Out of Egypt and into England: Secrecy and the State in Samuel Pratt’s Family Secrets
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Though unfamiliar to many students of the period, Samuel Pratt’s Family Secrets (1797) explores themes common to the eighteenth-century novel in a narrative that marries the domestic to the Gothic. True to the title of his novel, Pratt entangles each of the major characters in a web of secrecy, rendered emphatic by his use of Gothic elements, such that his narrative creates in miniature a culture of secrecy within this extended family romance. Pratt contrasts legitimate (alphabetical or modern) secrecy with illegitimate (Egyptian or dated) secrecy, and he re-enacts the broader tensions that define the history of secrecy in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These differences, I contend, play a key role in the formation of a modern British state, already steeped in secrecy (reason of state), which in turn governs the fortunes awaiting individual characters.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".