Out of Her Hands : On the Charlotte M. Brame Manuscripts in the O'Neill Collection (MSS 0141)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article concerns the more than forty literary manuscripts held in the James O Neill papers at the University of California, San Diego, which hitherto have been attributed by Mandeville Special Collections to the prolific English author of sensational tales of romance in high places, Charlotte M. Brame .The first section of the article, Evidence of inauthenticity, presents detailed evidence to show that none of these manuscripts is in fact a genuine authorial holograph.The evidence concerned is not only circumstantial (concerning the interpretation of annotations on the manuscripts) but also physical (concerning hand-writing, paper, signature, and spelling) .The second section, Evidence of true provenance, considers the actual source of the manuscripts in question, again providing both physical and circumstantial evidence to support the contention that they were transcribed in the United States well after the author s death from previously published versions for commercial purposes at the instigation of William J. Benners, Jnr , self-proclaimed American agent of Brame.Attention is given here to the question of the extent to which Benners activities should be considered as fraudulent.The third section, Lessons to learn, represents a wide-ranging discussion of what can be learned more generally from these circumstances regarding the history of popular fiction in the Anglo-American world at the turn of the twentieth century, focusing particularly on the character of the prevailing copyright regimes.Though the spurious O Neill manuscripts can tell us nothing about the material practice of Charlotte M. Brame as a living author, they do give away a good deal about how her labours were afterwards exploited in the febrile conditions of the US popular fiction market at the turn of the twentieth century, when American soft power was beginning to expand inexorably across the globe.
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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 | 0.018 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.003 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.008 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.062 | 0.019 |
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".