It is curious to reflect that when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of a famous person, we commemorate an event of which the celebrity himself almost certainly never had any conscious memory. Accordingly, there may be some who think that anniversaries should every now and then be occasions for commemorating events that were consciously experienced by the celebrity and remembered by him for the rest of his life. If so, then allow me to take advantage of that idea by noting that it is also just over two hundred years since Johann Caspar Lavater paid his one and only visit to England, at the age of fifty. We know about this visit through a letter dated 29 December 1791 and sent to a Mr. Ruxton by Maria Edgeworth from Clifton, near Bath, saying: “Lavater is to come home in a coach today. My father seems to think much the same of him that you did when you saw him abroad, that to some genius he adds a good deal of the mountebank.”¹ Written as they were by someone who was soon to become a well-known English novelist, those two sentences already give us a glimpse of what has by now been well established and documented, namely, that Lavater enjoyed much the same remarkable fame—and notoriety—in Britain two centuries ago as he did on the continent of Europe.²

Yet if by 1791 Lavater had become practically a household name, and was to remain one for a good hundred years to come, there can be little doubt that he is scarcely remembered nowadays in Britain, or anywhere else for that matter, outside Switzerland. That he is at best a remote figure even for scholars of English literature can be seen plainly enough when, for instance, you happen upon a footnote in which he is designated as a phrenologist.³ And though he is, to be sure, usually identified as “a Swiss physiognomist” and sometimes even described therewith as “eccentric” or “enthusiastic,” you cannot help deeming the entry somewhat dry and perfunctory, as if Lavater's presence in the text were of essentially peripheral interest.⁴ All the same, I have to admit that, quite recently, I discovered to my delight that in a 1986 edition of Ann Radcliffe's novel The Romance of the Forest, first published, as it happens, in the year of Lavater's visit to England, the editor had taken advantage of a reference to physiognomy to provide us with the following note: “… the judgment of character by the face was a particular form of interest at the end of the eighteenth century: at least two different English translations of Johann Caspar Lavater's Physiognomische Fragmente (1775-78) were published in the course of the seventeen-eighties.”⁵ The fact that there is no actual mention of Lavater in this novel made that detail especially welcome and suggests that specialists in English literature—perhaps in response to the research done in recent decades on physiognomy in fiction—are now taking rather more cognizance than ever before of Lavater's significance for their particular domain.⁶

With the foregoing in mind, and given the current state of Lavater scholarship, we might, then, ask ourselves: How can one, or rather, how should one, henceforth approach the topic “Lavater and the Nineteenth-Century English Novel”? The most common approach to this sort of topic hitherto has been the more or less historical one initiated around 1910 by the French comparatist Fernand Baldensperger with a well-known essay in which he shows how various French writers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries were affected by Lavater's physiognomic theories.⁷ Much the same approach has been used by John Graham, who, to my knowledge, is the first academic to have drawn attention to Lavater's influence on the English novel as a whole.⁸ At the same time, there may be some who think that, rather than adopt Baldensperger's approach, we might, instead, alter the process by, say, comparing Lavater's physiognomic ideas with methods of physical character description to be found in any work of fiction from classical antiquity down to the present day. François Jost was quite in favor of this approach; and it is one that the English dramatist and critic John Dryden somehow evokes when, for example, he refers to Chaucer's Canterbury Tales as follows: “All his pilgrims are severally distinguished from each other; and not only in their inclinations, but in their very physiognomies and persons. Baptista Porta could not have described their natures better than by the masks the poet gives them.”⁹ More importantly, however, Dryden reminds us here that physiognomy was an integral part of the epic genre long before the Lavaterian era. Lavater himself certainly acknowledged imaginative literature to be an important repository of physiognomy, and even speaks of physiognomic passages he has noticed in some of the German fiction of his period.¹⁰ It is probable, too, that much physical character description in the eighteenth-century English novel would have gained Lavater's approval, not least the familiar correlations between beauty and virtue and between ugliness and vice. English literature between 1700 and 1790 is, moreover, conspicuous for all kinds of references to physiognomy: Addison, for example, writes a good deal about it, often tongue in cheek, in The Spectator, and Fielding gives the subject serious consideration in some of his essays.¹¹ One may also find, usually in minor fiction, serious references to a character's “skill in physiognomy” or “gift of reading countenances,” and even the occasional serious discussion of physiognomy, as in Henry Brooke's The Fool of Quality, which was first published some ten years before the Physiognomische Fragmente.¹²

Nevertheless, it must be said that eighteenth-century English fiction otherwise seems to betray a largely skeptical attitude to physiognomy, or, rather, to physiognomists, the best of that fiction more or less representing the traditional notion of fronti nulla fides—i.e., not trusting outward appearances—as typified, for example, by John Clubbe's brilliant satirical essay on physiognomy of 1763 and monumentalized by such blundering physiognomists as Parson Adams in Joseph Andrews and the eponymous heroes of The Vicar of Wakefield and The Man of Feeling.¹³ This physiognomic skepticism informs some English fiction even in the 1790s.¹⁴ I say “even in the 1790s” because it was that decade which saw Lavater's earliest influence on the English novel.¹⁵ I am thinking in particular of Ann Radcliffe's The Romance of the Forest (1791) and The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), William Godwin's Caleb Williams (1794), and Matthew Lewis's The Monk (1796), in which a serious use of physiognomy seems to be in sharp contrast with what we find in earlier fiction, thereby justifying to some extent the argument for Lavater's influence.¹⁶ Would that, then, make a comparison between Lavater and, say, the English novel before 1790 pointless? Not at all, some might readily retort. After all, is not Lavater sometimes rather similar in outlook to, say, Addison or Fielding, especially when he deplores astrological physiognomy, or laments the difficulty of being a good physiognomist, or confesses how often he was himself the victim of physiognomic deception?¹⁷ But whether such a comparison would be fruitful in the long run seems doubtful, if only because the Physiognomische Fragmente were quite clearly intended both to discredit once and for all that skepticism toward physiognomy which had prevailed for so long in the literary world, and to bring about a fundamental reappraisal, not to say a rehabilitation, of a much misunderstood science.¹⁸

