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  • About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain
  • David Stack (bio)
About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain, by Sharrona Pearl; pp. xii + 288. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 2010, $49.95, £36.96.

Charles Darwin's nose almost blocked his career. At their first meeting, Captain Robert Fitzroy of the Beagle thought the shape of the young naturalist's proboscis indicative of a lack of sufficient energy and determination for seafaring and considered not taking Darwin on the voyage that was to make his name. This tale of the naturalist's nose, retold in Sharrona Pearl's About Faces, illustrates two central problems in studying physiognomy in nineteenth-century Britain. First, how does one move beyond the recognition of the pervasiveness of physiognomy to demonstrate its influence? Fitzroy, after all, took Darwin, despite his nose. Second, how does one avoid playing physiognomy, as Darwin did in his autobiography, for cheap laughs?

Pearl admirably eschews any temptation to satirize. She defines her task as chronicling "how actors, novelists, painters, photographers, caricaturists and others who engaged in mimesis and representation mobilized physiognomic messaging as part of their visual shorthands" (7). The range of the book, which is divided into six thematic chapters, is commendable and appropriate to the subject. Pearl follows physiognomy into the nooks and crannies of such diverse fields as theatrical performance and portraiture in the early and mid-nineteenth century, before exploring its later role in the representation and diagnosis of mental illness and criminality. What the book lacks, as Pearl concedes, is "a clean narrative with a beginning, a middle, and an obvious end" (216). Chapters "overlap in both time and space" and, some perfunctory linking paragraphs notwithstanding, each chapter has been written, and can be read, as "a stand-alone unit" (3).

This would matter less if Pearl were able to provide a connecting thread for her observations. As it is, the book's structure tends to emphasize the lacuna at its heart: the failure to provide any meaningful, historical, or contextual definition of physiognomy. It is, as Pearl puts it, "a slippery and flexible concept" (2), with an ancestry stretching back beyond Plato. To make sense of it, however, in a specifically British nineteenth-century context—and Pearl asserts the "unique extent of physiognomy's reception and spread in England" (11), compared to the continent—requires some bounded definition. Richard Gray achieved this in his similarly titled book, About Face: German Physiognomic Thought from Lavater to Auschwitz (2004) by identifying Johann Casper Lavater's physiognomy as an [End Page 331] innovative attempt to transcend folklore with a thoroughly modern and strictly empirical science of facial signs rooted in Enlightenment semiotic theory. Pearl, by contrast, largely ignores Lavater as a starting point and treats physiognomy as an amorphous, almost ahistorical, entity. This allows her to emphasize how porous and permeable physiognomy was, with pathognomy and a whole range of "metonymical symbols of clothing, hairstyle, and other forms of self-presentation" entangled in the concept (23). But it renders it almost impossible to delineate its significance.

Pearl's main argument—that there was a shift in physiognomy, "from the discussion of individuals to the discussion of groups" (4)—is convincing. And some of the individual chapters, particularly those on caricature and photography, while not entirely original, contain useful insights. Too often, however, she seems bored by the minutiae of history or ingenuous in her reading of sources. "Once I knew how to look for physiognomy," she gushes, "it was everywhere" (3). A satirical text, George Jabet's Nasology (1848), is treated as unproblematic evidence, while in the chapter on theatre Pearl quotes Henry Siddons's guide to actors—"Lavater is a book which I have not ready to hand … if you happen to have the book, I beseech you to read what is there said concerning attitudes" (qtd. in Pearl 67)—giving great import to the second part of the sentence, but ignoring the significance of the first. Siddons, moreover, is misrepresented as a champion of naturalism (as a mimetic absolute), rather than as an advocate of a more limited refinement, which later critics would call the "teapot school." Pearl is too myopically focused...

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