True Crime: Contagion, Print Culture, and Herbert Croft's <i>Love and Madness; or, A Story Too True</i>
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
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.
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.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 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 it