Library Briefings

19th-century satire

Special Collections etchings caricature the "science" of phrenology

George Cruikshank’s hand-colored etchings satirize the theories of Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), whose controversial pseudo-science of phrenology was a topic of debate through much of the nineteenth century. Cruikshank (1792-1878) had a long and prolific career, learning to etch as a child in the studio of his father, the caricaturist Isaac Cruikshank, and getting his own political and theatrical caricatures published as a young teenager. His style was much influenced by that of political caricaturist James Gillray (1757-1815), and besides inheriting thematic and stylistic elements from Gillray, Cruikshank made this inheritance emblematically literal by obtaining Gillray’s work table after the latter’s death. (The McCormick Library has a fine collection of Gillray prints donated by alumni Lawrence D. Stewart and Donald K. Adams.)

The insouciant images in Cruikshank's book Phrenological Illustrations* depict the curious and often curiously named “organs” of phrenology, those sections of the brain believed to be the physical locations for attributes as conceptually diverse (and difficult to define) as “Philoprogenitiveness,” “Adhesiveness,” “Veneration,” “Firmness,” and “Time,” all of which were thought to be discrete lords of mappable colonies of the empire of the brain. The size and thus, the theory goes, particular potency of these regions were thought to be perceivable by corresponding bumps in an individual’s skull. Cruikshank’s first image, from the title page of this book, burlesques such brain charts as this standard one (1) with this one of his own (2): gleeful, pert, and vigorously frantic.

The images on the pages that follow make light of the pomposity and conceptual instability of the phrenological organs with literal, punning, and deflating images. The illustration for “Philoprogenitiveness” (the love of having children) is of an anarchically large family at home. The organ of “Comparison” (3) shows a sidewalk meeting of two easily distinguishable types. “Veneration” (4), which to phrenologists was the locale of the worship and adoration of God, is in Cruikshank more carnal, more carnivorous. For “Imitation” (5), Cruikshank depicts a lecturing phrenologist; in his text note on this image he writes that, according to phrenology, all men possessing a large organ of Imitation “like to be actors,” and thereby he shows phrenology to be a form of show-business quackery. Cruikshank’s “Adhesiveness” (6) is far from the homoerotic, democracy building “Adhesiveness” of Walt Whitman, a later believer of phrenology, whose second edition of Leaves of Grass would be published by the Fowlers, America’s pre-eminent phrenological proselytizers

In these and other pictures, Cruikshank is attentive to details of the fashions and sights of his contemporary London, showing a skill for evoking atmosphere he would also display in his many book illustrations, for Dickens and others. This was Cruikshank’s first self-published book, and it was successful enough in formula to lead him to publish similar works.

The art of pictorial caricature typically involves the exaggeration of facial features and body parts to convey aspects of personality. Cruikshank’s book, which caricatures a supposed science in which the relative size of bumps in the skull reveals personality, is thus neatly double-edged.

Scott Krafft

*Phrenological Illustrations, or, An Artist’s View of the Craniological System of Doctors Gall and Spurzheim. London, G. Cruikshank, 1827.