Illiterate Inmates: Educating Criminals in Nineteenth Century England

odd to wait so long to confirm that mechanised calculation, underlying the digital revolution, has its roots not only with Charles Babbage’s engineering of his analytical engine but also with the culture of measurement fomented in the 1830s. Goldman concludes that ‘numbers are plastic’ (p. 318) rather than transcendental truths, but that belief in their objectivity was a powerful motivator which affected practitioners in different ways. This is not a particularly surprising conclusion for a volume published in 2022.