Why Did Victorians Collect Hair?

In the mid-1800s, many people saved loved ones' hair -- but the collection of Peter A. Browne went much, much further than that. Learn why he thought it had scientific merit -- and why it actually does today -- in this episode of BrainStuff.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to brain Stuff production of I Heart Radio. Hey,
brain Stuff, I'm Lauren Vogelbaum. And collections are by definition
kind of weird. The collectors devote days, weeks, months, even
years to compiling excessive quantities of stamps. They'll never mail coins,
they'll never spend hair, They'll never wait what, yes, you

(00:22):
heard that right? Hair? Take for example, nineteenth century lawyer
and naturalist Peter A. Brown. He has the distinction of
having cultivated the world's greatest known hair collection. In the
eighteen forties and fifties, Brown decided he would try to
piece together a scientific portrait of humanity by obtaining as
many hair specimens as possible. He wanted strands from famous figures,

(00:45):
in regular folks, living in dead. Basically, if a person
had hair, Brown wanted it. He collected samples from a fetus,
a one year old man, patients in the Western Virginia
Lunatic Asylum, celebrities can joined twins, a corpse that have
been buried for third two years, and a convicted murderer.
Before and after his hanging. Of course, Brown even had

(01:05):
a few strands of George Washington's hair, courtesy of the
late president's Barber's son. He had samples from thirteen of
the first fourteen US presidents, so all in all, a
pretty weirdly thorough collection. What exactly was the point of
all this hair gathering, you might ask? According to the
book Specimens of Hair, the Curious Collection of Peter A.

(01:26):
Brown by Robert McCracken, Peck Brown was on a mission
to explain the differences and similarities between humans. Years before
Charles Darwin blew the world's collective mind with his theory
of evolution, Brown obsessively sought to understand how and why
there was so much variance in human beings appearances. Peck
told the arts and culture website hyper Allergic, his fellow

(01:47):
members of the Academy of Natural Sciences were doing the
same things with birds and insects and fish, and trying
to figure out what were the distinctive characteristics that separated
one from another and combined one with another. With humans,
that a much more fraught political and social issue. Any
attempt he made to separate people into separate species, as
he called them at the time, was doomed to failure,

(02:08):
and rightly so, because we recognize that all humans are
from the same origin. But Brown didn't know that, so
he collected. And perhaps the strangest part about his strange
collection is that for the era, it wasn't considered strange
at all, Peck said in an interview with the Academy
of Natural Sciences of Drextile University, or the a n
SP for short. The collection may seem weird by today's standards,

(02:31):
but at the time it was made, it was considered
very important by scientists around the world. Brown referred to
it as a national collection. It contained not just the
hair of humans, but the wool of sheep and the
fur and hair of many other animals. It was a
collection made for scientific purposes and for the love of country.
Welcome to the world a Victorian hair culture. If you
haven't heard of this, consider a recent news story out

(02:54):
of the UK wherein a woman stumbled upon a ring
containing a lot of Charlotte Bronte's hair while waiting through
her late father in law's attic. She opened a curious
metal box and found a single ring inside inscribed Bronte's
name and the date of her death. So the woman
did what anyone in sudden, unexpected possession of an old
trinket might do. She went on Antiques Road Show. On

(03:14):
the show, she told jewelry expert Jeffrey Munn she suspected
she might have accidentally inherited some of Bronte's strands. Munn
wasn't phazed, he explained on the show, it was a
convention to make jewelry out of hair. In the nineteenth century.
There was a terror of not being able to remember
the face and the character of the person who had died. Yes.
In those days, people often wove bits of hair into

(03:35):
just about everything, from rings and bracelets and cuff links
to intricate framed art pieces suitable for display. Peck told
the NSP blog the hair Family and Friends was commonly
exchanged and retained through the nineteenth century. It was often framed,
kept an albums, or featured in jewelry. Today, many parents
still retained the hair from their child's first haircut, but

(03:56):
it's rarely put on public display as it was during
the Victorian era. That kind of thing is also probably
not as valuable as Brontes. Mun told the Lady with
the Ring that while her newly discovered jewelry was probably
only worth about thirty two bucks, the famous authors strands
bumped up the value to about twenty six thousand dollars.
But back to Peter A. Brown. While he never realized

(04:18):
his albeit flawed and problematic dream of separating the human
race in two species, he did make an enduring contribution
to modern science. Peck said to hyper Allergic, what is
so useful about this collection now is that all of
that DNA is preserved. And he had no idea he
was doing that. When he sent out his requests to
people for hair, he actually asked them to send the
roots of the hair the follicles. Many of them did

(04:40):
just clip it, but with the follicles attached, that is
a gold mine. And Peck actually helped save this collection
from total destruction, he told the n s P blog.
In the mid seventies, before anyone recognized the importance and
irreplaceable value of the DNA contained in Brown's collection, a
staff member, in a position to determine its fate, decided
that the wool, fur and human here it contained was

(05:00):
of no current scientific interest and was taking up too
much space, and he decided to discard it. I was
lucky to be in the right place at the right
time to spot it and save it from oblivion. Who
would have guessed it would one day become a collection
of such interest and the subject of a book. Today's
episode was written by Michelle Konstantinovski and produced by Tyler Clang.

(05:23):
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