The dome of thought: Phrenology and the nineteenth-century popular imagination

By William Hughes

The dome of thought is the first study of phrenology based primarily on the popular – rather than medical – appreciation of this important and controversial pseudoscience. With detailed reference to the reports printed in popular newspapers from the early years of the nineteenth century to the fin de siècle, the book provides an unequalled insight into the Victorian public’s understanding of the techniques, assumptions and implications of defining a person’s character by way of the bumps on their skull. Highly relevant to the study of the many authors – Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot, among them – whose fiction was informed by the imagery of phrenology, The dome of thought will prove an essential resource for anybody with an interest in the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century, including literary scholars, medical historians and the general reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Mar 29, 2022
• ISBN: 9781526143747

William Hughes

William Hughes is Professor of Gothic Studies at Bath Spa University

Book preview

The dome of thought

ffirs01-fig-5001.jpg

The dome of thought

Phrenology and the nineteenth-century popular imagination

William Hughes

Manchester University Press

Copyright © William Hughes 2022

The right of William Hughes to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

Published by Manchester University Press

Oxford Road, Manchester M13 9PL

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 1 5261 4372 3 hardback

First published 2022

The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

FRONT COVER:

Poster advertising a series of lectures on phrenology and mesmerism in Chard, Somerset, December 1846 (author’s collection)

BACK COVER:

Cartoon of William Hughes by Nigel Parkinson, 2021

Typeset

by New Best-set Typesetters Ltd

Dedicated to the memory of

Bill Beaven (1927–2014)

and

Don Farmer (1926–2014)

We met upon the Level and we parted on the Square

Contents

List of figures

Acknowledgements

Preamble: ‘This far-famed skull’: exhumation and the autopsy of talent

1 ‘Dr Gall, the anatomist, who gives lectures on the skull’: phrenology in Britain during the first decade of the nineteenth century

2 ‘A field for quacks to fatten in’: phrenology in the British Isles

3 ‘The doctrines of phrenology shall spread over Britain’: George Combe and the rise of British phrenology

4 ‘That strange amalgamation of the two sciences’: mesmerism, celebrity practitioners and the schism of 1842–3

Conclusion: The decadence of phrenology: materiality and meaninglessness in modern Britain

Coda: The phrenology of Donald J. Trump

Bibliography

Index

Figures

1 ‘The Craniognomic System of Dr Gall of Vienna’, Journal of Natural Philosophy, 4 (March 1803), Plate X, following p. 208. Wellcome Library no. 27668i

2 ‘Dr Gall's Craniology’, engraving accompanying Monthly Magazine, 21/3 (1 April 1806), 197. Wellcome Library no. 27669i

3 Cover of Weekly Medico-Chirurgical and Philosophical Magazine, 22 February 1823. Wellcome Collection: b10180424

4 Frontispiece to G. Spurzheim [sic], Phrenology, or the Doctrine of the Mind; and of the Relations between its Manifestations and the Body, third edition (London: Treuttel, Wurtz and Richter, 1825). Wellcome Library no. EPB/B/49405

5 Frontispiece to George Combe, Outlines of Phrenology (Edinburgh: MacLachlan & Stewart, and John Anderson, jun., 1836)

6 ‘Miss Clara Fisher, Aged Nine Years’, frontispiece to Transactions of the Phrenological Society (Edinburgh: John Anderson, 1824)

7 John Elliotson as phreno-magnetist, Anon., ‘A New Musical Instrument’, Punch; or the London Charivari, 5 (July–December 1843), 168

8 Advertisement placed by Henry Bushea, consulting phrenologist, in Westmoreland Gazette, and Kendal Advertiser, 5 April 1845, p. 2, col. 4

9 Ceramic phrenological bust attributed to L. N. Fowler (c. 1879)

10 TrumPhrenology, satirical caricature by Gman (2017), www.facebook.com/trumphrenology

Acknowledgements

Many individuals have contributed to the writing of this book, and to the research that made it possible. I would like to thank, first and foremost, Gillian, who has endured the literal presence of denuded crania and the pungent odour of pipe tobacco throughout its writing. I am also particularly grateful to Pat Main, who has been exceptionally supportive to me personally, and who read the manuscript more than once, providing valuable advice about clarity and content. Jillian Wingfield (University of Hertfordshire) has likewise proved a true friend and a perceptive reader, and has earned my deep gratitude across this and many other projects.