Let me, therefore, return to the question raised above: Given the current state of Lavater scholarship, how may one approach a topic such as “Lavater and the Nineteenth-Century English Novel”? Or let me put it another way. Let us suppose, instead, that you were about to embark upon that topic for the first time ever, with not much more scholarship to go on than John Graham's immensely useful essays and bibliographies.¹⁹ What do you do? It may sound rather banal to say so, but there is little you can do other than get down to the nitty-gritty of reading, and even rereading, any number of literary texts you can lay your hands on in the hope of eventually stumbling upon some references to Lavater. For was it not such references that validated your field of research in the first place? Still, already mindful of the prominence of physical character description in the nineteenth-century novel, you feel a bit like a scientist starting out with a plausible hypothesis, confident that it will be verified time and again. Indeed, after many months of perusing, or dipping into, a multitude of books, you are happy to be able to announce that you have actually found Lavater's name in sundry nineteenth-century letters, notebooks, travel books, essays, lectures on aesthetics, philosophical treatises and so on; that you have even come across his name in the fiction of Robert Bage, Charlotte Smith, Agnes Maria Bennett, Anna Maria Porter, Maria Edgeworth, Catherine Gore, Anthony Trollope, George Borrow, Charles Dickens, and Bulwer Lytton, not to mention that of several well-nigh forgotten figures; and that you have noticed, by the way, that all those references, whether in novel or short story, span well over three quarters of a century.²⁰ To these you can add references to physiognomists or to people “skilled in physiognomy,” whether anonymous real-life authorities or fictional characters, together with references to physiognomic observation you have found in the novels of Samuel Pratt, Elizabeth Helme, Elizabeth Hamilton, Amelia Opie, Susannah Gunning, George Walker, Susan Ferrier, Walter Scott, James Hogg, Frederick Marryat, Letitia Landon, Frances Trollope, G. P. R. James, Palgrave Simpson, and Thomas Hardy, not to mention novelists already quoted or about to be.²¹ Nor have you forgotten the countless references, both concrete and abstract, to the word physiognomy, or even quite a few to phrenology, which latter, you are glad to have discovered, not merely sustained popular interest in physiognomy during the nineteenth century, but, pace Franz Joseph Gall, is itself a kind of physiognomy.²²

You have also gathered a sheaf of comments from descriptive passages about faces or countenances that attract or repel, faces that inspire confidence or fear, or that command attention; faces unique or, in some sense, superlative; faces gazed on with pleasure or for their own sake; faces or types of faces that would interest the “observer” or the “beholder” or the “connoisseur” or “the judge of outward signs.” By now you have also noticed a tendency in novelists to make fairly elaborate physiognomic pronouncements of the kind seen in the essays of, for example, Carlyle, Hazlitt, and Stevenson, having paused in your research to ponder a passage in George Gissing's novel The Unclassed (1884), where Ida Starr claims that she “never saw a man's or a woman's face which would bear looking at from all parts”; or to meditate on a socio-anthropological description of Clym Yeobright's face in Hardy's Return of the Native (1879), whereby the narrator, having deemed male beauty to be “almost an anachronism” in the late nineteenth century, wonders whether, “at some time or other, physically beautiful women may not be an anachronism likewise”; or to muse over Lady Mountstuart's warning to the hero of The Egoist (1879) not to try to shape the beautiful Clara Middleton to his amorous needs: “She has no character yet. You are forming it, and pray be advised and be merry; the solid is your safest guide; physiognomy and manners will give you more on a girl's character than all the divings you can do.”²³

Nor have you forgotten to note down physiognomic correlations about facial and bodily features—the eyes, the eyebrows, the hands, the voice, the clothes, and so on—bearing in mind that Lavater attaches considerable importance to the individual feature alone.²⁴ How often have you not felt the moral essence of a fictional character to dwell in one particular physical feature, whether it be Becky Sharp's “green eyes” or Dobbin's “big hands” in Vanity Fair, Peggotty's “rough forefinger” or Miss Murdstone's “very heavy eyebrows” in David Copperfield?²⁵ Interesting, too, for you is a passage about noses in George Eliot's Middlemarch, where the narrator, just after having referred to Lydgate's faults of character, and then warned us not to allow the generalities made by “polite preachers” about such faults to blind us to the complexity of human character, continues thus: “The particular faults from which these delicate generalities are distilled have distinguishable physiognomies, diction, accent and grimaces; filling up parts in various dramas. Our vanities differ as our noses do: all conceit is not the same conceit, but varies in correspondence with the minutiae of mental make in which one of us differs from another.”²⁶ How warmly Lavater might have approved of that idea!

In your research, you will also have remarked a decline in pathognomic references in the novel after 1790 in favor of physiognomic ones, as well as an absence of the seeming dichotomy between body and mind which typifies much early and mid-eighteenth-century character portraiture. Rarely, if ever, will you have found this sort of detail as culled, for example, from Eliza Haywood's The Injur'd Husband: “She also knew that, all lovely as he was, the Graces of his Mind were far superior to the Beauties of his Person”; or this one from Richardson's Pamela: “My Pamela's person, all lovely as you see it, is far short of her Mind.”²⁷ On the contrary, for the nineteenth-century novelist the outward man generally reveals all one needs to know about the inner man. This you have seen confirmed by the way in which, as seldom before 1790, the moral, psychological, or biological development of a character is often indicated by certain changes in facial appearance.²⁸ Consider, for instance, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a novel written by someone you might not have readily associated with Lavater, and whose interest for you derives almost entirely from the way in which the gradual undermining of the hero's marvelous beauty by persistent and excessive moral depravity is registered not in his fleshly face, but, thanks to some magical arrangement with the artist, only in the portrait itself. Some may recall how Oscar Wilde finally brings us back to reality when the hero's servants, having noticed that the portrait in the secret room they have broken into still shows “all the wonders of Dorian's exquisite youth and beauty,” find their master lying dead “in evening dress” on the floor, “with a knife in his heart”; whereat the narrator concludes his fascinating story with these two grim sentences: “He was withered, wrinkled and loathsome of visage. It was not till they had examined the rings that they recognized who it was.”²⁹

Then, if you are sufficiently familiar with the eighteenth century, you can show how the often elaborate treatment of family and national physiognomies, and of the physiognomy of death—ideas which figure prominently in the Fragmente—is virtually an innovation in the novel after 1790.³⁰ In this connection, you might casually mention having come across a little-known short story published in 1860 by Margaret Gatty and entitled “The Human Face Divine,” whose narrator, asked by an editor to write a story for his magazine, speaks of the revelation it has been for her to reread an English translation of Lavater's essays—which, until that time, were for her “books [she] had often amused [herself] with, but nothing more”—because the Swiss pastor's comments on the beautification of the face in death now enables her to justify her desire to portray a plain, nay an ugly, heroine, on the assumption that all earthly beauty is but a kind of ugliness and as nothing compared with the beauty endowed by death.³¹ You have also collected details about family resemblances, lyrical ones for the most part, especially from the novels of Jane Austen and Elizabeth Gaskell as well as from others just as famous.³² And, as if to demonstrate the universality of the notion, you think you might even quote from a short story in Hardy's collection entitled Life's Little Ironies because he has this to say about the effect of seasickness upon the face: “Unexpected physiognomies will uncover themselves at those moments in well-known faces; the aspect becomes invested with the spectral presence of entombed and forgotten ancestors; and family lineaments of special or exclusive cast, which in ordinary moments are masked by a stereotyped expression and mien, start up with crude insistence to the view.”³³

Other physiognomic subject matter to which you may wish to draw attention includes the use of contrasts in appearance to underline differences in character; and passages of physical description in which, rather more often than before 1790, painters or sculptors are invoked, not seldom by name, as if some writers had not forgotten how closely Lavater links the fine arts with physiognomy.³⁴ You may also have drawn up a long list of writers that nobody much reads today—Charlotte Yonge, Elizabeth Gardiner, Frances Trollope, Catherine Gore, Catherine Crowe, Mary Braddon, Letitia Landon, and so on—just to show how abundantly they, too, describe their characters and in what physiognomic detail.³⁵ Finally, you hope to reinforce your findings by pointing out that the novels of, say, Charles Lever, Harrison Ainsworth, and Robert Surtees, like those of Dickens and Scott, are sometimes graced by the wonderful caricatural illustrations of George Cruikshank or Hablot K. Browne, otherwise better known, appropriately enough, as “Phiz.”³⁶

