Reading Wollstonecraft after Godwin’s <i>Memoirs</i> : Wollstonecraft in Circulating, Subscription, and Private Libraries, 1799–1842
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.
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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 | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.009 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.008 | 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".