by Colin Dickey
The reinterment, Noble went on, was carried out not by friends of this thief but by the Swedish Countess von Schwerin, who had heard of the situation and “requested an English gentleman of rank to wait upon the possessor, and request that he would allow the skull to be restored to its former situation.” Most important for Noble were the motives for this reinterment: “It is true, then, that its re-interment took place; but it is not true that this was attended with any solemnity, or ‘excited unbounded (or any) interest among his numerous followers.’”116
The erroneous claim that a Swedenborgian had done this was bad enough for Noble. But what was doubly insulting was any suggestion that the Swedenborgian community cared one way or another about the body: “Some of them knew that the skull had been taken away: but I believe that none of them (or not more than one) knew when it was restored; and I am sure that none of them cared anything about the matter.”
Swedenborg in life had been a mystic, and those who valued his teachings above all valorized the spirit over the body. As David George Goyder, a phrenologist, Swedenborgian, and contemporary of Noble, wrote, “Of all the different classes of Christians, the Swedenborgians are the least accessible to relics of any kind, but more especially relics of the dead.” As a temporary vessel, once the body has “fulfilled its use in this world, which use is principally to prepare the soul for heaven, it will be consigned ‘to the earth as it was, while the spirit will return to God who gave it.’”117 No matter who had taken the skull, he couldn’t have been involved with Swedenborgianism.
In fact, Noble concluded, the sole motive of Countess von Schwerin was that
the admirers of the writings of Swedenborg might not be charged with such stupidity as that of venerating the mortal remains of any man, which, Swedenborg maintains, are entirely unnecessary to the future existence of the soul, and will never be resumed; for she was aware, that if at any future period it should be discovered that the skull was gone, the robbery would be imputed to the admirers of his doctrines, and that misrepresentations of their sentiments, such as your anecdote contains, would be the result. Nothing, I assure you, can be more abhorrent to their principles, or to the doctrines of the New Jerusalem church, than any thing that can tend to the revival of saint-craft.118
And so, Noble believed, the skull had been stolen for phrenological purposes, not out of veneration for the dead. But another letter quickly arrived at the Times to clarify the matter further, and this writer, John Isaac Hawkins, not only knew more of the story but also identified the thief.
“Captain Ludvig Granholm of the Royal Navy of Sweden,” he wrote, “called on me, near the end of the year 1817, invited me to his lodgings and showed me a skull, which he said was the skull of Swedenborg.” Granholm had been in the chapel, not for von Nolcken’s funeral but for the funeral of a fellow naval officer, when he noticed Swedenborg’s coffin. Hawkins described how, “on observing that the coffin was loose, he was seized with the idea of making a large sum of money, by taking the skull, and selling it to one of Swedenborg’s followers, who, he had heard, amounted to many thousands in this country, and amongst whom, he imagined, there would be much competition for the possession of so valuable a relic. He watched his opportunity, lifted the lid of the coffin, took out the skull, wrapped it in his pocket handkerchief, and carried it out of the chapel unnoticed.”
Hawkins himself had tried to set the captain straight: “I informed Captain Granholm, to his great disappointment, that the members of the New Jerusalem Church reprobated the possession of any religious relic, and more particularly a part of a dead body, which, they believe, will never more come into use, the soul remaining, after death, a complete and active man in a spiritual body, not to be again fettered with material flesh, blood, and bones.”119
But did Hawkins have all his facts straight? A third writer, who signed himself “Tertius Interveniens” (a legal term for one who argues on another’s behalf), wrote to clarify. This was Johan Peter Wåhlin, who was pastor of the Swedish Church during this time. Like Hawkins, he was intimately involved with the events surrounding the theft. On his deathbed Granholm had summoned Wåhlin and confessed to taking the skull, which Wåhlin took away with him. Granholm may have not lived long enough to find a buyer for the head, but after word got out that Wåhlin now had the skull, someone offered him 500 pounds for it, which he claimed to have declined somewhat indignantly.
The Swedish Church council asked Wåhlin to keep the skull until the vault was opened again, “in order that it might not again come into unauthorized hands,” but Wåhlin instead loaned it to Charles Tulk. Tulk was a member of Parliament and had helped Noble found the Swedenborg Society; he also was an avid believer in phrenology and had amassed a large private collection. Tulk displayed the skull in his museum until 1823, when Countess von Schwerin pushed for its reinterment; both Tulk and Wåhlin were on hand when the skull was finally reunited with the rest of the remains in the Swedish Church’s vault.
Wåhlin’s letter to the Times primarily concerned how the vault had been opened in the first place. Like Broling and Hindmarsh, he confirmed that a doubting Thomas from America had bribed the sexton to open the coffin, and that only when the lid was finally opened did “the mephitic vapours did at the same time expel the septic and his doubts upon the subject.” These bizarre events in 1790, Wåhlin explained, had left the coffin unsealed and vulnerable to anyone who happened to wander into the crypt. Disagreeing with Hawkins’s account, Wåhlin claimed that the theft had happened in 1816, not 1817; in addition, like Noble, Wåhlin claimed that it had been done not by a follower of Swedenborg or for profit but by a phrenologist “who expected to fix the organ of imagination beyond any doubt.”120
The confusion that thus played out over a week in the Times was the question of what place the skull held in the world of the living. Was it a relic, something to be preserved with “the greatest care and veneration”? Was it a scientific instrument with which one might “fix the organ of imagination beyond any doubt”? Or was it, as Hawkins affirmed, simply an item of commerce?
