by Colin Dickey
Unbowed, Spurzheim taught himself English in six months and moved to London in 1814 to lecture on “practical phrenology.” Spurzheim’s phrenology may indeed have been a perversion of Gall’s ideas, but it was a necessary perversion. The body of scientific evidence was now fairly strong against organology, and certainly against the bump-reading aspects of cranioscopy. In order for phrenology to survive at all, it had to move beyond science and into popular culture. This was what Spurzheim set out to do, to bring it into the public sphere as something other than pure science. “Phrenology is one of a group of sciences, different from anatomy, and its truths are of a larger stature,” one phrenologist later put it. “It belongs to the doctrine not of the human body, but of man.”93
In England Spurzheim quickly befriended a number of prominent phrenologists, including the Swede Johan Didrik Holm. Holm had been a captain in the Royal Swedish Navy before embarking on a lucrative career in private shipping and settling in London in 1805. He had met Gall at Napoleon’s coronation in 1804 and had subsequently developed a large phrenological library and a skull collection that included the head of Alexander Pope and other notables. His zeal for the New Science was such that he had reportedly tried to plunder his own father’s grave for his collection. One visitor to his home described it as “a museum, filled with natural history specimens, works of art and curiosities. Books and pictures cover the walls together with a large number of heads, such as marble busts, plaster casts, and real skulls of deceased persons.”94 His prominence was such that when Spurzheim died, it was to Holm that he left his own collection.
Spurzheim traveled widely through the United Kingdom, where his lectures and demonstrations were met with fascination and derision. He turned both to his advantage. After a scathing attack against him was published in June 1815 in the Edinburgh Review, Spurzheim began performing dissections with the article placed alongside the brain, inviting spectators to compare what they had read in the Review to what they saw with their own eyes.
Among those deeply impressed by such showmanship was a young Scottish lawyer named George Combe. Combe had come from miserable poverty and carried with him a deep loathing of the backward religious and educational institutions that had oppressed him as a child. As an adult he had dedicated himself to liberal reform. He had immersed himself in the philosophy of Locke, Hume, and Adam Smith, but after watching one of Spurzheim’s dissections he had an epiphany. “I attained the conviction,” he wrote in his memoirs, “that the faculties of the mind he had expounded bare [sic] a much greater resemblance to those which I had seen operating in active life, than did those which I had read about in the works of metaphysicians.”95
Spurzheim spent another seven months in Edinburgh and stayed in constant contact with his new disciple, carefully cultivating Combe to continue his work after he had left England. With the publication of Essays on Phrenology in 1819, Combe had established himself as one of the foremost writers and thinkers of the phrenological movement in the country. Combe saw phrenology as the key to humankind’s inner consciousness and the means to diagnosing and curing society’s ills. “I plead guilty of being known to the world only as a Phrenologist,” he wrote in 1834. “Believing, as I do, that the same Divine Wisdom which ordained the universe, presided also at the endowment of the brain with its functions; that the brain is the organ of the mind, and that mind is the noblest work of god; convinced, also, that this discovery carries in its train the most valuable improvements in education, morals, and in civil and religious institutions.”96 In other words, for Combe the brain occupied the midpoint between God and progressive reform; the key to bringing about God’s plan for social justice lay in phrenological understanding.
Johann Spurzheim.
With such a cosmic mandate, the possibilities were limitless, and phrenologists like Spurzheim and Combe took Gall’s original idea much further than the doctor had ever intended. Seeing himself as a serious scientist, Gall had been deliberately modest about the possibilities of phrenology. When he was accused by the Viennese authorities in 1802 of attempting to distinguish “the worthless and the useless from the virtuous” by the shape of their skulls, Gall replied that such a thing was impossible “because moral, social, civil, and religious conduct, is the result of many and different concomitant causes, and especially of many powerful external influences; for instance, education, example, habits, laws, religion, age, society, climate, food, health, and so forth.” In his English translation of this document thirty years later, Combe added this footnote: “This was written in 1802. I consider it quite possible, in the present state of Phrenology, to distinguish the naturally worthless and useless from the virtuous by the shape of their skulls. See Combe’s System, vol. ii. p. 695. 4th edition.”97
By the 1830s phrenology had come a long way indeed.
