The Victorian novel developed unique forms of reasoning under uncertainty-of thinking, judging, and acting in the face of partial knowledge and unclear outcome. George Eliot, Wilkie Collins, William Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, and later Joseph Conrad drew on science, mathematics, philosophy, and the law to articulate a phenomenology of uncertainty against emergent models of prediction and decision-making. In imaginative explorations of unsure reasoning, hesitant judgment, and makeshift action, these novelists cultivated distinctive responses to uncertainty as intellectual concern and cultural disposition, participating in the knowledge work of an era shaped by numerical approaches to the future. Reading for uncertainty yields a rich account of the dynamics of thinking and acting, a fresh understanding of realism as a genre of the probable, and a vision of literary-critical judgment as provisional and open-ended. Daniel Williams spotlights the value of literary art in a present marked by models and technologies of prediction.

Short-listed, 2025 Book Prize, British Society for Literature and Science

‘A strong addition to the series, and it will be stimulating for advanced readers who enjoy studying the evolving form of the novel … Highly recommended.’

S. A. Parker Source: CHOICE

‘This is a forensically detailed and ambitious book, spanning, and often juggling richly, several disciplines at once.’

Alicia Rix Source: The Times Literary Supplement

‘The reader will find exceptionally careful and sensitive analyses of individual novels, as well as suggestive accounts of thematically-related philosophical and psychological problems that concerned the Victorian novelists on whom the book focuses.’

Amanda Auerbach Source: Nineteenth-Century Contexts

‘Daniel Williams’s ‘The Art of Uncertainty’ explores some of the ways in which nineteenth-century fiction drew on and critiqued emerging legal, mathematical, philosophical and scientific ideas. As such, the book joins the growing body of scholarship examining literature’s engagement with contemporaneous discourses and practices. Williams does not merely extend previous efforts in this area by attending to the interconnections between a range of disciplines, however. … Williams’ interest in fictional representations of the counterfactual, the hypothetical and the provisional in turn means that his book additionally contributes to ongoing revisions of a key literary genre. It does so, too, by astutely unpacking and problematizing the traditional and ‘silent predicate in the practice and analysis of realism’: the notion of probability.’

Encarnación Trinidad Barrantes Source: The British Society for Literature and Science