Strange Science in the 1800s

To George Combe, the Edinburgh-born popularizer of phrenology, the science was the one hope of breeding a better race. In his work The Constitution of Man (1828) he blamed unhappy marriages on ignorant, thoughtless persons who imagined themselves absolved from all obligation to study and obey 'the laws of heaven as announced in the general arrangement of the universe'. Phrenology offered a natural index to the mental qualities, and-in Combe's view-there was no longer any excuse for rash unions based on youthful passion and inexperience. He cited several disastrous marriages which could have been prevented if the infatuated parties had subjected each other to an elementary phrenological check. A man with his animal organs, particularly combativeness and destructive-ness, very pronounced, though with fair moral and intellectual development, had married, against her inclination, a young woman, fashionably educated, but with a decided deficiency of conscientiousness. 'They soon became unhappy and even blows were said to have passed between them, although they belonged to the middle rank of life. The mother employed the children to deceive and plunder the father and latterly spent the pilfered sums in purchasing ardent spirits.' The man's very life was endangered by his own family. In another union, the father's animal organs were highly developed, and the mother had pronounced moral and intellectual organs. Of those children who inherited the father's brain, several died of debauchery under the age of thirty.

Combe was spurred by the same ideals that were to inspire the eugenists. With Voltaire he believed that 'if as much care were taken to perpetuate fine races of men as some nations still take to prevent the mixing of breeds in their horses and hounds, the genealogy would be written in the countenance and displayed in the manners'. In one issue of his book he quoted with approval an American, Dr Charles Caldwell, who -in 1833-had been demanding the absolute prohibition of marriages between schoolgirls and striplings 'in or out of college'. Animal breeders, said Caldwell, took good care to prevent the mating of immature beasts, and similarly marriages of immature young people produced only mischief and un-happiness. 'Patriotism, therefore, philanthropy and every feeling of kindness to human nature call for their prevention.' As a footnote, Combe commended the example of Wurtem-burg, where men under twenty-five and girls under eighteen were not allowed to marry unless they could prove to a policeman or a priest that they could support a family.

Just as it was wrong for the immature to marry, said Combe, so was it wrong for old men to marry young girls. 'It is rare for the descendants of men far advanced in years to be distinguished by high qualities of either body or mind.' The deformed and even the gouty should conscientiously abstain from matrimony.

Though Combe's theories were freely derided (the Edinburgh Review described phrenology as 'despicable trumpery') he was twice invited to Buckingham Palace by Queen Victoria, and gravely examined the heads of the royal children.

The tendency of the immature to rush into marriage had been exercising others besides Dr Charles Caldwell. Notable among them was the Reverend T. R. Malthus, author of the famous Essay on Population, whose view was that a man who married when his wages would not support a family, and when the king was not in need of subjects, was acting contrary to the will of God. (John Morley had the same stern idea in mind when he referred to 'the besotted maxim that He who sends mouths, will send meat'.) Malthus did not, however, advocate a law to ban such unnecessary marriages. How, then, were courting and marriage to be discouraged? Young people, he said, should be taught the principles of population as expounded by Adam Smith. They should be persuaded that marriage was a sound idea but only if a man was able to support a family-and that meant waiting. A man's 'period of delayed gratification would be passed in saving those earnings which were above the wants of a single man, and in acquiring habits of sobriety, industry and economy which would enable him to enter into the matrimonial contract without fear of its consequences'. In this way society would be rid of all abject poverty.

Malthus saw that a new attitude would be necessary towards lovers. It would have to be recognized that two young people could converse together intimately 'without its being immediately supposed that they either intended marriage or intrigue; and a much better opportunity would thus be given to both sexes of finding out kindred dispositions . . . the earlier years of life would not be spent without love, though without the full gratification of it'. Their passion would burn with a brighter, purer flame instead of being extinguished early. For women the advantage of later marriage would be that 'the period of youth and hope would be prolonged and fewer would be ultimately disappointed'.

It is all magnificently unreal. One of the first to mock Malthus for thus seeking to subject the appetites to reason was Hazlitt. He saw that a young woman of the working classes might well interrupt a lecture on the principle of population to say that she did not see why her children should starve when the squire's lady and the parson's lady kept half a dozen lapdogs.

The failure of popular education, such as it was, to teach higher ideals to the rising generations was henceforth to distress moralists. As soon as young people could read they turned to the lurid cheap romances which were the equivalent of the middle-class novels, or to the ballads about simple girls seduced by squires and soldiers ('Never go into a sentry-box, Rolled up in a soldier's cloak'). Hazlitt has a graphic, if ramshackle, sentence describing how the innocence of working girls was destroyed by a surfeit of tales of seduction:

Is it to be wondered at that a young, raw, ignorant girl who is sent up from the country as a milliner's or mantua-maker's apprentice and stowed into a room with eight or ten others, who snatch every moment they can spare from caps and bonnets, and sit up half the night to read all the novels they can get, and as soon as they have finished one send for another, whose heart in the course of half a year has been pierced through with twenty beaux on paper, who has been courted, seduced, run away with, married and put to bed under all the fine names that the imagination can invent to as many fine gentlemen, who has sighed and wept with so many heroes and heroines, that her tears and sighs have at last caused in her a defluction of the brain and a palpitation of the heart at the sight of every man, whose fancy is lovesick and her head quite turned, should be unable to resist the first coxcomb of real flesh and blood who, in shining boots and a velvet collar, accosts her in the shape of a lover but who has no thoughts of marrying her?