Soft Materiality: Dress and Material Fiction in T.S. Surr’s <i>A Winter in London</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As against a recent tendency of material culture scholarship to gravitate towards hard objects, I argue for the special significance of the “soft materiality” of dress, as both a category of material life and a dimension of literary fiction. To do so, I explore both the general theoretical background and the specific case of Thomas Skinner Surr’s bestselling novel A Winter in London (1806). Unlike all other kinds of objects in the novel, Surr’s remnant clothing is highly materialized, with a uniquely clear sense of meditation on the different possibilities of transformation and use available via dress. Most pointedly, the novel turns what Surr calls the “wreck of a wardrobe” into a plenitudinous graveyard testifying to the surprisingly resilient life of dress materials. In this way, the text suggests the special significance of a late-eighteenth-century encounter with a newly softened regime of clothing for a much longer epoch of material perception and imagination.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.011 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 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".