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Know Thyself? Did Phrenology Help William Powell Frith Address Middle- Class Victorian Crowd Anxiety?

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Know Thyself? Did Phrenology Help William Powell Frith Address Middle- Class Victorian Crowd Anxiety? Know thyself? Did Phrenology help William Powell Frith address middle- class Victorian crowd anxiety? JANE DE BENEDUCCI Lorenzo Niles Fowler’s Phrenology bust of circa 1850 has achieved a modern iconic status as an artefact that represents either a quackish pseudoscience or early attempts to understand the functions of the brain. Fowler maintained that Phrenology could allow you to ‘know yourself’. This article will investigate the history and context of Phrenology to understand why knowing thyself and others aided William Figure. 1. William Powell Frith, Ramsgate Sands (Life at the Seaside), 1854, Oil on Canvas. (Collection: Royal Collection Trust / © Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II 2017 Powell Frith’s painting Ramsgate Sands (Life Ref RCIN 405068) at the Seaside) (1854) to be interpreted by the public as a celebration of the crowd. Disparaged by several prospective that the crowd is diverse enough to right to be there. The crowd became herds, while they only recover their purchasers as ‘a tissue of vulgarity’ and offer the ‘excitement of modernity’ but a social and democratic leveller as senses slowly and one by one.’ Logan a ‘piece of vulgar cockney business’,1 holds fast to the tightly knit normative never before. Industrialisation and notes that whatever mania, delusion, William Powell Frith’s (1818-1909) middle-class family unit.3 The painting the population growth of cities such or protest Mackay uses as an example narrative panorama of a British seaside is crowded but gentle and domestic, with as London, Manchester, and Liverpool of crowd behaviour, they always have town was exhibited to great acclaim at no hint of crime or vice that comes in throughout the 1800s created problems adverse results.5 This deep suspicion of the Summer Exhibition of The Royal his later renowned paintings Derby Day that were not new but vastly magnified. crowd behaviour remained consistent KNOW THYSELF? Academy in 1854. One of the highlights (1858) and The Railway Station (1862). The poverty, over-crowding and and powerful throughout the Victorian VIDES of that year, it proved immediately The seashore occupants are relaxed, the unsanitary conditions of urban era. In Gustave Le Bon’s The Crowd popular with the viewing public who reading, crocheting, talking, lounging working-class housing and streets (1895), written over fifty years later, lined up to see it where a guard rail was on chairs that seem to come from their provided a breeding ground for diseases Plotz states that Le Bon, like Mackay, put in place to protect Ramsgate Sands houses. In a modern shift, Frith places such as cholera, typhus and typhoid still chose to make passing events such (Life at the Seaside). The Athenaeum, ordinary domestic pleasures in the that spread easily through the socially as violent working-class protest appear The Times, and Punch all gave it good seaside’s public domain and produces diverse crowds of cities. Violence and as ‘a deep-seated fact of the human coverage, with The Art Journal astutely a work that is neither simplistic nor crime were an ever-present threat psyche’.6 predicting it would become valuable sentimental. The innovative panoramic due to poverty and unemployment. JANE DE BENEDUCCI / ‘as a memento of the people, habits narrative of a predominantly middle- Streets thronged with beggars, Negative visual representations of and manners of the English at the class crowd enjoying their leisure by aggressive street vendors, prostitutes urban crowds were famously depicted seaside’.2 Further proof of its success the sea thrilled its viewers with the and pickpockets that even middle- by Hogarth in the 18th century, of whom came when Queen Victoria and Prince meticulous detail, modern subject and upper-class citizens could not be Frith was an admirer. Contemporary Albert, on viewing, immediately sought matter and setting. immune from. paintings by Gustave Dore and Luke to purchase the painting. Fildes built on these illustrations. Frith’s painting was exhibited at The Peterloo massacre of 1819 and the Similar literary descriptions were Measuring 77cm x 155cm, Life at the a time when the public space had Chartists’ meetings, demonstrations found in the fictional works of William Seaside, as it was originally titled, become a sphere of anxiety. The shape and risings that led to violence and Blake, Charlotte Bronte, Thomas de features over 100 characters and an of the urban crowd changed forever deaths in the 1830s and ‘40s marked Quincey, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth array of town buildings familiar to in the decades preceding the 1850s. a damaging change in the perception Gaskell, and John Ruskin. Henry Victorian visitors of Ramsgate. The During the first half of the century, of the working-class crowd by the Mayhew’s journalistic report on the viewer is unusually placed in the sea the population of Britain doubled Government and the public alike. London Labour and the London Poor 4 looking towards the paraphernalia of to approximately 18,000,000. The