The night a surgeon robbed Robert Burns’ grave and stole his SKULL
How Victorians hoped Bard’s head would back their bizarre beliefs... as spiritualists published his post-mortem poetry
THE group of distinguishedlooking gentlemen made for an incongruous sight as they gathered under cover of darkness within the walls of St Michael’s Kirkyard, Dumfries.
Their presence among the graves of their fellow townsfolk on the last day of March, 1834, was occasioned by the recent passing of an elderly lady of considerable social standing.
Yet they were less concerned with paying their respects to the venerable Mrs Jean Burns than with a macabre desire to lay their hands on the mortal remains of her long-dead husband, Robert. In particular, his skull.
Having entered the family mausoleum, their leader, John McDiarmid – president of the Dumfries Burns Club and the editor of the Dumfries Courier – took charge of proceedings and ordered the Bard’s tomb be broken open.
Dr Archibald Blacklock, a surgeon, began the grisly task of parting the head from the rest of the skeleton and cleaning it of grit. The precious cranium was then taken on a midnight walk to a plasterer’s workshop, where a perfect replica was cast in plaster of Paris.
Dr Blacklock later noted: ‘The cast is admirably taken, and cannot fail to prove highly interesting to phrenologists and others. Having completed our intention, the skull, securely enclosed in a leaden case, was again committed to the earth precisely where we found it.’
The men may have arguably displayed all the ghoulish disregard of a body snatcher for the sanctity of the burial chamber, but their interest in Burns was mirrored by an emergent fascination with the poet across Victorian Britain which would see his memory – and even his mortal remains – generate as much interest in death as they ever did during his brief life.
The spectres who entered the tomb that night were, in fact, heralds of an early science known as phrenology which attempted to map the organs of the intellect by measuring the contours of the skull. Their hope was to show that it was nature, rather than nurture, which shaped a man’s character.
Who better than the ploughman poet – notorious for his womanising and with a welldocumented personal history – to reveal in the bumps of a skull cast the vital proof they craved to prop up their theories?
What made the phrenologists so determined was that they feared they had missed the boat with Burns almost 20 years earlier.
The Bard’s body was disinterred in September 1815 from its original plot, marked by a modest monument, and moved to a grand new family mausoleum within the same cemetery. But no efforts were made to obtain a cast.
When a second opportunity presented itself, the phrenologists would not be shaken from their task. The vault may have been opened to deposit 69-year-old Mrs Burns’s remains beside those of her husband, but the cause of science – or pseudoscience – held sway.
When word got out that a cast of Burns’s skull existed, the world of phrenology was jubilant.
Others sounded a note of caution. An article in the Manchester Times & Gazette warned that the cast ‘afforded phrenologists and the public an opportunity of testing the truth or falsity of phrenology’.
The crucial analysis was carried out by phrenology’s leading thinker, George Combe, who received his copy of the cast within a month and wasted no time in forming his conclusions on the 30-plus organs that were said to make up the brain.
Burns, he wrote, ‘had the elements of all that is bad & good powerful, & an intellect not quite adequate to their proper control, but very nearly so. All this is the language of the cast, & I think it conformable to with his history’.
HOWEVER, there was a problem. For a man reputed to have enjoyed more than his share of affairs of the heart, it seems Burns’s mind had fallen down on the job – his sex drive was underpowered.
Dr Megan Coyer, an academic at Glasgow University who has researched the phrenology of Burns’s skull, explained: ‘There was a great deal of interest in Burns because he was a class-transcendent genius, the Heaven-taught ploughman.
‘The phrenologists were very much on the side of nature over nurture. If they could show by reading Burns’s brain that he was naturally poetic, it would be a triumph for phrenology.
‘But they were surprised to find he had a very small organ of amativeness, the organ of sexual passion. According to his biography and poetry, one would think he would have a large organ of amativeness.’
Aware that Burns’s reputation would be ruined if this got out, the phrenologists craftily sought out other organs that might cover up the great man’s shortcoming.
Dr Coyer said: ‘They said his organs of adhesiveness – the ability to form attachments with people – and secretiveness – sneaking around and having affairs – were very well developed.’
The fact such a sticking plaster solution proved acceptable probably says much about the lack of academic rigour among phrenology’s converts, something which would eventually help to sound its death knell as a serious science.
‘Although phrenology turns out to be complete bunkum, the notion that you can use anatomy and physiognomy to trace the development of ever-more intelligent species has been absorbed widely by the 1830s,’ said Professor Gerry Carruthers, the co-director of Glasgow University’s Centre for Robert Burns Studies.
‘There was a general growth in interest in science at this time which fostered all sorts of weird and wonderful outcrops, some of which are actually quite unscientific.’
Of all such weird outcrops, few can be regarded as more unscientific than the spiritualists, an entertainingly credulous bunch who believed they had the power to make contact with the afterlife. They also alighted upon Burns as a likely ally.
