‘humble but respectable’: Recovering the Neighbourhood Surrounding William and Catherine Blake’s Last Residence, No. 3 Fountain Court, Strand, c. 1820–27
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In this paper, drawing upon a wide range of unpublished archival sources, I present a detailed reconstruction of Fountain Court and its residents, William and Catherine Blake during the period William and Catherine Blake were resident at No. 3 Fountain Court (c. 1820–27). The paper presents important new information concerning the society and milieu in Fountain Court and its neighbourhood during 1820–27. This fresh archival evidence enables us to identify and precisely locate for the first time the ’humble but respectable’ fellow lodgers and neighbours living in Fountain Court during William and Catherine Blake’s period of residence, and provides a detailed picture of life in the Blakes’ neighbourhood during this period, and of trades conducted in the court, as well as the close familial and social relationships existing between a number of households immediately surrounding the Blakes’ residence. Such relationships provide a context for William and Catherine’s own relationships with their brother-in-law and landlord at 3 Fountain Court, Henry Banes and his wife Sarah Banes (née Boucher) and two of their neighbours and fellow lodgers in the court, the carver and gilder John George Lohr, and Blake’s employer and fellow artist John Barrow. The Blakes’ last residence was not in a sleepy, forgotten backwater, as some contemporary accounts and later biographers appear to suggest. As my paper demonstrates, Fountain Court in the 1820s, leading directly off the Strand, a major commercial thoroughfare of the largest metropolis of the period, was comprised of a small community, thriving with social and commercial activity. The reconstruction provides a detailed immediate context in which to view afresh William and Catherine’s years living and working in Fountain Court.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
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".