it, “localized”—event based on a probability that only obtains as long-term ratio. The fact that such predictions seem intuitively reasonable make them, for Eliot, no less superstitions. After all, as her narrator rhetorically asks, “Who supposes it is an impossible contradiction to be superstitious and rationalising at the same time?” (19).

Lapidoth exemplifies this superstitious belief in the power of a seemingly rational system to predict future events. The narrator describes him, awake at night, going “back over old Continental hours at Roulette, reproducing the method of his play, and the chances that had frustrated it” (778). The phrasing here is precise; chance frustrates the method of play, but chance is not what Lapidoth is concerned with. He is instead dwelling on, and likely refining, the method itself. As Proctor puts it, “There has never been a ruined gambler … who has not believed that when ruin overtook him he was on the very point of mastering the secret of success” (704). The specific nature of Lapidoth’s method of play is uncertain, but it is safe to assume that it is was one of the numerous gambling systems that English travelers to the Continent so often remarked on.¹⁰⁰ The common thread in these reports was an amazement at Continental gamblers’ belief in these systems. Proctor’s term—“superstition”—appears with regularity. One traveler to Monte Carlo, for example, described the “truly astonishing” number of systems for sale:

[F]or the man who fancies that superstition has been destroyed by the influences of nineteenth century materialism, there is a great surprise in store at Nice. The extent of shop-window space devoted in that town to the impossible demands of the gambler, will be a revelation to him. The gambler demands a “system,” that is, a previously arranged sequence of bets so cunningly devised that the odds which would otherwise be in favour of the bank become by its use in favour of the gambler, and, needless to say, the demand is met.101

Nice, Monte Carlo, even Paris—the gambling systems for sale in these towns become a last stronghold of superstition against modern rationality. As the author goes on to say, “A ‘system’ is the gambler’s fetish, and even when the system has ruined him he still believes in it” (487). Such systems represented not only a belief in one’s luck, or an uncontrollable mania; rather, they offered the illusion of control over the workings of chance.

Such systems were just as present in German gambling towns, and particularly the one in Homburg, on which Eliot modeled her opening scene. Pamphlets known as Deutsche-Kalifornien—so called after the Gold-Rush slang of the day—were available both in and around casinos.¹⁰² The Kalifornien offered advice on all facets of gambling, combining techniques for knowing when to bet, how to bet, and in what frame of mind to bet. The popularity of these systems would have been almost impossible to miss. One visitor to the roulette tables at the Kursaal—the tables that would be represented in the novel’s opening scene—wrote, “Nearly every gambler had a coloured paper lying before him, or an infallible system, in accordance with which he played. One had a small machine, representing a miniature barrel-organ, the handle of which he turned, thrust a pin several times into the table of figures inside it, and whispered to his companion what he should back.”¹⁰³ This latter machine appears to be a rather overwrought method for determining which numbers will come up next, based on a record of which have come up in the past.¹⁰⁴ The systems that the author describes as nearly covering the gaming tables were, as we have seen, common all over Europe. Yet they were likely even more common in the casino in Homburg. According to the English traveler quoted above, the casino’s owners, the brothers François and Louis Blanc had taken deliberate steps to draw “all the ‘players upon a system’ to Hambourg” (469). They were the first to introduce the “half refait” in trente et quarante (or, as it was sometimes called, rouge et noir), which lessened the already slight house advantage in this game.¹⁰⁵ This, along with the fact that Homburg roulette wheels had only one zero while those in Baden had two—again halving the house advantage over punters wagering on a color—made the Kursaal at Homburg the most popular casino in Germany among those believing that the odds could be worked in their favor.

This, then, should offer some context for Eliot’s 1872 trip to Homburg, often credited with having “supplied the germ” for Daniel Deronda.¹⁰⁶ Eliot and Lewes had traveled to the Continent so that she might finish Middlemarch. While in Homburg for their health—they were on a strict regime of “drinking the waters and taking the baths” (456)—they were taken to the casino by a Lady Castletown, whose acquaintance they had made in town. As mentioned earlier, their curiosity was no doubt stoked by the fact that the German casinos would be closing forever in little over three months. What is most remembered from this trip, though, are the outraged letters Eliot wrote describing the casinos, which seem to offer us our first hazy sight of the novel’s opening. In one we see the figure that would become Gwendolen: “Miss Leigh, Byron’s grand niece, who is only 26 years old, and is completely in the grasp of the mean, money-raking demon. It made me cry to see her young fresh face among the hags and brutally stupid men around her.”107 Another presents a description of the cast of characters that surround the gaslit tables:

I am not fond of denouncing my fellow-sinners, but gambling being a vice I have no mind to, it stirs my disgust even more than my pity. The sight of the full faces bending round the gaming table, the raking-up of the money, and the flinging of the coins towards the winners by the hard-faced croupiers, the hateful, hideous women staring at the board like stupid monomaniacs—all this seems to me the most abject presentation of mortals grasping after something called a good that can be seen on the face of this little earth. Burglary is heroic compared with it. (312)

Eliot, in this letter, shows little interest in understanding what fills her with such disgust. She flings insults—“hateful,” “hideous,” “stupid”—but makes little effort to describe. Her rhetoric—“this little earth,” “burglary is heroic”—strikes a high pitch. Her only effort at analysis is to say that she has so little fellow-feeling for gamblers because she, herself, has no taste for gaming.

