From 1880, the performer Lio Medo embarked on a career as a phrenologist in colonial New Zealand and – later – Tasmania, fleeing controversy and another name. As a man of African descent, Medo laboured under heavier cultural baggage than his white brethren, not least because of a recurrent minstrel trope. Originating in the US, the joke of the ‘lack phrenologist’ sailed to Australia with minstrel troupes, sheet music and newsprint, constantly confronting real-life Black phrenologists such as Medo. A performer’s awareness and skill in navigating such representations created opportunities, even while these caricatures perpetuated oppressive racial myths. Men such as Lio Medo therefore plied popular science within a paradox, the signifier of skin attracting attention that added to the usual phrenological work of winning improved social status. For Lio Medo, signs of identity emanated not just from a top hat and a gold watch, but from his very body.

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.”

Mark Twain now began to lampoon the head readers as cheats and frauds. He first did this in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, which appeared in 1876, and continued to do so in its sequel, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, which appeared eight years later. He described Tom Sawyer’s Aunt Polly as a believer in “phrenological frauds” and as “an easy victim” in the first of these often-paired novels. More telling, he explained how they operated in Huckleberry Finn, using a phony duke and king bilking unsuspecting victims along the Mississippi River for this purpose. These two characters mention how they rely on gathering advance information for some of their schemes, and they brag about putting on charades. As they saw it, phrenology was an easy-entry business that anyone with a good set of eyes and ears along with some acting skills could exploit. This chapter also presents Twain’s use of phrenology in Life on the Mississippi, a book he completed in 1883 after returning to St. Louis and to relive the river between it and New Orleans.

Samuel Clemens, later adopt to write under “Mark Twain,” spent his formative years in Hannibal, Missouri, a town on the Mississippi River. After his father died, he began working for printers. While just a teenager, he carefully observed various performers stopping in the town. He was especially taken by a mesmerist and tried to become his assistant. After failing to become hypnotized, he faked being in a trance and fooled everyone by “reading” the audience to guess what the mesmerist was compelling him to do and gathering advance information about people he would mention in his trance. This experience might have made him suspicious of the itinerant phrenologist he watched in 1850, one of many now visiting small towns. The townsfolk flocked to him and adored him. But what most registered on young Clemens was how the phrenologist was giving every client a glowing report, as if each was another George Washington. This observation made him wonder if there were anything to the head readings or whether the phrenologist was just out to dupe his clients. Still, he recognized that phrenology might be a quick and helpful way to judge character and of use to a writer.

Samuel Clemens left Hannibal for more promising St. Louis in 1853, where he continued to work in the printing trade. In his notebook from 1855, he mentioned how he was reading George Sumner Weaver’s phrenology book. He was so enthralled with it that he copied parts and the skull diagram into his notebook. In 1857, he became a riverboat pilot, a far more exciting and lucrative job. When the Civil War ended river traffic from the North to New Orleans, he headed west with his older brother, now secretary for the Nevada territory. He now began to write for local newspapers, presenting himself as “Mark Twain.” He next tried mining and writing in California, where his hilarious jumping frog story from 1865 was his first nationally acclaimed piece. It led to commissions for pieces on the people and places he would now see, including Hawaii, Europe, and the Middle East. He would present some of his experiences in his travel books, including The Innocents Abroad (1869) and Roughing It. He used phrenological terms, concepts, and portraits in these works, even poking phrenological fun at himself. He did not, however, denigrate phrenology or the head readers in these works.

Clemens must have continued to have his doubts about the head readers into the 1870s, because he decided to conduct an experiment of his own on a leading head reader in 1872. Having discovered some of the tricks mediums were using, he made two trips to Lorenzo Fowler’s phrenological emporium in London. He dressed and acted like a nobody during the first trip. Then, after some weeks had passed, he returned and presented himself as the famous American humorist and author Mark Twain. He would later describe his great awakening in a short but serious published letter, and with humor and artistic liberties in an autobiographical dictation and his posthumous but never-completed novel Eddypus. The letter and phrenological parts of his dictation and Eddypus are presented in this chapter. Being told on his first visit that his head had a cavity above the organ for a sense of humor and on his second that he had a Mount Everest in the same spot would change how he would depict the head readers in his most famous novels. Writing as Mark Twain, Samuel Clemens would now set forth to educate the gullible public.