Bibliographic record
Abstract
Dickens felt transported by sublimity of Niagara Falls when he visited it on his 1842 journey United States and Canada. In a letter Forster (26 April 1842), he said of Horseshoe Falls (the Canadian side of Niagara) that It would be hard for a man stand nearer God than he does there (Letters 3: 210). Dickens proceeds effuse over beauty and majesty of falls in a passage that forms chief part of his description of his experience in American Notes, although letter actually offers superior account: There was a bright rainbow at my feet; and from that I looked up --great Heaven! To what a fall of bright green water! The broad, deep, mighty stream seems die in act of falling; and, from its unfathomable grave arises that tremendous ghost of spray and mist which is never laid, and has been haunting this place with same dread solemnity--perhaps from creation of world (Letters 3: 210-11). In this essay, I analyze Dickens's reaction Niagara Falls in context of other British travel narratives from previous decade, and examine how Niagara speaks Dickens of life after death (as he describes it above, falls die and then rise again in ghostly mist). His profound experience at Niagara Falls shaped his treatment of climactic, transcendent moments in subsequent novels; in particular, from this point on Dickens repeatedly uses water imagery (especially seas, swamps and rivers) as symbols of death, rebirth, transformation and of being disturbed with the joy of elevated thoughts, use Wordsworth's phrase in Tintern Abbey. But Dickens's reaction was more than just a typical Romantic experience, similar those of other nineteenth-century British travelers; it was in part shaped by his overall disappointment in America and his relief be on English ground again. Niagara Falls fulfills several definitions of sublime. Philosophers since Longinus have used term refer experiences that go beyond everyday, that inspire awe, that involve a sense of grandeur, that elevate one's thoughts and feelings and that exceed capacity of human descriptive powers. Longinus, of course, used term in reference rhetoric, but later philosophers found many of same qualities in sublime scenes of nature. Edmund Burke in his Philosophical Enquiry into Origin of Our Ideas of Sublime and Beautiful (1757) emphasized role of terror in sublime, for only presence of fear, he felt, could account for complete overwhelming of all other thoughts and sensations in experiencing sublime scenes in nature. Alexander Gerard in An Essay on Taste (1759) stressed importance of physical immensity in experience of sublime: When a large object is presented, mind expands itself extent of that object, and is filled with one grand sensation, which totally possessing it, composes it into a solemn sedateness and strikes it with deep silent wonder and admiration (11). Similarly, Romantics, and particularly Wordsworth, felt that natural scenes that impress viewer with their immensity and particularly their power, such as mountains or waterfalls, create sublime sensations that feed soul and poetic imagination both at moment and in future by aid of imagination and memory. Niagara Falls embodies all qualities traditionally associated with sublime--its immensity, power, and beauty overawe viewers, reminding them, particularly in nineteenth-century accounts, of presence of other awe-inspiring forces such as death and God. Niagara Falls, oddly enough, fits even scientific definition of sublime, which is to cause pass from solid vapor state by heating and again condense solid form. Not by heating but by motion and pressure falls turn water into vapor, ever present mist that surrounds them, and vapor eventually returns again falls, a cycle that led Dickens use death/resurrection imagery in description quoted above (i. …
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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 | 0.000 | 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 | 0.021 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".