Dickens Quarterly

The Victorians have recently acquired fresh relevance for scholars of information and new media in the twenty-first century. As information and communication technologies (ICTs) continue to transform Western culture, some authors, both creative and academic, are turning to historical narratives of upheaval, finding in them harbingers of our current tempestuous networked age, as well as continuities that persist even when ICTs have transformed culture, authorship and scholarship seemingly beyond recognition. The steampunk genre of science fiction, for instance, poses frequent "What if?" questions: William Gibson and Bruce Stirling imagine in The Difference Engine (1990) a Victorian Britain in which the computer revolution occurred at the time of Charles Babbage. And popular historians have revisited numerous time periods, finding in them the seeds of current technologies. Simon Winchester, in The Professor and the Madman (1998) depicts the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary as an early example of crowd sourcing, and decentralized collaboration, over a century before the advent of Wikipedia. And Steven Johnson follows up his popular treatise on complex systems, Emergence (2000), with a surprising return to Victorian Britain. In The Ghost Map (2006), which recounts the story of London's cholera outbreak in September 1854, Johnson uses the records of that outbreak – particularly those documenting the activities of the pioneering physician John Snow – to describe Victorian London in terms familiar to, and important to, the early twenty-first century.

In Johnson's account, the poor of London in the nineteenth century played an important part in a complex system. Like the neighborhoods, ant colonies and computer systems that Johnson described in Emergence, waste removal in Victorian London evolved into an efficient system, without any central planning:

We're naturally inclined to consider these scavengers tragic figures, and to fulminate against a system that allowed so many thousands to eke out a living by foraging through human waste. […] But such [End Page 224] social outrage should be accompanied by a measure of wonder and respect: without any central planner coordinating their actions, without any education at all, this itinerant underclass managed to conjure up an entire system for processing and sorting the waste generated by two million people.

(Johnson 2006, 2)

The fight against cholera in the nineteenth century, he argues, was hindered by popular and entrenched misconceptions, which were dislodged by the imaginative and rigorous reasoning of John Snow, aided by the local assistant curate, Henry Whitehead.¹ Snow used the emerging practice of statistical data gathering in a way that anticipated modern practices of big data analysis, predictive analytics and data visualization. Snow emerges from Johnson's account as a thinker ahead of his time, who used data analysis to track correlations and compute likelihoods, in a manner similar to the data analysts of the twenty-first century, and to present his findings persuasively through techniques that prefigured modern computerized means of data visualization.

The present study emerges from a curious absence, in Johnson's narrative and in historical evidence. Charles Dickens was deeply engaged with questions of sanitation, water quality and living conditions as a novelist, a public speaker, and a journalist and editor. Two years before the 1854 cholera epidemic, Dickens had begun publishing Bleak House, which contained some of the most vivid and powerful depictions of poverty, disease and wretched living conditions ever found in Victorian English literature. He was deeply concerned at the outbreak of cholera in 1854, and he actively solicited material on water and sanitation in Household Words. And yet, there is no evidence from Dickens's correspondence that this gregarious and socially-engaged activist even met Snow, let alone conversed with the man who solved the riddle of the cholera outbreak: an event that spoke to the very concerns that Dickens had been championing throughout his career. In The Ghost Map, Johnson dismisses Dickens as the spokesperson – an admittedly brilliant spokesperson – for a mistaken idea that led to scores of unnecessary deaths. Why this lack of connection?

Snow's silence on Dickens is understandable, given the physician's documented low regard for fiction; his friends could never persuade him "that reading novels was anything other than a frivolous waste of...