Tragedy and the Economics of Providence in Richardson's <i>Clarissa</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The postscript to the 1751 edition of Clarissa provides Samuel Richardson's most definitive explication of what he was doing through the novel's unfashionably tragic turn. This essay considers his project in light of the period's taste for narratives that culminate in poetic justice, arguing that the postscript identifies such notions of moral compensation as symptomatic of an age of scepticism. Richardson is thus engaged in reimagining older modes of providence at odds with middle-class values of exchange and an ascendant providential economy, fashioning a distinctive mode of tragedy that drew on both classical and biblical sources in which the very form of his novel interrogates bourgeois cultural norms. In this way, he queries the relations between eighteenth-century theology, early capitalist political economies, and moral action being negotiated through the novel's formation.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 teacher head, 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".