Two Experiments in Probabilistic Thinking: Maxwell’s “Demon” and Eliot’s Daniel Deronda

IN NOVEMBER 1875, just before the first monthly part of Daniel Deronda was scheduled to appear in February 1876, Eliot’s editor, John Blackwood, wrote the author to express concern about the manuscript’s opening lines. His worry was not its depiction of gambling nor its representation of the heroine in a compromising circumstance, but rather, as he put it in his letter, because “I remember pausing at the use of the word dynamic in the very first sentence and I am not quite sure about it yet as it is a dictionary word to so many people.”¹ As readers know, Eliot