“To think of your happy fireside”: The Materiality of Home and Belonging in the Letters of James and Letitia Hargrave, 1826–1854
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The concept of “home” can refer to a range of things, from a house or a homeland, to family and community, or even a feeling of belonging or exclusion. This paper asks what home meant for employees of the Hudson’s Bay Company and their families by taking HBC employee James Hargrave and his wife Letitia as a case study, examining the different ways they conceived of home in the letters that they wrote to their families in Lower Canada and Britain, and to each other, between 1826 and 1854. Home had multiple meanings for the Hargraves, which changed over time depending on their location and circumstances. The unsettled nature of life in the fur trade, and the uncertain future it held for them, led to a sense of anxiety. The Hargraves found comfort in ideas of home that were grounded in connections to their homeland, their family and community in Scotland and Lower Canada, and eventually the family that they created for themselves. Home also had very material connotations, and was entangled with the memories, experiences, and imaginings of people, places and things, from James Hargrave picturing himself seated by his father’s fireside, to Letitia Hargrave cherishing jars of marmalade sent from Scotland by her mother. Thinking about the materiality of the past when examining the Hargraves’ letters reveals some of the strategies that they employed to reinforce their connections to family and friends, and how these relationships created and maintained a sense of home and belonging.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.027 | 0.022 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".