by Paul Collins
I walk toward the invisible back of the store, to where the examining room stood. Phrenological charts and heads stared from every corner and flat surface: a thousand eyes upon you. Orson Fowler might invite you to sit down and take off your hat; then, calipers in hand, he'd set to examining thirty-seven dimensions of your head. The very top of your skull down to the beginning of your nose alone comprised five separate carefully measured arcs. Sometimes he'd pause to work his hands through your hair, gently feeling your bump of Destructiveness just over your ear, and feeling at the back of your head for a depressed organ of Amativeness. When was the last time you, strange customer, had someone running their fingers through your hair? And for the purpose of self-knowledge?
"The skull," Fowler would explain, "yields and shrinks in accordance with the increase and diminution of the brain within." This brain was a constantly changing organ, with the skull simply reflecting the changes within, like the bark upon a twisting and knotty tree. "The exercise of organs absorbs the portions of the skull which covers them, so as to render them thin," he said, "while inaction, and also excessive action, reduce their size, and allow the skull to become thick." Stop exercising parts of your brain and you'd literally become thick-skulled: a bonehead. But an overdeveloped organ could be a problem too. Fowler would talk of a girl who received a fracturing blow to her head that dangerously inflamed the Tune organ of her brain: ever since, she could scarcely stop singing. Ah, and then there was that case in Pennsylvania: a woman, a known glutton, who proved in Fowler's postmortem to have a skull whose Alimentiveness section was paper thin.
"So very thin"—Orson leaned in to listeners—"as to be transparent."
And you? Why, of the thirty-seven dimensions of your skull, perhaps a few were over- or underdeveloped. Perhaps more than a few. But—there was hope! A phrenological chart, you see, was not your destiny: it was not descriptive but rather prescriptive, a guide to what you needed to work on in order to achieve a well-balanced brain. By conscious effort at regulating and altering your behavior, you could build up your mental organs and effect a permanent change in the very physical structure of your own brain. "Self Made or Never Made," declared the store motto. Whether people realized it or not, they were perpetually making themselves anew: the question was whether they were consciously working to make themselves better.
"Improvement is the practical watch-word of the age," Fowler would insist. The patent office was bursting each week with new smokeless furnaces, new steel temperings, new fabrics and dyes; settlers were improving the westward lands; newspapers floated grand civic schemes for rising metropolises. Why, was not the New World itself an improvement on the Old? Right here in the store were two busts of Benjamin Franklin: one as a strapping young man, one as a wise old statesman. Very accurate, as a glance at his portrait over at Peale's Museum will confirm. Now, note how different the two heads are! Here, in his early days of siring bastards, we see Amativeness overly enlarged; later, as he crafted treaties and bifocal lenses, we see his bumps of Benevolence and Causality both more fully developed.
Fowler's measurements would continue around your bewildered head. Did you have children, then? Indeed. Just at the back of your skull, parallel with the top of your ears, was your organ of Philo-progenitiveness, regulating one's love of offspring. Too little, and you were cold and neglectful: too large, you were liable to be a doting and ineffectual parent. Ah, but there were even worse kinds of parents than that. "Children should never be governed by punishment," he'd say, wagging his finger. "Because all its forms and degrees constitutionally excite and therefore enlarge those very propensities you would subdue. No chastisement can ever be inflicted without the exercise of Combativeness and Destructiveness in the punisher, and therefore without increasing them in the punished." Thrashing a child really did hurt you more than it hurt him: you both eventually ended up with bad, criminal-looking skulls. But even the worst skull could be reformed with enough effort. Self-knowledge was but the first step. All in time—all could be fixed. The utterly ineffable thought, our very cognition, was coming within the reach of science.
"Man is just beginning to think—is just learning the great truth that laws govern all things," he'd rhapsodize.
