Like the Romantics and Victorians before us, we live in a numbery age. Stefanie Markovits makes this clear in her latest book The Number Sense of Nineteenth-Century British Literature. By "numbery," a term that she borrows from David Kurnick ("Numberiness," Representations [2015]), Markovits means that both the nineteenth century and our current era are marked by an inundation of numbers as sense-making tools. The explanatory and organizational power of numbers led to their increased appearance in print. As the author notes in her introduction, this numerical deluge is most evident in the influx of statistical data and rise in political economic thinking, starting in the early nineteenth century. The consolidation of liberal democracy via the expanding franchise also heightened the importance of quantification. The proliferation of enumeration, moreover, left a lexical imprint, seen in the innovative ways that the word "count" shows up in the period. Following Matthew Bevis's observation that "several new uses of the verb count come into being" at this time ("Poetry by Numbers," Raritan [2017] 38), Markovits explores some of these uses--counting as marking rhythm or temporality, as taking measure or stock, as counting down, and as an intransitive verb--as she examines fiction and poetry's figures.

Given this explosion of counting and digits, one of Markovits's aims is to keep track of how and when integers emerge in nineteenth-century letters. Specifically, this book considers the special meaning of certain numbers and kinds of numbers--such as threes, half, and age--and particular and general quantities of people or things--for example, pairs, heaps, and many. It likewise examines how literary works compel readers to "keep count" and asks whether keeping count is the function of literary numbers in the first place (20). Together, Markovits's readings of "represented numbers (be they ordinal or cardinal, printed as Arabic or Roman numerals or spelled out as words)" demonstrate what she calls the "number sense" of Romantic and Victorian texts (5).

Throughout the book, Markovits employs this phrase to refer to the "labor, intellectual and ethical," that numerals in literature perform, as well as to the "faculty of number sense" that readers can hone "by paying attention to [these figures'] presence" (20, 5). While I would have preferred a more substantial definition of this term in the introduction, Markovits chooses not to provide one, for, as she writes, "different numbers matter differently, and authors use them in diverse ways. The figures' distinctive meanings would be lost were I to try to add them into a tidy sum; even the discovery of a single pattern would need so much statistical 'smoothing' as to result in serious distortion" (21). That certain texts have unique number senses is clear from Markovits's fascinating and detailed analyses. For instance, her first chapter on counting in Romantic verse differentiates between the ethics and logics of counting found in William Wordsworth's and Lord Byron's respective oeuvres. Whereas Wordsworth's integers indicate an ironic refusal to count or rank via ordinal figures, Markovits shows that Byron's integers serve as a brace against the depersonalizing scales of vast quantities. The feeling of this latter mode of enumeration, which in Don Juan often materializes as counting down, contrasts with the cold rationality of statistics that writers like Charles Dickens and Thomas Carlyle famously critiqued. The number sense that Markovits identifies in Romantic and Victorian literature is thus perhaps not so much one sense but a slew of senses--an indefinite set of contrasting reasonings, impressions, and affects that exceeds the mathematical sums and operations frequently associated with nineteenth-century counts.

Because of the attention that Number Sense pays to the aesthetic work and impact of numbers, this book stands apart from recent and foundational scholarship on nineteenth-century statistics and mathematics. Monographs such as Mary Poovey's A History of the Modern Fact (1998) and Ian Hacking's The Taming of Chance (1990) explain the historical and cultural background for the numbery society that produces the writings Markovits investigates. Criticism by Alice Jenkins, Andrea Henderson, Maureen McLane, Audrey Jaffe, and Emily Steinlight, among others, establish the influence of mathematical advances and large numbers on poetic and novelistic form. Markovits's study, however, is singular in its dogged emphasis of the actual numbers that appear in texts. Markovits hence makes a case for treating literary digits as figures, not as mere quantities or realist detail but as meaningful aesthetic elements. Numbers, in short, for Markovits, are like letters and words, rife with interpretive possibility. "[G]enerating a feel for numbers," therefore, occurs through "old-fashioned close reading," even as the author occasionally employs distant reading methods to confirm the numberiness of the poetry and novels she dissects (21). And it is in those close readings where this book truly shines, proving that numbers, when wielded by writers with number senses of their own, "can create new forms of literary agency" (20).