Unfortunately, received wisdom has too often taken Eliot at her words in these letters, and held up her largely unexamined condemnation of gambling as axiomatic in reading the novel. Yet, though she began with an instinctive dislike, her interests turned quickly to understanding what delusions lay at the heart of the desire to gamble. Though she does not mention it in her letters, we know that the casino at Homburg would have been literally papered with gambling systems, and filled with punters who believed that they themselves had the secret to beating the odds. And furthermore, we know that upon her arrival back in England, she turned immediately to a study of the nature of these “gambling superstitions” and why they were faulty. We can see this not only in her descriptions of Lapidoth and Gwendolen, but also in her representation of Homburg as Leubronn. In the novel, she describes not only “hideous” or “stupid” gamblers but also the nature of their delusion. One gambler, described at some length, is “probably secure in an infallible system which placed his foot on the neck of chance” (9). To make it clear that such systems are, as her research taught her, “gambling superstitions,” she immediately follows this with a description of an older man, who chooses his plays based on “no severity of system, but rather some dream of white crows, or the induction that the eighth of the month was lucky.” The term “induction” not only draws the link between the ostensibly rational superstition and the overtly fetishistic one; it also makes clear what it is that is so superstitious about such systems: the belief that an induction from a limited number of examples will be in any way predictive about what will happen next.108 The proof of this is the fact that both lose: the systematic gambler is forced to prepare a “new pile” of stakes, having just lost the last one, while the older seer is busy “ask[ing] for change.”

In other words, though her letters present a rather simple rigidity, her actual preparation for the novel showed that she wanted to understand the nature of the gambler’s delusion of control. The manner in which she wrote these lessons back into the character of Lapidoth suggests that her understanding of the “gambler’s mania” was far more subtle than simply seeing it as a “mean, money-raking demon.” She rather saw it as the failure to understand that though, over long enough time spans, certain statistical certainties will hold sway, such laws are not reducible to the individual case. Her note on probability is worth restating, not only because it refutes Lapidoth but because it describes the breach between the individual and aggregate that lies at the heart of the novel: “True that results will right themselves but not over any given number of localized chances.” They will only right themselves at the largest levels.

Gwendolen, until the very last scene with Deronda, expects her story to right itself. The reader has likely expected this as well. Gwendolen’s marriage seemed to cry out for some fortunate spin of the wheel, after a seemingly endless succession of losses, and that winning turn came at sea, in the form of Grandcourt’s providential death. The only thing left, for Gwendolen and for the reader, would be for the bad marriage to be balanced by the good one and the figure of the “spoiled child” to be replaced with that of the wiser wife. Such, after all, is the narrative equilibrium reached in so many novels of experience: Vanity Fair, Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Middlemarch. Marry imprudently; suffer; be rescued by the spouse’s providential death; remarry. One of the novel’s most wrenching scenes occurs when Gwendolen discovers that her plot will not tend to such equilibrium, in the form of marriage to Deronda, thanks to his threefold announcement that he is a Jew, marrying Mirah, and leaving for Palestine. This scene is also the occasion for Eliot’s most extended, and extensive, use of the long view, as she invokes “the great movements of the world, the larger destinies of mankind” (803). The novel’s great moment of moral seriousness, in other word, does not come with Gwendolen’s possible sin of omission leading to her husband’s death or Deronda’s reclamation of his heritage. It comes instead at the moment that a character does not get what it seems—seems to her, and to us—that she is due. And the way that the novel makes sense of this moment is to direct our attention away from the “localized” instance to the level at which things reach their proper balance: the “great,” the “larger.”

It directs our attention to this lesson—but not Gwendolen’s. In introducing the “larger destinies,” the narrator is carefully vague about where these thoughts are occurring: “There comes a terrible moment to many souls …” (803). After escalating this terrible moment through chariots of fire, the “submission of the soul,” and the “awful face of duty,” the narrator then retreats, back to the first inkling of something larger: “That was the sort of crisis which was at this moment beginning in Gwendolen’s small life” (804). Gwendolen, in other words, is refused even the consolation of her place in a larger universe, where things balance out properly. We are given to believe that she might one day reach this understanding, but ultimately the novel does not even allow the character the integration of realizing the larger movements of the “historical stream.” The understanding of these workings is so counterintuitive that the best Gwendolen is given is “something spiritual and vaguely tremendous.”