Yet, despite having drawn up such an impressive array of evidence, you are suddenly, and almost unaccountably, assailed by nagging doubts about your project and begin to imagine every conceivable objection that might be raised to the demonstrations you are about to make. You wonder, for instance, if you will not be found guilty of specious syllogisms: Lavater mentions such and such a physiognomic idea; that idea turns up in such and such novels; therefore Lavater influenced such and such novelists. Another objection you anticipate, if you are lucky, is that you have committed the logical fallacy of post hoc ergo propter hoc, a charge commonly laid at the door of influence studies. Accordingly, you begin to think of all the concessions you might make in order to propitiate your would-be readers, particularly would-be readers well-versed in the English novel, and in so doing, you remind yourself that physiognomy was by no means new after 1790, or even an invention of Lavater's; that novelists might have picked up their physiognomic ideas from any number of sources other than Lavater, not least from contemporary or earlier practitioners of their craft; that, in any case, Lavater's physiognomic essays were often thought too unsystematic, too rhapsodic, or too frivolous for serious-minded people such as novelists to be bothered with.³⁷ You also remind yourself that there are nineteenth-century novelists who rarely describe their characters, or who, like George Eliot, are evidently quite out of sympathy with what Harriet Lee, in the preface to her Canterbury Tales of 1797, disparagingly designates as “the new race of physiognomists.”³⁸ Then you reread the Fragmente only to ask yourself whether, irrespective of his staunchly religious outlook, Lavater's technical and geometrical discussions on the skull and the bone structure and his utterly moral concept of beauty are not, after all, somewhat at variance with many a novelist's practice.³⁹ For example, ever since reading Richardson and his successors, you have become aware of a tendency in English novelists to portray their virtuous heroines with faces that are noticeable for sweetness and sensibility, rather than for classically regular features, and even to minimize the importance of good looks in their heroes.⁴⁰ This is especially true of George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, and Charlotte Brontë, writers for whom the concept of goodness is, if anything, an essentially secular one, having little to do with Lavater's acknowledgment of man as being created in the image of God.⁴¹ Finally, you know that you can never really prove Lavater's influence on any novelist, all the more as you recall that the very mention of his name in a novel may be utterly unserious, not to say deliberately ironic. Thus it seems as if, long before you have really got down to business, your brilliant ideas have simply gone up in smoke.

Does that mean, then, that you should abandon your project forthwith and without further ado? Not at all! It is simply a matter now of shifting your ground a little, or, rather, of discreetly shelving for the moment the question of influences in order to focus on the concrete evidence itself, namely, physical character description as it exists per se in the nineteenth-century novel. You do this because you know that, as a humble comparatist, you are otherwise very likely to find yourself face to face with those proud specialists in the English novel who are ready to discountenance you as an intruder, nay a poacher, on their sacred territory. Now, the literary portrait, or character portraiture, is perhaps not quite the respectable topic it used to be in the early decades of this century, when it was, for example, considered eminently suitable for many a German doctoral dissertation; but whatever its past or present status, one can hardly deny that physical character description does constitute a substantial part of many a nineteenth-century novel. So you decide to deal with it as a phenomenon in its own right, as you would any other aspect of the novel, knowing that as long as you show a basic understanding of the structural and thematic elements of the works you have selected, you are far less likely to antagonize your specialist friends than you would with your overtly documentary or historical approach. But then you wonder for a moment: Have I been wasting my time reading Lavater? By no means! As a matter of fact, it is precisely because you have read your Lavater and are pretty familiar with the extraordinary physiognomic culture which he, and he above all, gave rise to, that, notwithstanding the extensive scholarship on the literary portrait, you have become aware how much there is still to be said about it; so that what others may have thought a rather old-fashioned topic now seems to have become an exciting new one for you.⁴²

How, then, will you approach your study of the literary portrait? To begin with, you may be much less inclined to bother about linking physiognomic correlations with fictional character and action than to see how far physical character description is aesthetically incorporated in the novels of your concern. And this is where your knowledge of Lavater—which, of course, you must for the moment sedulously keep hidden from your reader—will have come in handy. For it is because you have read the Physiognomische Fragmente that you will have come more easily to notice that, from the 1790s onwards, descriptive methods, instead of being restricted more or less to expressions of admiration of male and female beauty, or to a conventional enumeration of bodily features, or to shrewd moralistic analyses of facial appearance in the manner of Marivaux or Diderot, are now expressions of the kind of physiognomical sensibility you have learned to associate with Lavater's concept of the ideal physiognomist.⁴³ You will have seen this in some measure already in such minor fiction as Helen Maria Williams's Julia (1790), Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792) and Marchmont (1796), Elizabeth Parsons's The Castle of Wolfenbach (1793), Richard Cumberland's Henry (1795), John Moore's Edward (1796), and Agnes Maria Bennett's The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors (1797), Charles Lloyd's Edmund Oliver (1798), and Samuel Pratt's Family Secrets (1798).⁴⁴ But by reason of their aesthetic limitations, most of those well-nigh forgotten novels will deserve far less of your attention than the better-known ones of the same decade I mentioned earlier, notably The Mysteries of Udolpho, in which the presentation of the physiognomically sensitive Emily St. Aubert, as manifest in her first impressions, her favorable or unfavorable reactions to faces, her constant awareness and observation of appearances, and even her fondness for gazing at landscapes and natural scenery, marks a turning point in the history of fictional characterization inasmuch as it bespeaks a maturity that was rare in fictional heroines before 1790 and was to be prototypical for numerous fictional heroines—and heroes—to come.⁴⁵ Moreover, in analyzing The Mysteries of Udolpho, you can show that physiognomic observation is used, as seldom before, as a means of thickening the plot and of maintaining dramatic suspense, as it is also in The Romance of the Forest, Caleb Williams, and The Monk. In later novels, however, you discern aesthetically more interesting and more important aspects of physical character description, which, again, you have luckily been prompted by Lavater to notice, especially family physiognomies, whose purely documentary interest for you is now very much in abeyance. If in many cases, especially in minor fiction, the family physiognomy has little more than a lyrical function, in the better novels it usually possesses a special thematic interest. Thus, family resemblances are used throughout The Mysteries of Udolpho to keep the reader on tenterhooks as to the real identity of particular characters until the denouement. You will have certainly found family physiognomies thematically essential in such works as The Mill on the Floss and Wuthering Heights, with their well-known family rivalries.⁴⁶ You can also show that physiognomy, far from being a mere convention in the novel, now plays a fundamental part even in characterization. Indeed, are not the moral contradictions in the hero of Great Expectations somehow underlined by his capacity for both cruel and sensitive physiognomic observations? And does not the moral development of the heroine of Jane Austen's Emma go hand in hand with the gradual correction of her wrongheaded physiognomic notions? And even in novels where physiognomy seems to be regularly called over the coals, as you have noticed, say, in George Eliot, is not the apparent inconsistency between the author's occasional objections to physiognomy and her detailed physiognomic portraits somehow integral to her central themes?⁴⁷

