The Apparitionists Page 8

  At the time Brady agreed to collaborate with prison matron Eliza Farnham, the pseudoscience of head measurement—“bumpology,” as phrenology was sometimes derided in the press—was not yet primarily associated with racist prejudgments about the physical characteristics of various ethnic and religious backgrounds. The seeds of such evil implications certainly were already there, but at the time phrenology was naively intended, by at least some of its proponents, as a compassionate development in the diagnosis and treatment of mental illness.

  As it applied to crime and punishment, reformers like Farnham insisted that criminals should not be treated too harshly because they suffered from “moral insanity.” Such unfortunates, it was believed, were no more responsible for their actions than one exposed to a disease was responsible for exhibiting its symptoms. In her view, the source of antisocial behavior was not a question of nature or nurture, but nature and nurture. Though social conditions played a role for Farnham, so much more depended on the physical position of the brain within the skull. “The form of head possessed by all dangerous and inveterate criminals is peculiar,” says one source Farnham quotes. “There is an enormous mass of brain behind the ear, and a comparatively small portion in the frontal and coronal regions. Such a conformation always characterizes the worst class of malefactors and wherever it exists we find an excessive tendency to crime.”

  To make this case in print, Farnham’s text would be supplemented not only with Brady’s images but with rough sketches of various cranial shapes, all shorn of hair. For the drawings, the prison matron engaged a young artist named Edward Serrell. Like apparently all artists of the day, Serrell was also a budding inventor, and held the patent on a machine for making the lead pipes that Morse hoped to use for enclosing and protecting his telegraph wires. He, too, was a starving artist, however, and took whatever work fell his way.

  On Farnham’s instructions, Serrell journeyed to Sing Sing. Working in the office of a chaplain, who found the whole enterprise suspect and possibly un-Christian, Serrell measured the heads of convicts from both the women’s and men’s sections of the prison and then made line drawings detailing the various widths, points, and bumps that supposedly could provide a new window on the soul.

  “No. 1 is the head of a very depraved person,” Farnham wrote of Serrell’s first subject. “The drawing indicates great firmness, with a very large development of the inferior propensities.” Image and exposition were rarely enough for Farnham’s purposes. She also included elaborate backstories attempting to demonstrate the real-world risks of those having such heads escaping proper treatment. “He has always been coarse and brutal in his conduct, an object of terror to children, and the dread of peaceable citizens,” she said of No. 1. “His whole person is characterized by the rudeness and coarseness of his mind. He is 24 years old, and is under a sentence of ten years for arson in the third degree. The circumstances of his crime are strongly indicative of his character. He had made a bet of five dollars that at the next fire a certain engine company would be the first at the scene of action. The next night, he fired the building contiguous to their house in order to secure his bet.”

  Other unfortunates who submitted to Serrell’s calipers and pen were no better off in Farnham’s eyes. The owner of a perfectly unremarkable head with a smoothly arching crown was guilty of “some of the most daring burglaries ever committed in New York” due to overdevelopment of the “organ of destructiveness.” Of a woman with a similarly ordinary-looking skull, it was decided, “She will doubtless spend her life in prison, for she is constitutionally a criminal.” On the good-news end of the spectrum, the shape of one convict’s cranium suggested to Farnham that there might be some small capacity within to know right from wrong, but “it is like the faintest gleam of starlight shining through the blackness of midnight.”

  Owing perhaps to the greater load required for his equipment, Brady was not asked to journey forty miles to Ossining to take his pictures, but just four miles from his studio. A ferry from Manhattan crossed the East River to the city’s nearest human dumping ground several times every day. Most passengers went in shackles; no ticket was required. Farnham’s suggestion that Brady relocate his daguerreotype shop temporarily to Blackwell’s Island could not have been taken lightly. From the moment its construction was completed in 1839, the island’s penitentiary had occupied a mythic place in the city’s vision of itself. The day-to-day terror of prisoners’ lives went mostly unremarked upon and largely unnoticed except by reformers like Farnham, but the island featured regularly in the cautionary tales favored by the New York press.

