"The Sorrows of Yamba," by Eaglesfield Smith and Hannah More: Authorship, Ideology, and the Fractures of Antislavery Discourse
Bibliographic record
Abstract
"The Sorrows of Yamba", published in 1795 by Hannah More in her Cheap Repository Tracts series, was one of the most popular and frequently reprinted antislavery poems of its time. Recently it has become popular once more, as a classroom text included (usually under More's name) in teaching anthologies, in anthologies of women's poetry, and in a selected edition of More's work. But the poem is not solely by Hannah More, who never signed it with her characteristic "Z." Following a stray reference by Wylie Sypher, I have located several versions of the poem signed by "E.S.J." and "Eaglesfield Smith." These versions are about half the length of the version in Cheap Repository Tracts: the material added (almost certainly by More) entirely change the tone and purpose of the poem, from a "slave suicide" poem to one that instead has the heroine converted by a passing missionary. More also adds a good deal of pseudo-dialect to the poem, making Yamba less tragic and dignified and more helpless and child-like. Recovering Smith's ur-version of the poem allows one to see two distinct strains of British anti-slavery discourse at work, one tragic and sentimental (and vaguely liberal), the other Christianizing and infantilizing (and distinctly reactionary). Far from underwriting a spurious unity as Foucault suggests in his critique of the individual author, concentrating on the authorship question in this instance reveals the ideological and formal discontinuities that critics have missed in this important antislavery poem.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.021 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".