With the caliper measurements completed, Fowler would finally note down the readings in a thick brown clothbound book—your book, included in the price of your three-dollar exam. Fowler's Phrenology, its spine declared, and by the time you left 308 Broadway your copy would be personalized with your measurements written into the first few pages, your name written into the very title page:
THE CHARACTER AND TALENTS,
of
as given by:
There, in the final blank, the author of Practical Phrenology would neatly sign his name. Your head had now been officially measured and judged: you could now leave, secure in your newfound self-knowledge, walking fearlessly past 308 Broadway's pantheon of staring faces, the endlessly scrutinized and scrutinizing heads of eminent men.
I sit down and open my little brown book; just as, at one time, customers emerging back on to Broadway would have stopped and paused to look over their newly inked charts, pondering the secrets locked within their own skulls. Actually, this particular copy of Practical Phrenology wasn't even bought here in New York, or in the United States. An ancient purple bookseller's stamp testifies to its true origin: "M. Shewan & Co., No 1 Arcade, Toronto." It could just have easily been purchased in London, San Francisco, or Paris. Every city had phrenologists by mid-century. What began as one doctor's odd notion in Vienna became a national and then international movement led by Fowler. Practical Phrenology, his distillation of road lectures and innumerable pamphlets, went through at least sixty-two printings in the nineteenth century.
There were phrenological children's books, phrenological almanacs, and a monthly American Phrenological Journal, largely written by Orson himself; you could piously peruse Phrenology and the Scriptures, or you could examine the heads of your favorite celebrities in Popular Phrenology. Hundreds of such titles burst forth from the press of Fowler's Manhattan shop. You could even study the phrenology of wild animals in guides copiously illustrated with grinning cat skulls, hollowed-out sparrow heads, and macerated monkey mandibles. Indeed, one of Abraham Lincoln's first employers, Denton Offutt, was for many years more famous for authoring A New and Complete System of Teaching the Horse on Phrenological Principles than for mentoring the gangly young manic-depressive he'd kept in his law office.
It would have been unimaginable to many Victorians that Fowler's books would be utterly forgotten today, some probably deemed him the only author of their era truly worth keeping in print. Now the only copies of Fowler are a century old, browned by sunlight shining in through attic windows, their pages marked up with the measurements of skulls whose owners now have neither hair nor skin to cover their bumps of Amativeness. These measurement pages resemble nothing so much as Ben Franklin's famous self-improvement grid, in which he listed his weekly progress of all his faults and qualities. Here some long-dead Toronto resident has helpfully marked up the measurement section of my book, working toward his little bit of perfectibility: I don't know his name, but I do know that his head had freakishly overdeveloped Agreeableness and very little Destructiveness. Yes, well: he is Canadian.
Just mere curiosities now, aren't they? The death mask, the measurements of some Canadian's head—junk for the back of a memorabilia catalogue. Except that once, of course, they were not junk at all.
Beginning in the 1830s, a curious tendency arose in fiction: authors were expected to introduce their characters with a detailed description of their physical appearance, particularly the shape of their heads. Rochester of Jane Eyre is granted a noticeably squarish forehead and "a decisive nose," while in Moby-Dick Melville has Ishmael declare that Queequeeg "reminded me of General Washington's head, as seen in the popular busts of him. It had the same long regularly graded retreating slope from above the brows, which were likewise very projecting,
like two long promontories thickly wooded on top." These were not mere splashes of scene-painting: such descriptions prefigured the morals and actions of a character. Oddly, these detailed headscapes of jutting jaws and well-defined temples can still appear in modern character descriptions, rather like an ancient coelacanth turning up in a chlorinated swimming pool: hack authors still use these absurdly detailed cerebral topographies without the faintest idea of why such a tradition once existed. They might as well be detailing their characters' balance of the four medieval humors while they're at it. Today it is household objects—brand names—things—that have taken the place of heads as a writer's means of implicitly delineating character. An old Volvo station wagon and an L.L. Bean barn jacket mark out a man as surely as a high brow and a weak chin once did.
