Phrenology and physiognomy in Victorian literature.

Phrenology evolved from the work of Franz Joseph Gall (1758-1828) and Johann Gaspar Spurzheim (1776-1832), becoming a fixture in Victorian culture, arts and letters as well as medicine. Writers such as Thomas Love Peacock (1785-1866) and Thomas Hood (1799-1845) initially satirized phrenology, as did playwright and composer William S. Gilbert (1836-1911). On the other hand, novelists such as Charlotte Brontë (1816-1855), Charles Dickens (1812-1870), George Eliot (1819-1880), and the poet and essayist Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) not only accepted the principles of this brain-based personality theory but exploited it in their characters. The popularity of phrenology in the Victorian period should in part be attributed to the popularity of physiognomy which, thanks in large part to Johann Christian Lavater (1741-1801), has been thoroughly embedded in Western culture since the end of the eighteenth century.