{"id":2038,"date":"2014-10-23T14:47:32","date_gmt":"2014-10-23T19:47:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/winedarksea.org\/?p=2038"},"modified":"2025-02-10T17:31:26","modified_gmt":"2025-02-10T22:31:26","slug":"the-novel-and-moral-philosophy-1-what-does-charlotte-lennox-have-to-do-with-adam-smith","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/?p=2038","title":{"rendered":"The Novel and Moral Philosophy 1: What Does Charlotte Lennox Have to Do with Adam Smith?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"ilennox001p1\"<\/a>The Visualizing English Print group is using new visualization tools to study genre dynamics in our corpus of texts spanning the years 1530-1799. While far from comprehensive, the corpus spans an interesting period in the history of English print. Most literary historians, for example, would agree that this is the period when the novel emerges as a distinct generic form. One of the tools we are using \u2013 a re-orderable matrix and topic modeling tool\u00a0called Serendip \u2013 has generated topics that illuminate this development in our corpus. We began that work by first labeling all 1080 items by genre, something we had to do if we were going to see any patterns in the larger collection. (A downloadable spreadheet\u00a0of both the items and the genre labels applied to them appears in a spreadsheet here<\/a>.) This post deals with two algorithmically generated topics that we found useful in identifying items we had previously labeled \u201cprose fiction\u201d and \u201cphilosophy.\u201d \u00a0The topics were generated through a process known as Latent Derichlet Allocation (LDA), a technique commonly used to sort through web pages or documents in large collections of texts.<\/p>\n

In exploring the VEP corpus with Serendip, we saw that our prose fiction texts \u2013 particularly the eighteenth century novels \u2013 were related to our philosophy texts in some interesting ways. We began to understand that relationship when we noticed that prose fiction and philosophy texts shared the topics that are present in large measure in each of them individually. (A topic is a collection of words that tend to co-occur with one another in individual documents; one might think of them as \u201cingredients\u201d that are mixed together to create the full variety of documents in the corpus.) The first of these topics was characteristically present in texts classed as prose fiction, which was reasonably interesting. More interesting still: we found that the type of texts next most likely<\/i> to contain words from this \u201cprose fiction\u201d topic were those we classed as \u201cphilosophy.\u201d And the topic that was most prevalent in philosophy texts \u2013 in this case, works of moral philosophy by thinkers such as Smith and Hume \u2013 were also present in our prose fiction novels.<\/p>\n

Why this overlap or sharing of ingredients? Where does the novel stop and moral philosophy begin? Before attempting an answer, it is important to understand what kinds of works qualified, in our naming game, for membership in these two groups. A complete list of works in the corpus, with their genre classes, can be found at the link above. Below we list only the works in these two classes. Our naming convention begins with a date of publication, short title of the work, author, and assigned genre class. Our dates here refer to the date of the edition transcribed by TCP in a corpus assembled at random: per our earlier post on the corpus<\/a>, it is composed of 40 randomly\u00a0selected texts per\u00a0decade. The corpus was thus specifically\u00a0not<\/em> created for the purpose of exhaustive surveying\u00a0any one literary form. Our purpose, rather, was to see how much we could learn from a relatively small sample of what\u00a0TCP had transcribed.<\/p>\n

