Sarah Scott’s and Lady Barbara Montagu’s Letters to George Aust
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Forty-three previously unpublished letters from the novelist Sarah Scott and Lady Barbara Montagu to George Aust, a civil servant who benefited from their generosity and mentorship, are introduced, transcribed, and annotated. The letters expand Scott’s known correspondence and provide new insights into the life of Scott and Lady Bab at the social, cultural, and economic peripheries, their commitment to charitable action, and Scott’s literary and publishing activities after the success of A Description of Millenium Hall (1762). The introduction features an account of Aust’s life and career, describing his relationships with Scott, Lady Bab, and other figures from the Bath and Batheaston communities. It solidifies scholarship on the proto-feminist projects of social reform in which Scott and Lady Bab engaged, demonstrating how Scott’s activities as a professional writer contributed to their benevolent practices and Christian sociability. The introduction also broaches the economics and logistics of eighteenth-century authorship and literary production, exploring the close attention and expertise that women writers brought to their publications and the print marketplace.
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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 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.004 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.013 | 0.003 |
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".