Representations of the First Colonial “Civil War” in Victoria’s Reign: the Canadian Rebellions in the English Press (1837–1838)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the various representations circulating in the British press of an unexpected and peculiar occurrence: a “civil war” which took place in the white colonies of Canada in 1837–38. In fact, the terms used to refer to the event varied according to the sources. English leaders and editorials reported on a “civil war” in the colonies, while American newspapers whose despatches were quoted verbatim in the English press, more often referred to “rebellions” or “insurrections”. By reflecting on such a discrepancy in the representations of this colonial crisis, we might wonder why what seemed to clearly have been short-lived insurrections rapidly controlled by the British army, were represented under the alarming colours of “civil war” in England, in the press and in official despatches. Combined to the frightful news from Canada, Victorian fears of the civil war were also heightened in 1837, by the representations of civil wars and revolution published by Edward Gibbon and Thomas Carlyle whose histories of the decline of the Roman Empire and the French revolution. The Canadian “civil war” was described as a threat to the harmonious working of the British parliamentary monarchy at home and in the Empire. It led the press, moderate and radical, to reassess the values of the “English” Constitution and the capacity of British colonists as well as “the mob” to work with it, at a timely period: the beginning of Victoria’s reign and that of her second Empire.
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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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.008 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.021 | 0.010 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.013 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".