Fictional Prose:<\/p>\n

1588 PandostoTriumphOfTime Greene, Robert, 1558-1592
\n1639 MoresUtopia More, Thomas
\n1634 StrangeMetamorphosisOfMan Brathwait, Richard, 1588?-1673
\n1667 LovingEnemyATrueHistory Camus, Jean-Pierre, 1584-1652.|Wright, John
\n1659 GovernmentOfWorldInMoon Cyrano de Bergerac, 1619-1655.|St. Serfe, Thomas, fl. 1668
\n1668 LifeOfMeritonLatroon Head, Richard, 1637?-1686?
\n1680 TheEnglishRoguePart2 Head, Richard, 1637?-1686?
\n1700 HistoryOfChildrenInTheWood
\n1572 SchoolOfWiseConceits Blague, Thomas, d. 1611
\n1759 PoliticalRomanceToYork Sterne, Laurence, 1713-1768
\n1799 TisAllForTheBest More, Hannah, 1745-1833
\n1724 HistoryOfJohnOfBourbon Aulnoy, Madame d’ (Marie-Catherine), 1650 or 51-1705
\n1753 SirCharlesGrandisonV1 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
\n1753 SirCharlesGrandisonV5 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
\n1749 TomJonesV1 Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754
\n1749 TomJonesV3 Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754
\n1789 Arundel Cumberland, Richard, 1732-1811
\n1712 AppendixToJohnBull Arbuthnot, John, 1667-1735
\n1797 FantomNewFashionedPhilosopher More, Hannah, 1745-1833
\n1748 RoderickRandomV2 Smollett, Tobias George, 1721-1771
\n1748 ClarissaV1 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
\n1751 ClarrissaV8 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
\n1777 CharlesCharlotteV1 Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814
\n1777 CharlesCharlotteV2 Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814
\n1764 CastleOfOtranto Walpole, Horace, 1717-1797
\n1763 HistoryLadyJuliaMadeville Brooke, Frances, 1724?-1789
\n1794 AdventuresOfHughTrevor Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809
\n1790 JuliaNovelAndPoems Williams, Helen Maria, 1762-1827
\n1752 FemaleQuixote Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
\n1758 HenriettaTwoVolumes Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
\n1790 EuphemiaFourVolumes Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
\n1782 CeciliaV3 Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840
\n1782 CeciliaV5 Burney, Fanny, 1752-1840
\n1741 PamelaV3 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
\n1741 PamelaV4 Richardson, Samuel, 1689-1761
\n1785 RecessTaleOfOtherTimes Lee, Sophia, 1750-1824
\n1795 HenryFourVolumes Cumberland, Richard, 1732-1811
\n1776 PupilOfPleasure Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814
\n1753 ShakespeareIllustrated Lennox, Charlotte, ca. 1729-1804
\n1792 AnnaStIvesNovel Holcroft, Thomas, 1745-1809
\n1766 VicarOfWakefieldTale Goldsmith, Oliver, 1730?-1774
\n1788 MusicalTourMrDibdin Dibdin, Charles, 1745-1814
\n1775 LiberalOpinionsAnecdotes Pratt, Mr. (Samuel Jackson), 1749-1814<\/p>\n

Philosophy:<\/p>\n

1534 ErasmusAgainstWar Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536
\n1532 DespisingTheWorld Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536.|Paynell, Thomas
\n1531 TreatiseSufferFriendsDeath Erasmus, Desiderius, d. 1536
\n1590 RoyalExchangeAphorisms Rinaldi, Oraziofin \/upd.|Greene, Robert, 1558?-1592
\n1614 LabyrinthOfMansLife Norden, John, 1548-1625?
\n1576 AnatomyOfTheMind Rogers, Thomas, d. 1616
\n1580 PatternOfAPassionateMind Rogers, Thomas, d. 1616.|Rogers, Thomas, d. 1616.|H. W
\n1561 CicerosFiveQuestions Cicero, Marcus Tullius.|Dolman, John
\n1675 FreedomOfWill Sterry, Peter, 1613-1672
\n1741 EveryManHisOwnWayEpistle Duck, Stephen, 1705-1756
\n1752 TheRambler Johnson, Samuel, 1709-1784
\n1740 TreatiseHumanNatureAbstract Hume, David, 1711-1776
\n1741 EssaysMoralAndPolitical Hume, David, 1711-1776
\n1759 EpistlesPhilosphicalAndMoral Kenrick, W. (William), 1725?-1779
\n1734 EssaysOnSeveralSubjects Forbes of Pitsligo, Alexander Forbes, Lord, 1678-1762
\n1751 EssaysOnTheCharacteristics Brown, John, 1715-1766
\n1759 TheoryMoralSentimentsSmith Smith, Adam, 1723-1790
\n1734 EssayonMan Pope, Alexander, 1688-1744.]<\/p>\n

A look at these lists confirms that our corpus contains significant examples of both the eighteenth-century novel (Richardson, Burney, Lennox) and important texts in the history of moral philosophy, for example, Adam Smith\u2019s Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/i>. Noting these landmarks, we want now to explore this overlap in vocabularies\u00a0and share some preliminary thoughts about why novels share the vocabulary of moral philosophy and how those vocabularies function in each genre.<\/p>\n