Any crowd could become a ‘mob’ and (1851) provided verbatim evidence recognisable seaside sights, a Punch exploding population of the Victorian potentially erupt into physical disorder of grim urban conditions. William and Judy stand, bathing machines, cities that merged onto streets, squares that created an undercurrent of anxiety Thackeray’s comment on Mayhew’s donkeys and performing animals. and parks had disconnected the social and tension. Charles Mackay’s widely report in Punch of that year describes However, it is the ordinary people that boundaries of previous centuries, with read text Extraordinary Popular Delusions the ambivalent experiences of inner- dominate the scene. Arscott comments each part of society claiming its own and the Madness of Crowds (1841) stated city existence, ‘A picture of human life that ‘Men, it has been said, think in so wonderful, so awful… so exciting 1 Jeremy Paxman, The Victorians (London: Random House, 2009). p. 22. herds; it will be seen they go mad in 2 Christopher Wood, William Powell Smith. A Painter and His World (Stroud: Sutton Publishing, 2006). p. 38. 3 Caroline Arscott, ‘William Powell Smith’s The Railway Station. Classification and the Crowd’, in William Powell Smith. Painting the Victorian Age, ed. by Mark Bills and Vivien Knight (London: Yale University Press, 2006), pp. 78–93. p. 167. 5 Peter Melville Logan, ‘The Popularity of “Popular Delusions”: Charles Mackay and Victorian Popular Cul- ture’, Cultural Critique, 2003, 213–41 <http://www.jstor.org/stable/1354664>. 4 Mary Cowling, Victorian Figurative Painting. Domestic Life and the Contemporary Scene (London: Andreas Pa- padakis, 2000), p. 89. 6 John Plotz, The Crowd. British Literature and Politics (London: University of California Press, 2000). p. 4. 197 198 and terrible’.7 The urban crowd was a human brains and examining skulls, mirror of Victorian modernity that was Gall identified 27 common organs or both terrifying and exhilarating. The faculties within the brain and promoted science of Phrenology offered stability a Theory of Organology. Galls’ colleague within this chaos. Spurzheim modified this around 1820 to a total of 35 faculties that are innate Morrell states that Darwinism has and whose size was reflected in the KNOW THYSELF? distorted for the modern reader the shape of the skull. This modification importance of other life sciences that formed the basis for the newly named were emerging during the first half of science of Phrenology which used the nineteenth century that included Spurzheim’s revisions to construct Phrenology, geology, anthropology, textbooks, manuals, busts, and conduct and psychiatry.8 The prominence of examinations that remained constant Phrenology to Frith’s audience of the for over 100 years.10 1854 Summer Exhibition phenology cannot be underestimated. The prolific Phrenology was fiercely debated number of Phrenology pamphlets, in scientific and intellectual circles journals, books, self-assessment charts during the early decades of the 1800s. published, and lectures given on the Critics noted that contradictory subject between 1800 and 1850 attest to evidence was explained away while its popularity.9 Numerous Phrenology ‘facts’ that correlated opportunely to societies flourished throughout Great individuals remained. The popularity Britain, attended by men of science and of Phrenology rested partly on its learning and middle and working-class simplistic formula of measuring skulls men and women. For Great Britain, and feeling for bumps and indentations Phrenology consisted of two phases: with callipers and craniometers that a scientific phase from 1800-1820, correlated to Spurzheim’s standardised dominated by Viennese physician system. However, it was to George Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and his Combe that Phrenology owed a larger colleague Johann Spurzheim (1776- debt. George Combe (1788-1858), an 1832) and a social improvement phase Edinburgh lawyer, attended several from 1820-1850 spearhead by George lectures given by Spurzheim in 1819 Combe (1788-1858). Around 1800 after and became enthralled by this science’s 20 years of painstaking dissection of the possibilities. Phrenology’s sustained Figure. 2. A System of Phrenology. George Combe (1830) Public Domain. Figure. 3. L.N. Fowler, Ceramic Phrenology Bust, circa 1850, Public Domain. 7 Mary Shannon, ‘Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor’, British Library, 2014 <https://www. bl.uk/romantics-and-victorians/articles/henry-mayhews-london-labour-and-the-london-poor> [accessed 1 February 2021]. 8 Jack Morrell, ‘Brains of Britain’, Social Studies of Science, 16.4 (1986), pp. 735–45 <https://doi.org/10.1177/03 0631286016004010>. 9 Fenneke Sysling, ‘Science and Self-Assessment: Phrenological Charts 1840–1940’, 51.2 (2018), 261–80 <https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087418000055>. 10 Ibid, p. 6 199 200 popularity during the Victorian era from traits from the external appearance 1820-1850, which became known as that had previously been considered the ‘Phrenology Craze’, has much to do the most pervasive Western personality with Combe’s book On the Constitution theory.14 Johann Caspar Lavater (1749- of Man and its Relation to External Objects 1801), a Swiss theologian and poet, (1828).
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