Queen Victoria's Skull: George Combe and the Mid-Victorian Mind

(Hardback)

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Queen Victoria's Skull explores the life and thinking of the Edinburgh phrenologist George Combe. Phrenology is a theory which claims to be able to detect personality traits, character and predisposition to criminality on the basis of the shape of the skull. Now dismissed as risible, it was treated with reverence by many Victorians.
George Combe was the author of The Constitution of Man, an ethical treatise that sold over 100,000 copies in Britain and 200,000 copies in America by 1900. The quirkiness of his life and work, and the fact that he befriended and influenced many public figures - from Prince Albert to George Eliot - make for an engaging story. Queen Victoria's Skull, however, does more than tell the tale of one idiosyncratic individual. By tracing the development of Combe's intellectual interests, it provides a prism through which to view Victorian culture, science and politics, covering themes of class, religion, sex, crime, art and the theatre. David Stack has written an entertaining and erudite study of an important, and now neglected, Victorian figure.

Reviews

'This is an interesting insight into the minds of intelligent Victorians.' BBC History Magazine, October 2008 -- Stephen Halliday
"Stack's book does a superior job of reviewing Combe's colorful story. Any scholar with a general interest in Victorian intellectual culture would be well served by this text. Beyond academic readers, Stack's book would probably operate well at the graduate level." -Roger Pauly, History: Reviews of New Books, Winter 2009
"...Stack's biography of Combe has great merit. It provides an archival basis for many of it judgements, and provides an intelligent picture of a Scot who was, by the standards of time, a publishing sensation, in addition to being a popular lecturer and an effective educational reformer." British Journal for the History of Science, 2009

Author Bio

David Stack is Professor of History at University of Reading, UK. He is the author of The First Darwinian Left (2003) and Queen Victoria's Skull (2008, Bloomsbury).