PHRENOLOGY WAS EXTREMELY attractive to reformers because it suggested that one’s innate mental powers—not birthright or class or the blessing of a religious institution—determined one’s worth. As such, Combe drew all manner of British liberals and socialist reformers, including the young Marian Evans, who had been introduced to phrenology by the philanthropist Charles Bray. Evans took to the New Science immediately and had a phrenological bust of her head made in 1844 in tribute to Bray. When Combe later saw it, he mistook it for the head of a man, and when he finally met Evans and read her scalp, he pronounced her the “ablest woman I have seen” with a “very large brain.” She would later confide to her friend Maria Lewis that “having had my propensities sentiments and intellect gauged a second time, I am pronounced to possess a large organ of ‘adhesiveness,’ a still larger one of ‘firmness,’ and as large of conscientiousness.”98 Whatever sexual ambiguity Combe had found in her head was something Evans would exploit when she adopted the nom de plume George Eliot and began to revolutionize the Victorian novel. In works such as Adam Bede and Middlemarch Eliot created a new mode of depicting the inner consciousness of everyday people. And, particularly in her earlier fiction, phrenology was an important tool for accessing that inner consciousness. In 1851 she would affirm to Bray, “I never believed more profoundly than I do now that character is based on organization. I never had a higher appreciation than I have now of the services which phrenology has rendered towards the science of man.”99 Those services included her own fiction, which is infused with phrenological descriptions. In the early Scenes of Clerical Life, we are introduced to Lawyer Dempster, who is “weighed down” by “a preponderant occiput and a bulging forehead, between which his closely clipped coronal surface lay like a flat and newly-mown table-lawn.”100 Astute phrenologists would have immediately recognized the selfishness of such a character, a “preponderant occiput” indicating an overdevelopment of the faculties of approbation and self-esteem. Likewise, his flat “coronal surface” would indicate a developed intellect but a lack of veneration, conscientiousness, and benevolence. By contrast, in Eliot’s first major novel, Adam Bede, Seth Bede is described as having thin hair that allows one “to discern the exact contour of a coronal arch that predominates very decidedly over the brow.” Unlike Dempster, Seth’s moral faculties are extremely well developed at the cost of his intelligence, resulting in an “arch” rather than a more “well-rounded” blend of moral and intellectual.101
Phrenology also appeared in the works of Dickens, the Brontë sisters, and dozens of lesser novelists. French writers such as Balzac had relied heavily on physiognomy, the correlation between facial features and personality, as developed by the Swiss Johann Kaspar Lavater. But English and American writers found the key to their characters’ personalities not in the face but in the skull.
IN 1832 SPURZHEIM went to the United States to spread the phrenological gospel further in the English-speaking world. He had planned a two-year tour and was especially interested in the heads of Native Americans and of slaves. At Yale he dazzled the audience with the dissection of the brain of a child who had died recently from hydrocephalus and continued to impress wherever
he went with his seemingly impeccable phrenological readings.
But only seventy-one days into his journey he succumbed to a fever while lecturing at Harvard and died on October 30, 1832. And so the task of proselytizing for the New Science fell to Orson Fowler, who began lecturing on phrenology while still an undergraduate at Amherst, and his younger brother Lorenzo. Together the Fowler brothers would build a phrenological empire, and with their ubiquitous ceramic phrenology bust, their name would gradually become synonymous with the most dubious elements of Gall’s science.
Like Combe, the Fowlers saw in phrenology not simply the study of the mind but the key to the betterment of humanity. As it had in the British Isles, phrenology flourished by attaching itself to reform movements. The United States was being torn apart at the seams, the rift between North and South growing wider by the day. The division had become intractable, war was nearly a foregone conclusion, and everyone was looking for some kind of panacea to solve the nation’s woes. Transcendentalists, abolitionists, hydrotherapy advocates, antilacing societies (against corsets: “Natural waists, or no wives!”), teetotalers, and vegetarians—all lined up to promote their causes; phrenology took them all in and made them part of its grand scheme. The Fowlers published tracts from all manner of reformers and idealists in their Phrenological Journal, aggregating every movement under the banner of bump reading. In the journal’s tautological simplicity, all society’s ills could be explained through the skull.