The dome of thought was substantially written at the University of Macau, an institution which has enthusiastically embraced my work both as a Gothicist and as a historian of the more curious corners of medicine. I would like to express my deep gratitude to the many colleagues who welcomed me to the university on my being appointed to a chair there in January 2020, and who have unstintingly supported my ongoing research. My particular thanks go to those scholars whose collegiality I enjoy on a daily basis, most notably Matthew Gibson, Damian Shaw, Victoria Harrison, Yifeng Sun, Jie Xu, Man Yin Chiu, Jeremy de Chavez, Younhee Helen Kim, Rhett Gayle and – especially – my fellow Professor of the Dark Arts, Nick Groom. I am also very grateful for the practical support I have received from Nick Heath and Lawrence Chui of the British Consulate-General in Hong Kong, and from Glenn McCartney, the British Honorary Consul to Macau.

Though scholarly research is, by its very nature, something of a solitary practice, its success is invariably dependent upon the support afforded by a network of friends both within and beyond academia. As well as the anonymous readers appointed by the press, I would especially like to acknowledge the support of Andrew Smith (University of Sheffield), Clayton MacKenzie (Zayed University), Marius-Mircea Crișan (Universitatea de Vest din Timişoara), Alison Younger (University of Sunderland), John Strachan (Bath Spa University), Darryl Jones (Trinity College Dublin), Magdalena Grabias (Maria Curie-Sklodowska University), Neil Sammells (Bath Spa University), Roger Sales (University of East Anglia), Ruth Heholt (Falmouth University), Dale Townshend (Manchester Metropolitan University), Chris Ivic (Bath Spa University), Catherine Wynne (University of Hull), Anil de Sequeira (Bath Spa University), Mariaconcetta Costantini (Università ‘G. D’Annunzio’, Pescara), Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck, University of London), Beth Wright (Bath Spa University), Fei Chen (University of Macau), Vic Sage (University of East Anglia), Paul Clarke (Manchester University Press), Samantha George (University of Hertfordshire), Angela Wright (University of Sheffield), You Chengcheng (University of Macau), William Thomas McBride (Illinois State University) and Fiona Peters (Bath Spa University). I am grateful, also, to Catherine Robinson, Brian Griffin, Mark de Fleury, Colin and Ros Edwards, and Gavin and Nicky Cologne-Brooks for their continuing friendship, and to Paul McIntosh, Derek Corlett and John Butler for keeping me in touch with the Liverpool Collegiate School. Nigel Parkinson, another Collegiate Old Boy whose illustrations often grace the pages of the Beano, supplied the caricature featured on the back cover, for which I am incredibly grateful. I would also like to thank Roger Brooks, John Cadby, David Hipperson, Mark Manning, Steve Nuttall, Martin Brown, Peter Tuite, David Asplin, Eric Brown and the late Brian Weston for their constant support, Jessica Cuthbert-Smith for her preparation of the MS, and I am also grateful to Tina Chao and Zoe Wong at the University of Macau for their consistent support over the past two years. Finally, Matthew Frost has – as always – been both the perfect publisher and a constant and true friend.

Many librarians and archivists have provided both advice and practical help during the writing of this book. My special thanks go to Simon Fazey, Alexandra Hill, Amelia Walker, Rada Vlatkovic and Tania Williams (Wellcome Collection, London); Sandra Glascock (H. Furlong Baldwin Library, Maryland Historical Society); Sarah Moxey and Moray Hannah Teale (Special Collections, National Library of Scotland); Alexandra Paynter (The Bar Council, London); and Mark Simmons (Alyth Museum). I gratefully acknowledge, also, the collegiate support of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, a scholarly body of which I am proud to be a Fellow.

Finally, I owe an immense debt of gratitude to all of the students I have taught over the past quarter of a century, many of whom did not suspect that various arguments within this current volume were being tested upon them during my seminars. In particular I would like to thank Rebecca Davey, Oliver Robinson-Sivyer, Sadie Bennett, Hamish Ratley, Becky Spicer, Leah Morris, Will Purbrook, Margherita Paone, Holly Ryan, Emily Lumbard, Bryony Curass, Ffion Davies and Michelle Falcon. Carpe noctem.

