Bibliographic record
Abstract
THOMAS DE QUINCEY’s The English Mail-Coach describes, in its second Part, a near-fatal collision between a mail-coach and a small gig on the Manchester to Preston road. No attempt has previously been made to correlate the details given by De Quincey with mail-coaches of the kind he describes. The New Manchester Guide (1815) and The Commercial Directory (1818) both offer a departure time, and Daniel Paterson’s Direct and Principal Cross Roads (1811) provides a location for the collision. These sources reveal De Quincey combined the two mail-coaches that connect Manchester with Kendal, so as to create a route unique to The English Mail-Coach—one with a distinctive turn in the road. De Quincey’s account is based on two mail-coaches. He says he arrived at the Bridgewater Arms Inn, Manchester, and departed from the Manchester Post Office ‘considerably past midnight’.1 He was travelling towards Kendal, a major stop before Carlisle, on the ‘London and Glasgow mail’.2 The New Manchester lists two mail-coaches, both departing from the ‘Bridgewater Arms Inn, High-street’: the first, ‘Royal Mail coach, to Carlisle, every morning at a quarter-past 1 o’clock’; and the second, ‘Royal Mail coach to Carlisle, Edinburgh, Glasgow, Dumfries, and Portpatrick, every afternoon at quarter before 5 o’clock’.3 The Commercial Directory adds that the Carlisle mail, on first leaving Manchester, passed through Blackburn and Preston, and that the Glasgow mail passed through Chorley and Preston.4 De Quincey insisted both that he left on the night mail, and on the Glasgow mail. Both claims cannot be accurate: he assumed the route of the Glasgow mail, using the schedule of the Carlisle mail.
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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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.096 | 0.015 |
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".