This chapter discusses the different subgroups of Sanhe gods – day laborers, job intermediaries, and gambling dogs – and their experiences of becoming precarious to varying degrees. It also explores the space of the urban village that sustains the everyday life of Sanhe gods, providing them with food, shelter, clothing, showering, pawning, and other types of goods and services. It ends with a discussion on the subculture of Sanhe gods and its presence on the internet.

Abundant moments of indecision and delay shape George Eliot’s last novel Daniel Deronda (1876), which treats uncertainty as a recursive movement between interior and exterior, potentiality and activity. This chapter shows how Eliot explores action’s convoluted antecedents, drawing on intellectual trends in mid-century comparative method and physiological psychology, especially the latter’s portrait of embodied willing and pathologies of volition. These contexts frame a reading of the novel’s twin stances of practical experience and intellectual reflection: hesitation, the bewildering experience of having a “will which is and yet is not yet,” and its rational cousin, comparison, “our precious guide.” Formal fluctuations and portrayals of mental caprice would seem at cross-purposes with Eliot’s narrative control and moral coherence. Yet in discovering a “kinship” between certainty and doubt, she reinvigorates her novelistic ethics and recasts sympathy as guaranteed by “closer comparison between the knowledge which we call rational & the experience which we call emotional.” Her characters set store by irresolute stances of hesitation and comparison, and predictive affects like trust and hope.

As literary realism shed earlier providential paradigms, William Thackeray inaugurated a startling interest in alternatives to reality as essential for novels that would be true to life. These “queer speculations” saturate his writing: a child who might have lived, an accident that could have been avoided, a war that would have ended otherwise if only …. Thackeray’s counterfactual imagination matures from occasional stories of the 1840s, through Vanity Fair (1847–48), the Roundabout Papers (1860–63), and Lovel the Widower (1860). His conditionals range from frenzied anticipation to paralyzing regret, developing from wild wagers and total reversals of fortune in the early sketches to a late style where memory, narrative, and writing itself are marked by virtuality. This chapter examines uncertain experience in Thackeray’s oeuvre in relation to historical writing of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and accounts of counterfactual reasoning in psychology and narrative theory. Probing uncertainty’s emotional and tonal modulations, Thackeray’s writing widens the space of novelistic realism to include the nonmimetic, hypothetical, improbable, and open-ended – or what he terms the “might-have-beens.”

This chapter studies two contrasting models for predictive thinking and representation in Thomas Hardy. In The Return of the Native (1878), Hardy’s depiction of repetitive phenomena evokes one renovated account of logico-mathematical probability, John Venn’s empirical theory about how we judge from series of instances. In the novel’s palpably antiquated rural setting – where characters intuit more than they see, gamble by the light of glowworms, and infer human plots from long-run traces in the material world – the abstractions of Victorian logic acquire concrete form. In The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886), by contrast, serial iterations are compressed into images. Hardy designs literary equivalents of Francis Galton’s “composite photographs,” used to model statistical data and mental processes. Characters think in overlays, detecting a parent’s face playing over that of a child, designing a future self by laying transparencies over the present, and imagining human plots as grids from overhead. Serial and composite thinking extend to Hardy’s “approximative” theory of fiction. He uses these tropes as an implicit riposte to critics and advocates for a novelistic realism tolerant of repetition, coincidence, and improbability.

The Romans had to cope with uncertainty and, in part, did so through a shared set of knowledge and practices, which this chapter calls a risk culture. These ways of coping contained a lower level of individuality, consciousness or reflexivity than Beck’s modern Risk Society. There was also no simple divide between lay and expert knowledge. The Roman world exposed its inhabitants to a variety of risks but the accumulated experience of coping with these represented a mutual way of mitigating the dangers.

Social media are changing the way people are exposed to products with addictive potential – including gambling. This chapter provides a brief overview of the way digital technologies like social media are changing the gambling landscape and their relationship with gambling harm. Traditional approaches to gambling harm reduction have largely failed to recognize and address many of the systemic factors that shape the environment in which gambling harm occurs, such as promotion of gambling. Greater regulatory attention is needed to prevent social media from contributing to harm, especially among vulnerable groups such as minors and people experiencing gambling problems.

The introduction sets out the intent of the book, an overview of the major works in the field, and a view of the arguments appearing in each chapter. Gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Studying casino gambling provides a way to see how nineteenth-century Europeans understood their changing world, even as it also reflected those changes itself. In this way gambling was used in an explanatory capacity, one that let contemporaries probe the inner workings of the machine and the creation of knowledge. If we want to understand the intricate dance of society, culture, politics, and ideas, then gambling is a useful tool to pry open these different stories, allowing us to see better large historical transformations.

In late 1823- early 1824 London society was agog at news of a brutal murder that took place just north of the metropolis in Hertfordshire. A professional gambler, William Weare, was killed by John Thurtell and his accomplices Joseph Hunt and William Probert, all denizens of the ‘flash’ underworld that was the subject of Pierce Egan’s outstandingly successful book and play, Life in London (1821). The minor theatres of the Surrey and the Royal Coburg, the latter only recently opened in 1818, sought to capitalise on the sensational case by putting on melodramas in the weeks following news of the murder breaking in the London press in late October 1823. These plays were subject to censorship, unusually not by the authorities, but by legal intervention on the behalf of the accused John Thurtell on the grounds that the virtual re-enactment of the murder (including the appearance of the actual carriage or gig used to transport Weare to his death) would prejudice his trial in February 1824. The fate of these dramas thus represents a new perspective on the history of the censorship of the theatre, as well as offering insights into the intersections of theatre, scandalous celebrity, the metropolitan ‘flash’, print publicity, and the genre of melodrama in the formative decade of the 1820s.