A final word

The age of the lone researcher is not past, trust me. Keep the faith, believe in yourself and in your research, and pursue knowledge. That is the best advice that I can give you.

William Hughes

Taipa, Macau, 20 September 2021

Preamble

‘This far-famed skull’: exhumation and the autopsy of talent

Suppose, for the sake of argument, that on opening Shakespeare's grave we should find nothing but his skull and a few bones. Of what good would they be to us?

Joseph Parker Norris, The Portraits of Shakespeare (1885)¹

The remains of William Shakespeare, reputedly, have lain undisturbed in their Warwickshire grave since their interment on 25 April, 1616.² Their uninterrupted repose might well be prompted by the due respect that is conventionally accorded in the British Isles to ‘the mighty genius of which Englishmen are so justly proud’, though it may equally be a consequence of the four lines of doggerel verse that distinguish the poet's monumental slab.³ This sepulchral quatrain, which may not have been written by Shakespeare himself, implores its reader thus:

Good friend, for Jesus’ sake forebeare

To digg the dust enclosed heare;

Bleste be the man that spares thes stones,

And curst be he that moves my bones.

These ominous words protect the mortal remains of William Shakespeare the Stratford burgher, a tithe-holder and man of consequence in his local community who had purchased the right to be buried within the chancel of Holy Trinity Church in 1605. The career and reputation of William Shakespeare the London actor, playwright and impresario are more colourfully memorialised, however, in the adjoining three-dimensional bust sculpted by the monumental mason Geraert Janssen (whose Dutch name is sometimes anglicised as Gerard Johnson) around 1620.

Unprotected by any graven curse, and for many years regarded as one of only two authentic records of the dramatist's visage, this polychrome monument has, however, been treated with somewhat less reverence and respect than the hallowed plot upon which its sculpted occupant gazes blankly.⁴ The nocturnal removal of the bust from its niche in 1973 or 1974 – variously attributed to ‘vandals’ or to thieves apparently searching for concealed Shakespearean manuscripts – is but the most recent of a succession of indignities to which the Bard's head and shoulders have periodically been subjected.⁵ Leaving aside the ongoing academic debate as to whether the effigy as it appears today is indeed the same one as was installed in the seventeenth century, or whether it was substantially modified (or even replaced) in 1649, 1748, 1814 or 1836, it is documented fact that the facial characteristics of the bust have been repeatedly copied and reproduced, not merely in the form of one-dimensional portraiture but on occasion as three-dimensional facsimiles.⁶ Shakespeare's purported head, it would appear, engages an enduring fascination all of its own – and one which is not necessarily aesthetic.

The bust appears to have been first removed from its niche in 1748, a plaster cast being acquired at the time by Joseph Greene, then Master of the Free Grammar School in Stratford.⁷ Another authorised casting was made in 1815, this latter occurrence being reported by a correspondent to the Gentleman's Magazine.⁸ At least one unauthorised casting is also supposed to have been taken from the head in the nineteenth century, and this alleged event was fictionalised in 1851 by Wilkie Collins (1824–89) in the sentimental Christmas novella Mr Wray's Cash-Box.⁹ Reuben Wray, a one-time minor actor at Drury Lane and now penurious teacher of elocution in the provinces, utilises the enunciation of the actor John Kemble (1757–1823) and the diction of Shakespeare's blank verse as his professional tools.¹⁰ On visiting the burial place of the Bard, Wray – who was once apprenticed to a statue-maker – is emboldened to spend a night in Holy Trinity Church without permission, and to take a reverent casting from the bust at daybreak. In justification of this apparently illegal act – which has inspired the inducement of a £10 reward for the apprehension of its perpetrator – Wray intimates to his daughter the profound effect exerted upon him by the purported authenticity, as much as the actual physical presence, of the bust. He informs her:

You looked at it, like other people, just as a curiosity – I looked at it, as the greatest treasure in the world; the only true likeness of Shakspeare! It's been done from a mask, taken from his own face, after death – I know it; I don't care what people say, I know it. Well, when we went home, I felt as if I'd seen Shakspeare himself, risen from the dead! Strangers would laugh if I told them so; but it's true – I did feel it. And this thought came across me, quick, like the shooting of a sudden pain: – I must make that face of Shakspeare mine; my possession, my companion, my great treasure that no money can pay for! And I've got it! – Here – the only cast in the world from the Stratford bust is locked up in this old cash-box!

