“Labouring in Suspense”: Paying Attention to Providence in Samuel Richardson’s <i>Clarissa</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the connection between suspense, providential anxiety, and the types of reading practices that are both represented in and required by Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa (1747–48). While some scholars point out that suspense and providence produce similar states of anxious pas sivity in readers, I argue that Richardson’s techniques for managing sus pense encourage the active—if provisional—interpretation of events still in progress, a process I term “attentive reading.” Not all suspense trains readers in attention, as Lovelace’s manipulative schemes make clear. However, Richardson’s epistolary technique of “writing to the moment,” taken alongside the novel’s editorial apparatus of prefaces, footnotes, and post scripts, simultaneously intensifies readers’ experience of suspense and offers the tools for developing provisional judgments within it. I conclude by reading Clarissa’s “father’s house” letter, and its gradual interpretation by other characters, as a model for the kind of attentive reading that the novel as a whole demands.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 teacher head, 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".