“Set the winter at defiance”: <i>Emily Montague</i>’s Weather Reports and Political Sensibility
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the political significance of the detailed descriptions of Canada’s very cold weather in Frances Brooke’s epistolary novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769). In 1769, public sphere debate about Canada was focused on the difficulty of displacing French Catholic loyalties among new British subjects. By using the same terms to describe the effects of the weather on her British protagonists and the effects of French Catholic influence on the new subjects these travellers hope to convert to British values, Brooke identifies French Catholic “coldness of character” as a serious threat to the British project to cultivate affection in these colonists. By the novel’s end, however, Brooke’s protagonists also model a willingness to enjoy the weather’s influence that aligns assimilating to British values with improvements in sensibility, rather than conflict. I conclude that tracking this change in Brooke’s characters’ writing about the weather casts new light on Emily Montague’s contribution to an important mid-century debate about how Britain would imagine and manage the increasingly diverse environments of its empire.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".