¹¹

Collins's story is as topical as it is ironic and amusing. Reuben Wray may choose to believe that he is in possession of ‘the only true likeness of Shakespeare’ outside of Holy Trinity Church, though it is evident from the contemporary press that several other castings were in circulation – and, indeed, on public display – at the time.¹² The topicality of Collins's narrative, though, is vested not in the concrete reproduction of the bust but rather in Wray's ascription of that portrait's apparent accuracy to its origins in a death-mask.

No less an authority than the Council of the Shakespeare Society was prepared to concede in 1851 that a death-mask recently sent from Belgium to Britain was not merely ‘an extraordinary relic’ but quite possibly the most intimate record of the Bard's likeness.¹³ The so-called Becker Mask or Darmstadt Death-Mask was to become the fulcrum of a significant body of popular, as well as academic, debate which persisted into the early years of the twentieth century.¹⁴ Intriguingly, the putative relationship between the Darmstadt Death-Mask and other incarnations of Shakespeare's face continues to surface sporadically in debate, even in a twenty-first century dominated by information technology and evidenced by forensic science.¹⁵ The liveliness of the debate regarding the authenticity or otherwise of the Stratford memorial and its purported parallels, the Darmstadt Death-Mask and the Martin Droeshout engraving which prefaces the 1623 First Folio, somewhat occludes the potentially more interesting question as to why such ephemera mattered then – and, indeed, continue to matter – to both academics and the general public. The author's head, the bony enclosure that frames the creative mind, is surely no more than an evocative human signifier for the written word which forms, variously, the focus of a lifetime's study or an evening's entertainment. Its enduring place in the appreciation of textuality, therefore, might well be regarded as a residual remnant of an earlier phase in cultural and critical history, one where the face particularly, and the body more generally, were seen as somehow intimate to both character and the products of that perceived character – be they letters, poems, plays, novels, paintings or music. Shakespeare's duly authenticated face – which continues to grace the covers of critical responses to his works – is, perhaps, but the most extreme example of this phenomenon.¹⁶ Any author's face, it would appear, is significant not merely because it reassures us as to the unique and human origins of a work or works, but because it also, somehow, implicitly says something about those origins, imparts some secret or advances some explanation with regard to character, motivation or inspiration.

The bardolatrous Mr Wray succinctly fictionalises this whole issue. He wishes to own the image of his literary idol, to be sure, but in a sense he desires also somehow to possess, as much as to understand, the qualities it represents – those very qualities, it might be added, which he deploys in training and, explicitly, improving others. This much is borne out by Collins's narrator's contention with regard to Wray's (notably few) pupils:

… out of what book were they to be taught? From what manual were the clergymen and orators, the aspirants for dramatic fame, the young ladies whose delivery was ungraceful, the young gentlemen whose diction was improper, to be all alike improved! From Shakspeare – every one of them from Shakspeare!

¹⁷

The name, as enunciated here by the narrator, elides the author and his writings: it is through silently reading or vocally declaiming Shakespeare's works that these individuals will be ‘improved’ but it is the qualities represented in the visage of the dramatist which must surely be sought, and fostered, in the characters of those whom he inspires. That is why – to Wray and perhaps to others – the authentic head of Shakespeare is in many respects as important as his writings.

This much is subtly inferred in Wray's deliberate and rather meticulously described efforts to fabricate ‘a mask … just a forehead and face without the head’ directly from the bust, which he has soaped and properly prepared in order to make his matrix.¹⁸ The emphasis placed by Wray upon certain components of the face of Shakespeare is significant, and quite in accord with how his non-fictional contemporaries were apt to appreciate this – or any other – mask of genius. Wray, having reproduced the Stratford Bust from forehead to chin, declaims its qualities to his daughter in the silent presence of that monumental visage:

Look at the forehead! Who's got such a forehead now! Look at his eyes; look at his nose. He was not only the greatest man that ever lived, but the handsomest, too! Who says this isn't just what his face was; his face taken after death? Who's bold enough to say so?

