A PHRENOLOGIST’S TAKE
POPE, Alexander.
An essay on man… with illustrations, and notes, by S. R. Wells.
New York, Wells, 1867.
Small 8vo, pp. 53 + 7 (publisher’s advertisements); a very good copy in the original brown cloth, gilt titling and decorative frame on the upper side; corners and extremities a little rubbed, some light soiling to the cover.
First edition thus: Pope’s Essay on man edited, with many notes, by the phrenologist Samuel Wells. ‘Looked at from a phrenological stand-point, this Poem exhibits rare beauties not seen, or rather not fully appreciated, by other eyes’ (preface). Phrenological thinking was influential in 19th-century psychiatry. Wells’ notes here combine his discipline’s mixture of neuroanatomy and moral philosophy with textual criticism in a remarkable, if idiosyncratic, reading of a classic.