The Atheist Bunyan: The Pilgrim’s Progress and Organized Freethought in Victorian Britain
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article explores how freethinkers received John Bunyan and read his works in Victorian Britain. An analysis of freethinking periodicals, letters to editors, lectures, essays, and autobiography reveals a vexed relationship that was anything but monolithic. There emerged two distinct reading communities within organized freethought. Some freethinkers, especially in the early nineteenth century, rejected Bunyan as another representation of irrational religious faith that was a hindrance to societal reform. However, other freethinkers appropriated his works and used him as a valuable resource for understanding their own experiences with religion as well as for communicating their message. I demonstrate that these contrasting positions resulted from interpretive strategies that stem from fundamental assumptions regarding how the project of secularism ought to interact with Britain’s predominantly Christian culture. It corresponds to an ongoing negotiation of meaning within organized freethought that reflects internal fissures, as well as a rapidly changing British society.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.020 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".