To teach learners these organic conditions which indicate character, is the first object of this manual. And to render it accessible to all, it condenses facts and conditions, rather than elaborates arguments, - because to expound Phrenology is its highest proof, - states laws and results, and leaves them upon their naked merits; embodies recent discoveries, and crowds into the fewest words and pages just what learners most need to know, and hence requires to be studied rather than merely read. To record character is its second object.

To teach learners these organic conditions which indicate character, is the first object of this manual. And to render it accessible to all, it condenses facts and conditions, rather than elaborates arguments, - because to expound Phrenology is its highest proof, - states laws and results, and leaves them upon their naked merits; embodies recent discoveries, and crowds into the fewest words and pages just what learners most need to know, and hence requires to be studied rather than merely read. To record character is its second object.

Through a consideration of photography manuals and professional and domestic periodicals, private letters, diaries and journals, and relevant visual and material culture, and the application of recent theory in material culture and consumption, this work analyzes cultural meaning making and the concomitant class formation by mid-nineteenth-century Americans through the creative nexus between photographer and patron.