Beginning in the 1830s, New York City had a curious business called the Phrenological Cabinet. It was owned by brothers Orson and Lorenzo Fowler, and their sister and brother-in law, Charlotte and Samuel Wells. They studied phrenology, which entails the belief that a person’s mentality and character can be determined by the size and shape of the skull, and that those characteristics can be generalized to entire racial groups. To this end, they collected evidence in the form of head casts, busts, portraits, and human skulls.
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The Cabinet included replicas of famous busts depicting such men as William Shakespeare, Napoleon Bonaparte, and George Washington, as well as casts of “persons of eminence in talent and virtue.” They advertised specimens from “pirates, murderers, robbers, thieves, forgers, gamblers, pickpockets,” and more. Peter Robinson, who was described as having a “base, coarse, animal character,” sat among these.
Fowler & Wells spared no expense in filling the Cabinet. In his preface to an 1875 catalogue listing some conents of the Cabinet, which by then was located on Broadway near Astor Place, Samuel Wells described how “an artist was kept in requisition” to obtain casts of the famous and infamous, “and large sums of money have thus been expended sometimes, as a premium, for obtaining the head of some singular or vicious character.” In 1864, Wells specified that over the previous 25 years, they had paid “not less than $30,000” for busts, casts, and skulls. In today’s currency, that’s nearly half a million dollars.
As their reputation spread, people began offering skulls for sale from all over. As you can imagine, many of them came from suspicious circumstances. Fowler & Wells were not overly concerned about whether the skulls came from war, murder, or genocide. Read about the Phrenology Cabinet at Atlas Obscura.
Source: neatorama