Cranioklepty by Colin Dickey Read Free Book Online Page B

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.
    I N 1832 S PURZHEIM
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 simplythe 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