For lust or gain: perceptions of prostitutes in eighteenth-century London
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This paper examines perceptions of lower-class female prostitutes in eighteenth-century London. This study challenges the prevailing argument that these perceptions fundamentally changed from ‘lusty whores’ to victims of poverty. An examination of Bridewell records, sermons, pamphlets, and the newspaper press, reveals that commentators believed that lust, poverty, and greed collectively explained what drove women to prostitution. Commentators recognized that, unable to make ends meet, many women turned to prostitution to survive, while also suggesting that others turned to prostitution because they believed they could gain considerable wealth by doing so. These same commentators asserted that some women were unusually lustful and that only prostitution would satisfy their insatiable desires. The simultaneous depiction of prostitutes in contradictory ways suggests that prostitution was not offensive to Georgian Britons solely because it involved women exchanging sexual favours for money, but because prostitution transgressed Britons’ deepest sensibilities about morality.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.007 | 0.001 |
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".