Regular readers will know that I have an answer to the above question. My resolution is based on the statistics of sampling from networks.
I like my theory, but it’s not the only one.
Here’s what Gareth Rees had to say. I don’t disagree with Rees—and I appreciate that he links to TV Tropes!—I guess I’d say that my resolution (that coincidence is one way to resolve an inherent impossibility of conveying a complex social structure in a book with a small number of characters) and his resolution (that, in the period when Dickens was writing, coincidence was viewed as a plus, not an unfortunate byproduct of necessity, in the same way that nowadays we consider contrivances such as plot and climax to be a plus in storytelling) are complementary.
Any theories you have, feel free to share in the comments.
Publication bias.
Books/plots with some coincidences are more interesting, especially when it is about characters we have invested in.
It is possible that Dickens considered versions with fewer coincidences, but those did not end up in a book.
Clearly, we should require that all plots are prepregistered :-P
Tomas:
Your explanation doesn’t work, because the underlying question is not, Why are published books full of coincidences, but, rather, Whassup with Dickens in particular. There are lots of bestselling books, but it’s Dickens in particular who has the rep of being coincidence-filled.
I think it’s a pretty big coincidence that Superman is always within a couple of blocks of every supervillain attack.
Metropolis is very densely populated and has a lot of supervillains. If Superman lived in Alaska it would be a very different story.
The reference to Harry Potter in Rees’ piece begs a question: Is it appropriate to compare modern literary fiction with popular fiction like Dickens’ stories, or are Dickens’ stories more comparable to popular fiction like Harry Potter? Like Dickens’ stories, the Harry Potter books are fast, easy reading, read by a very large share of the population, while modern literary fiction has a very narrow market.
A really *popular* book has to get past the professors and into the hands of the baristas and pallet loaders. The fantasy element of coincidence is an important part of the escape for them and fuels their imagination of the way their life could be.
On the idea of why did coincidence disappear: Tyler Cowen likes to talk about Dylan and The Beatles and how no modern music compares to them. That might be true, but that’s because the Beatles and Dylan did it first. What remains for song writers is an increasingly fragmented landscape in which to create, requiring, with a few exceptions, more complexity to be original. The change from the fiction of Dickens’ time to modern literary fiction can be thought of as similar: the writers of Dickens’ time were there first and told the easy and popular stories – and those stories are still selling today. Modern writers seeking originality can retell Dickens’ period stories in disguise in popular fantasy form, the fantasy part being the “originality” contribution; or develop more complexity for originality – modern literary fiction.
What Tyler Cowen says is just silly. He’s of the generation that liked that kind of music. Of course nothing in the current generation appeals to him as much, but I’m sure there are kids these days who think Kendrick Lamar is far preferable to Dylan and the Beatles. Personally, I think that no music written in my lifetime compares to Mozart, but that’s my taste as well, isn’t it?
If you think Charles Dickens has a lot of coincidences, you should try reading Edgar Rice Burroughs.
Anyway, I’m pretty mystified why Rees thinks the question being asked presupposes aesthetic universalism. Quite on the contrary, the asker accepts it as entirely possible that nineteenth-century readers had different tastes than we do; the question is about the reasons for that difference.
I’d also take issue with Rees’s claim that “we don’t require fantasy novels to be realistic.” Just about any fantasy novel requires a realistic substrate for the fantastic elements. If you include magic rings in your novel, that’s one thing; but if you have sailing ships performing impossible maneuvers because you couldn’t be bothered to do your research, readers can and will complain.
Have you read the novella Turbulence by David Szalay? It fits exactly your theory about coincidences as a way to demonstrate social complexity, but does so knowingly. That is, it’s sort of a satire about complexity, and how some people are aware the world is connected and others are not. It’s clever and entertaining and you’ll finish it in an hour.
https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/Turbulence/David-Szalay/9781982122744
David:
Thanks for the recommendation. I read London and the South-East, and I absolutely loved it.
My theory, based on picking up _The Pickwick Papers_ and getting 50 pieces of paper in before putting it down with a wicked headache, was that Dickens is so like that because he started as an anecdotalist and short-story teller, and he developed from there as a serialized high-volume novelist who didn’t plan his novels in detail. (A ‘pantser’, not a ‘plotter’, in the current argot.) The use of coincidence and lots of stray allusions is to avoid writing yourself into a corner: you can always improvise some way out and segue somehow to a new story. It helps to set your stories in Victorian London or England, where you could bring in pretty much anyone from anywhere at anytime without it being implausible. You want an Australian convict, a Mormon assassin, an Indian rajah, a Chinese coolie, an American tycoon? Anyone is fair game because they’ll be passing through or living in London at some point.
“And finally, we are told of ‘the sin, most gross, most palpable, which Dickens everywhere commits in his abuse of coincidence. Bleak House is the supreme example of his recklessness…. Therein lies the worthlessness of the plot, which is held together only by the use of coincidence in its most flagrant forms.’
“Now, we have thought it worth while to quote thus at length, because, although these and similar objections to the canonisation of Dickens have been urged often enough, …”
From the Saturday Review of Politics, Literature, Science and Art, Volume 85, **1898**
https://www.google.com/books/edition/Saturday_Review_of_Politics_Literature_S/TVxJAQAAMAAJ?hl=en&gbpv=1&dq=dickens+book+review+coincidence&pg=PA330&printsec=frontcover
The coincidences in Dickens novels usually involve the social network having many unexpected connections between a small number of people. Dickens’s method is to create a microcosm of society, a test-tube version, so to speak, which, rather than containing millions of people, instead contains about sixty people. In such a tiny society, the coincidences are only to be expected.