The Dome of Thought

The dome of thought is an accessible and lively history of the Victorian pseudoscience of phrenology. It makes extensive use of the popular accounts found in contemporary newspapers and journals, the majority of this material being reproduced for the first time since the nineteenth century. The dome of thought is the first study of how the Victorian public understood and reacted to the pseudoscience of phrenology. Drawing on the content of popular newspapers, published reports of phrenological meetings and demonstrations, and reviews of publications spanning the full extent of the nineteenth century, this book provides not merely a comprehensive history of phrenology in Britain but also an insight into the social, financial, literary and cultural politics of the pseudoscience, as well as its association with contemporary ideas about gender, criminality and race.This book is far more than a history of medical quackery, however. Phrenological ideas shaped the writings of many nineteenth-century authors, informed the ongoing debate about education, and were applied to the inmates of prisons, lunatic asylums and workhouses. The skulls of dead and living authors, including William Shakespeare, Robert Burns and George Eliot, were as likely to be subjected to phrenological analysis as those of executed criminals, while so-called practical phrenologists charted the characters of casual visitors to the consulting rooms which could as often be found on important London thoroughfares as at the end of seaside piers. The dome of thought will prove an essential and accessible resource for anybody working within the popular and literary culture of the nineteenth century. Featuring a mass of previously unreprinted accounts from both popular newspapers and specialist phrenological journals, as well as artefacts from material and visual culture, this is a unique and ground-breaking work which sheds new light on a once-important movement. 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.