¹⁹

The elision of perceived beauty and acknowledged intellectual worthiness here may suggest, in the first instance, that Wray is little more than a bardolatrous amateur physiognomist, a practitioner of a pseudoscience-cum-parlour-game which insisted that the secrets of individual character might be readily discerned from the involuntary droop of an eyelid, the habitual grimace of a mouth, or the cartilaginous contours of the ears and nose.²⁰ Be that as it may, Wray's words betray substantially more than a mere obsession with facial characteristics.

Irrespective of its inconsistencies as a practice, the perceptive and interpretative gaze of physiognomy must be regarded as a negotiation between the fixed – or bone-determined – contours and protrusions of the face and those aspects into which the features might be thrown by a habitual propensity to anger, melancholy, levity or some other powerful emotion.²¹ These latter provoke contortions in the soft tissue, this being a pliable medium manipulated by muscle rather than a thin dermal surface held rigid by unyielding and immobile bone.²² Shakespeare's face, as depicted in the Stratford Bust, would appear to be excessive in its fleshiness, almost to the point of obscuring the finer qualities that must be associated with the Bard himself. In part such things may be a matter of mere degree, or even of artistic licence. John Seeley Hart (1810–77), for example, argued that ‘artists, in moulding a bust or painting a picture, from a death-mask, always make allowance for the falling away of the flesh, and fill it out to the supposed fullness of life’.²³ Even this observation, though, does not adequately disarm a later remark by Hart, in which he contends of the Stratford Bust that ‘the expression of the eyes, so far as they have any expression, is simply that of easy, well-conditioned good nature, not overburdened with sense or intellect’.

²⁴

It is the problem posed by the ‘full and puffy’ visage of the Stratford Bust that surely underpins what might be argued to be the consistent mode of perceiving and analysing the face of Shakespeare in the nineteenth century.²⁵ For all Wray's enthusiasm, the Stratford Bust is, implicitly, aesthetically unpleasing and thus constitutes an inadequate signifier of the greatness which once reposed within the skull beneath its purported model's skin. Beyond this, its fleshiness encodes inconsistencies which set it apart from the other authenticated versions of the Bard's face. These inconsistencies cluster around the soft-tissue features of eyelids, lips and nose – key signifiers of character in the intellectual regime of physiognomy.²⁶ William Page, for example, perceives in the Stratford Bust an explicitly false portrait of the dramatist, his ‘eyes and nose grossly maimed and his cheeks hanging with formless redundancy’: the iconic three-dimensional representation of Shakespeare, therefore, can at best be regarded ‘as a hieroglyphic, or certain sign, standing for his looks rather than as an actual portrait of his face’.

²⁷

It is arguably this inconsistency between the actual appearance of the Stratford Bust and what it must represent in cultural and nationalistic terms that generated an abiding interest not merely in the ‘equally authentic’ and widely circulated Droeshout engraving but in the Darmstadt Death-Mask which was to come to public notice in Britain only in the mid-nineteenth century. This latter, for both Hart and Page, was the authentic portrait. Unencumbered by artistic interpretation and stripped of excessive fleshiness by age and the wastage of death, the Darmstadt Death-Mask represented hard fact through hard tissue – the true character embodied in the true face.²⁸ The genius of Shakespeare and the authenticity of the death-mask are thus simultaneously verified when the artefact is presented to the interpretative gaze of a perceiver who has no foreknowledge regarding the identity of the dead face he beholds. Hart recalls:

The experiment has been frequently made and uniformly with this result. It was exhibited, without a word of explanation to Hermann Grimm, the celebrated art critic of Berlin. ‘At the very first glance’, said Grimm, ‘I thought to myself that I had never seen a nobler countenance.’ ‘What a noble, clean-cut, aquiline nose; what a wonderfully shaped brow! I felt that this must have been a man in whose brain dwelt noble thoughts.’

Grimm was, quite naturally, unsurprised when he was finally informed that this was the purported face of Shakespeare – though he might well have deduced as much upon reading the date of the alleged model's death, which was inscribed into the artefact's reverse.