It’s too simplistic to say it was all three of these things at once. Rather, as the debate over Swedenborg’s skull suggests, religion and science were each in their own way trying to claim the skull as exclusively belonging to their respective realms. And men like Granholm understood quickly that there was money to be made in such a dispute. His mistake was to pick the wrong saint and the wrong branch of Christianity. Twenty years later and one hundred miles to the northeast of London, in the town of Norfolk, county Norwich, another cranioklept would have more luck.
SUCH WAS THE fate that befell Sir Thomas Browne, whose head had lain waiting, as if for this moment, for 160 years. Browne, who was born in 1605 and died on his birthday seventy-seven years later, was both a doctor and a theologian but is mostly remembered for a series of amazing books that he published late in life. “Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne,” said Virginia Woolf, “but those who do are of the salt of the earth.” Browne’s works run the gamut of Renaissance preoccupations, from the religious-philosophical meditations of Religio Medici to the manifold superstitious beliefs he exposed in Pseudodoxica Epidemica to the armchair archaeology of Urn Burial. His writing is a kind of esoteric secret, passed from library to library, treasured by each who receives it as if it were a rare jewel made of prose—to quote Woolf, it excels by “bringing the remote and the incongruous astonishingly together. A piece of an old boat is cheek by jowl with the funeral pyre of Patroclus. Vast inquiries sweeping in immense circles of ambiguity and doubt are clenched by short sentences rapped out with solemn authority.” To read Browne’s works “is always to be filled with astonishment, to remember the surprises, the despondences, the unlimited curiosities of youth.”121
Sir Thomas predated Gall by a century, so he had never given a thought to phrenology during his life, but the New Science was in the Norfolk air in 1840: A traveling phrenologist had delivered a lecture in February of that year that
was extremely well received, and the entire community of Norfolk had been hotly debating the tenets and findings of phrenology ever since. Phrenological thoughts were on the minds of many that August when the doctor’s bones came to light once more.
Workers had been digging a grave for the recently deceased wife of the vicar of St. Peter Mancroft and unknowingly had been digging into the vault of Sir Thomas Browne. As was the custom at the time, the vault that contained Browne’s coffin had earlier been filled in with dirt so as to keep the ground above level, and as a result it was sometimes difficult to tell where one plot ended and the next began. When the diggers struck something hard in the dirt, it was at first unclear what they had hit. Digging further, they found the two halves of a brass plaque that they had inadvertently shattered, and only when they read the plaque did they realize it was Browne’s coffin they had broken into.
Whether this disturbance was intentional has long been a subject of debate, though it seems likely that it was an accident. Either way, the news spread quickly, and people from all over Norfolk gathered to see the sudden reappearance of their local saint. The workmen had to cover the remains quickly to keep away the curious, but they did not fill in the grave right away, and the remains of Browne were accessible to the churchwardens as well as to George Potter, the sexton.
Closer inspection revealed a skull in good condition. The brain had long ago liquefied by a process called “apidocere,” where the chemical decomposition of biomass is converted to soap; a contemporary report of the remains described the contents of the skull as resembling an “ointment of a dark brown hue.”122
Then there was his hair—it was also found to be in good condition among the remains, and witnesses described it as “of a fine auburn colour.” How had the hair survived in such good condition? Over the decades there was a good deal of speculation about this. In 1894 a surgeon named Charles Williams (who would become somewhat of an expert on the subject of Thomas Browne) would argue that it was not actually Browne’s hair but a wig. “It is difficult to believe that a man of seventy-seven,” Williams surmised, “who must have suffered much anxiety and worry in an arduous practice of over forty years, and who had lost all his teeth, could have possessed a large amount of hair ‘of a fine auburn colour.’”123 More likely, it seems (since Browne’s letters show him castigating others for wearing wigs) that it was indeed genuine, albeit from his beard, and that it had turned the reddish color through the leaching of iron from the soil into the hair.
In any case, Browne’s hair had fared better than his coffin, the lead of which had almost completely decomposed into a carbonite substance that crumbled to the touch, the chalky soil having been responsible for its disintegration.
The condition of the coffin and remains was recorded by Dr. Robert Fitch, a chemist, druggist, and amateur antiquarian and collector, who presented his findings to the Society of Antiquaries later that year. Given the excitement surrounding phrenology at the time, it is not surprising that the sexton George Potter had asked Fitch, a parishioner at St. Peter Mancroft who was appointed churchwarden in 1845, to examine the skull to see what information it might provide about the long-dead doctor.
