Richardson, Celebrity, and Editorial Mediation in Anna Meades’s <i>Sir William Harrington</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In 1757, Anna Meades wrote to Samuel Richardson. She had written a novel in his style. Would he read it, correct it, and publish it? Sir William Harrington (1771) is one of only four books supposed to have been guided by Richardson’s advice after the end of his writing career. Richardson wrote novels not simply to entertain, but to influence; he created models of moral behaviour for his readers to follow. Meades’s novel engages with Richardson’s celebrity status towards several ends, creating a text that operates as a celebrity relic, producing a text that will eventually reach other readers than Richardson’s audience, and thus opening the moral community beyond its original scope. This article looks specifically at this literary celebrity mediation as it operates on several levels. The novel serves as a relic of Richardson, offering the lure that the reader may approximate a synthetic relationship with Richardson by developing an intellectual connection with Richardson’s ideas, friends, protégées, and favoured texts. The novel thus offers readers a synthesized public intimacy with Richardson.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.008 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.013 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.010 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".