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Generic Inferences

An Interactive Online Exhibition of
Commonplaces in 19th-Century Literature

Introduction

‘We watch ourselves, and the mere wonder of the spectacle enthrals us.'

Commonplaces are general truths distilled from lived experience which are passed down to guide people's understanding of other people, things and abstract concepts alike. The patterns of their appearances in literary texts similarly reflect people's approaches to generalisation and categorisation—of textual forms like genre as much as broader conceptual categories. Even though these commonplace ideas may be familiar, they are often expressed in different ways. Moving beyond exact matches, a small model (SBERT) was used to detect similarities between commonplace anthologies and longer fictional works.

Involving no fewer than 37 novels and fictional texts, this exhibition is a tiny but curious selection of commonplaces and related facts, offering a glimpse of the shifting networks of association and inferences from the past. These cursory observations come from a little offshoot of a small-scale computational study of nineteenth-century genre system, collective sense-making and knowledge extraction. Scroll down to assess some of this collective wisdom, how it was echoed or challenged in a fictional context and the technical process/limitations surrounding this study. Share your thoughts so we may see if these fragmented understandings may still hold!

Commonplaces

Commonplaces

Commonplaces, in the form of maxims, proverbs and other general truths distilled from lived experience, has for centuries been as private and public practice. The current study of commonplace-seeking across novels and other fictional works limits its focus to these anthologies of commonplaces (click on the titles to open up a copy; it'll take a while to load): ): Francis Bacon's Apophthegms New and Old (1674), Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Aids to Reflection; and, The Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (1840), Thomas Preston's A Dictionary of English Proverbs (18--), Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870) , John Barlett's Familiar Quotations: A Collection of Passages, Phrases, and Proverbs (1875, 1882, 1891, 1903), Sebastian Melmoth (Oscar Wilde)'s Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul Of Man (1911).

🔸 'The heart is the seat of understanding; thus the Scripture speaks of men 'wise in heart'; and 'slow of heart' means dull of understanding.'

S. T. Coleridge, Aids to Reflection
🔹 He suffered all the pangs of a mother, and he knew not what it meant; for that great and singular movement of a heart which begins to love is a very obscure and a very sweet thing. (Score: 0.4856) – Chapter III, Book Fourth, Les Misérables (1862), Victor Hugo
🔹 The heart becomes heroic, by dint of passion. (Score: 0.4811) – Chapter IV, Book Sixth, Les Misérables (1862), Victor Hugo
🔹 People are unlearning certain things, and they do well, provided that, while unlearning them they learn this: There is no vacuum in the human heart. (Score: 0.4839) Chapter XI, Book Sixth, Les Misérables (1862), Victor Hugo
🔹 Remember, my friend, that knowledge is stronger than memory, and we should not trust the weaker. (Score: 0.4121) – Chapter X, Dracula (1995), Bram Stoker

💡The higher the score (closer to 1), the higher the similarity as determined by the model.

Q:The characters don't always agree with the commonplaces. Do you agree that 'The heart is the seat of understanidng'?

🔸'It is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation is ever really shown in the work one creates.'

Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man
🔹 Even now I cannot help feeling that it is a mistake to think that the passion one feels in creation really shown in the work one creates. (Score: 0.9852) – Oscar Wilde, Chapter IX, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
🔹 It is said that passion makes one think in a circle. (Score: 0.7069) – Oscar Wilde, Chapter XVI, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Q: I'm not sure if Wilde writes his aphorisms into his fiction, or that his fiction gives rise to these aphorisms. Do you have an aphorism of your own to share?

🔸'There is nothing like leather'

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

🔍The story is that a town in danger of a siege called together a council of the chief inhabitants to know what defence they recommended, A mason suggested a strong wall, a shipbuilder advised 'wooden walls', ** and when others had spoken, a currier arose and said, 'There's nothing like leather.'

🔹 The sword of a cuirassier, which hewed down the bagpipes and the arm which bore it, put an end to the song by killing the singer. (Score: 0.3995) - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
🔹 Let a notary transfigure himself into a deputy: let a false Corneille compose Tiridate; let a eunuch come to possess a harem; let a military Prudhomme accidentally win the decisive battle of an epoch; let an apothecary invent cardboard shoe-soles for the army of the Sambre-and-Meuse, and construct for himself, out of this cardboard, sold as leather, four hundred thousand francs of income; let a pork-packer espouse usury, and cause it to bring forth seven or eight millions, of which he is the father and of which it is the mother; let a preacher become a bishop by force of his nasal drawl; let the steward of a fine family be so rich on retiring from service that he is made minister of finances,—and men call that Genius, just as they call the face of Mousqueton Beauty, and the mien of Claude Majesty. (Score: 0.3980) Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
Q: Without context, what do you think this commonplace means?

🔸 'He has no further claim to be considered as an artist.'

Oscar Wilde, Miscellaneous Aphorisms; The Soul of Man

🔎Context: A work of art is the unique result of a unique temperament. Its beauty comes from the fact that the author is what he is. It has nothing to do with the fact that other people want what they want. Indeed, the moment that an artist takes notice of what other people want, and tries to supply the demand, he ceases to be an artist, and becomes a dull or an amusing craftsman, an honest or a dishonest tradesman. He has no further claim to be considered as an artist. Art is the most intense mode of Individualism that the world has known.

