The accidental muse: Chance and early-Victorian metropolitan literature

"The Accidental Muse" argues that early-Victorian literature, in its fascination with chance contact and accidents, articulates within metropolitan experience a pervasive sense of contingency, an awareness of the generative possibilities of chance. The shift that took place during the nineteenth century toward non-determinist explanatory paradigms has been variously traced to a revolution in theories of probability, to the new evolutionary biology, and to a proto-modernist aesthetic in Second-Empire Paris. However, these critical narratives overshoot moments earlier in the century when randomness caught the attention, and began to restructure the imagination, of writers and artists in early Victorian cities. In different guises---including on-the-street collisions, industrial catastrophes, and inexplicable coincidence---accidents provoked the Victorians to take more stochastic views, not only of causality within the urban environment, but also of literary form, social structure, and cultural exchange. They adapted such accidents to reinvent the ethical and epistemological significance of chance.;Harnessing the enthusiasm in the 1830s for surveys of metropolitan scenery and character, Charles Dickens in Sketches by Boz uses the accidental encounters of his proxy ethnographer to outline a non-deterministic alternative to the social and moral mapping that had become the order of the day. Urban industrial accidents led Elizabeth Gaskell to place fiction in implicit dialogue with the insurance business, as novelists and actuaries were engaged in a common struggle to define and manage risk. Along with the novel, accidents penetrated more evanescent publications on the streets. Commenting on the flood of cheap literature for an "unknown public," Wilkie Collins and Margaret Oliphant characterized popular literature as an accidental media whose generation and diffusion were subject to chance. The railway, by seeming to expand haphazardly and to collapse the nation into one immense city, similarly invoked the uneven and potentially aleatory development of systems and capital. Depictions of railway accidents paradoxically solved the representational dilemmas of the railway and the metropolitan condition it seemed to elaborate. "The Accidental Muse" demonstrates how accidents energize a dialectic of chance and purpose, chaos and order, through which the Victorians reconfigured cultural forms and grasped their urgent work of knowing.