The above headpiece for the ‘Essays on Cranioscopy’, published in Blackwood's in August 1821, is cited as the ‘Justiciary Records for the year 1996’ and projects the bump-reading rules of phrenology as the court evidence of the future. Combining this determinism with the ‘well-known fact’ of the malleability of the infant human skull, ‘Sir Toby Tickletoby, Bart.’ makes a ‘modest proposal’ to fashion mental caps that ‘by repressing the growth of the injurious, and encouraging the expansion of the good affections, would inevitably make all the future generations of Britons to think and act alike for the common welfare’. Further, once phrenologically identifi ed, ‘[t]he grown up wicked people might be put to death without mercy, for the safety of the good’. Cool, scientifi c reasoning, bereft of humane feeling, becomes the source of ludicrous horror. This is the article that the Phrenological Journal and Miscellany particularly highlights when they declare Blackwood's to be ‘the most persevering, and, of course, the most absurd of the assailants of phrenology, and enemies of phrenologists’.

The Blackwoodian tale of terror – the genre for which the magazine is most renowned – emerged against a backdrop of medico-scientific progress that was laden with Gothic potential: the development of pathological anatomy, phrenology, and forensic medicine. As the ‘champion of the Invisible World’ in an age defi ned by ‘utilitarian philosophy and materialism’, Blackwood's was suspicious of any reductive idiom that privileged progress or utility over aesthetic pleasure, scientifi c reason over humane feeling, and scepticism over belief. This does not imply that the magazine was ‘anti-science’, and the present chapter reads the tale of terror as an experimental, dually epistemic and aesthetic literary genre, which evinces a transauthorial attempt in Blackwood's to counter the perceived ‘opposition between literature, aesthetics, and feeling, on the one hand; and science, utility, and reason, on the other’.