Reading Wollstonecraft after Godwin’s <i>Memoirs</i> : Wollstonecraft in Circulating, Subscription, and Private Libraries, 1799–1842
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
Following Mary Wollstonecraft’s death in 1798, her grieving husband William Godwin made public many of the details of Wollstonecraft’s highly unconventional life. The ensuing backlash seemed to ensure that Wollstonecraft’s major works ceased to be reprinted for a period of roughly forty years. This article contributes to efforts to revise narratives of Wollstonecraft’s early nineteenth century reception by asking how and where readers, in the absence of new editions, might have accessed the books themselves. A survey of 41 circulating and subscription library catalogues dated between 1799 and 1842 reveals that, despite scholarly assumptions otherwise, Wollstonecraft’s works remained widely available. Even when books left the library, they did not necessarily disappear, as a copy of Wollstonecraft’s Vindication of the Rights of Woman that moved from a circulating library into a private collection attests. Placing the information in these catalogues in conversation with what can be gleaned from this copy of the work, this article argues that the durability of the hand-press book complicates the narrative of Wollstonecraft’s posthumous reputation.
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 | 0.001 | 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 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