A letter about a phrenologist, by Ephraim Grimshaw

An original letter written in a nineteenth-century voice; a period simulation, not an archival document.

In this letter, written in 1858, an ironmonger tells his brother about having his character read by a phrenologist, who claimed to judge a person’s talents from the shape of the skull.

My dear Mordecai,

You will wish to know whether I went to the phrenologist after all, and I confess that I did, though I told the shop boy I was going to the bank. Mr Vavasour has hired the back parlour of the Golden Lion for a week, and the town talks of nothing else. His card offers to reveal ‘the whole Character from the Contours of the Head’, at one shilling for a spoken reading or half a crown with a written chart.

He is a tall, damp sort of man in a velvet waistcoat, and he smelt of hair oil and peppermints. He sat me by the window, took my head between his hands as a woman takes up a melon at market, and kneaded it for a full five minutes, humming. Then he wrote a great deal very quickly and read it out to me in a voice like a curate’s.

I have, it seems, a fine organ of Benevolence and a large one of Hope. My bump of Order is ‘sadly deficient’. And I have, he said, no head for figures, and ought on no account to be trusted with money, but would have made an excellent musician.

Mordecai, I have kept the books of this shop for twenty-six years and never once been a farthing out. I cannot whistle a hymn tune.

I paid my half crown, because I had promised it, and walked home with the chart rolled under my arm. At the shop door I tore it across twice and put the pieces in the stove, and then I sat down and added up the week’s takings, and they were correct to the penny.

Your affectionate brother,

Ephraim

(a) How much did a reading with a written chart cost? (b) According to the phrenologist, what did the writer have no head for? (c) What do the writer’s actions after he reaches the shop door suggest about his reaction to the reading?