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Phrenology and the Social Education of Young Men

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 February 2017

Allan S. Horlick
Allan S. Horlick*
Affiliation:
New York University
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Extract

The numbers of native young men who began flooding American cities in the 1840s and 1850s were faced with a bewildering array of problems. Opportunities they had been led to believe were available for the asking appeared more difficult to lay hands on. Employers were unexpectedly reluctant to hire them and they themselves began to realize how unsure they were about what they wanted to do in a strange environment.

Type
Making it in Nineteenth-Century America
Information
History of Education Quarterly , Volume 11 , Issue 1 , Spring 1971 , pp. 23 - 38
Copyright
Copyright © 1971 History of Education Quarterly 

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References

Notes

1. This generalization clearly cannot be applied with the same ease as it might have been in the very recent past. Interestingly the social and institutional crisis we are currently experiencing is producing a revival of such “ancient sciences” as phrenology for reasons similar to those marking their rise a century and a half ago. See the remarks on education in Sybil Leek, Phrenology (New York: Collier Books, 1970), pp. 133–34.Google Scholar

2. Davies, John D., Phrenology, Fad and Science: A Nineteenth Century Crusade (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), p. 14.Google Scholar

3. Ibid., pp. 4–5.Google Scholar

4. Ibid., p. 33.Google Scholar

5. Ibid., p. 35.Google Scholar

6. Ibid., p. 34.Google Scholar

7. Ibid., p. 47.Google Scholar

8. Ibid., p. 52.Google Scholar

9. Ibid., p. 56.Google Scholar

10. American Phrenological Journal (hereafter cited as APJ), XXVII (1858), iv. (Italics added.)Google Scholar

11. Davies, Phrenology, p. 62. (For most of the above material Davies provides no documentation.)Google Scholar

12. APJ, XXV (1857), 59.Google Scholar

13. Ibid.Google Scholar

14. Ibid., XXV (1857), 28.Google Scholar

15. Writers of the advice books which proliferated during this period quickly incorporated the new advances into their later works. Alcott, William A., in his Familiar Letters to Young Men (Buffalo: G. H. Derby and Company, 1849), included chapters on the advantages of phrenology and its related sciences physiology and physiognomy.Google Scholar

16. APJ, IX (1847), 19.Google Scholar

17. Ibid., IX (1847), 263. For another example see Davies, Phrenology, p. 50.Google Scholar

18. APJ, XXV (1857), 28.Google Scholar

19. See for example Taylor, Bayard, John Godfrey's Fortunes (New York: G. P. Putnam, Hurd & Houghton, 1865).Google Scholar

20. See for example accounts of the lives of college president Mark Hopkins, journalist Matthew Hale Smith, and educator Thomas Gallaudet.Google Scholar

21. APJ, XXV (1857), 57.Google Scholar

22. S., O. and Fowler, L. N., New Illustrated Self-Instructor in Phrenology and Physiology… (New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1859), pp. viii, 167–75.Google Scholar

23. Ibid., p. 176.Google Scholar

24. There is no way of knowing where the meeting took place. Fowler's comments about the examination are found in the copy of the Self-Instructor that he presented to Hopkins (now in the possession of Stephen Nissenbaum, Department of History, University of Massachusetts).Google Scholar

25. Fowler, and Fowler, , Self-Instructor, p. 101. “Very large” acquisitiveness made a man too eager for riches and thereby doomed him to illicit dealing and eventual ruin, ibid., p. 100.Google Scholar

26. Ibid., p. 101.Google Scholar

27. Davies, Phrenology, p. 166.Google Scholar

28. APJ, XXV (1857), 34. (Italics added.)Google Scholar

29. Ibid., XXV (1857), 2.Google Scholar

30. Ibid. Google Scholar

31. See “The Quiet Man's Philosophy,” APJ, XXVI (1857), 67; also Sizer, Nelson, Choice of Pursuits: or, What to Do, and Why, Describing Seventy-Five Trades and Professions and the Talents and Temperaments Required for Each… (New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1876), pp. 121–24.Google Scholar

32. [Samuel Roberts Wells], How to do Business: A Pocket Manual of Practical Affairs and Guide to Success in Life… (New York: Fowlers & Wells, 1857), p. 55.Google Scholar

33. Ibid., p. 83.Google Scholar

34. Sizer, Choice of Pursuits, p. 12.Google Scholar

35. Ibid. Google Scholar

36. Ibid., p. 16. See also ibid., pp. 41–42.Google Scholar