“Piety and Popishness”: Tolerance and the Epistolary Reaction to Richardson’s <i>Sir Charles Grandison</i>
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Samuel Richardson’s Sir Charles Grandison (1753), in its every aspect, attempts to solve the problems of religious difference in the post-Jacobite world. Recent readings argue that despite the apparent openness of Sir Charles’s marriage proposal to his Catholic love interest, Clementina, the novel presents Catholicism as a threat to both the protagonist and his nation, reducing Sir Charles Grandison to a highly politicized tolerationist platform. For Richardson’s contemporary opponents, a “True Englishman” is an Anglican of conservative social values, an icon they believed Richardson countered by offering the religiously liberal Sir Charles as an alternative model of English character. Through my analysis of the anonymous epistolary responses to the novel, the social and political milieu that informed them, and the novel itself, I challenge the critical assumption that Sir Charles Grandison puts forward a recognizable tolerationist agenda, instead arguing that it works against politically authorized intolerance by unyoking religion from public policy altogether.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.014 | 0.023 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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".