But whether you quote from the aforementioned titles or not, there is one work of fiction you know you simply cannot omit from your discussion, and that is Charlotte Brontë's Villette, which was first published in 1853. Few novels could match this one for abundance of physical character description; indeed, in some respects it may be said to have gone too far in that direction, embodying as it does many familiar physiognomic ideas, and even a few phrenological ones.⁴⁸ And, conversant as you are with your three or four volumes of Lavater, you are intrigued to read that the heroine Lucy Snowe has hardly arrived at her girls' school in Belgium, when the headmistress Madame Beck sends for the senior master M. Paul Emanuel and, pointing to the new arrival, orders him to “read that countenance.”⁴⁹ The physiognomic reading turns out to be not quite conclusive, but at least it marks the beginning of an important, if often vexed, relationship between the new English teacher and that eccentric physiognomist. And as you read further, it becomes increasingly obvious to you that physiognomy has a major thematic function here, for Villette is very much a novel about seeing and about how we look at one another. Like many a small community, Madame Beck's school is an institution where almost everybody spies on everybody else. The principal herself is presented as a martinet whose watchwords are “surveillance” and “espionage.”⁵⁰ For much of the novel, Lucy Snowe is herself the object of spying eyes, not least those of Paul Emanuel, often at quite long range. The turning point of the action, however, occurs in that moment when, just after breaking his spyglass, Lucy Snowe is astonished to find the normally irascible little man reacting to the accident with great good humor. Not very long afterwards, Paul Emanuel, now confident of Lucy's love for him, declares his own warm feelings for her when, having asked her if she has not already noticed an affinity between them when she looks in the glass, he goes on to say: “Do you observe that your forehead is shaped like mine? Do you hear that you have some of my tones of voice? Do you know that you have many of my looks? I perceive all this, and believe that you were born under my star.”⁵¹ Those words are, of course, a marvelous expression of love, as they are also unmistakable signs of a profound physiognomic sensibility. If Madame Beck and her like-minded associates can use physiognomy only for practical, even abject, purposes, not so Paul Emanuel, who by now has become much more for you than the comical physiognomist you saw at the beginning. And by the end of the novel you find that Lucy Snowe herself, the inveterate, and sometimes cruel, observer of her fellow creatures, no longer sees Paul Emanuel merely as the funny-looking, dark-faced, violet-eyed man of “low stature” and “wiry make,” but as someone whom, by virtue of his “intellect” and his “goodness of heart,” she now “preferred … before all humanity.”⁵² It is as if, perhaps for the first time in her life, the heroine somehow had come to understand Lavater's concept of physiognomy as a means by which we may come to know and to love one another better.

Now after all that rigmarole, do you think that you will at last have the courage, nay the audacity, to mention Lavater by name with regard to a novel where his name is certainly not mentioned? And if you do, are you not afraid that you might be declared a vox clamantis (if not clamans) in deserto?⁵³ These are the sort of questions that you will sooner or later have to weigh carefully, knowing that you will never be able to answer them to everybody's satisfaction. But in case you feel that you have been unduly diffident about your topic, or that you ought to be saying a little more about commemorating centennials or, rather, semiquincentennials, you might perhaps think about starting, or even ending, your first draft with a remark made by a character in an English novel that was published exactly one hundred years after Lavater's visit to England: “It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.”⁵⁴ The novel in which you have found those aphoristic words is, of course, The Picture of Dorian Gray. And now it is up to you to decide whether you are going to say anything at all about that “enthusiastic,” “eccentric” Swiss physiognomist—or not.

Notes

1. See The Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Augustus J. C. Hare (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1895), 1:19.

2. Lavater's influence on European culture has been discussed in several studies, of which the reader is referred especially to: Paolo Mantegazza, Physiognomy and Expression (London: Scott, 1890); Jean Larat, “Un Fragment inédit de Charles Nodier, sa Physiognomonie inspirée de Lavater,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 1 (1921): 285-94; Auguste Viatte, “Madame de Staël et Lavater d'après des documents inédits,” Revue de Littérature Comparée 3 (1923): 640-50; Viatte, Les Sources occultes du Romantisme, 2 vols. (Paris: Champion, 1928); Olivier Guinaudeau, Jean-Gaspard Lavater: Études sur sa vie et sa pensée jusqu'en 1786 (Paris: Alcan, 1924); W. J. Noordhoek, “Lavater und Holland,” Neophilologus 10 (1925): 10-19; George Levitine, “The Influence of Lavater and Girodet's Expression des sentiments de l'âme,” Art Bulletin 36 (1954): 33-44; John Graham, “Lavater's Physiognomy: A Checklist,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 55 (1961): 297-308; Graham, “Lavater's Physiognomy in England,” Journal of the History of Ideas 22 (1961): 561-72; Graham, Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy: A Study in the History of Ideas (Bern: Lang, 1979); Edmund Heier, “J. C. Lavater und der russische Zarenhof,” Schweizer Monatshefte 45 (1965): 831-50; Walter Brednow, Von Lavater zu Darwin (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1969); Brednow, “Wilhelm von Humboldt und die Physiognomik,” Clio Medica 4 (1969): 33-42; G. P. Brooks and R. W. Johnson, “Contributions to the History of Psychology XXIV: Johann Caspar Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy,” Psychological Reports 46 (1980): 3-20; Graeme Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982); Judith Wechsler, A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris (London: Thames & Hudson, 1982); Günter Gebauer, “Ausdruck und Einbildung: Zur symbolischen Funktion des Körpers,” in Die Wiederkehr des Körpers, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1982), 313-29; Fritz Aerni, Huter und Lavater: Von der Gefühlsphysiognomik zur Psychologie und Psycho-Physiognomik (Zurich: Kalos, 1984); Karl Pestalozzi, “Physiognomische Methodik,” in Germanistik aus interkultureller Perspective, ed. Adrian Fink and Gertrud Gréciano (Strasbourg: Presses Universitaires de Strasbourg, 1988), 137-53; Hartmut Böhme, “Der sprechende Leib: Die Semiotiken des Körpers am Ende des achtzehnten Jahrhunderts und ihre hermetische Tradition,” in Transfigurationen des Körpers: Spuren der Gewalt in der Geschichte, ed. Dietmar Kamper and Christoph Wulf (Berlin: Reimer, 1989), 144-81; Rotraut Fischer and Gabriele Stumpp, “Das konstruierte Individuum: Zur Physiognomik Johann Kaspar Lavaters und Carl Gustav Carus,”’ in Transfigurationen des Körpers, 123-43; Giovanni Gurisatti and Klaas Huizing, “Die Schrift des Gesichts: Zur Archäologie physiognomischer Wahrnehmungskultur,” Neue Zeitschrift für systematische Theologie und Religionswissenschaft 31 (1989): 271-87; August Ohage, “Von Lessings ‘Wust’ zu einer Wissenschaftsgeschichte der Physiognomik im 18. Jahrhundert,” Lessing Yearbook 21 (1989): 55-87; Carsten Zelle, “Physiognomie des Schreckens im 18. Jahrhundert: Zu Johann Kaspar Lavater und Charles Lebrun,” Lessing Yearbook 21 (1989): 89-102; Marita Kaiser, “Passionierte Liebe als exklusives Refugium,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 14 (1990): 153-58; Pia Schmid, “Zur Geschichte des weltlichen Körpers im 18. Jahrhundert: Besprechung einschlägiger Neuerscheinungen,” Das achtzehnte Jahrhundert 14 (1990): 159-80; Richard Gray, “Die Geburt des Genies aus dem Geiste der Aufklärung: Semiotik und Aufklärungsideologie in der Physiognomik Johann Kaspar Lavaters,” Poetica 23 (1991): 96-138; Gray, “The Transcendence of the Body in the Transparency of its En-Signment: Johann Kaspar Lavater's Physiognomical ‘Surface Hermeneutics’ and the Ideological (Con-)Text of Bourgeois Modernism,” Lessing Yearbook 23 (1991): 127-48; Gray, “Sign and Sein; The Physiognomikerstreit and the Dispute over the Semiotic Constitution of Bourgeois Individuality,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 66 (1992): 300-302; Michael Hollington, “Benjamin and Physiognomy,” Southern Review 25 (1992): 49-60.

