“Our Old Houses Are Full of Ghosts”: Gothic and Utopian Visions in Violet Tweedale’s Theosophical Writings
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Violet Tweedale, granddaughter of the notable Scottish publisher Robert Chambers of Chambers’s Edinburgh Journal, became a prominent figure in the spiritualist and subsequent theosophy movements when she formed a close association with H. P. Blavatsky. Writing in the transitionary period between Victorian spiritualism and the Edwardian popularity of the esoteric and Eastern-inspired theosophy religion, Tweedale’s writings navigate between the true apparition narratives of Ghosts I Have Seen (1919) and the Arthur Conan Doyle-endorsed Phantoms of the Dawn (1928), with their emphasis on scientific inquiry championed by 19th-century psychical researchers, and novels such as Lady Sarah’s Son (1906) and The Beautiful Mrs. Davenant (1920) that emphasise the moral and philosophical promises of Blavatsky’s doctrine of spiritual progress. Tweedale’s turn-of-the-century supernatural writings illustrate the cultural and geographical shifts—from Tweedale’s native Scotland in the last decades of the Victorian era to the legacies of a Russian mystic’s New York-founded Theosophical Society—that influenced spiritualists’ increasingly global post-WWI relationships to both scientific futures and gothic pasts.
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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 | 0.013 | 0.030 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".