²⁹

The nose, in physiognomical thought, is a feature of primarily ‘ethnical and … aesthetic’ significance rather than a profound index of character.³⁰ Though the Italian physiognomist Paolo Mantegazza (1831–1910) was to proclaim the nose ‘nearly immobile’ in its fleshy objectivity, and thus apparently unresponsive to emotion, that facial feature is not supported to its full extent by unyielding bone but rather by pliable cartilage.³¹ Even in the death-mask, therefore, the ostensibly aquiline nose remains an unreliable index of character – indicative, perhaps, but not an authoritative guide. In life the nose may be contorted by some violent impact, whether accidentally or deliberately inflicted; immediately after death it may be compressed by the action of forming the matrix from which the death-mask is taken; years later, the skull denuded of flesh will exhibit no more than the recessed vertical septum and the short eminence of the nasal bone. It is arguably a consequence of the variability of pliable flesh that virtually all nineteenth-century analyses of Shakespeare's visage stress one facial component above all others, this being the only part of the mask upon which the flesh may be regarded as being unequivocally supported by bone rather than kept taut by cartilage or muscle.

The brow or forehead – accentuated in Wray's fictional account as well as in the purportedly more serious nineteenth-century interpretations of Hart, Page and Grimm – is the consistent focus of writings which read and affirm Shakespeare's genius in and through the various concrete records of his physiognomy.³² Admittedly, the brow is a conspicuous – even spacious – component of the Stratford Bust, the Droeshout engraving and their supposed derivatives. It is a prominent feature, needless to say, of the Darmstadt Death-Mask also. Not every nineteenth-century commentator, however, appears to have been convinced that its much-stressed eminence was simply a consequence of unerringly accurate reproduction. Reviewing J. Hain Friswell's Life Portraits of William Shakspeare (1864), for example, an anonymous columnist for the Morning Post suggests that the facial characteristics of a nineteenth-century mezzotint engraving of one of the derivative portraits have been manipulated to satisfy the abiding prejudice regarding the connection between Shakespeare's face and his character. The reviewer notes:

This artist seems to have been insensibly influenced by a prevailing ideal to improve the original into a resemblance, which more nearly than any other personalises our conceptions of Shakspere. He has portrayed a man of refined and superior intellect. The forehead is ample; the eyes clear, mild, and benignant, the lips thin, the mouth small and well closed, the beard graceful, and the moustache delicate.

This process of manipulation, the reviewer subsequently asserts, may in itself characterise Friswell's own attempt to produce ‘a correct description of Shakspere’ from original and derivative sources. Admittedly, this summative Bard is no more than ‘an imaginary head of Shakspere … intimately associated with our popular ideas of the poet's appearance’, but such a compound, the reviewer suggests, can be no more than ‘a Frankenstein image’ symptomatic not so much of genius itself but rather redolent of those signifiers of enhanced humanity commonly esteemed in contemporary culture.

³³

The forehead has long functioned as a cultural signifier of a capacity for thoughtfulness or originality. Johann Caspar Lavater (1741–1801), whose eighteenth-century writings were to popularise physiognomy as a putative science in Britain, for example, stated unequivocally that ‘The form, height, arching, proportion, obliquity, and position of the skull, or bone of the forehead, show the propensity, degree of power, thought and sensibility of man’.³⁴ Certainly, for enthusiasts of Shakespeare's work, the very presence of that feature served to confirm the genius of the Bard. Addressing the Town Council of Stratford-on-Avon in October 1883, for example, Alderman E. Gibbs was provoked to remark that ‘A low-browed man never portrayed all the workings, passions, and foibles of our natures, nor possessed such a brilliant imagination as our immortal bard’.³⁵ The signifying forehead, though, is not the unique property of the physiognomist, amateur or professional. The brow's positioning at the junction of face and scalp facilitates its parallel signification in the rather more elaborate pseudoscience of phrenology. The two pseudosciences are, at times, almost congruent not merely in terms of their specific epistemologies but also because the practitioners of one discipline might, on occasion, be found as explicit practitioners of the other. Consider here the opinion of R. B. D. Wells, writing in a popular manual of physiognomy, Faces We Meet and How to Read Them (c. 1875):‘Phrenologists usually claim the forehead as belonging exclusively to their science, inasmuch as it is a part of the head. Physiognomists, on the other hand, insist that it is a part of the face, and hence claim it as their own, but we think that each may just claim an equal share.’ ³⁶ Wells was not a physiognomist but, as the title page of his book intimates, a professional phrenologist, with consulting rooms in Pavilion Place, Scarborough.

