“Piety and Popishness”: Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in its every aspect, attempts to solve the problems of religious difference in the post-Jacobite world. Recent readings argue that despite the apparent openness of Sir Charles’s marriage proposal to his Catholic love interest, Clementina, the novel presents Catholicism as a threat to both the protagonist and his nation, reducing Sir Charles Grandison to a highly politicized tolerationist platform. For Richardson’s contemporary opponents, a “True Englishman” is an Anglican of conservative social values, an icon they believed Richardson countered by offering the religiously liberal Sir Charles as an alternative model of English character. Through my analysis of the anonymous epistolary responses to the novel, the social and political milieu that informed them, and the novel itself, I challenge the critical assumption that Sir Charles Grandison puts forward a recognizable tolerationist agenda, instead arguing that it works against politically authorized intolerance by unyoking religion from public policy altogether.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".