Child adoption in the seventeenth century: vignettes from Defoe and Pepys
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In the seventeenth century, between a quarter and one-third of children died in the first year of life and only half reached the age of fifteen. Children born out of wedlock were at even higher risk, partly through infanticide. Indeed, in 1624 Parliament passed an Act ‘to prevent the murthering of bastard children’.2 Many were consigned to the care of a parish, which resented the burden and neglected them. Others went to paid carers; there was no formal system for child adoption, and a mother often made secret arrangements to have the child taken off her hands. In this article I draw attention to two vignettes from the writings of Daniel Defoe (1661–1731) and Samuel Pepys (1633–1703).
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.022 | 0.012 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.005 | 0.009 |
| 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".