3. See, for example, the entry for Lavater in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble, 5th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 552; see also Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Stephen Gill (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 902n.

4. For the epithets “eccentric” and “enthusiastic,” see, respectively, Anthony Trollope, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, ed. W. J. McCormack (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 535n; and Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend, ed. Michael Cotsell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 839n.

5. See Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, ed. Chloe Chard (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 388n.

6. The growing awareness of Lavater among scholars of English literature is also suggested in Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary and The Wrongs of Woman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), whose editor, Gary Kelly, also refers to Lavater with regard to a physiognomic reference in the text (p. 210n), where the Swiss physiognomist is not actually mentioned by name. For studies on the relationship between nineteenth-century fiction and physiognomy with particular reference to Lavater, see Wilfred M. Senseman, “Charlotte Brontë's Use of Physiognomy and Phrenology,” Papers of the Michigan Academy of Sciences, Arts and Letters 38 (1953): 457-83; E. Paul Gauthier, “New Light on Zola and Physiognomy,” Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 75 (1960): 297-308; John Graham, “The Development of the Use of Physiognomy in the Novel (Diss., Johns Hopkins, 1960); Graham, “Character Description and Meaning in the Romantic Novel,” Studies in Romanticism 5 (1966): 208-18; Graham, Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy; Hans Ludwig Scheel, “Balzac als Physiognomiker,” Archiv für das Studium der Neueren Sprachen 198 (1961): 227-44; Ian Jack, “Physiognomy, Phrenology and Characterisation in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë,” Brontë Society Transactions 15.5 (1970): 377-91; Edmund Heier, “Lavater's System of Physiognomy as a Mode of Characterisation in Lermontov's Prose,” Arcadia 6 (1971): 267-82; Heier, “The Literary Portrait as a Device of Characterisation,” Neophilologus 60 (1976): 321-31; Heier, “Direct and Indirect Literary Portraits in Pushkin's Works,” Canadian Slavonic Papers 29 (1987): 189-97; Taylor Stoehr, “Physiognomy and Phrenology in Hawthorne,” Huntington Library Quarterly 37 (1974): 355-400; François Jost, “George Sand et les Physiognomische Fragmente de Lavater,” Arcadia 12 (1977): 65-72; Charles Grivel, “Die Identitätsakte bei Balzac: Prolegomena zu einer allgemeinen Theorie des Gesichts,” in Honoré de Balzac, ed. Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, Karlheinz Stierle, and Rainer Warning (Munich: Fink, 1980), 83-141; Helen Goscilo, “Lermontov's Debt to Lavater and Gall,” The Slavonic and East European Review 59 (1981): 500-515; Jeanne Fahnestock, “The Heroine of Irregular Features: Physiognomy and Conventions of Heroine Description, Victorian Studies 24 (1981): 325-50; Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel; Claude Cohen, “Victor Hugo et l'anthropologie physique: ‘Une Tempête sous un Crâne,’” Revue d'Histoire Littéraire 86 (1986): 1008-23; Lee Fontanella, “Physiognomics in Romantic Spain,” in From Dante to Garcia Marquez, ed. Gene H. Bell-Villada, Antonio Gimenez, and George Pistorius (Williamstown, Mass.: Williams College, 1987), 110-13; Ian Pickup, “Balzacian Portraiture in the Novels of Eugène Sue before Les Mystères de Paris,” Nottingham French Studies 26 (1987): 34-45; Andreas Käuser, Physiognomik und Roman im 18. Jahrhundert (Bern: Lang, 1989); Gerhard Neumann, “‘der Mensch ohne Hülle ist eigentlich der Mensch’: Goethe und Heinrich von Kleist in der Geschichte des physiognomischen Blicks,” Kleist Jahrbuch 8 (1989): 259-79; Juliet McMaster, The Index of the Mind: Physiognomy in the Novel (Lethbridge, Alberta: University of Lethbridge Press, 1990); Michael Hollington, “Dickens and Cruikshank as Physiognomers in Oliver Twist,” Dickens Quarterly 7 (1990): 243-54; Hollington, “Monstrous Faces: Physiognomy in Barnaby Rudge,” Dickens Quarterly 8 (1991): 6-15; Doris Alexander, “Benevolent Sage or Blundering Booby?” Dickens Quarterly 8 (1991): 120-27.

7. See Fernand Baldensperger, “Les Théories de Lavater dans la littérature française,” Études d'Histoire Littéraire, 2d series (Paris: Hachette, 1910), 51-91.

8. See Graham, “The Development of the Use of Physiognomy in the Novel” and Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, 75-84. In Senseman's article (see note 6 above), Lavater's influence is confined entirely to Charlotte Brontë's fiction.

9. John Dryden, Selected Essays, ed. W. P. Ker (Oxford: Clarendon, 1961), 2:262. For details about François Jost, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, xviiif.

10. See Johann Caspar Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente zur Beförderung der Menschenkenntniß und Menschenliebe, 4 vols. (Leipzig and Winterthur: Weidmann, Reich, and Steiner, 1775-78; reprint, Zurich: Orell Füssli, 1968-69), 2:9f, 3:214.

11. See Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, The Spectator, ed. Donald Bond, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965), 1:365-69, 4:291-93, 4:342-45; see also Miscellanies by Henry Fielding, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1972), 155-78.

12. See Susannah Minifie, The Histories of Lady Frances S∗∗∗ and Lady Caroline S∗∗∗ (London: Dodsley, 1763), 3:67; William Hutchinson, The Hermitage (York: Etherington, 1772), 40; Thomas Cogan, John Buncle Junior, Gentleman (London: Johnson, 1776), 1:99f; Elizabeth Blower, Maria (London: Cadell, 1785), 1:85f; Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality (London: Routledge, 1906), 128-36.

