The Regaining of Faith: Reconversions among Popular Radicals in Mid-Victorian England
Bibliographic record
Abstract
There is a wealth of literature on Victorian religious doubt, and much of it is structured by implicitly defining pure faith in the context of nineteenth-century England as an organized, traditional, orthodox, trinitarian, and supernatural version of Christianity and then herding together people who deviate from this ideal at various points into vague categories such as “unbelief,” “infidelity,” “irreligion,” “honest doubt,” or “freethought.” Members of the numerically impressive group which is thereby constructed are then said to represent a strong trend that is given labels such as “the Victorian crisis of faith,” “the loss of faith,” or “secularization.” Much of this historiography is imbued with a Whig interpretation: these figures are seen as part of an inevitable movement toward the abandonment of religious beliefs by thinking people in the modern age as they progressed toward a more credible worldview. Indeed, the considerable attention that is paid to such people in the literature despite the fact that the Victorian age is often simultaneously declared to have been an extraordinarily religious one seems to be tacitly justified on the grounds that, although these figures may have been out of step with thespiritual confidence of their own generation, they were in step with the march of truth. The rhetoric of “honest doubt” is often tinged with the notion that a full appreciation of the fruits of modern thought and scientific inquiry would almost automatically lead to the abandonment of religious views; it is not just “honest” in the senseof candidly avowed and not derived from unworthy motives, but, rather, it is as if an “honest” examination ofthe facts could lead only to religious doubt. A contention of this study is that these interpretative tendencies have obscured a notable and telling countervailing pattern.
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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 | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 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".