Stefanie Markovits, The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025) 240 pp. $100 Hb. ISBN: 9780198937791
‘Number sense’ is the term Stefanie Markovits uses to describe the numerical thinking that permeates the lines and pages of nineteenth-century novels and poems, crafting patterns across the tapestry of poetic imagery and narrative arcs. As she puts it, the purpose of The Number Sense is to ‘follow the effect produced by represented numbers (be they ordinal or cardinal, printed as Arabic or Roman numerals or spelled out as words) when we encounter them in novels and poetry’ (5). That is, the book examines how nineteenth-century poets and novelists were not only attuned to the literary and cultural significance of numbers, but also how they infused them with new meanings to make sense of their historical moment, particularly the contemporary uses of statistics to represent society and individuals. Criss-crossing literary forms and genres—from Romantic poetry to realist, detective, gothic, and sensation fiction—Markovits demonstrates that ‘number sense’ was a distinctly nineteenth-century literary phenomenon.
Woven through the main chapters is Markovits’s examination of how numbers in nineteenth-century poems and novels often carry multiple, even conflicting, meanings—most notably, representing both the one (the individual) and the many (the social collective), a duality foregrounded by the nineteenth century’s statistical turn. She shows how, rather than resolving this tension, nineteenth-century poets and novelists embrace ambiguity. Consider the Romantic poet Lord Byron, whose Don Juan (1819-1824)Markovits examines in Chapter One. She argues that counting is central to understanding the poem, as its ever-expanding architecture of cantos and stanzas frames a dramatization of excess, both in the numerical ordering of Juan’s seemingly endless lovers and in the countdown of mounting war deaths. For Markovits, Byron resists ‘the hard logic of statistical enumeration’ with his ‘ethics of counting’, inviting readers to register both the singularity of each lover or death and the scale of collective tragedy (51, 43).
In Chapter Two, Markovits explores how ‘half’ defines and structures the marriage plots in Jane Austen’s novels: ‘[T]he half-hour dances, morning visits, and solitary scenes of meditation’ build towards marriage and marriage itself is the joining of two halves (78). However, as with Byron’s counting, Austen’s ‘half’ carries multiple, often conflicting meanings. Challenging the reassuring ideal of wholeness and completion in marriage are the realities of scarcity in the absence of a partner; incompletion in the possibility of interchangeable lovers, evoking again the tension between the one (the beloved) and the many (potential matches); and inequality in women’s lower social and financial status. These layers of meaning confront the numerical logic that one half plus another makes a whole with the lived social experience. If the chapter appears to proliferate meanings of ‘half’ in Austen’s novels without arriving at a single conclusion, Markovits intends it. As she explains, her approach is ‘ruminative—rather than having parts of an argument add up to a final sum, I will keep dancing around the implications of Austen’s use of the figure half’ (65).
Markovits revisits the concept of the one and the many in Chapter Three to explore how Charles Dickens crafts flat characters that gesture toward submerged individuality in a liberal-democratic society organised by utility. Dickens employs numerical labelling and counting to render his characters as interchangeable statistical units: he identifies them with numbers, such as Dr. Manette as ‘One Hundred and Five, North Tower’ in A Tale of Two Cities (1859), quantifies traits like age and height, and defines characters through repetitive numerical phrasing. In one striking example, a raped woman (Madame Defarge’s sister) counts to relive her husband’s dying breaths. Markovits argues that these numerical descriptions and iterations expose the reductive logic of social utility while paradoxically drawing attention to the emotional and psychological depth concealed beneath the surface of the characters.
In Chapter Four, Markovits turns to the question of plot, examining how Anthony Trollope structures his serial fiction around the numerical ages of his characters. She observes that he organises narrative progression through the repeated and accumulative moments of ‘now’ that track memory, ageing, and the unfolding of life. As Markovits shows, Trollope does not separate plotting from characterisation in his use of numbers. That is, he avoids choosing between precise, number-driven plotting—favoured by authors like Wilkie Collins—and the slower, seemingly numberless development of character. Rather, for Trollope, ‘plot is . . . embodied in character’ through the passage of time and the experience of ageing; age, therefore, becomes more than a statistical marker (166). His novels often conclude with what Markovits calls a ‘countdown plot’, a numerical descent toward marriage or death (166). If Trollope counts down to a single death, Bram Stoker in Dracula (1897) counts down to the destruction of the ‘distributed’ or ‘compound’ characters of the Un-Dead, once again evoking the problem of how to numerically contain the many (176).
Mathematical references in nineteenth-century novels, particularly in realist fiction, are often subtle and sporadic, making sustained analysis difficult. The Number Sense is therefore a welcome addition to full-length studies of mathematics in nineteenth-century prose fiction, complementing work on Euclidean and non-Euclidean geometry, higher-dimensional geometry, symbolic algebra, computation, and probability and statistics.[1] Markovits savours the interpretive richness of something as small as numbers, showing that mathematics need not be conceptually complex to carry weight in fiction. Had she focused solely on individual numbers, the argument for a nineteenth-century ‘number sense’ might have faltered; instead, she builds on their presence through numbering, ordering, counting, and comparing, all situated within the statistical turn of the period. The result is a compelling and intricate account of numerical thinking in nineteenth-century literature. Although the book risks overemphasising single terms like ‘half’ or ‘odd’, Markovits balances close reading with broader interpretive networks, both within the canon of individual authors and across the wider literary landscape. The chapter codas offer effective transitions, showing how writers like Wilkie Collins, Lewis Carroll, and Bram Stoker engage with numbers in ways both analogous to and distinct from Austen, Dickens, and Trollope. Though The Number Sense focuses primarily on rational numbers—positive integers and Austen’s famous half—it opens the door to future studies of more complex numerical forms in nineteenth-century fiction, including negative, irrational, and imaginary numbers.
Sumin Kim, Seoul National University
[1] For Euclidean geometry, see Alice Jenkins’s Space and the ‘March of Mind’: Literature and the Physical Sciences in Britain 1815-1850 (Oxford University Press, 2007). For higher-dimensional geometry, see Mark Blacklock’s The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension: Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle (Oxford University Press, 2018) and Elizabeth L. Throesch’s Before Einstein: The Fourth Dimension in Fin-de-Siècle Literature and Culture (Anthem Press, 2017). Andrea Henderson discusses non-Euclidean geometry, symbolic algebra, and symbolic logic in Algebraic Art: Mathematical Formalism and Victorian Culture (Oxford University Press, 2018). For probabilistic and statistical thinking, see Michael Tondre’s The Physics of Possibility: Victorian Fiction, Science, and Gender (University of Virginia Press, 2018) and Tina Young Choi’s Victorian Contingencies: Experiments in Literature, Science and Play (Stanford University Press, 2021).
