"On the threshold of manhood": Working-Class Religion and Domesticity in Victorian Britain and Canada
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Recent studies indicate that records of church membership are unreliable as a barometer to measure the religiosity of Victorian working-class people. Specifically working-class forms of religious practice, when combined with working-class views of masculinity, tended to privilege the domestic space rather than church membership as the primary site of Christian experience. The religious diary and family correspondence of Frederick and Fanny Brigden, both working-class Londoners, reveal Brigden’s own version of domesticated religiosity and his conception of respectable working-class masculinity. His life-long obsession with temperance, thrift, self-help, and religion was neither imposed by nor borrowed from the values of the dominant classes, but grew directly from his experience of the inequalities and vicissitudes of working-class life. As the Brigdens’ example shows, working-class families’ conceptions of domesticity did not merely mimic those of bourgeois ruling elites, but flowed from their own interpretations of religion and their own strategies for survival.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
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 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.017 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| 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".