Cultural Skirmishes in 18th Century England: The Attack on Aristocratic Vice
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper seeks to trace the evolution and nature of changing ideas about crime and vice in 18th century England. The new social history of England, which began in the 1960s, inspired perhaps most visibly by the works of E. P. Thompson, had as an early area of interest the history of plebeian criminality: motives, policing, the work of the courts and the nature of punishment. After the first wave of these groundbreaking studies, some historians started considering the crimes and vices of England's upper classes, which, in contrast, were treated quite differently by the courts, whether the offense was killing someone in a duel or killing oneself, both acts which were seen to be murderous, though no aristocrat was so punished. This change in direction created a body of work which complemented the fine earlier studies of plebeian crime and gave rise to studies of four aristocratic vices, i.e. duelling, suicide, adultery and gambling. What made these vices the focus of public attention, however, was the growth of the popular press which highlighted stories of such misdeeds and reported on whatever trials occurred as well as printing letters from their readers on their responses to these stories. This combination of vices unpunished, and a popular media which publicized the fact, enabled the emergence of a critique of aristocratic mores on moral and cultural grounds, and may have led to many of the “middling sort” to think that they were better people than their betters.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".