The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity by Andrew Gailey, and: Liberal Hearts and Coronets: The Lives and Times of Ishbel Marjoribanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, the Aberdeens by Veronica Strong-Boag (review)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Andrew Gailey, The Lost Imperialist: Lord Dufferin, Memory and Mythmaking in an Age of Celebrity (London: John Murray, 2015), 464 pp. Cased. £30. ISBN 978-1-4447-9243-0. Paper. £14.99. ISBN 978-1-4447-9245-4.Veronica Strong-Boag, Liberal Hearts and Coronets: The Lives and Times of Ishbel Marjor-ibanks Gordon and John Campbell Gordon, the Aberdeens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015), 384 pp. 15 images. Cased. $70. ISBN 978-1-4426-4827-2. Paper. $32.95. ISBN 978-1-4426-2602-7.The aristocratic subjects of these two biographies shared an important connection to Canada: both the Earl of Dufferin (1826-1902) and the Earl of Aberdeen (1847-1934) served as governor general of Canada in an era of ambiguous imperial ties, Dufferin in 1872-8 and Aberdeen from 1893 to 1898. To a great extent, the ambiguity about Canada's status in the empire extended to the governor general's own function, and the background and skills of the appointee were especially important. Each book explores the fuller lives of the men; Andrew Gailey and Veronica Strong-Boag place their subjects' Canadian careers into a broader context. Liberal Hearts and Coronets attempts more still, and offers a joint biography of Lord Aberdeen and his energetic and socially conscious wife. Lady Aberdeen, the former Ishbel Marjoribanks, archly labelled the 'governess general' by her detractors, was the first president of the International Council of Women and the founder of the Victorian Order of Nurses.Andrew Gailey's book is a delightful surprise, as diverting as any novel, yet painstaking and rigorous in its research. Dufferin's life trajectory was familiar to me, but Gailey fully constructs its almost-forgotten dimensions, demonstrating how strikingly prominent Dufferin was in his own lifetime, how readily he courted celebrity, and how frequently he could be found at the centre of events. Dufferin won adulation in the press during his Canadian term, and Gailey reveals how successfully he repeated that winning formula in other circumstances. Lord Dufferin remains the somewhat brittle and often superficial man I came to know, yet Gailey's empathetic treatment of him also reveals a more complex and appealing figure.Gailey seeks to examine 'memory and mythmaking in an age of celebrity', and the book inevitably invites reflection on the fleeting nature of popular acclaim. Dufferin is the 'lost imperialist' primarily because his high public profile did not result in an equivalent historical reputation. Events early in Lord Dufferin's life - his aunt's scandalous divorce and affair with Lord Melbourne, and his father's fatal morphine overdose - made him conscious of public scrutiny. But he soon achieved his own renown with his widely admired account of a daring 6,000-mile journey on the schooner Foam to the Arctic Circle, and for his successes in the diplomatic realm. Gailey skilfully balances the intimate intricacies of Dufferin's personal story with essential historical context. He ably analyses Dufferin's 1860 diplomatic appointment to Syria - a delicate mission, given the climate of outrage surrounding the massacre of Christians - and likewise places into context the subsequent events of a very full life: appointments as ambassador to Russia and the Ottoman Empire, Dufferin's frustration as an Irish landlord, his important commission of investigation into Egypt in 1882, and his viceroyalty of India. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".