13. See John Clubbe, Miscellaneous Tracts (Ipswich: Shave, 1770), 1:1-84; Oliver Goldsmith, The Vicar of Wakefield, ed. Arthur Friedman (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 62, 67-72; Henry Mackenzie, The Man of Feeling, ed. Brian Vickers (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), 43-53. For discussions on physiognomy in eighteenth-century fiction and on Fielding's treatment of the foibles of physiognomists in Joseph Andrews as well as his other novels, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 136-69; see also Tytler, “Letters of Recommendation and False Vizors: Physiognomy in the Novels of Henry Fielding,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 2 (1990): 93-111. Fronti nulla fides is a quotation from Juvenal's second Satire, and though Fielding used this phrase as the motto of The Champion (11 December 1739), his later writings show him to have become only too aware of its dangers for would-be physiognomists. Thus, in his “Essay on the Knowledge of the Characters of Men,” he suggests that “the old Adage Fronti nulla Fides” can be properly understood only in the context of the passage where Juvenal mocks the type of libertine that hides his moral corruption behind a solemn face. Indeed, Fielding is convinced that Juvenal “never intended by these Words, which have grown into a Proverb, utterly to depreciate an Art on which so wise a Man as Aristotle thought proper to compose a Treatise” (Fielding, Miscellanies, 156).

14. See especially, Ann Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 256 and The Mysteries of Udolpho, ed. Bonamy Dobrée and Frederick Garber (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 111f.

15. See Graham, “The Development of the Use of Physiognomy in the Novel,” passim, and Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, 75-83.

16. The heroes and heroines of Ann Radcliffe's novels tend to have markedly physiognomic gifts, which usually include a sensitive awareness of landscapes and nature; even her minor characters, especially women servants, show their intelligence and usefulness through their basic physiognomic skills. Physiognomy also plays a significant part in the delineation of love relationships, underlining as it does the mutual awareness that exists between Emily St. Aubert and Valancourt (Mysteries of Udolpho) and between Adeline and Theodor (Romance of the Forest). If a physiognomic eye is also an essential aspect of heroic stature in The Monk (one thinks of Don Lorenzo and Don Raymond), the chief interest in physiognomy in this novel seems to lie in the way in which, on the one hand, it helps to account for the fascination that Ambrosio exercises over women, and, on the other, exposes his apparently aesthetic disposition as being little more than a latent sign of a long-repressed lust to which he will increasingly give rein in his tragic relations with Matilda and Antonia. The hero of Caleb Williams is presented as an earnest observer of human faces and appearance—perhaps too earnest for his own good, inasmuch as he is prompted by a priggishly uneasy conscience to use his physiognomic skills in a more or less ruthless quest to prove his former master Falkland guilty of murder, with tragic consequences for himself. The essential seriousness of the treatment of physiognomy in these novels is confirmed somewhat by the conspicuous absence of all satire or humor in episodes where physiognomic judgments turn out to have been unduly hasty, not to say rash, as we see, for instance, in the case of Adeline's initial, favorable judgment of Madame LaMotte in The Romance of the Forest, Don Raymond's unfavorable first impression of Marguerite in The Monk, and Caleb Williams's optimistic assessments of the appearance of the elderly stranger and that of Laura Denison.

17. See Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente 1:17, 3:354f, 4:219.

18. See Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 65.

19. For bibliographies on Lavater, see Graham, Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, 85-101, 103-107, 129-130.

20. For references to Lavater in nonfictional English literature, see Graham, Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy, 64-74; Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 75-119. See also Walter Pater, “Winckelmann” (1867) in his The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (London: Macmillan, 1900), 185f.; The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, vol. 3 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973), n. 3694; The Collected Letters of Thomas and Jane Welsh Carlyle, ed. Charles Richard Sanders et al., vol. 1 (Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1970), 266. For direct references to Lavater in English fiction, see Robert Bage, Man as He is (London: Lane, 1792), 1:177; Charles Henry Wilson, The Wandering Islander (London: Ridgeway, 1792), 1:50; Charlotte Smith, Marchmont (London: Low, 1796), 2:174f; Agnes Maria Bennett, The Beggar Girl and her Benefactors, 7 vols. (London: Lane, 1797), 1:138, 3:181f; Anon., A Marvellous Pleasant Love Story (London: Lane, 1801), 1:39; Henry Whitfield, A Picture from Life (London: Highley, 1804), 1:72; Anna Maria Porter, The Hungarian Brothers (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees and Orme, 1807), 1:25; Susannah Gunning, The Exile of Erin (London: Crosby, 1808), 2:35; Anon., Marian (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, 1812), 1:196; Azilé d'Arcy, Prejudice; or Physiognomy (London: Newman, 1817), 2:70; Maria Edgeworth, Harrington and Ormond (London: Hunter, 1817); Thomas Brown, Bath (London: Sherwood, Kneely & Jones, 1818), 1:83; Anon., The Physiognomist (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, 1818), 1:85; Quintin Poynet, The Wizard Priest and the Witch (London: Newman, 1822), 1:197; James Sheridan Knowles, The Magdalen and Other Tales (London: Moxon, 1832), 121; Catherine Gore, The Ambassador's Wife (London: Bentley, 1842), 2:80f; George Borrow, Lavengro (London: Nelson, n.d.), 139; Anthony Trollope, The Kellys and the O'Kellys, 413f; Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1973), 112; Edward Bulwer Lytton, The Parisians (London, 1873), 273.

21. See Samuel Pratt, Family Secrets (London: Longman, 1798), 3:314f; Elizabeth Helme, Albert (London, 1799), 1:127f; Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (London: Noble, 1800), 1:36; Amelia Opie, The Father and Daughter (London: Longman and Rees, 1801), 17; Susannah Gunning, The Heir Apparent (London: Ridgeway, 1801), 1:214; George Walker, Don Raphael (London: Walker & Hurst, 1803), 3:169; Susan Ferrier, The Novels (London: Dent, 1894), 1:43; Walter Scott, Waverley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 139; Scott, Rob Roy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912), 54; Scott, Ivanhoe (Edinburgh: Black, 1871), 229; James Hogg, The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, ed. John Carey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969), 164f; Frederick Marryat, The Novels, ed. R. Brimsley Johnson (London: Dent, 1891), 2:220; Letitia Landon, Ethel Churchill (London: Colburn, 1837), 1:39f. Frances Trollope, The Widow Barnaby (London: Bentley, 1839), 1:217; William Harrison Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard (London: Bentley, 1840), 23; G. P. R. James, The Stepmother (London: Smith, Elder, 1846), 98, 101; J. Palgrave Simpson, The Lily of Paris (London: Bently, 1849); Edward Bulwer Lytton, Kenelm Chillingly, 2d ed. (London: Blackwood, 1873), 3:173; Thomas Hardy, Desperate Remedies (London: Macmillan, 1912), 150, 322; Hardy, A Pair of Blue Eyes, ed. Roger Ebbatson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986); Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, ed. David Wright (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 52-54; Hardy, A Laodicean (London: Macmillan, 1912), 203; Hardy, Jude the Obscure, ed. C. H. Sisson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 164.

