7 - More Head Readings and a Phrenological Farewell

Summary

Samuel Clemens had at least two more head readings. He might have done the 1884 reading in Cincinnati for the publicity since he was on a lecture tour. The second was in Manhattan in 1901, and it could have been to gather material for his novel Eddypus. These head readings were published. Unsurprisingly, they accounted for all Mark Twain’s known traits and “sanguine” (now presented as “mental-motive”) temperament. We also see how Twain continued to use phrenological terms and ideas to make his verbal portraits even more memorable. In A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, for example, he brings up “what slavery could do, in the way of ossifying what one may call the superior lobe of human feeling.” Phrenology can also be found in lesser-read works, including A Double Barrelled Detective Story, his spoof on Sherlock Holmes. The remainder of Chapter 7 presents what Lorenzo Fowler’s surviving daughter wrote about Mark Twain and his head in 1904 and what was written about him when he died in 1910, including how he “only wrote in a humorous way to make people sit up and take notice of what he wanted to tell them.”