  Even a casual reader could recite a litany of colorful events that had occurred on that melancholy strip of land between Manhattan and Queens. For the most part these stories confirmed widespread stereotypes and suspicions of both the inmates and their minders. One day a cruel jailer buried a prisoner up to his waist for a minor infraction, leaving him in the ground for two days without food, as press reports noted, “except a little bread which was put into his mouth by a poor lunatic.” In another strange incident involving untimely interment, an Irishman dug a hole in the prison yard and buried himself so he might be concealed while guards searched for him. When he later climbed free, he made his way to a pub in Five Points, where he buried himself in booze until he was apprehended.

  The battle-hardened, too, found the prison nearly too much to bear. “An old Pole between 70 and 80 years of age was sent to Blackwell’s Island,” one newspaper reported. He had fought with Napoleon at Waterloo, returned to his homeland in time for the November Uprising against Russia, then embarked for America to fight as part of the Florida army in the Seminole War. “The survivor of many fields of blood and carnage,” the man found his time in the penitentiary the worst ordeal of all.

  Brady would not have visited the island on a lark. Yet having seen the poverty Morse endured, he was undoubtedly pleased to have the job.

  Though less onerous than the journey to Sing Sing, the trip from his Broadway studio to the ferry waiting room at the foot of Seventieth Street still would have required some planning. And the river crossing, too, could be an experience. “The Blackwell’s Island ferry has indeed a pitiable class of passengers,” a newspaper lamented. “The up trip carries the convicts under sentence, while the returning boat brings those that are released.” Weighed down with his camera, chemicals, and plates, Brady became the rare commuter seen equally on each leg of the crossing.

  Once on the island, visitors were often conveyed from one site to another in smaller boats manned by prisoners, like gondoliers in traditional jailhouse garb. “Dressed in a striped uniform of black and buff,” Dickens had noted, “they looked like faded tigers.” If spotted rowing toward freedom, they could thus be shot from a distance with minimal risk to their passengers. Corpses of would-be escapees bobbed to the river’s surface with alarming regularity.

  While Brady encountered no such drama on his way to the penitentiary, inside its walls was another story. One after another, convicts entered his makeshift studio and sat before the camera. The daguerreotype process required that these sittings be undertaken in abundant natural light, which no doubt presented challenges within the prison’s thick walls of quarried stone. While Farnham would later thank “the officers of the Penitentiary on Blackwell’s Island for their politeness in furnishing me with facilities for taking the daguerreotypes,” it’s safe to say they did not build the temporary prison photographer his own “palace of the sun.”

  Joining Brady in these sittings were Eliza Farnham herself, whose subsequent character sketches of the convicts suggest lengthy conversations, and Farnham’s phrenological mentor, Lorenzo Fowler. The two men were likely already acquainted. Fowler had gone into business around the same time the aspiring photographer arrived in the city, opening his first “Phrenological Rooms” on the very block of Broadway that was soon to be home to Brady’s studio, Appleton’s publishing house, and Barnum’s museum. In his shop, Fowler and his colleagu
es offered services ranging from “examining the heads and describing the character of their numerous visitors,” to creating three-dimensional depictions of these visitors’ skulls. “The new mode of taking busts in plaster,” he insisted, “is perfectly safe to every age and sex” and “sure to give a perfect likeness.” While not direct competitors, Brady and Fowler tilled adjoining fields.

  Their work at Blackwell’s seems to have progressed with Fowler hunting among the prisoners for heads representing a range of shapes and rap sheets providing a full menu of misconduct. Farnham then interviewed each convict to see if the contours of their heads comported closely enough with Fowler’s expectations of their characters. Finally, Brady posed each case study appropriately to achieve the desired effect.

