Mesmerism as a Religious Imaginary in Mary Ward's Robert Elsmere
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract: In Mary Ward's 1888 novel, Robert Elsmere , the eponymous hero relinquishes his Anglican curacy after becoming convinced that "miracles do not happen" and migrates to London, where he founds a "New Brotherhood" predicated on the human experience of God rather than scriptural testimony. Given Robert's anti-miraculous bent, Ward's inclusion of an experiment in mesmerism seems a strange intrusion of the spiritual realm into an otherwise empirically realist novel. However, I argue that mesmerism becomes a vital imaginary for the novel's presentation of a new religion capable of synthesizing religion and science, satisfying the contemporary demand for first-hand experience and bridging the gap between religious belief and social reform. In his lectures, sermons, and relationships, Robert holds sway over his followers like a messianic Victorian mesmerist. This novel's employment of mesmeric language serves as a case study of the imaginative opportunities and challenges faced by late nineteenth-century novelists writing about religious and social reform.
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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 | 0.003 | 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 | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.003 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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".