Nothing but a Humbug: P.T. Barnum, Charles Dickens, and the Construction of National Identities in a Living Archive
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: Even as the Victorians attempted to stabilize British national identity through institutional ownership of cultural property, Britishness remained a protean, imagined construct. This essay shows, through a new narrativization of the auction of Shakespeare's birthplace in 1847, that the purportedly kitschy and fake aspects of Barnumesque, new-money America were paradoxically also constitutive of Britain's own nationalism. In the spring of that year, newspapers advertised that Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford-upon-Avon would soon go up for public auction. Rumours immediately began circulating that the American showman P.T. Barnum, who had recently barnstormed through England with the "Greatest Show on Earth," was intent on purchasing the birthplace for his menagerie of cultural oddities. In opposition to this foreign threat, a full-blown rescue campaign, driven by British media fearmongering, was launched in order to save Shakespeare's home "for the nation." Soon, these efforts drew in Britain's own premier showman of the 1840s, Charles Dickens. The nineteenth-century popular press's mythologization of these events, and the myth's subsequent recapitulation in the twenty-first century, is emblematic of the way national-infused archives wind and unwind in a double-spooled temporality. As I renarrativize archival materials associated with the auction of Shakespeare's birthplace, I proffer a different model of American and British nationalisms that points to their symbiotic development and perpetual reinvention. Ultimately, I suggest, we can learn from the Victorians' reinvention of their own history that the nineteenth-century archive is not a stable point of origin but rather a point of departure for questioning our national heritage and understanding the ways in which we inscribe the past with our present.
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 | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.016 | 0.029 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.005 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 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".