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War was not inevitable in 1914 nor is it today. In 1914, however, peace was threatened by the inflexibility of alliances, the rise of nationalism, and Social Darwinism. Counterfactually in 1914, however, Britain might have stayed out or come in later, Franz Ferdinand might not have been killed, the war might have been local, rather than continental or worldwide. Germany might have avoided unlimited submarine warfare which brought the United States in. Any of these would have had profound effects, shortening or obviating the war or changing its outcome. Fortunately because of its dependence on world markets, China cannot afford a policy like the Kaisers’ Germany.

This chapter argues for the importance of moral perfectionism to the life of writing depicted in Besant’s All in a Garden Fair (1883) and Gissing’s New Grub Street (1891). Scholarship by Andrew H. Miller has identified our desire to improve as ‘a defining aspect of modernity’. Miller’s terms explain a good deal about these novels, in both of which characters routinely (aspire to) improve themselves by means of comparing themselves with others. In All in a Garden Fair, for example, Claire rejects Allen by imagining untoward future outcomes, prospects cancelled by their decisions in the present. Meanwhile, New Grub Street opens with Milvain referring to a man who is being executed: his self-conceptualization arises out of an understanding of who he is not, or at least not yet. My aim, in the first half of this essay, is to show how the two works articulate a larger, Victorian conversation regarding moral perfectionism. In the second half, I concentrate on Besant’s and Andrew Lang’s conversation about New Grub Street in the Author, and Gissing’s responses, revealing how they reenact some of the novels’ debates.

The subject-specific data from either an observational or experimental study consist of a string of numbers. These numbers represent a series of empirical measurements. Calculations are performed on these strings and causal inferences are drawn. For example, an investigator might conclude that the analysis provides strong evidence for ‘‘both an indirect effect of cigarette smoking on coronary artery disease through its effect on blood pressure and a direct effect not mediated by blood pressure.’’ The nature of the relationship between the sentence expressing these causal conclusions and the statistical computer calculations performed on the strings of numbers has been obscure. Since the computer algorithms are well-defined mathematical objects, it is crucial to provide formal causal models for the English sentences expressing the investigator’s causal inferences. In this chapter we restrict ourselves to causal models that can be represented by a directed acyclic graph. There are two common approaches to the construction of causal models. The first approach posits unobserved fixed ‘potential’ or ‘counterfactual’ outcomes for each unit under different possible joint treatments or exposures. The second approach posits relationships between the population distribution of outcomes under experimental interventions (with full compliance) to the set of (conditional) distributions that would be observed under passive observation (i.e., from observational data). We will refer to the former as ‘counterfactual’ causal models and the latter as ‘agnostic’ causal models (Spirtes, Glymour, & Scheines, 1993) as the second approach is agnostic as to whether unit-specific counterfactual outcomes exist, be they fixed or stochastic. The primary difference between the two approaches is ontological: The counterfactual approach assumes that counterfactual variables exist, while the agnostic approach does not require this. In fact, the counterfactual theory logically subsumes the agnostic theory in the sense that the counterfactual approach is logically an extension of the latter approach. In particular, for a given graph the causal contrasts (i.e. parameters) that are well-defined under the agnostic approach are also well-defined under the counterfactual approach.

Chapter 6 introduces two conceptual issues that, in our opinion, will become important in the near future. The first involves the validity of statistical inference. Critics of the conventional null hypothesis significance test generally focus on the undue influence of sample size on p-values and the common misinterpretation of significance levels. Bayesian approaches address and, to some extent, solve both shortcomings. The second conceptual issue involves the use of control time series. As a rule, valid causal inferences require the use of a contrasting control time series. In most instances, no ideal control series is available; however, a synthetic ideal control series can sometimes be constructed from an ensemble of less-than-ideal control time series.

The data described in chapter three are presented summarily in the form of tables that focus on a number of key issues. These are: the extent to which YEPP's 10 non-negotiable principles were adhered to; how far YEPP's research structure was implemented and the main outcomes – youth and community empowerment, partnerships, transnational activities, sustainability and impact on public policy. A table summarising the summaries is also provided based on the impacts of well- and partly implemented sites. The significance of the results is then discussed further with especial stress being given to methodology used, and its challenges, and the question of whether YEPP caused the changes that occurred. Since it was not possible to address this question using ‘experimental’ and ‘control’ sites an interpretation based on Lewis’ counterfactual approach was preferred. This provided strong support for the view that YEPP did cause at least some of the observed changes in the local programme sites. The better YEPP is implemented the more confident this conclusion becomes.

Revealing the Romantic credentials of the counterfactual sensibility, this chapter calls on us to embrace an ‘aesthetics of contingency’ through which we may recognise the conditioning counterfactuality of our lived lives. Extending the insights of William Galperin’s work on Jane Austen and Andrew Miller’s on the ‘optative mode’, the chapter powerfully recommends an ethically recalibrated view of objects, literary texts and periods – one that is alive to the multiple possibilities and counterfictions that condition our identities and which shadow our relation to a negotiable (literary) past.

