“Extraordinary and dangerous powers”: Prisons, Police, and Literature in Godwin’s Caleb Williams
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the novel Caleb Williams , William Godwin focuses on how “the spirit and character of government intrudes itself into every rank of society” with petitions, resolutions, and parliamentary bills that sought to address the perceived increase in lawlessness in England in the years after the American Revolution. I argue in this article that Godwin’s attention to the inhumane rigours of incarceration, his concerns about the development of a shadowy new police force that existed outside the traditional bounds of magisterial oversight, and his anxieties about the increasingly important role of literature in shaping popular attitudes towards suspected criminals grew out of broader discussions about the penal and police reforms that William Pitt’s government introduced in the years after the 1780 Gordon Riots. The public debates about the extent of these new powers may have shaped the focus and tone of Godwin’s novel as much as the government’s suppression of radical dissent in the 1790s.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.039 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".