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An Appetite for History
The early nineteenth-century invention of the past in "fancy stories and fancy characters" extended well beyond Watson's relic box or his Annals. For example, Samuel Goodrich, writing as Peter Parley, and Francis Lister Hawks, writing as Lambert Lilly, churned out thousands of anecdote-based history books for children in the 1820s and 1830s. Their fancy histories tolerated poorly documented stories about the adventures of Peter Parley and other characters in order to bring readers imaginatively into tactile contact with the past. This method responded to changing concepts of memory itself from an art to a biological organ. In his preface to The History of New England, Illustrated by Tales, Sketches, Anecdotes, and Adventures (1831), Lilly explains children's minds as though they were stomachs. "The first impulse of a child," he says somewhat contemptuously, "is to feed his imagination, and satiate his curiosity." Although he knows that children's appetites are unsound, Lilly writes his history according to the laws of human development. "Children are impelled by their feelings and tastes, and we cannot change their nature. The only way to guide them safely through the first giddy paths of their existence, is to consult their nature, and conform to their dispositions." The History of New England assumes children are developmentally incapable of understanding better-researched narratives and provides them with colorful, apocryphal stories instead. Lilly's idea that physical appetites govern the mind indicates that fancy, anecdotal history increasingly functions as a concession to memory that has become a physical organ.
Watson's shift from memory as a metaphorical miser's chest to memory as an appetite appears most clearly when he has his head examined by phrenologist A. D. Ditmars in 1835. The word "memory" does not appear in Watson's transcript of the phrenologist's report. Instead, Ditmars uses Watson's head shape to determine that his capacity for remembering has changed from a strong ability to remember faces and places to an ability to remember historic facts and dates. Watson's memory changes over time, just as a child's memory gradually matures. But the memory still remains fixed by the growth and decay of the physical structure of the head. Ditmars does not suggest that any amount of art or cultivation will allow Watson to regain his memory of faces and names.
Watson's interest in the past, according to this reading, comes primarily through his "organ of Self Respect." This organ is "very high indeed … Should like to command & to rule—would have been military, but that my organ of destructiveness was not large—don't like to see pain & misery inflicted." He concludes, "Self Respect & veneration & comparison being very high & full, are the cause of my love of Relics, and my Acquisitiveness makes me gather & keep that which is rare & curious." It seems fairly obvious why Watson links the organs of veneration, comparative reasoning, and acquisitiveness to his collecting activities. Interest in the past requires an emotional respect for its significance and delight in the difference between past and present. The miserly organ of acquisitiveness naturalizes the desire to snatch and hold onto things that Watson and Coale had once perceived as only a metaphor in Mnemonika. "Self Respect," in contrast, does not appear like an obvious quality for a relic collector. As Watson explains it, however, it demonstrates the strengths and weaknesses of fancy history's effort to blend art and empiricism to produce a past that people will want to protect.
According to Ditmars's phrenological reading, Watson naturally desires to "command and rule" and is just as naturally unable to destroy anything. Thanks to his insufficient "organ of destructiveness," Watson is incapable of throwing out the Indian hemp or the woman's shoe buckle or the "piece of coffin!" because they feed this appetite for delight even though they do not add up to a single, coherent narrative of the past. However, Watson does not acknowledge, as Mease does, that a sense of entitlement to history travels along with the humane desire to preserve it. The complicated politics of rendering, say, indigenous objects or other people's coffins as history are entirely absent from Watson's "fancy tales." Instead, all his evidence demonstrates the size of his self-respect. The fact that this organ is large shows, in turn, that he is entitled to collect this evidence. Watson's relics reveal the strength of his appetites and his physical capacity to command and rule. But because the objects that he acquires are evidence of his physical nature, they cannot critique his physical desires. By positing a natural drive to feed the imagination on relics and anecdotes, Watson and other creators of "fancy tales and fancy characters" fail to remember that history is an art as well as a science and that, like all human-fabricated things, destruction is its genesis and its destiny.
