Bibliographic record
Abstract
Precocity is incongruous with the nineteenth-century ideology of childhood innocence. It is, nevertheless, a prominent subject across discourses in the century’s final decades. This thesis argues that in the late nineteenth century precocious children are depicted and debated in ways that reveal their particularly post-Darwinian significance. Through an analysis of a broad range of literary texts, in dialogue with key contributions to the emergent branch of psychology known as Child Study, this thesis illustrates that the precocious child functions as a problematic origin for narratives of adult selfhood in an era when such narratives were ever more tentative, and ever more tenacious. The thesis first examines precocity and innocence in a scientific overview of the subject, and in a selection of Henry James’s fiction, to suggest that these contradictory qualities are inextricably bound up with the question of adult self-construction. Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess and E. Nesbit’s Treasure Seekers series are then shown to complicate the assumptions about, and functions of, the precocious child in contemporaneous medical studies of precocity. Following this, the thesis interrogates the extent to which autobiography enables authors and psychologists to create a remembered child who might function as the precocious origin to the adult self. J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan is then analysed as a study of the ideology and contextual significance of the precocious child. A final chapter discusses work produced by two precocious children themselves. This thesis illustrates that the precocious child emblematises the continuity of the self across time, but only by reflecting an adult to whom it is supposed to be a primitive antecedent. Precocity can thus be read as a study of the idea of progressive selfhood which was so central to the Victorian era after Darwin.
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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 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.027 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
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".