True Crime: Contagion, Print Culture, and Herbert Croft's <i>Love and Madness; or, A Story Too True</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Herbert Croft fictionalized an eighteenth-century crime of passion in his epistolary novel, Love and Madness; or, A Story Too True (1780); in his retelling, Croft presents James Hackman, the suicidal murderer of Martha Ray in 1779, as both the victim of various forms of contagion—social, textual, and medical—and as an exemplar of a kind of self-sacrificing sensibility that enables him to overcome the stigma of suicide. Croft's representation of the crime draws heavily upon Goethe's controversial The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and implicates this text in Hackman's suicidal subjectivity. Croft frames his anti-Wertherian story as a Christian heroic and nationalist narrative dedicated to dismantling the myth of the “English Malady” of suicidal melancholy. Croft struggles to reposition suicide as a transnational rather than a national phenomenon. The historical figure of James Hackman emerges out of Croft's treatment as an unlikely means of revaluing national character, interests, and sensibility.
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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 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".