Men from Nowhere: Literary representations of class by writers from the social margins 1880 – 1910
Bibliographic record
Abstract
The period 1880 to 1910 witnessed the emergence of writers from the social periphery who capitalised on new opportunities for publication. These decades also experienced, however, the highest peak in wealth inequality in Britain in two hundred years, with the top 10% of society owning more that 90% of the country’s total wealth.1 Powerful discourses of class also intensified towards the fin de siècle, hardening attitudes towards those from humble backgrounds. Despite Britain’s proud legacy of literary achievement by authors from the lower-middle class, the discourse of public school ‘character’ and pseudo-scientific eugenic theories now challenged the potential for creative genius among those born into working-class or petit bourgeois families. For socially-marginalised authors, positive commercial developments and negative social attitudes were in direct opposition. Authors conversant with life at the social margins, including H. G. Wells, Jerome K. Jerome, George Grossmith, Frank Swinnerton, William Pett Ridge and J. M. Barrie, provide a crucial commentary on the class-based inequalities and biases of the late-Victorian and Edwardian eras. This thesis provides an in-depth analysis of social critique in specific texts published by this group of authors between 1880 and 1910, analysing in detail the methods by which they resisted, challenged and rejected the powerful discourses of class that underpinned inequality of treatment and opportunity in late-Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Analysis of their social critique provides a largely overlooked perspective on individual resistance, as a vital counterpoint to more widely studied collective resistance witnessed during this period in, for example, the emergence of socialism and developments within trade unionism.
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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 | 0.005 | 0.012 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.015 | 0.020 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.012 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.006 |
| 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".