The next three posts are structured as a dialogue, beginning with some remarks by Michael Witmore (a Serendip user) and Eric Alexander (Serendip\u2019s designer). These remarks focus on how Serendip helped them to pinpoint this kinship between the two genres.\u00a0In the next post, we have a\u00a0\u201creaction\u201d from a scholar of the Eighteenth Century Novel, Julie Park, who was recently\u00a0a fellow at the Folger Shakespeare Library where Serendip was tested. Her post, entitled \u201cTelling and Feeling, Aunts and Letters,\u201d introduces some historical context for the development of\u00a0the eighteenth century novel, moving on to show how the topic words associated with the prose fiction texts contribute to the latter\u2019s project of rendering everyday life and moral sensibility for readers. Park offers specific readings of some of the topic words\u00a0that Serendip flagged as highly present of our clusters of topic words, offering the\u00a0perspective of a new user\/interpreter on the results produced by a software tool still in development. In a final post entitled \u201cWhat Does Lennox Do with Moral Philosophy Words?\u201d Witmore expands on Park\u2019s analysis, offering an interpretation of the differences between the two topical fields we are associating with the novel and moral philosophy.<\/p>\n

Serendip<\/strong><\/p>\n

We begin with a few words about what Serendip is and how it works. At its highest level, Serendip allows users to visualize how topics are distributed across a document set. “Topics,” in this instance, are significant collections of words (extracted by an algorithm known as Latent Dirichlet Allocation, or LDA) that tend to occur in the same documents across a corpus. Serendip displays the occurrence of these topics in a re-orderable matrix that plots documents, in the vertical axis, against topics, in the horizontal axis, indicating individual proportions with circular glyphs of varying size. Documents can be displayed individually or in aggregate groups. After some tuning by Alexander, who is the original designer of Serendip, a user (in this case, Witmore) takes the tool and begins to explore these topics, looking at what words they contain and what texts score highest on each topic. The power of the tool is the ability it gives its user to re-order the matrix according to individual topics, texts, or text groups.<\/p>\n

We are not going to discuss how topic modeling works in this post. (A good explanation<\/a> can be found on Ted Underwood\u2019s blog<\/a>.) We do want to show something that happened when we began exploring this corpus using the topics that had been generated for us. You\u2019ll see several screen shots\u00a0below. For the time being, focus on the center pane with the yellow circles that look like planets. Across the top are the topics, which were named according to Witmore\u2019s best guess at what they captured in texts. (Naming topics is a task that seems to have been designed for human beings: the judgments are highly contextual and built upon the study of examples.) Witmore\u2019s topic names were based, first, on his examination of the word distribution in that topic (the window at right labeled \u201cNovel\u201d), but also on his knowledge of the works displayed in the lower right hand pane. (The lower right hand pane displays individual texts within a given subgroup of texts \u2013 here the ones that our bibliographer had labeled \u201cprose fiction\u201d). A lot of this is subjective, which is as it should be.<\/p>\n

\"SnipImage1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

On\u00a0this screen, Witmore had selected the topic which he had named \u201cNovel\u201d at the top left portion of the page and then re-ordered the matrix to show all of the genre types which contain those topic words. (The genres are listed vertically in descending order down the red column at left.) The size of these circles represents the frequency with which this topic occurs in a given group of texts; additional information about outliers is furnished by the Saturn-like rings. We can also disaggregate this group and see how individual texts score on this topic, again in descending order:<\/p>\n

\"SnipImage2\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Witmore\u2019s initial name for this topic was \u201cNovel,\u201d which seems to accord well with the actual texts that are highly rated on this topic: Charlotte Lennox\u2019s Henrietta<\/em>, followed by two parts of a Richardson novel, a few dramas, and then more novels by Lennox and Richardson. Knowing that he needed to consult an expert, he decided to talk to Julie Park, a scholar of eighteenth century literature, whom he hoped could help him understand this topic. The initial identification of this topic, however, seemed right given that the matrix in the previous screenshot identifies texts classed as \u201cFictional Prose,\u201d \u201cAutobiography,\u201d \u201cDrama,\u201d \u201cTravelogue,\u201d and \u201cBiography\u201d as high scorers on this topic. (\u201cLegal Prose,\u201d not so much, which is all for the good.)<\/p>\n

Neither Witmore nor Park was surprised to see that the words making up the \u201cNovel\u201d topic (mr, mrs, lady, madam, sir, miss, dear) occur frequently in epistolary novels, which make up a large proportion of this group. For structural reasons, the narrative voice of epistolary novels must register and mark an awareness of addressee (Mr., Sir, etc.); letters also recount dialogue (and so, once again, use terms of address and quotational words like \u201ccried,\u201d \u201ctold,\u201d \u201creplied,\u201d). The drama of these novels is a social one; we are not surprised to find words that tag an individual\u2019s social standing. (Technical terms from geometry or botany are not featured high on this list, for example.) The initial finding suggested to us that we were operating in the same universe as the\u00a0tool; it was\u00a0doing things we understood.<\/p>\n

