He Thanked Princeton by Donating His Collection of Death Masks

Before Laurence Hutton h*1897 started collecting heads, he established himself as a prominent man of literature. The son of a wealthy merchant, he grew up in New York City, where he skipped college in favor of touring literary Europe and then joining the scribbling game himself. He worked as a theater critic for the New York Evening Mail, then a literary editor for Harper’s Magazine.

In 1897, Princeton awarded Hutton an honorary degree of master of arts. He had already been thus honored by an institution in New Haven, but he understood which honor was greater. He moved to Princeton, where he lived with his family at the Princeton Inn and made frequent use of the University’s library. Whenever in New York City, he socialized at the Princeton Club. From 1901 onward, he worked as an instructor in Princeton’s Department of English.

Soon after he became a Princeton man, Hutton presented to the University a collection of 74 death masks. “I thought I’d like to do something for the University,” he said. “So far as I have been able to discover, mine is the most nearly complete and the largest collection of its kind in the world.”

The collection was ostensibly scientific: For centuries, men of learning, believing the workings of the brain must shape the head, had sought to learn the secrets of greatness by taking plaster casts of the heads of great thinkers — by any means necessary. (This pseudoscience, known as phrenology, contributed to racist theories, especially about Black people.) Thus it was for the masks in his collection. They represent the astonishing lengths men went to in the quest to capture those valuable faces: digging up bodies; stealing impressions from the coroner’s table; haunting the curiosity shop, the dissecting room, and the charnel house.

For example, a mask of Shakespeare in the collection was said to be an impression taken from a death mask that a friend secretly made of the playwright before his burial. A mask of William Makepeace Thackeray, likewise, was made by a friend of the author after his death. Thackeray’s family asked that it be destroyed, but the friend refused.

The body of France’s Henry IV was exhumed from his grave during the French Revolution; Parisians lined up to see the old monarch’s face, and one of them supposedly made his mask. Robespierre, by contrast, had his head preserved for posterity before he even went to the guillotine; by prior arrangement, the revolutionary government sent it to Madame Tussaud so that she could add his likeness to her waxworks.

As a literary man, Hutton recognized the face of the author Laurence Sterne when he saw his mask in a curiosity shop, though no such mask was supposed to exist. He bought the mask and investigated its origin. According to the story he pieced together, after Sterne’s burial in a London churchyard, “resurrection men” dug up his body, not knowing it belonged to someone famous, and sold it to a medical school. A doctor who knew Sterne recognized with horror the face of his friend. He reclaimed the body and buried it properly — and, along the way, made a death mask.

Hutton took great pleasure in describing the gory origins of his collection. 

“I am sure that mine is the actual death-mask of Aaron Burr [1772],” he wrote, “because I have the personal guarantee of the man who made the mold in 1836. I am positive of the identity of another cast, because I saw it made myself. And concerning still another, I have no question, because I know the man who stole it!”

Today, we no longer think of this messy business as scientific, although we continue to search for meaning in artifacts like Percy Shelley’s heart and Ezra Pound’s teeth, as well as the very physical historical remains that are books, diaries, letters, drawings. What are the humanities but resurrecting the dead?

There is no death mask of Hutton in his own collection. But he’s buried, very conveniently, in Princeton Cemetery, if an alum wants to obtain one for the library in the old-fashioned way.