From the distance of centuries, it all seems rather amusing. Phrenology as a party trick or as historical kitsch is easy to imagine, but as a philosophy? Really? And yet Henry Ward Beecher—that era's leading light of American religion and ethics—had no doubt at all about phrenology's importance. "The views of the human mind, as they are revealed by phrenology, are those views which have underlayed my whole ministry," he insisted. Could we but look around this spot—we, stranded in modernity, in this empty Manhattan plaza—and still see the store that stood here, we would understand what Beecher meant. A customer browsing through Fowler's stock would find him shouting out in his book Self Culture that most "glorious truth" of phrenology: "Small organs CAN be enlarged and excessive ones diminished, EVEN IN ADULTS."
Once you ponder the implications of this statement, as Fowler himself did endlessly, strange things start happening. Fowler's philosophy is all about the possibility and the real hope of change. Calvinistic predestination and hellfire are swept away in an instant; if the brain and its resultant behavior is malleable throughout one's life, then nobody is fated to remain bad: they can mend their ways and their selves.
Suddenly, too, the shaping influence of one's physical development—of one's diet and exercise and behavior—become of paramount importance. "Behold, moreover, the great procuring cause of man's depravity, and consequent wretchedness," Fowler explains in his guide Self Culture. "Namely, a MORBID PHYSIOLOGY. An irritated or abnormal state of the body morbidly affects the brain." Bad actions become the correctable result of improper development, rather than machinations of some cloven-footed prat with a fiery pitchfork. Prayer was not the answer, Fowler snapped: "Ministers may preach, and revivals be multiplied to any extent, without laying the ax at the ROOT of the tree of vice. Mankind must also abandon flesh, condiments, narcotics, gluttony, and fermented liquors, and substitute farinaceous food, cold water, and a light die—must learn how to EAT AND LIVE."
What Fowler holds out is nothing less than the promise of redemption. Will it surprise you at all when, at long last, Fowler tears aside his scientific lineaments, and reveals what he has been all along: a minister leading his flock heavenward? "[Let us] redouble our efforts for . . . that high and holy destiny hereafter as such by this great principle of ILLIMITABLE PROGRESSION!" Indeed. Look carefully around this empty plaza: what you see is nothing less than the birthplace of American progressivism.
The publication of Thomas Paine's spirit-memoir in 1852 came at the apex of phrenology's fame. Their fashionable interest in the latest craze of stances and spirits, though, left some wondering just how serious the Fowlers were. Orson's much younger brother Edward had suddenly proclaimed himself a spirit medium, and held nightly conferences on electricity with Ben Franklin, who would obligingly show up with a spectral set of batteries and wires. Other poltergeists, less scientific and civic-minded, amused themselves by mysteriously moving furniture while the room's lights were out. Edward's spirit interviews were duly published by Fowler &Wells in a two-volume edition, though the tome's copious notes did not include one Fowler relative's observation that he'd seen Edward secretly moving furniture and tossing sofa pillows around when he thought nobody was looking.
No matter. Lippard's and Fowler's resurrection of Paine had occurred just as dead people themselves were making a curious sort of comeback: or as much of a comeback as dead people can make. People could now imagine being dead because they'd just gained, with the 1846 debut of ether anesthesia, the remarkable ability to sink into a temporary living death. Ether arrived to find a culture already well primed for exploring liminal states: Americans and Europeans alike had already been fascinated for decades by mesmerism's claims of being able to produce states of suspended animation; newspapers eagerly reprinted wildly unsourced stories of frogs found living eons inside geological formations, "mummy wheat" seeds that sprouted anew after millennia inside the pyramids of Egypt, and bugs that reanimated themselves from deep inside household furniture generations after the original tree had been cut down.
With the dead becoming more than sloughed-off shells of the spirit, cemeteries developed into respectable places, modeled after parks and plazas; dead children and adults had postmortem formal portraits taken by daguerreotypists, so that unseeing eyes could gaze at you in shades of silver nitrate. For a while, the mysterious realms of photography and death even had a strange overlap; some believed that corpse retinas retained their last image for forty-eight hours after death, so that photographers could capture this dying image on film. In 1857 the New York Observer went so far as to quote experiments on a murder victim by a "Dr. Sanford"—"[I used] a weak solution of atrophine, which evidently produced an enlarged state of the pupil . . . We now applied a powerful lens, and discovered in the pupil the rude worn-away figure of a man in a light coat, beside whom was a round stone standing, or suspended in the air, with a small handle stuck as it were in the earth . . . [perhaps] the exact figure of the murderer." So . . . dead men do tell tales.