  Nineteen portraits—engravings taken from Brady’s plates—ended up in the finished book. Given the high failure rate for daguerreotype images that continued into the 1840s, many more prisoners likely sat for Brady than made the final cut. Among those who did, Farnham first told the story of a man selected by Fowler who had been born a slave but emancipated himself—the text does not note how—and then had lived “free” in the North for several years, most of them locked up on Blackwell’s Island.

  M.B., as he is called, is “a man of great determination and fixedness of mind and character; can scarcely be thrown off his guard, or induced to do any thing which his own mind does not deliberately consent to. He possesses great strength of purpose, strong powers of reason, and much capacity to plan, as well as energy to execute.” He was “esteemed by his officers an obliging, good man,” and sat patiently for Brady, staring slightly away from the camera as if reluctant to meet its gaze.

  After Brady’s picture was done, the collaborators inspected it closely. Then the prison matron and the phrenologist read it like tea leaves for hidden meanings their understanding of cerebral organization might make plain. “The head indicates very strongly all these characteristics,” Farnham wrote of M.B. “With a very powerful temperament, are combined a large brain, well developed in the intellectual region, particularly the superior faculties, large self-esteem, firmness, caution, and secretiveness. He has the capacity to be made a very useful or a very desperate and dangerous man.”

  Next came an inmate they called S.S. A vagrant and a former prizefighter, he was an Irishman—like Brady’s father. He was first sent to state prison for assault with intent to kill. After serving five years, he moved in and out of smaller city and county jails. “Before his mind became deranged,” Farnham wrote, “he exhibited great energy of passion and purpose, but they were all of a low character, their sole bearing being to prove his own superiority as an animal.” Brady’s daguerreotype, in her estimation, showed S.S. to have “a broad, low head, corresponding with such a character . . . If the higher capacities and endowments of humanity were ever found coupled with such a head as this, it would be a phenomenon as inexplicable as that of seeing without the eye, or hearing without the ear.”

  In the women’s section of the island, they met C.P., “a half-breed Indian and negro woman, under confinement for the fourth time.” An inveterate thief, she apparently was able to acquire a carving knife during one of her incarcerations. She used it to attack a guard, who “was compelled to fell her with a loaded cane.”

  “In her head,” Farnham wrote, “destructiveness is enormously developed.”

  On and on. Brady aimed his camera repeatedly at people who had likely never seen such a contraption before. They had all been brought together in a crowded room of the stone prison so that Fowler could walk among them and pull aside specimens useful for demonstrating the phrenologist’s art. For the most part, the selected inmates stared off to the daguerreotypist’s side as M.B. had done. Among those who looked directly back were five children from the juvenile detention facility known as Long Island Farms (one noted for his “love of fun”), who appear utterly unimpressed, and a woman who decided to share a tune as she sat unexpectedly in the daylight.

  “A Jewess of German birth,” the woman called T.Z., Farnham explained, “sometimes appears to be insane, and is generally, I believe, esteemed to be so by her fellow prisoners.” Yet she gave no outward signs of any affliction during her sitting. “She is exceedingly ingenious, displays great skill in many feminine arts, such as embroidery, drawing, etc.”

  “I much like music,” T.Z. told them in heavily accented English. “I sing, play guitar, piano, and very much like to whistle.”

  Her picture, the phrenologists believed, indicated “a large development of the perceptive, the mechanical and musical powers.” Perhaps covering their bases, they added that her head also suggested “excessive secretiveness and destructiveness.”

  When and how she decided to demonstrate her love of music can’t be known, but something during her time before the camera led Farnham to comment on it. “And she really is a wonderful whistler,” the prison matron said.

  Following the illustrations of supposedly deranged, destructive, and deficient cerebral organization, the phrenologists inserted a few examples displaying “great mental power and refinement of feeling.” The two male specimens “are taken from the busts of gentlemen distinguished for ability.” The female representative, “known in her circle as a woman of superior mind, and a pattern of moral excellence and domestic affection,” bears a striking resemblance to Lydia Folger Fowler, the phrenologist’s wife.

  When the work was done, Farnham thanked her mentor “for aiding me in the selection of cases,” and Brady for his “indefatigable patience with a class of the most difficult of all sitters.”