Theorising the relation between forgery and Romantic counterfactualism, this chapter analyses the credit afforded to forged pasts and texts during the Romantic period. The chapter argues that in the hands of James Macpherson, Thomas Chatterton and Edward Williams (‘Iolo Morganwg’), forgery’s ‘counterfactual world’ becomes a modality of Romantic counterfactualism’s investment in ‘possibilism’. Forgery in the service of national and local identity and of national literary history is insightfully located in spaces of loss – material, cultural, political – and in the context of recuperative ‘possibilities’.

Daring to imagine Wordsworth’s Prelude published ‘not long after he first finished it’ in May 1805 – rather than posthumously in 1850 – this chapter speculates on the effects on younger writers of the poem’s radical ‘self-creation mode’. The chapter explores what Wordsworth’s contemporaries were denied by the poet’s decision not to publish his autobiographical epic at the point of first completion. Counterfactually exploring the impactfulness of The Prelude’s models on Byron – and emphasising how challenging and unsympathetic certain aspects of the poem might at first have been for him – the chapter brings into play an uncannily ‘Romantic’ (rather than Victorian) Prelude and a defamiliarised Byron, with each becoming the other’s uncanny avatar.

In creative-critical mode, this chapter develops a theory of critical obstetrics, exploring a series of counterfactual scenarios beginning with Mary Wollstonecraft’s recovery from puerperal fever in September 1797 and resulting in the ‘miracle counterfactual’ of (a version of) Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein being written by Wollstonecraft at the close of the 1790s. Analysing the nature of the counterfactual prompts that suggest such a scenario, the chapter uncannily appropriates Frankenstein as the mother’s text in order to explore not only what a necessarily ‘zombie’ Wollstonecraft might have gone on to create, but also the nature of our own critical and affective relation with her death. Seeking to challenge pious memorialisations of Wollstonecraft and the tyrannous stratifications of literary historiography, the chapter – in uncanny speculative mode – profiles the novel of the Irish Rebellion that Wollstonecraft went on to publish in 1799, delivering the reader into a refreshingly troubled relation both to Wollstonecraft and to her daughter’s novel.

Deploying a creative-critical mode, this chapter prompts a debate as to the quantum and nature of the imaginative investment informing all critical engagements with the literary past. The chapter’s larger context is the biography of John Thelwall that the author is preparing; offering an inhabitation of the counterfactual in which the spectral figures prominently, the chapter details the archival lacunae and absences that prompt the counterfactual imagination. The critic-biographer embraces counterfactual speculation as a tool through which to (re)construct a literary-political life and to understand Thelwall’s own self-conscious acts of indirection and ventriloquism in a body of transgressive poetry related to a taboo-haunted family drama of 1816.

This chapter identifies 1824 as a ‘crux in the history of factual and counterfactual writing’ – a moment when Walter Scott, John Banim, John Galt and Mary Russell Mitford choose a counterfactual turn at a time of ‘rampant speculation’ in the wider economic sphere. Revealing the varieties of ‘soft’ counterfactual speculation deployed by these authors – ranging from the uncanny interactions of history and fiction and Romantic-period time-travel ‘speculative fantasy’ to the ironic counterfactual effects of a literary miscellany and the interplay of documentary and idealising modes of writing place – the chapter shows how its chosen texts yield teasing metaperspectives on contemporary literary production, reading practices, the literary market and literary history.

Imagining the counterfactual at scale, this chapter explores the contours of an all-pervasive China-centric strand of Romantic Orientalism that never was. The chapter accounts for why China as both ‘topos’ and ‘culture’ failed to make as influential a mark on Romantic-period culture as one might have expected it to. Creatively defamiliarising Thomas Percy and Horace Walpole through the lens of the counterfactual, the chapter interpellates the reader through subtle strategies into a new cultural and literary history of the age. The return, at the end, to ‘history’ thus has the force of a repression of the Chinese counterfactual that parallels various evasions and forgettings at work in Romanticism’s own relation to the East.

Focusing on counterfactualism in the classroom, this chapter considers the affordances of the counterfactual as regards the value-laden process of canon formation. The chapter forges an alternative Romantic canon curriculum in the face of the very difficulty the author sees in imagining such an entity at the present time. The relation between the new curriculum canon and that which currently obtains is an uncanny one; the effect of the experiment is to render existing structures negotiable and to prompt the reader-pedagogue’s own views concerning who should be the beneficiaries of the imagined new–old canon. Looking to the future of Romanticism in the classroom, the chapter prophesies a curriculum heavily influenced by the values and methods of creative writing and creative-critical practice – one that returns us to a modality of Romanticism we thought we had outgrown.