Economic Imperialism and Financial Citizenship: Reconsidering British Subjectivity in<i>Martin Chuzzlewit</i>and<i>Lawrie Todd</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
During the tumultuous time of financial and colonial expansion between 1825 and 1855, both Charles Dickens and John Galt published picaresque novels depicting transatlantic travel and land speculation. If emigration is the act of permanently leaving one's homeland and living in another, then neither novels' eponymous protagonist Martin Chuzzlewit nor Lawrie Todd is an emigrant. By reading Martin Chuzzlewit (1843–44) and John Galt's Lawrie Todd (1830) alongside nineteenth-century developments of the geo-political and financial spheres, this article shows how these works form a counter-narrative to traditional novels of emigration. Both protagonists leave Britain with the explicit intent to seek their fortune in America through engagement with land speculation companies. Though the characters' experiences of transatlantic financial speculation is dichotomous (with Todd becoming rich and Chuzzlewit losing all he has), both characters ultimately return to Britain. In these counter-narratives, we argue that America is deployed as Britain's financial periphery, rather than an alternative imperial centre, working to entrench British nationalism through transatlantic financial speculation. It is through the act of returning from America that Dickens and Galt counter typified emigration narratives that represent the choice to emigrate to America as synonymous with abandoning the Empire for the ‘Great Republic’. Instead, Dickens and Galt show how America can be exploited as a financial extension of Empire where Britons can maintain national loyalty while simultaneously responding to an unstable global financial market that was increasingly dependent upon speculation and foreign investment practices.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.037 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".