Chapter 8 - Making Soldiers Count

Summary

Stefanie Markovits’ chapter thinks about counting and accountability, and how they inform literary representations of the military man, one of the most visible of war’s outcomes in mid-Victorian Britain. Markovits reflects on this period as one which saw ‘the rise of statistics as a discipline of social science and a method of statecraft in Britain’, and with it the growing need for accountability in public affairs. The figure of the soldier is both hero and statistic, individual and number, in a period where fiction, philosophy, and popular commentary, were preoccupied with how individuals realised their fully individualised potential. The soldier’s cultural and political potency is enabled because his being is aligned with the numbers that account for him. In the work of Tennyson, Harriet Martineau, and Dickens we see how ‘the mid-century soldier becomes such a potent figure precisely because his “type” aligns so closely with numbers’.