22. For uses of the word physiognomy and variants thereof after 1790, see Thomas Holcroft, The Adventures of Hugh Trevor (London: Shepperson and Reynolds, 1794), 6:161; Godwin, Caleb Williams, 186, 209; Mary Shelly, The Last Man (London: Colburn, 1826), 1:88, 226, 256; Robert Plumer Ward, De Vere (London: Colburn, 1827), 1:4, 35; G. P. R. James, Darnley (London: Colburn and Bentley, 1830), 68; William Harrison Ainsworth, Rookwood (Paris: Baudry, 1836), 195; Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard, 167; Ainsworth, Old St. Paul's (London: Cunningham, 1841), 1:152; Ainsworth, The Constable of the Tower (London: Chapman and Hall, 1861), 1:233, 2:5; Marguerite Gardiner, The Victims of Society (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 2:157; Frederick Marryat, Olla Podrida (London: Longman, 1840), 2:95; Catherine Gore, The Ambassador's Wife 1:145, 2:83; Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850), 2:13; Mrs. Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1856), 1:3; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (London: Everyman, 1964), 499. See also Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 117f, 364f. For some references to phrenology or phrenologists, see Frances Trollope, The Widow Barnaby 3:188; Charles Lever, The Confessions of Harry Lorrequer (Dublin: Curry, 1839), 41; Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke 1:71; Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd (London: Tinsley, 1863), 1:32; Braddon, Henry Dunbar (London: Maxwell, 1864), 1:102; Bulwer Lytton, Kenelm Chillingly 3:175; Thomas Hardy, The Trumpet-Major, ed. Robert Ebbatson (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987), 353; Hardy, The Woodlanders, ed. Dale Kramer (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985), 59. With regard to phrenological references in George Eliot's novels, see T. C. Wright, “From Bumps to Morals: The Phrenological Background to George Eliot's Moral Framework,” Review of English Studies 33 (1982): 35-46. For other references to phrenology in English fiction, to the close association between physiognomy and phrenology, and to Gall's disapproval of the confusion of the two sciences, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 87-114, 263, 350-63, 389f.

23. See Thomas Carlyle, Heroes, Hero Worship and Heroes in History (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), 93, 106f; William Hazlitt, The Complete Works, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols. (London: Dent, 1930-41), 3:116, 7:281, 8:303f, 12:138; Robert Louis Stevenson, Virginibus Puersique and Other Papers (London: Macmillan, 1907), 42-44; George Gissing, The Unclassed (London: Chapman and Hall, 1894), 2:9; George Meredith, The Egoist (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 1:50. General or particular physiognomic ideas can also be found, for example, in Maria Regina Roche, Alvondown Vicarage (London: Lane, 1807), 1:147, 2:258; Susan Ferrier, The Inheritance (1824), in her The Novels 1:51; G. P. R. James, Darnley, 287; William Lister, Arlington (London: Bentley, 1832), 1:34f; Letitia Landon, Ethel Churchill, 1:224f; Landon, Lady Anne Granard (London: Colburn, 1842), 1:19; Frances Trollope, The Widow Barnaby 1:344f; George Borrow, Lavengro, 139; Charlotte Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe (London: Parker, 1853), 1:113; G. P. R. James, Agnes Sorel (London: Newby, 1853), 3:49; Craik, John Halifax, Gentleman 1:3; Braddon, Aurora Floyd 2:57f; Braddon, John Marchmont's Legacy (London: Tinsley, 1863), 1:244; Joseph Hatton, Clytie (London: Chapman and Hall, 1874), 1:66; Hardy, Under the Greenwood Tree, 52-54; Hardy, The Return of the Native, (New York: Bantam, 1989), 151f; Hardy Two on a Tower (London: Macmillan, 1912), 177, 183.

24. See Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente 4:461.

25. See William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair, ed. J. I. M. Stewart (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985), 49, 56, 258, 343, 350, 441, 446, 483, 492, 497, 561; Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. Nina Burgis (Oxford: Clarendon, 1981), 11, 19, 41, 748. For the treatment of individual facial and bodily features in nineteenth-century English fiction, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 208-226.

26. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. David Carroll (Oxford: Clarendon, 1986), 147.

27. See Eliza Haywood, The Injur'd Husband (London: Brown, 1725), 131; see also Samuel Richardson, Pamela (London: Dent, 1930), 2:372.

28. For instances of this aspect of physical characterization, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, especially chapters 6 and 7.

29. Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, ed. Isobel Murray (London: Oxford University Press, 1974), 224.

30. For Lavater's comments on family and national physiognomies and on the physiognomy of death, see Lavater, Physiognomische Fragmente 1:73, 2:33f, 4:325.

31. See Margaret Gatty, The Human Face Divine and Other Tales (London: Bell & Daldy, 1866), 24-34. For a discussion on the treatment of the physiognomy of death in other nineteenth-century fiction, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 254-59. As for references to national physiognomies in English fiction after 1790, see, for example, Charlotte Smith, Celestina (London: Cadell, 1791), 1:2f; Smith, Desmond (London: Robinson, 1792), 3:163; George Walker, Don Raphael 4:49-53; Bulwer Lytton, The Disowned (London: Colburn, 1829), 1:90; Ainsworth, Rookwood, 157; Landon, Ethel Churchill 1:14; G. P. R. James, Agnes Sorel 3:49; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford: Clarendon, 1984), 92; Hardy, The Return of the Native, 59; Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 345; Hardy, The Well-Beloved, ed. Tom Hetherington (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 74, 110. See also Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 234-38. Interest in national physiognomies, supported by occasional reference to Lavater, is also evident in English travel books published after 1790, such as, for example, Thomas Cogan, The Rhine; or a Journey from Utrecht to Francfort (London: Johnson, 1794), 2:97; Samuel Pratt, Gleanings through Wales, Holland and Westphalia (London: Longman and Seeley, 1795), 213n, 276f; Thomas Holcroft, Travels from Hamburg through Westphalia, Holland and the Netherlands (London: Robinson, 1804); Archibald Alison, Travels in France (London: Longman, 1815), 2:225.

32. See, for example, Jane Austen, Love and Friendship, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: The Women's Press, 1984), 67; Austen, The Watsons, ed. R. W. Chapman (London: Athlone, 1985), 25f; Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South, ed. Dorothy Collins (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 48; Gaskell, Wives and Daughters, ed. Frank Glover Smith (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1986), 97f. See also note 46 below.

33. Hardy, Life's Little Ironies (London: Macmillan, 1912), 67f. For other references to family resemblances, see Ann Burke, The Secret of the Cavern (London: Dutton, 1805), 1:36; Ferrier, The Novels 1:58; Landon, Ethel Churchill 1:13,224; G. P. R. James, The Stepmother 1:101; William Carleton, The Black Prophet (London: Simms and McIntyre, 1847), 8f; Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe 1:251, 2:349; Wilkie Collins, After Dark (London: Smith, Elder, 1856), 2:161; George Eliot, Daniel Deronda, 25, 77; Hardy, A Laodicean, 210-18; Hardy, The Well-Beloved, 79-81, 88-90, 127, 146-53.

