Plebeianizing the Female Soldier: Radical Liberty and <i>The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This article examines the work-related dimensions of The Life and Adventures of Mrs. Christian Davies (1740). A rollicking account of a plebeian female soldier, the Life is a key document for the history of eighteenth-century working women and their representation in narrative. By portraying both the industriousness and the radical liberty associated with the lower-class milieu of real-life female soldiers, Davies’s narrative challenges the depiction of plebeian identity in numerous early eighteenth-century fictions of low-born women, whether picaresque like Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders or sentimental like Samuel Richardson’s Pamela. Drawing on genres such as jest-books, criminal biography, and amatory fiction to break with heroic images of well-born women warriors (including those in popular ballads), it voices a resistant outlook on the regulation of women’s labour and sexuality. And, with a social perspective springing as much from class status as sexual identity, Davies’s Life marks a literary epoch in which female soldiering is plebeianized in plays and novels as diverse as John Gay’s Polly and Tobias Smollett’s Ferdinand Count Fathom.
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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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 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".