Fitch shared little of the mysticism that had made Browne’s writings sparkle. The epitaph written on the brass plaque—the one that had been broken in half—had read, “Hoc Loculo indormiens, Corporis Spagyrici pulvere plumbum in aurum Convertit”: “sleeping in this coffin, by the dust of his alchemical body, he converts the lead into gold.” However, Fitch, in his original report, commented that “whether the last two lines of the original latinity were meant to predict an alchemic transmutation, or to express a hyperbolic compliment, we leave to the learned, with this remark that the coffin is still a leaden one.”124
While the coffin was being repaired and Fitch was examining the remains, he ordered a cast of the skull so that it could be studied after it was reinterred. For this he turned to a fellow parishioner, Charles Muskett, who was not destined to go down in history as a virtuoso caster of skulls. The cast he produced was marginal at best; a twentieth-century anthropologist noted that “to-day we should class it contemptuously as a miserable specimen of a skull-cast.”125 Most significantly, Muskett’s cast didn’t include Browne’s face: it replicated only the cranial cavity. Muskett’s interest, after all, was phrenology, and what he wanted was only a record of the bumps of the skull. No physiognomist, he wasn’t the least interested in the face.
The cast being completed and the grave repaired, Fitch instructed George Potter to return the skull for reinterment. But Potter—or “Skull George,” as he would come to be known by his descendents—had other ideas. Apparently he did not take the inscription on Browne’s coffin as literally as Fitch had. With the skull in his possession, he thought surely there had to be some way to turn the good doctor’s leaden bones into gold.
Thus it was that Skull George hid the skull and reburied the rest of Browne’s body, then began to look for a buyer. The first person he approached, G. W. W. Frith, turned him down, but Potter soon struck gold. His crass opportunism would later come to be seen as somewhat of an embarrassment; writing in 1905, Edmund Gosse noted that the sexton “offered it for sale, and it was bought by a collector over whose name, in my opinion, it is best to shed the poppy of oblivion.”126 This last line was a reference to the final chapters in Urn Burial, where Browne wrote that “the iniquity of oblivion blindly scattereth her poppy, and deals with the memory of men without distinction to the merit of perpetuity.”127 But such poppies could not shield the name of the man who purchased the skull because he ultimately left it, quite publicly, to the Norwich and Norfolk Hospital Museum. Entered into the museum’s records for the year 1848 is item No. 641, N. 5: “Cranium of the celebrated Sir Thomas Browne.” Under the column “Whence derived” is written “Dr. Lubbock.”
Not much is known about Edward Lubbock (for this we can blame the poppies) except that he was, like Fitch—and, for that matter, Browne—both a doctor and an antiquarian, and he apparently enjoyed the same lack of scruples about purchasing heads. He kept the skull in his collection until his death in 1848, when it was left to the museum. The museum displayed it proudly, along with a lock of the doctor’s “fine auburn hair” (which was later lost). Thus “gnaw’d from his grave,” Browne took up his residence in the hospital museum’s pathological section, as if a way with words was somehow a pathology unto itself.
NOT EVERY UNEARTHED corpse was so unfortunate. The great Scottish hero Robert the Bruce was disturbed in 1819 in a similar manner, and while a cast was taken of his skull, it was promptly reinterred afterward. Likewise, in 1835 workers inadvertently broke open Jonathan Swift’s grave, which bore the inscription “Ubi Saeva Indignatio Ulterius Cor Lacerare Nequit”— “Where savage indignation can lacerate his heart no more.” The skull was taken out and examined; the physician William Wilde described it as resembling “in a most extraordinary manner those skulls of the so-called Celtic aborigines of North-Western Europe,” while the phrenologist who examined it pronounced its owner as having “amativeness large and wit small.” But as with Bruce, once a cast was made, the skull was returned to its grave, sparing Swift any possible savage indignations.128
They were among the lucky ones, but it was clear that a new era of relic theft had begun, one to which Browne himself could have related. “The Egyptian mummies, which Cambyses or time hath spared, avarice now consumeth,” he wrote at the end of Urn Burial. “Mummy is become merchandise, Misraim cures wounds, and Pharaoh is sold for basalms.”129 No longer just the Egyptian mummies of antiquity, now the great minds of Europe had also become merchandise.
CHAPTER NINE
THE BRAINOWNER AND HIS SKULL
The same year that Skull George absconded with Sir Thomas Browne’s head, Anton Schindler published his infamous biography of Beethoven. Schindler was careful to put in a note for his phrenological audience, including the autopsy’s description of the numerous convolutions of the brain and the thic
k skull, since “it would not be uninteresting to many admirers of Beethoven to learn the conformation of his skull.”130 Certainly Beethoven was one of those figures whose genius was not only legendary but highly specific, and no doubt a thorough study of his skull could afford much insight to the phrenologically inclined. As it happened, in 1863 they got their chance.
While Stephan von Breuning’s attempts to keep thieves away from Beethoven’s grave had worked, he couldn’t keep out nature, and by 1863 Beethoven’s grave was in disrepair. That year the Gessellschaft der Musikfreunde—the Society for the Friends of Music—decided to exhume and rebury two bodies to “save the earthly remains of Beethoven and Schubert from further decay and, at the same time, to establish their resting places in a deserving manner.”131