34. For some examples of physiognomic comparison, see Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho, 158, 376; Lewis, The Monk, 242f; Pratt, Family Secrets 1:6-10, 3:5-10; Ainsworth, Jack Sheppard 1:167; Charlotte Brontë, Villette, ed. Mark Lilly (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1979), 281; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 74, 79, 331; Eliot, Middlemarch, 109; George Meredith, Rhoda Fleming (New York: Russell & Russell, 1968), 34f; Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 490. Of countless references to painting or sculpture in English character description after 1790, see, for example Radcliffe, The Romance of the Forest, 29; Agnes Maria Bennett, Ellen (London: Lane, 1794), 2:52; Bennett, The Beggar Girl 6:11; Lewis, The Monk, 9, 40f; Maria Regina Roche, Children of the Abbey (London: Lane, 1800), 1:181f; George Walker, Three Spaniards (London: Walker, 1800), 1:56f, 73f; Elizabeth Sleath, The Nocturnal Minstrel (London: Lane, 1810), 2:45; Marguerite Gardiner, The Repealers (London: Bentley, 1833), 2:11; Gardiner, The Confessions of an Elderly Gentleman (London: Longman, 1836), 202; Ainsworth, Rookwood, 195; G. P. R. James, The Stepmother, 101; Charles Kingsley, Alton Locke 1:88; Yonge, The Heir of Redclyffe 2:248; George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, 27, 555; Eliot, Middlemarch, 110; Braddon, Henry Dunbar 1:99-101; Gissing, The Unclassed 1:84; Hardy, The Return of the Native, 14; Hardy, A Laodicean, 29; Hardy, Jude the Obscure, 137, 248; Hardy, The Well-Beloved, 94. For other similar references and a discussion of Lavater's linking of physiognomy and the fine arts, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 67-69n, 172-180.

35. All these writers are referred to in notes above and below.

36. See the entries for Cruikshank and Hablot K. Browne in The Oxford Companion to English Literature, 138-243f. For illustrations by “Phiz,” see also Charles Lever, Charles O'Malley (Dublin: Curry, 1841); Lever, Arthur O'Leary (London: Colburn, 1844); Lever, The Daltons (London: Chapman & Hall, 1852). For the link between “Phiz” and physiognomy, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 106; see also Michael Hollington, “Dickens, ‘Phiz’ and Physiognomy,” in Imagination on a Long Rein: English Literature Illustrated, ed. Joachim Möller (Marburg: Jonas, 1988), 125-35.

37. See Graham, “Character Description in the Romantic Novel,” 518; see also Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, especially chapters 2 and 3.

38. Harriet Lee, Canterbury Tales (London: Robinson, 1799), 1:xiiif. Of nineteenth-century novelists who seem to be generally little interested in the outward man, I have noted, for example, Rhoda Broughton, Emily Eden, Elizabeth Helme, William Lister, John Henry Newman, Margaret Oliphant, and Charlotte Tonna.

39. See Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 64-74.

40. For example, Samuel Richardson, Clarissa, ed. W. Lyon Phelps (London: Everyman, 1932), 1:127, 205, 297 and 2:259; Thomas Amory, The Life of John Buncle (London: Johnson, 1766), 2:438; Henry Brooke, The Fool of Quality, 134; Frances Brooke, The History of Emily Montague (London: Dodsley, 1769), 1:40f; Edward Bancroft, The History of Charles Wentworth, Esq. (London: Becket, 1770), 1:93; Henry Mackenzie, The Man of the World (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1773), 1:20; George Keate, Sketches from Nature (London: Dodsley, 1779), 1:58f; Thomas Holcroft, Alwyn (London: Fielding and Walker, 1780), 1:119; Charlotte Smith, Emmeline (London: Cadell, 1788), 1:11; Lewis, The Monk, 11f; Robert Bage, Hermsprong (London: Wogan, Byrne, Moore and Rice, 1796), 3:106; Fanny Burney, Camilla, ed. Edward A. Bloom and Lillian D. Bloom (London: Oxford University Press, 1972), 61, 84; Ann Burke, The Secret of the Cavern 1:37f, 152f and 2:30f; Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, & Orme, 1805), 1:47; Gardiner, The Repealers 2:11; Theodore Hook, Fathers and Sons (London: Colburn, 1842), 1:59-62; Braddon, John Marchmont's Legacy, 297f.

41. For a discussion of the physical appearance of heroines in the nineteenth-century English novel, see Fahnestock, “The Heroine of Irregular Features,” passim.

42. For a list of monographs and articles on the literary portrait published since the late nineteenth century, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 323-327n.

43. For discussions both of Lavater's concept of the physiognomist and on physical portraiture in the English and French novel before 1790, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 64-76, 125-53, 181.

44. See Helen Maria Williams, Julia (London: Cadell, 1790), 1:47, 79; Smith, Desmond 3:35; Smith, Marchmont 2:64f, 3:156, 4:353; Elizabeth Parsons, The Castle of Wolfenbach (London: Lane, 1793), 1:127; Richard Cumberland, Henry (London: Dilly, 1795), 1:10-12; John Moore, Edward (London: Strahan and Cadell, 1796), 1:292; Bennett, The Beggar Girl 4:139, 4:145, 5:159, 6:165; Roche, The Children of the Abbey 1;19; Charles Lloyd, Edmund Oliver (London: Cottle, 1798) 2:1f; Pratt, Family Secrets 2:265.

45. When Walter Scott described Ann Radcliffe as “the first poetic novelist,” it is very likely that he had the physiognomic sensitivity of her heroines in mind, and it is just as likely that he had been inspired by The Mysteries of Udolpho when he came to portray the physiognomically gifted Jeanie Deans in The Heart of Midlothian (1818), who, to my mind, is a main link between Emily St. Aubert and later fictional heroes and heroines given to physiognomic observation and analysis. For discussions of physiognomic awareness in the nineteenth-century novel, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, especially chapters 5 and 8.

46. For discussions of the treatment of family physiognomies in these two novels, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 242-45.

47. For discussions of the physiognomic awareness of the protagonists or narrators in Great Expectations, Emma, and George Eliot's novels, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 279-81, 286-90, 311-15. For George Eliot's attitude to physiognomy, see also Fahnestock, “The Heroine of Irregular Features,” 349.

48. See Senseman, “Charlotte Brontë's Use of Physiognomy,” passim; see also Jack, “Physiognomy, Phrenology and Characterisation in the Novels of Charlotte Brontë,” passim.

49. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 128.

50. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 135.

51. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 457.

52. Charlotte Brontë, Villette, 592. For a discussion of physiognomy in the relationship between Lucy Snowe and Paul Emanuel, see Tytler, Physiognomy in the European Novel, 275-77.

53. Concerning the dictum Vox clamantis in deserto, Eugene Ehrlich writes: “Familiar word from various books of the New Testament, in Matthew continuing ‘prepare you the way of the Lord; make his paths straight.’ The motto of Dartmouth College, with apologies to the New Testament, is Vox clamans in deserto, usually translated as ‘a voice crying in the wilderness.’” Eugene Ehrlich, Amo, Amas, Amat and More (New York: Harper & Row, 1985), 302.

54. Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray, 22.