Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Read Free Book Online Page A

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 ofthe 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.
    P HRENOLOGY 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 everydaypeople. 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