Phrenology Chart, by L. N. Fowler
By the time the Fowler brothers opened their Phrenological Cabinet on Broadway in Manhattan, phrenology was a nationwide phenomenon, and people came from everywhere for readings with the famous Fowlers. Among those who came to the New York Golgotha to have their heads read was a young printer’s devil named Walt Whitman. Whitman had already established himself as a phrenology convert. Three years before, in November 1846, as an editor of the Brooklyn Eagle, Whitman had written of phrenology, “Breasting the waves of detraction, as a ship dashes sea-waves, Phrenology, it must now be confessed by all men who have open eyes, has at last gained a position, and a firm one, among the sciences.”102
And now he waited patiently in the lobby, paid the fee not just for the chart but for the full reading, and was examined by Lorenzo Fowler himself. Like most people who came to see the Fowlers, Whitman was told that on most counts, his skull was quite exceptional. He scored high in Amativeness, Philoprogenitiveness, Adhesiveness, Inhabitiveness, Alimentiveness, Self-Esteem, Firmness, Benevolence, and Sublimity, with lower readings in Concentrativeness, Acquisitiveness, Secretiveness, Approbativeness, and Marvelousness.103
Most of the chart, as can be expected, was composed of the sort of bland platitudes that were meant on the one hand to be reassuring, and on the other to be unverifiable: “You were blessed by nature with a good constitution and power to live to a good old age. You were undoubtedly descended from a long-lived family. . . . You are very firm in general and not easily driven from your position. Your sense of justice, of right and wrong is strong and you can see much that is unjust and inhuman in the present condition of society.”
Some of it, in retrospect, seems fairly accurate with regard to the figure that Walt Whitman would become: “You choose to fight with tongue and pen rather than with your fist. . . . You are no hypocrite but are plain spoken and are what you appear to be at all times. You are in fact most too open at times and have not always enough restraint in speech.”
Some of it, on the other hand, was completely off the mark, given what we now know of the poet: “Your love and regard for woman as such are strong and you are for elevating and ameliorating the female character. You were inclined to marry at an early age. You could not well bear to be deprived of you[r] domestic privileges and enjoyments. . . . By practice you might make a good accountant.”
In sum, the chart that Lorenzo Fowler produced for Whitman had the same measure of accuracy that any successful huckster could provide: a good snap judgment of character filled out by vague compliments and tautological nonsense.
Whitman ate it up.
The chart Lorenzo produced for him would go on to develop a life of its own—Whitman would publish it as a testament to his genius in the first three editions of Leaves of Grass and would keep it close throughout his life. When asked about his visit to Lorenzo in 1888, Whitman replied, “I guess most of my friends distrust it—but then you see I am very old fashioned—I probably have not got by the phrenology stage yet.”104
The Fowlers, who were looking for a poetic genius with whom they could associate phrenology and further its cultural influences, saw in Whitman an opportunity. They carried his self-published book of poetry in their storefront and advertised it in the Phrenological Journal. This was in many ways their most prescient act, the closest they came to anything like actual prophecy. Considering the dismal failure that Leaves of Grass was in its first edition (before Ralph Waldo Emerson’s endorsement), the Fowlers’ decision to back the young Whitman indicates a fair amount of poetic judgment.
It helped, of course, that Whitman had apotheosized phrenology in his work, going so far as to make it a central lynchpin in his poetry. In what would become a literary landmark, the voice that defined American poetry had constant recourse to phrenology; the New Science insinuated itself throughout. “The sailor and traveler,” he wrote in the book’s preface, “the anatomist chemist astronomer geologist phrenologist spiritualist mathematician historian and lexicographer are not poets, but they are the lawgivers of poets and their construction underlies the structure of every perfect poem.” Whitman, a transcendentalist in the mode of Emerson, saw the world in terms of invisible connections and mystical threads that bound all things together; like the mathematician or the lexicographer, the phrenologist understood the secret laws of these invisible networks and offered the maps to traverse them. No skull-stealer himself, Whitman nonetheless shared with men like Rosenbaum a conviction that in phrenology creative genius could be understood, as it was one of the “lawgivers of poets.”
