Figures of Arithmetic, Figures of Speech: The Discourse of Statistics in the 1830s

Scenes of commission: Royal commissions of inquiry and the culture of social investigation in early Victorian Britain

“…Statistical tables allowed the reader, with a flick of the eye, to glide over localities, trades, wages, and ages. 14 But the comparative imperative, regardless of particular scientific disciplines or genres of representation, invaded every facet of the commissions' work. Even lesser field agents habitually devised and promoted typologies of classification and comparison.…”

A History of Regression: Actors, Networks, Machines, and Numbers

“…The Statistical Society of London, later the Royal Statistical Society, was inaugurated in 1834, albeit not without some resistance from the British Association for the Advancement of Science (Hilts, 1978;Poovey, 1993). In this formative period only numbers mattered for Society members.…”

“…For example, the probability distribution taken up by Gauss to evaluate the accuracy of astronomical observations is projected by Quetelet back onto society as the normal distribution, which is then later picked up by James Clark Maxwell and used to derive his gas laws (Porter, 1981), which yet in turn is utilized by Ysidro Edgeworth to describe the stability of the market under conditions of uncertainty, and on it goes (Mirowski, 1994, page 15; see also Tribe, 1991, page 417). In this reading the normal distribution is not just a figure of statistics but a figure of speech (Poovey, 1993). Specifically, it is a very pliable metaphor: the distribution of social statistics is like the distribution of astronomical observations which in turn is like the distribution of the velocities of gas molecules.…”

From oneFin de Siècle to another: The educated woman and the declining birth-rate

“…At this point we step onto a very different terrain than that of the demographers and social historians. We turn from the figures of arithmetic to figures of speech (Poovey 1993), from wide ranging economic transformations to the smaller focus of the subject. As we have seen, something fundamental changed in relations among men and women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.…”