national movement led by Fowler. Practical Phrenology, his distilla-
tion of road lectures and innumerable pamphlets, went through at
least sixty-two printings in the nineteenth century.
There were phrenological children’s books, phrenological alma-
nacs, 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 employ-
ers, Denton Offutt, was for many years more famous for authoring 'A
New and Complete System of Teaching t/Je Horse on Phrenalogical
Principles' than for mentoring the gangly young manic-depressive
he'd kept in his law office.
*
Beginning in the 1830s, a curious tendency arose in fiction: authors
were expected to introduce their characters with a detailed descrip-
tion 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 Wash-
ington’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- t/aingr—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.
*
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 develop-
ment- of one’s diet and exercise and behavior—become of para-
mount importance. “Behold, moreover, the great procuring cause of I
man’s depravity, and consequent wretchedness,” Fowler explains in
his guide Se§’Culz‘ure. “Namely, 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 I
flesh, condiments, narcotics, gluttony, and fermented liquors, and
substitute farinaceous food, cold water, and a light diet—must learn if
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 séances 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 them-
selves 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 imagme being dead because they’d just gained,
with the1846 debut of ether anesthesia, the remarkable ability to
sink into a temporarily 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 mes-
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 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 ap—
peared, yet another found its way into stores. The author of 14 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,
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