Charity, social control and female emigration in the “white empire”, Angela Burdett-Coutts’ and Charles Dickens’ Urania Cottage: reforming prostitutes for the colonial market
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Françoise Le Jeune analyses the case of a well-known British charity in the 1850s, whose mission was to save undeserving underclass girls from prostitution, sometimes against their will, and to offer them a new life opportunity in the colonies in marriage. Coated in discourses of benevolence and humanitarianism, the charity funded and presided by two prominent Victorians, Charles Dickens and Angela Burdett-Coutts, was in fact quite revealing of Dickens’patronizing and patriarcal outlook on prostitutes who could be saved by adopting some bourgeois mindset and manners, after some years spent in a new milieu and whose only fate would be married life in the colonies. As for Ms Coutts, who was still a single heiress in the 1860s, she placed in Urania Cottage her Anglican and Evangelical beliefs that young prostitutes once exposed to kindness and the comfort of cottage life could become Christian women ready to start a new life in the colonies whom she saw as the extension overseas of the mother country. Françoise Le Jeune shows that Coutts and Dickens saw their charitable scheme as rendering great services to British society by removing some prostitutes from the streets of London. They were also convinced they would solve the sex imbalance in the white colonies in Australia or Canada, conceiving their social activism as a moral mission to make up for the absence of commitment, on the part of the British State, to the relief of distress among the working classes.
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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 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| 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".