A Cabinet of Curiosities: The Apostles Cabinet in Charlotte Brontë’s <i>Jane Eyre</i>
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Bibliographic record
Abstract
The Apostles cabinetFootnote1 is one of the most recognisable objects that Charlotte Brontë encountered in life and subsequently represented in fiction. Two years before the publication of Jane Eyre (1847), Brontë had visited Hathersage in Derbyshire and had seen the Apostles cabinet in situ; the object clearly remained embedded in her memory. Although the Brontë Parsonage Museum purchased the Apostles cabinet in 1935, no one has yet identified the individual apostles depicted on it, or deeply considered the cabinet’s imaginative recreation in Brontë’s novel. This article will present previously unknown information about the Apostles cabinet, including the fact that eleven of the cabinet’s twelve portraits are modelled on engravings by Cornelis van Caukercken produced circa 1650–1660, which in turn were based on a series of paintings by Anthony Van Dyck created circa 1615–1620. Understanding the cabinet as a material object will enable an investigation of several curious aspects of Brontë’s imaginative transformation of it. I will argue that the fictional cabinet in Jane Eyre serves multiple literary purposes: to enhance the Gothic setting; to contribute to Brontë’s subtle characterisation of Mr Rochester as Catholic; and to evoke the themes of redemption, healing, sin, and betrayal that pervade the novel.Footnote2
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 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 it