Popular phrenologists lecturing in the Tasman World from 1850 onwards performed head public readings, on stage or in the street. Although bump readers abounded across the Anglosphere, the region and its rapid population growth shaped a particular reception experience. The arrival of an exotic outsider provided a chance for townsfolk, often newly thrown together, to glean an objective – if chaotic – perspective on their community and neighbours. Across this patchwork of settlements, popular phrenology became a tactile lingua franca, with audiences scrutinising the lecturer to catch out humbug through the public ordeal of “trying the bumps”. Whatever the outcome, the town experienced the dual entertainment of theatre and public power-play. Here was a chance to jest about their town and pecking order under the veil of science. Inevitably, phrenologists altered the local climate. But the town always won, and a phrenologist with a crushed reputation could face disaster.

More than 140 phrenologists ascended the platform as popular lecturers in Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand during the second half of the nineteenth century, seizing on scientific spectacle for their own physical and social mobility. These scientists – usually men – also often offered private consultations and blended phrenology with other forms of knowledge such as mesmerism or physiognomy. Joining waves of migration to and from new settlements, phrenologists faced harsh physical conditions, with women performers confronting the additional risks of gender-based violence. Phrenologists generally did not pursue respectability. Rather, in building up their personas, lecturers embraced the word ‘science’ as a signifier of progress and authority, policing the boundaries between the ‘valid’ science that they supposedly offered and that of their rivals. They lived in a state of tension between their public, fee-earning selves – founded on supposedly good reputations – and their private ordeals, struggling to make ends meet.

This new collection enables students and general readers to appreciate Coleridge’s renewed relevance 250 years after his birth. An indispensable guide to his writing for twenty-first-century readers, it contains new perspectives that reframe his work in relation to slavery, race, war, post-traumatic stress disorder and ecological crisis. Through detailed engagement with Coleridge’s pioneering poetry, the reader is invited to explore fundamental questions on themes ranging from nature and trauma to gender and sexuality. Essays by leading Coleridge scholars analyse and render accessible his extraordinarily innovative thinking about dreams, psychoanalysis, genius and symbolism. Coleridge is often a direct and gripping writer, yet he is also elusive and diverse. This Companion’s great achievement is to offer a one-volume entry point into his incomparably rich and varied world.

Oratory played a significant and enduring role in the public life of Frederick Douglass. This chapter charts the various eras, genres, places, topics, and traditions in which Douglass’s speaking traversed. For example, this chapter addresses Douglass’s early rhetorical education, how his contemporaries described his speaking, his connection to religion, his long career as a lecturer, the threats of violence he experienced while speaking publicly, and the array of subjects about which Douglass spoke. Such a capacious understanding of context allows for a fuller depiction of Douglass’s skill as an orator while also acknowledging his failures that are often elided from the general account of his rhetorical prowess.