  Rationale of Crime and Its Appropriate Treatment, Farnham’s edition of Sampson’s book, was met with mixed reviews when it was issued in 1846. The most scathing called it a product of “quackery” and “humbug.” Were Brady better known at the time of its publication, he might have been charged with the same. Surely these were labels the owner of a fledgling business seeking clients would do everything possible to avoid, and Brady managed to do so, but his collaborator Lorenzo Fowler made no effort to distance himself from the project. His reputation only rose in the years after the book’s release. He opened a bigger and more successful enterprise, which he advertised far and wide:

  THE PHRENOLOGICAL CABINET

  129 and 131 Nassau Street, New York

  Contains Busts and Casts from the heads of the most distinguished men that ever lived; also Skulls, of humans and animals, from all quarters of the globe—including Egyptian Mummies, Pirates, Robbers, Murderers, and Thieves; also numerous Paintings and Drawings of Celebrated Individuals, living and dead; and it is always FREE to visitors, by whom it is continually thronged.

  While Brady never expressed sympathy for Farnham’s phrenology or the eclectic beliefs she would later embrace, putting his camera in their service for the duration of her project on Blackwell’s Island could not have been wholly inconsequential to his development as an artist.

  Phrenology was a humbug on the order of table-rapping Spiritualism, but its basic premise—that something of the interior life could be gleaned from exterior appearance—was almost universally accepted among that class of people who called themselves artists. This notion might be considered the single most important ingredient in the next stage of Brady’s career, and indeed of the whole photographic industry, which was spreading as quickly as one of Morse’s electromagnetic pulses across a country newly mapped with telegraph wires.

  Just as Fowler filled his Nassau Street Phrenological Cabinet with “Busts and Casts from the heads of the most distinguished men that ever lived,” Brady began to plan a project he called the Gallery of Illustrious Americans, which similarly would provide ideal types “representative” of “genius and patriotism” against which the public might measure themselves. And as Fowler included the counterexamples of “Pirates, Robbers, Murderers, and Thieves,” Brady also began making images for his neighbor P. T. Barnum, whose human oddities were at once novelties to gawk at and unfortunate figures
who might allow the average man and woman to feel superior. The shadows of phrenology in the rising celebrity cult were made plain when Barnum brought Lydia Fowler to speak on the subject at the most popular lecture ever offered by his American Museum.

  Eliza Farnham did not fare as well. Led by the prison chaplain, who had been annoyed to discover a sketch artist had been measuring heads in his office, a movement against her phrenologically inspired reforms accused her of abusing the authority invested in her by the state. Her infractions were alleged to include “use of improper books,” “unlawful use of prisoners’ time and labor,” and perhaps most damningly, “infidelity.” Though at the time she would not have called herself anything other than a Christian, Farnham lost her job at Mount Pleasant in part because she was suspected of having religious beliefs that strayed far from the orthodox.

  Eventually this charge would be proven correct. Within a few years, Farnham embraced the gospel of the Fox sisters, becoming an ardent believer in ghostly visitations and otherworldly communication. The man who had brought her to Sing Sing, John Edmonds, likewise became an evangelist for the new faith and, as he rose through the ranks of New York City jurists, was largely responsible for its increasing social acceptance.

  Farnham meanwhile shook the dust of New York and Sing Sing from her feet. By the middle of the 1850s, she was both a successful author and a popular lecturer on the séance circuit. She traveled west with a number of single women in search of new lives, and husbands, on the frontier, and would be widely credited with introducing Spiritualism to California.

  The three who collected the stories and images of convicts did not work together again. Brady was on the verge of becoming the most successful photographer in the city, presiding over a grand gallery and studio where he would later photograph Lorenzo Fowler in conditions infinitely better than those available at Blackwell’s Island. He would not find himself in the same place as Eliza Farnham until 1863, when the fates and the war would conspire to bring the photographer and the prison matron together under worse conditions than either could have imagined.