Straight on 'til mourning: death in Victorian and Edwardian children's literature
Bibliographic record
Abstract
In contrast to sanitized portrayals of death today, ideas and behaviors surrounding death permeated Victorian and Edwardian culture in Britain. The Industrial Revolution brought disease and dangerous work conditions to England, which elevated mortality rates, especially among children. The middle- and upper-classes engaged in elaborate and expensive funerary practices, while the working-class rarely had the time or money to openly grieve for extended periods of time. No matter the economic or social standing, death practices presented the dead in open caskets, usually in the home, and grief was not hidden as it often is today. Children in these years, spanning from the beginning of Queen Victoria’s reign in 1837 and ending with the start of World War I in 1914, were familiar with the physical aspect of dying. Authors of these periods sometimes used this physical aspect of dying as a vehicle for presenting the act of psychological death in their stories for children. J.M. Barrie’s Peter Pan and The Little White Bird are placed in historical context and analyzed to understand how Barrie used physical death to represent psychological death, or loss of childhood, in his works. I include examples of Victorian authors Charles Kingsley, who wrote The Water Babies, and Lewis Carroll, author of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland to suggest Barrie’s use of physical and psychological death was not an uncommon theme in Victorian and Edwardian children’s novels.
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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 | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.025 | 0.031 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| 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".