As Leaves of Grass grew both in stature and in size, so did the bumps on Whitman’s head. His phrenological chart was reprinted in subsequent editions, but Whitman felt free to edit it, and he increased the size of several of the bumps from the original measurements given by Lorenzo. By this point, of course, Whitman had become the American poet, and he saw himself as one of the few capable of speaking on the country’s behalf. And the America that he spoke for was a phrenological one, as he wrote in “By Blue Ontario’s Shore”:
Who are you indeed who would talk or sing to America? Have you studied out the land, its idioms and men? Have you learn’d the physiology, phrenology, politics, geography, pride, freedom, friendship of the land? its substratums and objects?
THIS WASN’T TO say, of course, that phrenology was without its detractors. Oliver Wendell Holmes lampooned the Fowlers in his newspaper column “The Autocrat at the Breakfast Table,” where he described a trip to the offices of “Professors Bumpus and Crane,” pillorying in particular phrenology’s reputation for neologisms with his own string of nonsense words. “Feels of thorax and arm, and nuzzles round among muscles. . . . Mild champooing of head now commences. Extraordinary revelations! Cupidiphilous, 6! Hymeniphilous, 6+!, Paedipilous, 5! Deipniphilous, 6! Gelasmiphilous, 6! Musikiphilous, 5! Uraniphilous, 5! Glossiphilous, 8!! and so on. Meant for a linguist.—Invaluable information. Will invest in grammars and dictionaries immediately.—I have nothing against the grand total of my phrenological endowments.”105
Perhaps most famously, Mark Twain conducted his own phrenological experiment, paying for a reading first as an ordinary, unpresuming citizen. “Fowler received me with indifference,” Twain later recalled, “fingered my head in an uninterested way, and named and estimated my qualities in a bored and monotonous voice. He said I possessed amazing courage, and abnormal spirit of daring, a pluck, a stern will, a fearlessness that were without limit.” The inordinate courage that Fowler found in Twa
in was negated, though, by a bump on the other side of his head, which Fowler identified as “caution”: “This hump was so tall, so mountainous, that it reduced my courage-bump to a mere hillock by comparison, although the courage bump had been so prominent up to that time—according to his description of it— that it ought to have been a capable thing to hang my hat on; but it amounted to nothing, now in the presence of that Matterhorn which he called my Caution.” This caution bump, Fowler explained to Twain, was why he hadn’t been able to amount to much in life. Some time later the author returned, this time introducing himself as Mark Twain and wearing his now trademark white suit. The difference, as could be expected, was quite startling: “Once more he made a striking discovery—the cavity was gone, and in its place was a Mount Everest—figuratively speaking— 31,000 feet high, the loftiest bump of humor he had ever encountered in his life-long experience!”106
But it was Ambrose Bierce who perhaps put it most eloquently and succinctly in his The Devil’s Dictionary: “Phrenology: n. The science of picking the pocket through the scalp. It consists of locating and exploiting the organ that one is a dupe with.”107
The Fowlers took it all in stride. Phrenologists had always viewed this resistance to their creed as a badge of pride, proof that bump reading was so revolutionary that the institutions of science were unready for it. One was either predisposed to find truth in it or not. “Self-made or never made” was the Fowlers’ favorite motto, and it could apply not just to their brand of reform and self-betterment but also to one’s own view of phrenology—either you believed in it or you didn’t. But in that dark decade leading up to the American Civil War, and in the bleak years that followed it, there were a lot of anxious souls looking for comfort, and for twenty-five cents one could be reassured not only of one’s innate goodness and intelligence but also of one’s capacity to better the world. It seemed a small price to pay.
