Introduction

The influence of that unpretending treatise has extended to hundreds of thousands of minds which know not whence they derived the new light that has broken in upon them, and percolated into thousands of circles that are scarcely conscious of knowing more about Mr. Combe than his name, and the fact that he was a phrenologist. This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts covered in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book argues that the phrenological naturalism, which stemmed from Gall and Enlightenment Europe, further modified in the phrenology controversies and then advanced by Combe, became one of the most influential ideological and cultural developments in Victorian Britain. Ironically, the history of phrenology in English has been without a head. Based in part on the tendentious accounts of the phrenologists themselves, the science's German origins were reduced to vague rumours and unfounded legends.