But you can always know what you know in new ways and you can also try to describe<\/em> that knowledge in different terms. This is what we were interested in doing with the tool that Eric had built. Re-ordering was the next step in the process.<\/p>\n

Look now at a second re-ordering of the matrix, this time on the basis of a topic named \u201cMoral Philosophy\u201d which is the third column to the right in light blue. The topic words here are obviously abstract \u2013 the highest scorers are words like \u201cobject,\u201d \u201cmankind,\u201d \u201cidea,\u201d \u201csystem\u201d \u2013 but further down the list, they seem to focus on the dynamics of moral deliberation. \u201cSentiment,\u201d \u201cmoral,\u201d \u201ccharacters,\u201d \u201cpropriety\u201d and \u201csentiments\u201d are all words that seem useful in this context. (One never knows for sure how words are going together or behaving, of course, until one sees these words working in a text.) Here again, the ratings of genre groups in descending order seemed plausible, beginning with \u201cPhilosophy\u201d\u00a0 and then moving through \u201cArgumentation\u201d and other forms of \u201cNonfiction Prose.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SnipImage3\"<\/a><\/p>\n

We get an even better sense when we rate items on this topic at a more granular level, going work by work in descending order. The \u201cMoral Philosophy\u201d topic \u2013 the blue, leftmost column \u2013 is now rating individual works:<\/p>\n

\"SnipImage4\"<\/a><\/p>\n

An abstract of David Hume\u2019s Treatise of Human Nature<\/em> is the top scorer here, and a little further down one sees Adam Smith\u2019s Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em>. Calling this topic \u201cMoral Philosophy\u201d rather than \u201cNatural Philosophy\u201d or \u201cMetaphysics\u201d was seeming like the right move.<\/p>\n

Now look at what happens when we re-organize the matrix according to the human generated genre designations on the left hand side \u2013 essentially asking which computer generated topics a human<\/em> designated genre group is made up of. Returning to a view that shows us the groups down the left hand side, we re-ordered the matrix according to the topic scores of texts that a human being has classified as \u201cFictional Prose:\u201d<\/p>\n

\"SnipImage5\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\u201cFictional Prose\u201d texts are, as a group, rated horizontally<\/em> on their prevalent topics, again in descending order, now from right to left. What we are seeing now are the topics of which \u201cFictional Prose\u201d texts are generally composed. The first one listed is \u201cNovel,\u201d to which we say, \u201cso far, so good.\u201d But look just to the right. Going next in sequence, we see that \u201cMoral Philosophy\u201d has moved across the screen to become the second<\/em> most highly ranked topic for this type of text, followed closely by another topic named \u201cTales of Chance and Virtue.\u201d<\/p>\n

Now things become interesting. Why would prose fictional texts, largely epistolary and high scorers on the \u201cNovel\u201d topic, also be associated with the \u201cMoral Philosophy\u201d topic? What does Charlotte Lennox do that Adam Smith does as well?<\/p>\n

To answer this question, we needed to begin looking at the topic words in context, which we did through Serendip\u2019s\u00a0ability to drill down into the documents, allowing us to view passages. We generated several views of the texts that showed texts by Charlotte Lennox and Adam Smith with topic words highlighted in different colors (red for the novel, blue for moral philosophy). To get a sense of what the \u201cnovel\u201d words in red are actually doing in context, we asked Julie Park to produce the reflection that follows in the next post, which begins with an analysis of novel words in Charlotte Lennox\u2019s Euphemia<\/em>. We also furnished her with several screenshots of Adam Smith\u2019s Theory of Moral Sentiments<\/em>, since this text contained a significant number of topic words that we are associating with moral philosophy. We post here a few screenshots of each work as a preface to the next installment.<\/p>\n

\"SnipImage6\"<\/a><\/p>\n

\"SnipImage13\"<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Visualizing English Print group is using new visualization tools to study genre dynamics in our corpus of texts spanning the years 1530-1799. While far from comprehensive, the corpus spans an interesting period in the history of English print. Most literary historians, for example, would agree that this is the period when the novel emerges […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[144],"tags":[188,186,187,147,189],"class_list":["post-2038","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-visualizing-english-print-vep","tag-adam-smith","tag-charlotte-lennox","tag-euphemia","tag-novel","tag-theory-of-moral-sentiments"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/16"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2038"}],"version-history":[{"count":23,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2104,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2038\/revisions\/2104"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2038"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2038"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/winedarksea.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2038"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}