“Give Me the Consideration of Being the Bondsman”: Embarrassment and the Figure of the Bond in the Sentimental Fiction of Samuel Richardson
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In Samuel Richardson’s sentimental, epistolary novels Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, bonds and embarrassment con sti tute currencies of commerce and sociability. Since sociability is a framework of compulsory social and financial obligation, bondmanship, including suretyship, becomes a metaphor for the perils of reciprocal exchange, social and commercial. In Richardson’s fiction, the social effects of exchanges of literal or figurative bonds or sureties play a role in an economy of embarrass ment that also forms part of an economy of sentiment. Circulating letters become the sentimental equivalents of bonds, while bonds embody the sociability of exchange much as letters do. Still, a close reading of Richardson’s handling of the metaphor of the bond as embarrassment suggests an evolution away from the two-party arrangement in Pamela, and towards the more sophisticated three-party suretyship figuratively deployed by Sir Charles against Lady Beauchamp: the impersonal efficiency of the bondmanship by which he brokers her humiliation resembles the operation of an eighteenth-century securities market.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.009 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.014 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".