³⁷

Acknowledging Wells's ascription of the place accorded to the forehead in both physiognomy and phrenology, the twenty-first-century reader might be forgiven for wondering why Wray did not cast the entire head of Shakespeare's bust, in order to make a phrenological rather than physiognomical cast. The reasons for his actions can be readily identified from contemporary descriptions of the Stratford Bust. The opinion of the novelist and biographer J. Hain Friswell (1825–78), in Life Portraits of William Shakspeare, is unequivocal. Friswell writes:

The skull of the figure, rudely cut and heavy, without any feeling, is a mere block; a phrenologist would be puzzled at its smoothness and roundness. It has no more individuality or power in it than a boy's marble. The cheeks are fat and sensual, the neck just rounded out of the soft stone; the linen collar of the dress like a sheet of bent block tin. Still a certain veneration and love for the old statue must be accorded by all lovers of Shakspeare; bad as it is, it is the most universally accredited and beloved likeness of the poet.

³⁸

Writer and reviewer concur on the veneration customarily accorded to the familiar image. As an icon, it has answered the purposes of the times during which it has been reproduced, and has mobilised – however obliquely – a cultural function that unites, in the body of the man as much as in the body of his work, original creativity and a type of national identity. Likewise, the compound – or ‘Frankenstein’ – image advanced by Friswell at the conclusion of Life Portraits of William Shakspeare may be said to serve much the same purpose as the variants on the familiar Bardic visage that precede it in his study. Like Victor Frankenstein, Friswell has carefully selected the physiognomical components of his creation, though in this case not for primarily aesthetic purposes.³⁹ Their function here is not to please but to signify within the grammar of two popular Victorian models of character. This is the face, in other words, that Shakespeare ought to have, one which testifies to and affirms his genius, according to the overlapping conventions of physiognomy and phrenology. Friswell's sculptural Bard is thus familiar, yet heavily accented, and presents its salient features with the authority of corroborative evidence. Witness, therefore, ‘the chin round and full (Bust, Droeshout Print, and Print by Marshall); the jaw strong and powerful (Droeshout Print and Bust); the forehead ample, broad, and high, the supra-orbital ridges oval and well marked (Felton, Head, Bust and Droeshout)’.

⁴⁰

This is an image of Shakespeare determined by hard bony contours rather than soft, malleable flesh. Far from being a singular statement, it is one of several Victorian interpretations of the relics of Shakespeare's head which prioritise those bony prominences. With regard to the Stratford Bust, for example, William Page asserted his own convictions regarding ‘the want of harmony or congruity between the bony structure of the frontal head and posterior, and the other parts, such as the eyes and cheeks and nose, which the ignorance of the sculptor interfered with’.⁴¹ Indeed, for Page as for Friswell, ‘The bones of the facial part of the bust alone bear some congruity to nature. The back part has no family likeness to her or to Shakespeare himself’.⁴² From interpretations such as these, it seems clear that if we have no authenticated skull from which to take a cast, then we must speculate those qualities into being, and map the missing head from the reputation as much as from variant portraiture. As the Morning Post's reviewer suggests, Friswell is engaged in a search for ‘symptoms of the genius’ of his chosen subject.

