Phrenological Propensities

Five hand-coloured etchings arranged on a single sheet illustrate the pseudoscience of phrenology — then a fashionable theory claiming skull bumps mapped personality — through comic animal and human vignettes: a snail retreating into its shell (*Inhabitiveness*), a spider spinning her web (*Constructiveness*), two figures hopelessly mired in a bog (*Adhesiveness*), a flag-waving mob brawl (*Combativeness*), and a bull destroying a crockery stall (*Destructiveness*). Cruikshank's line is sharp and merciless; the brawling crowd carries the coarse class caricature typical of the period, rendering working people as grotesque and animalistic. The composite plate format — multiple sequential vignettes on one sheet — directly anticipates the comic strip page, linking Cruikshank to Rowlandson, Gillray, and the German *Bilderbogen* picture-sheets that would feed directly into the nineteenth-century comic press.