“A Pair of Scissors, and One Daring, If Trembling, Snip—!”: Making Mrs. Oliphant’s Dress
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Devised and edited by the Reverend W.J. Loftie, the Art at Home Series, published by Macmillan & Co. between 1876 and 1883, was a highly successful collection of domestic advice manuals aimed at a growing lower-middle-class readership. This paper focuses upon the volume in the series devoted to the subject of the book Dress , written in 1878 by the well-known Scottish novelist Mrs. Margaret Oliphant (1828–97). Drawing upon previously unpublished sources from the Macmillan Archive and contemporary reviews, this article charts the book’s production and initial reception to suggest Dress reveals as much about the expedient world of Victorian writing and publishing practices as it does about fashion. Demonstrating Oliphant’s skill in “writing with scissors,” it reveals the intertextual relationship that Dress has with many other literary and visual sources. Whether we interpret this as an example of plagiarism or a creative strategy, I argue that while Dress should be considered a cultural document of the late-Victorian period, it can never be treated as straightforward evidence of how people dressed in the past.
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 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 | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| 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 itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, 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".