Posthumous narrators made their presence felt with the infinitely reprinted and pirated stories of Blackwood's Magazine, and even Emily Dickinson began to toy around this same year with unnerving ghostly narrators: "I heard a fly buzz, when I died . . ." So it's little surprise that just three month's after Paine's spirit-memoirs appeared, yet another found its way into stores. The author of A Series of Communications, Jacob Harshman, admitted that he, too, was skeptical when he heard about those spirits writing books up in New York, but—wouldn't you know it?—now he'd been getting them too, swooping down upon his home in Dayton, Ohio.
A Series of Communications is a real odds and sods of the Other-world: George Washington, James Victor Wilson, Benjamin Franklin, and . . . um, Sir Astley Cooper M.D. The latter's urgent message from beyond the grave? Eat right, bathe, exercise, and "avoid all noxious drugs." But the greatest revelation comes in the book's very first paragraph. Ghosts, it turns out, have terrible spelling. "Let truth prevale and harmony and wisdom reigns supremly," they inform us. "Misey follows arror and ignorence."
Other rather dubious sequels were to follow. Paine did make his return into hardcover fame, just as promised, a couple of years later with the 1854 spirit-memoir The Philosophy of Creation: Unfolding the Laws of the Progressive Development of Nature. This time his earthly secretary was a New York lawyer, and his Paine is a Transcendentalist. "God is not a person, but a principle, the all-animating principle of all things," Paine patiently explains. Paine seems to have kept up with his posthumous reading, since in later editions he argues for Darwin's theory of evolution, for life on other planets, and for valuable truths found in other religions. And sixty years after The Age of Reason, he remains not terribly fond of Christianity: "The tendency of religion of the day is not moral . . . I say the religion of the day is demoralizing."
By the end of the decade the same freethinking and spirit-happy bookstores and local publishers that had stocked the first Paine memoir now offered plenty of others by the late Founding Father. But if his spirit resided with any of them, it was with his very first posthumous publisher inside the curious storefront along the very sidewalks that the living Paine himself had once trod. A true blizzard of publications and causes i
ssued forth from 308 Broadway. The American Anti-Tobacco Society took its headquarters within Fowler's store: so did the American Vegetarian Society. Fowler and his brother Lorenm pounded out books arguing against tight-lacing in women's clothes, and for daily bathing. Convinced that the plasticity of the brain meant that there could be no such thing as permanent depravity, Orson pestered the head of Sing Sing prison to turn prisons into reforming institutions, and "declared war on the gallows" with campaigns against capital punishment; he pointedly published a magazine titled The Prisoner's Friend, and vociferously argued for the educability of the retarded and insane. And if, he wondered aloud and loudly, we may all progress in our mental development, what cause was there any longer for holding back women? Or blacks?
Reformers flocked to the Fowler & Wells publishing house. Margaret Fuller became one of Fowler's authors: so did Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Horace Greeley, and Susan B. Anthony. Clara Barton, founder of the Red Cross, considered her youthful consultations with Orson's brother and partner phrenologist Lorenzo as nothing short of a conversion experience: "How can the value of the results of that month, extending through a lifetime, be put into words?" Educational titan Horace Mann went so far as to name his own son after pioneering phrenologist George Combe, explaining, "I declare myself a hundred times more indebted to Phrenology than to all the metaphysical works I ever read." As they visited the Broadway store, these enthusiasts might have even noticed one ardently idealistic Fowler employee—well, all of them were ardent idealists. But this one, John, was especially exercised over slavery—"as though his own soul had been pierced," Frederick Douglass marveled after meeting him. He eventually moved to Kansas, joining a wave of reformist settlers struggling to outnumber proslavery settlers. And it was that quiet and intense Fowler clerk who, armed with two hundred "Beecher's Bibles—rifles financed by New England reformists—made a disastrous raid upon the federal arsenal at Harper's Ferry, Virginia.