>“I even have some small knowledge of phrenology”
What book/story/play is that quote from? I was thinking Chekhov, but I can’t find anything, and it seems that the quotation is not accurate either. I do find some small traces of
“I even have some small knowledge”
but not enough to make me think it is quite correct.
Any ideas?
Just from the way it flows, and the interior rhyme scheme, I’m inclined to peg it as a line from the Major General’s song by Gilbert and Sullivan.
(Pinafore? Penzance? One of those.)
Okay, I looked up the lyrics, and that line does not appear (and the song is from The Pirates of Penzance).
Nope. Not G&S. But there have been any number of variations played on the Major General’s song, depending upon the performers and what is most likely to appear as useless book-learning to the immediate audience.
Anyone who believes in phrenology wants his head examined.
I don’t mean to detract from the search but is the line supposed to be ironic or self deprecating?
That’s what I am wondering, too. The first possibility that jumped into my brain was Sherlock Holmes - I imagine him saying it to Watson, with a note of condescension in his voice, while figuring out how a believer of phrenology may have acted…
I had exactly the same thought. First story, when Watson is trying to figure out what Homes knows, or Hound of the Baskervilles, seems most likely.
This link has a list of fiction in which phrenology plays a part. perhpas your quote is from one of these.
AFAIK, the novel “A Study in Scarlet” is chronologically the earliest item in the Sherlock Holmes canon to include Watson, (and I never heard of an earlier prequel story to feature either Holmes or Watson alone.) It covers their meeting, from Watson’s point of view, and how they came to share the Baker Street rooms.
I’ve searched the text copy over at Project Gutenberg, and there’s no match for ‘phrenology’, though I have the feeling I’ve come across the term in one of the short stories…
Okay, I also realized that I have “Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes” on the tablet and searched through that. 0 hits, sorry. None in the Gutenberg copy of “Hound of the Baskervilles” either.
ETA: Okay, I’ve found the reference I was thinking of, but Holmes doesn’t use the word Phrenology:
“It is a question of cubic capacity: a man with so large a brain must have something in it.” – The adventure of the Blue Carbuncle.
A line from Young Frankenstein?
“Could be worse… could be braining.”
Holmes was my second thought, actually. In The Hound of the Baskervilles, I quite vividly recall Mr. Jack Stapleton telling Holmes: “I covet your skull.”
This is a longshot, because “some small knowledge” doesn’t come into play, but Inspector Jacques Clouseau reveals that he decided to become a detective “when my great aunt was kidnapped and held for ransom by an unlicensed Armenian phrenologist.”
The case I was imagining, the phrenology part of the reference, was the case of a country doctor who’s modest assertion actually revealed how out-of-date he was. So a reference to that case would then be ironic and self-depricating.
Since I haven’t found it in Dickens or in Checkov, now I’m wordering if the original was in French: some French literary memes have crept into English.
Smithers: Uh, sir, phrenology was dismissed as quackery a hundred-sixty years ago.
Burns: Of course you’d say that, you have the brainpan of stage coach tilter!
“You know what’s wrong with me/You know phrenology…”
Has nothing to do with your quote, of course, but I’ll be humming it for days now.
In Men at Arms, Pratchett introduced retro-phrenology, a practice in which particular aptitudes could be instilled via a hammer.
The song can’t have been from Pinafore, because one of the Major-General’s accomplishments is that he “can sing every word of that infernal nonsense Pinafore”.
The sad thing is there are NO schools I could find online where I could get a certificate in Retro-Phrenology.