🔹 No artist desires to prove anything. (Score: 0.7404) – Oscar Wilde, 'The Preface', The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
🔹 No artist has ethical sympathies. (Score: 0.7217) – Oscar Wilde, 'The Preface', The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
Q: Might an artist ever need to prove anything?

🔸'Beggars on horseback will ride to the devil'

🔍Context: There is no one so proud and arrogant as a beggar who has suddenly grown rich.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870)
🔹You know the proverb, Mr. Hale, 'Set a beggar on horseback, and he'll ride to the devil,'—well, some of these early manufacturersdid ride to the devil in a magnificent style—crushing human bone and flesh under their horses' hoofs without remorse. (Score: 0.7705) – Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, North and South (1855)
Q: What's another saying you can think of about the nature of greed?

🔸 'What cannot be cured must be endured.'

Barlett's Familiar Quotations (1875) and Thomas Preston's A Dictionary of English Proverbs (18--)
🔹 What does not a man undergo for the sake of a cure? (Score: 0.7007) – Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
🏋️‍♀️

🔸 'Cruelty is a devil's delight.'

Thomas Preston's A Dictionary of English Proverbs (18--)
💡Also, 'Cruelty is a tyrant always attended by fear.'; from Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable (1870), 'Tyrant. In ancient Greece the tyrant was merely the absolute ruler, the despot, of a state, and at first the word had no implication of cruelty or what we call tyranny. Many of the Greek tyrants were pattern rulers, as Pisistratus.'

🔹 "Cruelty,—I'd like to know what the cruelty is! (Score: 0.7187) – Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
🔹 And this far for the cruelty committed, to give occasion unto others, and to such as hate the monstrous dealing of degenerate nobility, to look more diligently upon their behaviuours, and to paint them forth unto the world, that they themselves may be ashamed of their own. (Score: 0.7124) – Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: A Romance , 1820
Musings on cruelty. The model's process of gauging sentential similarity may also reveal something about the way statistical inference works. Might we discern an overlap between human and machine inference?

🔸 'Eat, drink, and be merry.'

Luke xi. 23. Barlett's Familiar Quotations (1875)
🔹 'If only from the devil they would insure us,
How pleasant were the maxim (not quite new),
'Eat, drink, and love, what can the rest avail us?'
So said the royal sage Sardanapalus. (Score: 0.6007) – Lord Byron, Don Juan (1824)
🔹'Eat drink and sport; the rest of life's not worth a filip, "quoth the King"' (Score: 0.6) – Paulist Fathers, New Catholic World , 1949
Q: What concept does this commonplace seem to refer to?

🔸 'There is no sin except stupidity.'

Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms; the Soul of Man (1880)
🔹 No sin at all is the dream of the angel. (Score: 0.7417) - Victor Hugo, Les Misérables (1862)
🔹 There is no sin, and there can be no sin on all the earth, which the Lord will not forgive to the truly repentant! (Score: 0.7121) – Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov (1880)
🔹 There is no sin except stupidity. (Score: 0.7099) – Oscar Wilde, The Soul of Man (1880)

💡 We're barely scratching the surface—scanning the 360,000+ volumes of fictional works from the 19th centruy will require more resources and time.

A contradiction concerning the commonality of sin.

🔸'One's past is what one is.'

Oscar Wilde Miscellaneous Aphorisms; the Soul of Man (1880)
🔹 The one charm of the past is that it is the past. (Score: 0.7301) – Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890)
🔹 The past was past; whatever it had been, it was no more at hand. (Score: 0.7070) Thomas Hardy, Tess of the d'Urbervilles (1891)
Q: Is it better to dwell on the past or let it go?

'Form and colour tell us of form and colour—that is all.' (Wilde)

Inferences

Below are visualizations of responses to each commonplace, showing how readers today interpret and respond to these historical observations. The visualizations update in real-time as new responses are submitted.

The Heart as the Seat of Understanding

people voted yes

Passion in Creation

Interpretations of Leather

Artists and Proof

Modern Views on Greed

Hedonism vs Relaxation

The Past's Influence

END OF EXHIBITION

Check out the K-SAA Public Commonplace Books

demo of the K-SAA Public Commonplace Book and interactive star chart

A project that seeks to collect user inputs for mapping out the conceptual connections between global Romantic-era writers and the readers of today, as part of the public engagement activity from the Keats-Shelley Association of America. Read Vol.1 and the accompanying 'star chart' (interactive network graph) here.

The second volume, under the theme of 'Field Notes on Freedom', is still collecting submissions for future visualisation. Click here to learn more.

To learn more about the practice of commonplacing, and its literary contexts, visit the K-SAA's public outreach programme here.

Feedback

Thank you for your interest in the exhibition! There's a lot more fixes, ideas and changes I'd wanted to make—had time permitted. I'd love to hear your thoughts. (If the form doesn't work, please email me at sha39[@]cam.ac.uk)

about the organiser

Shellie Audsley is a PhD candidate in English and Associate at Cambridge Digital Humanities (CDH). She is slowly working on Book Digs (bookdigs.club) , an upcoming book discovery platform for better semantic searches, recommendations & visualisationsof books, based on her research on 19th-century genre systems ('genre mixing'), referential networks and associative sense-making—alongside interests in computational literary studies, critical theory and a little bit of systems design.