The use of the large novel, though, is that it can frustrate what seems to be the correct coming-to-equilibrium of one story, Gwendolen’s, while still suggesting that the story as a whole worked out as it should. Eliot’s oft-quoted reminder that she “meant everything in the book to be related to everything else”109 refers to the unity of the interrelations in the book, but it also refers to the narrative. The novel as a whole asserts that the Gwendolen’s disappointment makes sense in “the big picture.” But it is only as the reader of a novel that there can be such comfort. The logic of large numbers brushes by Gwendolen, leaving her only with a simple, forward-looking moral imperative—“I shall live” (807). She follows this by the final declaration that though she has no internal sense that she will “be the best of women, who make others glad that they are born” (810), she still has faith in Deronda’s assertion that this will turn out to be the case. The narrative of the novel, in other words, ultimately divorces moral desire from any sort of intuition. It continues to exist only for those who can see the interrelation of the individual with the large numbers: that is, the reader.

COROLLARY: JULIET FENN

Eliot’s lesson thus seems a rather gloomy one for any individuals not fortunate enough to discover, like Deronda, that they are part of an enumerable community. For the rest, there is the lesson of the large novel: things, as a whole, do work out as they should, but that does not mean that they work out that way for individuals. That is to say, when the novel follows its molecular-statistical model, we can only locate progress among the larger group. The difficulty of this for literary representation, though, is an obvious one: as soon as a character is individualized, he or she becomes an exception to the “prevailing expression” of the larger group.

The way that Eliot balances this helpless outlook is through another formal quality of the large novel: its profusion of characters. Even though Eliot insists that we avoid the gambler’s fallacy of believing a small sample size of events will come together in a meaningful way, this does not mean that nothing will come together in a meaningful way; it only means that it will not come together that way for Gwendolen, or you or me, or any other individual. However, “results will right themselves” for large groups, over time—not because any individual event will tend back toward equilibrium, but because the large numbers will simply outnumber the exceptions. In the novel, though, it is much easier to represent the exceptions than these large numbers. Even though there is a large cast of characters in Deronda, their main purpose, it seems, is to stand as a sort of negative space for individualized characters to move through. The cast of characters expresses conventional wisdom in the form of rural gossip, and provides the backdrop from which the central characters “come forward,” as Grandcourt does when he approaches Gwendolen from out of a crowd (111). Though these characters are often named, they are often essentially invisible. Such is the case, for example, when Gwendolen sits down to dinner in “the ladies’ dining room” after the archery meeting. We are told that there are other women sitting beside her, insofar as we are told that she does not talk with them, but no description or even dialogue is offered. The narrator may be offering as critique her claims that Gwendolen “when left alone in [other women’s] company had a sense of empty benches” (116). Gwendolen’s sense, though, is the reader’s sense as well. The other women, Catherine Arrowpoint excluded, are there, in some sense, but only as undifferentiated backdrop in opposition to Gwendolen.

One of these women, though, a certain Juliet Fenn, does get a name, without ever being quite individualized. We might call her the femme moyenne, if it were not for the colorful language that is used to describe her unattractiveness: “It was impossible [for Gwendolen] to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl as middling as mid-day market in everything but her archery and plainness, in which last she was noticeable like her father: underhung and with receding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes” (114). That fishy appearance, though, is explained away with a parenthetical digression on questions of physical attractiveness and natural selection. Her distinguishing characteristic, in other words, is given as the nearly inevitable result of movements at a vast scale. The inevitability of her appearance, as well as her insignificance for Gwendolen, is reasserted later in the novel: “Miss Juliet Fenn, a young lady whose profile had been so unfavorably decided by circumstances over which she had no control, that Gwendolen some months ago had felt it impossible to be jealous of her” (418). But it is also Juliet Fenn who beats the two individualized, and physically attractive, women at the archery meet. According to one observer: “There’s luck even in these games of skill. That’s better. It gives the hinder ones a chance” (104). Luck, in the form that assists Juliet in the archery match, is not simply random chance. Rather it functions as a sort of even distribution; it evens things out for “the hinder ones.” In the figure of Juliet, we have a marker of the aggregate, which displays the meaning in such large-scale processes as Darwinian evolution and the workings of luck. But this is only because Juliet has never been fully differentiated from the uncountably large social backdrop, and so she never has to be reintegrated into it. Yet, among the English, it is only for the Juliet Fenns, the large group, that we can expect things to “work out” in the end.