organ of benevolence

Filed under: Funny, New-to-me Words
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I've never previously read A Christmas Carol. Happened across it in an iPhone edition recently, discovered that it's quite short (about 30,000 words—I had always assumed it was hundreds of pages), and started reading it. And I'm struck, as I was years ago when I finally read Oliver Twist, by the moments of charming humor.

I was also struck by a particular phrase when I came across it last night:

Old Fezziwig [...] rubbed his hands; adjusted his capacious waistcoat; laughed all over himself, from his shoes to his organ of benevolence; and called out in a comfortable, oily, rich, fat, jovial voice[....]

"Organ of benevolence" sounded like some kind of a euphemism, so I went and looked it up. Turns out it was one of the organs recognized by phrenology: it was "at the top of the forehead, near where the hair commences" (according to the Graham journal of health and longevity), and the size of one's organ of benevolence determined how benevolent one was (unless overridden by other factors, such as phrenology being meaningless).

My Google search also turned up a use of the phrase in Frederick Marryat's 1836 novel Mr. Midshipman Easy:

"Surely, sir, you would not interfere with the organ of benevolence."

"But indeed I must, Jack. I, myself, am suffering from my organ of benevolence being too large: I must reduce it, and then I shall be capable of greater things, shall not be so terrified by difficulties, shall overlook trifles, and only carry on great schemes for universal equality and the supreme rights of man. I have put myself into that machine every morning for two hours, for these last three months, and I feel now that I am daily losing a great portion."

Turns out Mr. Easy's invention pushes on or sucks on various parts of the skull in order to reshape the phrenological organs therein. I would call that science fiction, of a sort, but it was clearly presented as satire.

2 Responses to “organ of benevolence”

  1. Shmuel

    I am slightly amazed that you’d managed to avoid reading it until now, and slightly jealous that you’re getting to read it for the first time. And I’m Jewish. 🙂

    One of my enduring regrets is that I never got to see Patrick Stewart’s one-man stage version of the story, in which he played all the parts. (On the bright side, I do have his audiobook version on cassette, and commend it to your attention, should such a thing be of interest.)

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  2. https://www.google.com/accounts/o8/id?id=AItOawknDMl-BDud-Ftf6PM_qrXgaOObcNq06ec

    I just completed reading A Christmas Carol. I too thought “Organ of benevolence” was a euphemism. I looked in dictionary.com but there were no results. I then looked on google.com (usually the word/phrase one is searching for comes up in the search history) but this phrase did not come up and your post was the first search result and thanks to your posting I was able to gather its meaning.

    May be there are relatively very few instances in all literature where this phrase is used nevertheless it is really some coincidence that we have chanced upon it the same way.

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