Mark Twain Had His Head Examined

Abstract

JN THE WINTER OF I900-I90I, Mark Twain, having returned from years of wandering abroad, settled with his family in a large furnished house at I4 West Tenth Street, New York City. In February, I9OI, the North American Review carried his scathing article, To the Person Sitting in Darkness, and the public began to discern in their veteran fun-maker a crusading, reforming spirit. Besieged by editors, reporters, and lecture agents, Samuel Clemens was becoming Huck Finn with a gun, the preacher of the new Gospel of St. Mark.' It was during this period of his life that Mark Twain underwent, for at least the third time, a phrenological examination-the nineteenth-century ancestor of a psychoanalysis. Both the examination and the phrenological portrait that resulted from it appear to have gone unnoticed by his hosts of biographers and critics. This neglected analysis of Mark Twain deserves to be rescued from oblivion, affording as it does a comparatively early insight into the tragic or serious character of the great humorist. Mark Twain's examiner was a member of New York's most successful firm of phrenologist-publishers, Fowler and Wells. Their office was located in a four-story and basement brownstone building at 27 East Twenty-first Street,2 which, having been remodeled to furnish a bookstore, business offices, examination department, lecture room and Cabinet or Museum, was known as the Golgotha of Gotham-a veritable House of Skulls. There, or possibly at his own home on West Tenth Street, the sixty-five-year-old Mark Twain bared his cranium to the manipulations of the Fowler and Wells examiner and the results of his analysis were recorded in the firm's periodical, the Phrenological Journal and Science of Health, in the issue of April, I9OI.