⁴³

Collins's associate, Charles Dickens (1812–70), was, characteristically, wryly ironic on the apparent relationships which may pertain between an exhumed head and a presumed genius. Writing to William Sandys on 13 June 1847 – just two years before the first British exhibition of the Darmstadt Death-Mask – the popular novelist expressed a sense of relief that so much about the Bard remained obscure in the nineteenth century, observing pithily that ‘If he had had a Boswell, society wouldn't have respected his grave, but would calmly have had his skull in the phrenological shop-windows’.⁴⁴ Such a proposal of exhumation and explication was indeed mooted in 1864, in Dickens's lifetime, ‘in the interests of physical and moral science’.⁴⁵ Some twenty years later, Dr Clement Ingleby, a life-trustee of the Shakespeare Birthplace museum, again proposed an exhumation, in part to settle the ongoing debate regarding the authenticity or otherwise of the various portraits of the dramatist.⁴⁶ This latter proposal was firmly repulsed by the secular guardians of Stratford's heritage – the redoubtable Alderman Gibbs among them – even though the incumbent of Holy Trinity Church was himself widely reported to be in favour of exhuming the Bard's skull.⁴⁷ The popular press, though, at times exhibited a somewhat exasperated impatience with the speciousness of the whole project. What, indeed, was the point of exhuming and exhibiting an authenticated skull ‘scientifically scrutinised by a commission of artists’ in the context of a public perception already so firmly shaped by variant portraiture? As the Morning Post noted,

Though existing busts and portraits may differ in detail, they have sufficed to create in all our minds an ideal picture of SHAKSPERE. Who would care to be convinced, even on the clearest evidence, that he had not the noble square brow, the firm lips, deep set eyes, and somewhat severe and melancholy face we have all been familiar with from childhood?

⁴⁸

Coverage of the debate around Ingleby's proposal was substantial in the British popular press.⁴⁹ The tone, when not exasperated, was characteristically saturated with the rhetoric of nationalistic and cultural indignation. An anonymous contributor to the Morning Post, for example, truculently asserted that

It will be nothing less than a great national scandal should a few enthusiasts succeed in carrying out this desecration of our proudest ashes, and the assertion of foreign countries that we were and are unworthy of our immortal bard will at length be abundantly justified.

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This pointed indignation from a correspondent to the English popular press, however, contrasts with how the British press generally, and the Scottish press specifically, had marked the exhumation of another national bard, Robert Burns (1759–96), some fifty years earlier.

Burns's death on 21 July 1796 was reported with a mixture of admiration, pity and condescension in the English press. He was, for the General Evening Post, ‘the pupil of nature, the poet of inspiration’, though his personal excesses were remarked upon in as much detail as his rise from a ploughman's humble status.⁵¹ The Scottish press, its words syndicated to English periodicals, was perhaps a little more indulgent: a short notice in the St James's Chronicle, or the British Evening Post, for example, lamented the passing of ‘a mind guided only by the lights of Nature and the inspirations of Genius’.⁵² Burns's funeral, in a relatively obscure corner of St Michael's Kirkyard, Dumfries, was noted for its solemnity and the military honours accorded to the poet by his brethren in arms.⁵³ The fate of Jean Armour Burns (1765–1834), the poet's widow, who was at the time pregnant with his final child, also claimed the sympathy of the press across Britain both before and following his interment.

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Scottish sentiment, though, was extended to the dead as much as to the living, and the canonising of Burns as a national, as well as dialect, poet prompted a subscription in support of a more conspicuous monument to his memory on the opposite side of the kirkyard.⁵⁵ In consequence of this, and with full public knowledge and approval, the poet's remains were – according to a report syndicated to the Morning Chronicle from the Dumfries Courier on the occasion of the death of Jean Armour Burns – ‘exhumed privately, on the 19th September 1815, and deposited with every regard to decency, in the arched vault attached to the Mausoleum, newly erected in honour of his memory’.

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Whatever the nature of the solemn decorum originally intended to accompany Burns's disinterment, the fragile state of his coffin was to facilitate a rather more intimate encounter with the poet's remains. Burns's tomb was opened before sunrise on 19 September 1815, specifically to prevent the scene being perceived by ‘early risers and accidental observers’. Despite this wise precaution, ‘an immense crowd besieged the front of St Michael's’, some even gaining a vantage point near the opened tomb in defiance of the ‘carefully locked’ gates of the kirkyard. Those formally in attendance, the Morning Chronicle testily notes, ‘discharged, with the greatest sternness, their duty as sentinels, by repressing all attempts at obtaining bones, relics, or indeed anything connected with the respective coffins of the Bard and his two sons’.⁵⁷ Their proximity to the tomb, however, made them witnesses of a spectacle, the significance of which would come