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 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 | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.003 |
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; both teacher heads agree on what is shown here.
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".