“Let Genius Still This Glorious Object Own”: Naming, Signing, Authoring, and Owning in the Manuscript Verse Miscellany
Bibliographic record
Abstract
This essay covers what it meant to “own” a manuscript verse miscellany in the eighteenth century. Manuscript miscellanies offer palpable, if enigmatic, evidence that the often-obscure individuals who made such books understood themselves to be, simultaneously, readers, copyists, makers, editors, and authors. As a result, when they took ownership of their books by signing their names on elaborate title-pages, such gestures signified something more complex and variable than a claim to “authorship.” Rejecting a post-Romantic oppositional hierarchy of writer over reader and original author over copyist, I examine acts of selection, adaptation, and copying, indicated by naming and signing, in a representative selection of miscellanies from the database Manuscript Verse Miscellanies, 1700–1820. I also consider such patterns of selection in four miscellanies extending across seventy years: five-and-a-half-year-old Melesinda Munbee's “Collection of Several Poems” (1749); Eleanor Peart's “Collection of Poems by Several Hands” (1768); Elizabeth Frances Amherst's “The Whims of E. A. afterwards Mrs. Thomas” (1798); and Lady Charlotte Campbell Bury's untitled miscellany (ca. 1815–20). Finally, I discuss “A Selection of Modern Poems” by Azarias Williams (1785), in which highly decorative, and often dated signatures, rather than claiming authorship, establish Williams's literary taste and highly developed scribal skills, while also creating a meaningful structure for his life as a transatlantic emigré. In exhibiting the many ways in which a poem might be “owned,” manuscript verse miscellanies invite us to recalibrate the relative values of composition, copying, and adaptation in the practice of literary creativity in the eighteenth century.
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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 | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.007 | 0.013 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.001 |
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".