Breakfast with “Her inky Demons”: Celebrity, Slavery, and the Heroine in Late Eighteenth-Century British Fiction
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Late eighteenth-century British newspapers were vehicles of celebrity and scandal; they were also venues for the advertising of slaves. The juxtaposition made newspapers a potentially explosive and productive object in British fiction. This essay identifies a formulaic scene, originating in William Hayley’s popular poem The Triumphs of Temper (1781) and recurring in various forms in fictions by Maria Edgeworth, Frances Burney, and Elizabeth Inchbald, as well as many less well-known novels of fashionable life, in which a young white woman experiences sudden unwanted celebrity by reading about herself in a morning newspaper. This essay introduces the term “dyspathy” for the mechanism by which these fictions present the heroine as always threatened by, but inevitably rescued from, a newspaper sphere in which older discourses of blackness, and metropolitan unease at the commodification of humans, were tightly but implicitly associated. Emerging white supremacist ideas of race are shown to be fundamental to the construction of feminine domestic subjectivity in these fictions.
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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.015 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| 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".