Markovits's investment in the formal and generic affordances of numbers is apparent in each of the book's chapters. Chapter 1 demonstrates how Romantic poets, especially Byron, use poetic form to reveal how counting feels. The book's readings of the war episodes in Don Juan, in which the dead are reckoned and named, are particularly illuminating. As Markovits explains, in these stanzas, quantification provides "an antidote not just to the kinds of indifference prompted by the larger numbers of modern statistical experience but also to novelistic full immersion in a singular experience" (56). By offering a bridge between the one and the many, counting in these moments--which work in accordance with the poem's ottava rima--keeps the multiple in view without sacrificing the "sympathy-based, Enlightenment ethics" usually linked to the individual (37).

In chapter 2, Markovits turns to prose to claim that the prevalence of half in Jane Austen's fiction both indicates the novelist's "ambivalence regarding the perfect fit of wholes" and serves as a marker of the courtship plot and its concern with the scarcity economics of marriage (65). As this chapter shows, the pairings in Austen's stories rarely add up to a complete one because women's social and financial subordination vitiates the promise of equality in marriage. The necessity of matching in these texts, furthermore, makes the lovers interchangeable and thus not the fated partners that romantic ideology suggests. The "matching problem" of Austen's novels persists in George Gissing's The Odd Women, where half similarly appears in high proportions (80). Accordingly, Markovits concludes that "the prolix use of a certain figure can ... help to identify a literary category," in this case "a particularly rational branch of marriage plot romances" (90).

The third chapter expounds on the relationship between "figure" and "character" to consider how "the very words we use to designate fictional persons can also refer to numerical symbols" (91). This affiliation appears in multiple ways: in how characters are identified by numbers, such as Doctor Manette as "One Hundred and Five, North Tower"; in how numbers define character traits like height or net worth, such as Mr. Darcy's ten thousand pounds a year; and in how many details distinguish round characters from flat ones. The issue of number and character likewise arises in terms of the social milieu a work depicts. How many characters become too many and turn a manageable set of personages into the politically complex masses? This chapter examines these connections in Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, which reflects, to a degree, the author's opposition to numbers. We see this antipathy notably in the final words of the nameless woman who, after being raped by the Marquis, is so traumatized that all she can do is count. Readers might view this counting as a superficial tic, affirming the woman's minorness, or as her tallying the unknown multitudes who, like her, have been discarded by the ancien régime and Revolution alike. Yet Markovits contends that these numbers also "paradoxically preserve a space for the most private form of inaccessible experience by deflecting our attention from it" (122). From this perspective, counting or being counted protects and even acknowledges the inner self, thereby undermining modern processes of aggregation and abstraction. For Markovits, then, numbers, despite their social utility, express our "radical unknowability and individuality," a duality captured in the conundrum of literary character itself (128).

In chapter 4, Markovits analyzes the role of enumeration in plots, specifically that of age in Anthony Trollope's serial novels. By keeping track of his characters' years, Trollope underscores that "what happens [in his fiction] is first and foremost that his characters age" (156). This fundamental process organizes his works, or, put differently, "aging results when plot is not so much subordinated to as embodied in character" (166). The emphasis on aging as the metanarrative of realist novels shows up most plainly in Trollope's experiments with the "countdown plot" (166). This literary structure relies on the narrowing interval between now and an expected then, providing a sense of reassuring completion. Whether counting down to marriage or death, the story concludes with a predictable resolution. In Dracula, however, Bram Stoker upends this temporal device, as the passing days winnow down not towards a known, contracted ending--but toward uncertainty and dispersal. Counting down, in this instance, thus subverts the ostensible steadiness of numbers, revealing that underneath their shell of facticity and reliability lies an ontologically dubious center.

While I have attempted to highlight some of Markovits's key insights, no review can adequately capture the depth and breadth of this book's findings. What I identified earlier as a possible weakness of this study--its fuzzy approach to articulating its main term and thesis--is also one of its strengths. As Markovits states in her first chapter, the approach she takes is "less teleological than ruminative--rather than having parts of an argument add up to a final sum, I will keep dancing around the implications" (65). This same approach applies to the entire book. In "dancing around" the numbers she finds, Markovits illuminates just how astounding and perplexing these digits are. Concurrently, she demonstrates her own developed number sense, or her heightened capacity to analyze and discern the emotional function of integers, with her playful and prolific readings. As a whole, then, the book encourages us, both as scholars of nineteenth-century literature and as citizens of a world where numbers are increasingly deployed as tactics of manipulation and persuasion, to cultivate our sensitivity to the sensations that numerals produce. Indeed, doing so is perhaps more urgent now than ever as algorithmic thinking vis-à-vis social media and AI transforms a public sphere already being inundated by numbers and data sets of varying quality.

Sophia Hsu is Associate Professor of English at Lehman College.