Respectable Men Seeking Odious Work in the Late Nineteenth Century
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Using the nearly 1000 unsolicited letters of application for the job of common hangman in 1883, this article examines how these mostly skilled or semi-skilled workmen presented their abilities and credentials for the job. Combining a statistical analysis of the applicant pool with qualitative analysis of the letters and testimonials provided by them, the authors seek to advance the debate about nineteenth-century working-class respectability and its connection to occupational status. They address the paucity of scholarship on how working men in the later nineteenth century presented their credentials and experience for new occupations, and how the hangman letters offer a unique source for understanding how some men did so. The authors conclude that the expected dictates of respectable status were invoked, instrumentally, by the applicants despite the social perception of the hangman role as one of extreme odium, using the kinds of information requested by other ‘adjacent’ occupations – like the military, police and railways – and found in newspaper advertisements.
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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 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.008 | 0.008 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 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 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".