Some 19 years after the phrenologists hoped to draw fresh insight from Burns’s skull, 13 men sat around a table in a dimly lit Temperance Hall in the Yorkshire town of Keighley, their hands spread palms-down in the hope of revivifying the ploughman poet via table–rapping.
This bizarre process, by which a table rocks from side to side, laboriously banging out a message letter by letter, much in the manner of a giant Ouija board, had been gaining in popularity by the mid-1850s.
Already that evening, the men had stared goggle-eyed as the table bounced and swivelled madly about, seemingly at the behest of a recently deceased local preacher whose spirit obliged their request to deliver a new sermon.
Flushed with success, the group ventured to summon up a far more venerated personality – Robert Burns. A report of the evening’s proceedings in September 1853, entitled Table Moving Extraordinary, states Burns was chosen as none of the parties present were of a poetical bent or knew the first thing about ‘Scotch poetry’. If any lines were successfully offered up, then ‘it ought to be taken as proof positive’ that they had summoned the spirit of Burns.
Again, the table rumbled into life and began rapping out the letters. Several sessions later, the men declared their satisfaction at their
efforts and rushed into print to effectively declare they had received the first new poetry by Burns since his death aged 37 in 1796.
If the claim was grand, it was scarcely matched by the quality of the poetry. One typical example began:
When we wor in the world o’ clay, We little kenn’d how breef ‘two’d be, As carelessly we pass’d away The time that wodna wait a wee.
Critics almost immediately dismissed the ‘puerile verses’ with their ‘simple, nursery rhyme-like’ construction, containing a ‘hotchpotch’ of words, neither English nor Scotch. If they were proof positive of anything, it was that Burns – alive or dead – had no hand in it. In another instance, Burns appears to lose his distinctive Lowland Scots brogue entirely. The poem ends:
No selfish views disturb our peace above, We seek each others good, and we each other love: For heaven, friends, look not, lo! there, lo! here, But search within and you’ll find Heaven there.
One detractor, who went by the pseudonym Gulielmus, launched an excoriating attack on the works in the December 1853 edition of the Keighley Visitor, writing: ‘To assert they are the productions of world-renowned Robert Burns is evidence either of lamentable ignorance or gross misrepresentation.’
Burns, he added, ‘gave to the world the heartfelt thoughts of a vigorous and powerful intellect clad not in the despicable garb of the “spirit-rapping” see-saw, but in the sublime but homely language of a poet truly gifted’.
Professor Carruthers is blunter still in his critique: ‘It’s the most execrable poetry ever and this is not unique. There are four or five séances and some of this material was published in a straight-faced way as authentic poetry by Burns down to even the 1890s.
‘Again, although this is all bonkers stuff, the reason Burns has a presence in English parlours from the 1830s for about the next 50 years is because Chartism begins to popularise him.’
The Chartist movement called for widespread parliamentary reform and the introduction of universal male suffrage, including for the lower classes.
Professor Carruthers said: ‘He’s a great post-Romantic symbol of peasant success. People are fascinated in how someone from a humble background can become great. Burns is also beginning to have his political reputation developed. He is seen as a great champion of the working classes.
‘The surprising thing to modern eyes is that during the 19th century, Burns has a popular readership in England, much more than he does today. That readership remains pretty strong in Scotland, but he is a staple of working-class reading in a lot of English regions so he is a bit of a minor celebrity, a British poster boy through most of the 19th century. Also, the 1840s is the beginning of the consumer age, where people start to have a wee bit of disposable income and the Burns industry with its Mauchline Ware is off the mark early on.
‘So Burns is transmitted, in every sense, through the 19th century through lots of popular avenues.
‘Also, we are in a post-Darwinian age and the rise of the Gothic means we are more and more fascinated by death which, of course, is a strong part of Victorian culture generally in several ways.’
OTHER groups held similar séances claiming Burns’s authorship for their efforts, including a group in Bingley, near Keighley, in 1854, and an American medium, Mina Seymour, who claimed to channel more than 150 new poems from Burns towards the end of the 19th century. In the opening poem, the voice of Burns reveals that, ‘I’ve beat auld Death, I write as weel, As mony in Earth life’.
The spiritualists amassed quite a following, including such notables as Arthur Conan Doyle, Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope and George Eliot. Ranged against these formidable writers were a bank of, mainly scientific, sceptics including Charles Darwin, Michael Faraday and the surgeon and radical MP, Thomas Wakley.
Faraday was credited with debunking table-rapping by overseeing an experiment at the Royal Institution. It proved the table’s movement was due to ‘unconscious muscular action’ by sitters.
For all the fascination Burns held for the Victorian age and the cult of personality that grew up around him in death, he was unable to assist his admirers in unlocking the secrets to his genius.
There was nothing really to be gained by feeling the bumps on his head, still less to be read into the dreadful cod poetry which emanated from those tables.
What matters to those who take their seats at Burns Suppers up and down the land this Thursday is the poet’s lasting legacy in the canon of Scottish literature. For them, Burns has already earned the toast to his immortal memory.