Johann Kaspar Lavater

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Lavater's Physiognomy in England

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In the following essay, Graham chronicles the reception and influence of Lavater's works in England.
SOURCE: Graham, John. “Lavater's Physiognomy in England.” Journal of the History of Ideas 22, no. 4 (October-December, 1961): 561-72.

When Johann Caspar Lavater died in 1801, a leading British periodical, The Scots Magazine, quite rightly acknowledged that he had been, “for many years, one of the most famous men in Europe.”1 Part of his fame rested on his capable and conscientious performance of duties as a pastor and a religious writer, rôles which made him loved and respected by his fellow citizens of Zurich who literally flocked about him in the streets. But his fame was based more firmly, albeit more questionably, on his Essays on Physiognomy.2 That this work was well-known on the continent and in England and America is common enough knowledge, but the full extent of its popularity and impact is yet to be measured.

The Gentleman's Magazine could hardly have painted a stronger picture of the popular reaction to his work:

In Switzerland, in Germany, in France, even in Britain, all the world became passionate admirers of the Physiognomical Science of Lavater. His books, published in the German language, were multiplied by many editions. In the enthusiasm with which they were studied and admired, they were thought as necessary in every family as even the Bible itself. A servant would, at one time, scarcely be hired till the descriptions and engravings of Lavater had been consulted, in careful comparison with the lines and features of the young man's or woman's countenance.

(LXXI, Feb. 1801, p. 124)

This account strikes one as a bit of sensational journalism, but thirty years later Charles Darwin found that the captain of the H.M.S. Beagle was ready to demonstrate its accuracy:

Afterwards, on becoming very intimate with [Robert] Fitz-Roy [sic], I heard that I had run a very narrow risk of being rejected on account of the shape of my nose! He was an ardent disciple of Lavater, and was convinced that he could judge of a man's character by the outline of his features, and he doubted whether any one with my nose could possess sufficient energy and determination for the voyage.3

Still later in the century the Encyclopedia Britannica (1853-1860, eighth edition), which had reached its mature and responsible position in England, contained this statement of his Physiognomy:

Its publication created everywhere a profound sensation. Admiration, contempt, resentment, and fear were cherished towards the author. The discoverer of the new science was everywhere flattered or pilloried; and in many places, where the study of human character from the face became an epidemic, the people went masked through the streets.

That these accounts are exaggerations or extremes is hardly to be denied, but they stand as indications of the intensity and distribution of the interest on this resurrection of a ‘science’ that had so long an empirical history.

The publication history of the Essays on Physiognomy is most startling testimony of the revived and sustained interest in physiognomy. After its initial success in German (five publications in the 1770's, four in the 1780's), the French translation of the 1780's introduced it to a still wider audience. This edition was often reviewed in both the French and English periodicals and led to the two English editions in the 1780's (including the opulent Henry Hunter translation that sold for thirty guineas a set), until in the 1790's, no fewer than twelve English versions were presented in five different translations. The French peak came in the first decade of the XIXth century when eleven versions appeared. These figures, however, do not give the full picture: a number of the editions were multi-volumed affairs and were issued volume by volume a year or more apart, each volume being treated as an entity and reviewed individually. The book was reprinted, abridged, summarized, pirated, parodied, imitated, and reviewed so often that it is difficult to imagine how a literate person of the time could have failed to have some general knowledge of the man and his theories. By 1810, there had been published sixteen German, fifteen French, two American, one Dutch, one Italian, and no less than twenty English versions—a total of fifty-five editions in less than forty years. The regular production of the work did not much slacken until about 1870—a full hundred years after the first edition—and the two Swiss editions in the 1940's swelled the total to 156 publications in all languages.4

This extraordinary popularity of the Physiognomy was based on a number of factors. In 1800, The Monthly Magazine (IX) called the Henry Hunter translation “the finest printed book which has ever appeared in this or any other country,” and it is certainly true that the early editions in Germany, France, and England were handsomely printed and embellished with fine engravings, many of famous contemporaries. If nothing else, one acquired in such a purchase a picture gallery executed by some of the leading painters and engravers of the century.5

Of more central importance, the work had a tendency to be all things to all men. The ‘scientific’ flavor may not have satisfied the increased interest in biology, zoology, anatomy, physiology, and anthropology, but it at least acknowledged these fields and made some pretense at employing their information and methodology.6 A further attraction lay in the fact that a pastor of orthodox persuasion offered an example of the ‘modern man’ who seemed to reconcile any conflict between science and religion, placing the former at the service of the latter. The Physiognomy is often a sermon on the goodness of God and that goodness as reflected in the constitution and action of created things, of which man is the highest example. Finally, Lavater fused science and religion through a personal enthusiasm and sensibility that satisfied an age in which emotional response and almost occult perception were to become the criteria of the new ‘ideal’ man.

There are three interrelated major corollaries to Lavater's basic concept of physiognomy, principles which anticipated at an early date some central ideas of romanticism. The first is his argument that all created things are individually unique, distinct from all other things. “Each man is an individual self, with as little ability to become another self as to become an angel.”7 Second, he holds that “Every minute part has the nature and character of the whole. … Each trait contains the whole character of man, as, in the smallest works of God the character of Deity is contained.”8 The third corollary is the unity of each individual being:

The finger of one body is not adapted to the hand of another body. Each part of an organized body is an image of the whole, has the character of the whole. The blood in the extremity of the finger has the character of the blood in the heart. The same congeniality is found in the nerves, in the bones.

(180)9

So true is this principle that even very similar faces are evidently distinct:

Take two, three, or four shades [silhouettes] of men, remarkable for understanding, join the features so artificially that no defect shall appear, as far as relates to the act of joining; that is, take the forehead of one, add the nose of a second, the mouth of a third, the chin of a fourth, and the result of this combination shall be folly. … “But let these four wise countenances be supposed congruous?”—Let them so be supposed, or as nearly so as possible, still their combination will produce the signs of folly.

(183)10

This emphasis on the distinctiveness of the individual man is a clear indication of the approaching collapse of the neo-classical concentration on the similarities.

As a whole the reviews of the Physiognomy in contemporary periodicals reflected the attitude that appears to be the inevitable one concerning the pseudo-science: reluctant to reject physiognomy but just as reluctant to accept any specific criterion. The reviewers generally equivocated, reserving their definite statements for the beauties of the illustrations and the errors of translation. The reviewers were cautious in judgment though generous in presentation; long summaries and quotations gave the reader a fair chance to see what the book had to offer.11The Monthly Review gave considerable space (17 pages) to a review of the first volume (1781) of the French edition. The first volume was treated very seriously, rather hopefully, the only criticism being that Lavater depended too much on feeling.12 When the second volume was issued, it received a twenty-eight page review, the author affirming the truth of physiognomy but complaining that Lavater's distinctions were too fine.13 Lavater was linked with Camper in this review—the tendency was definitely to see the Swiss as a scientist. By the time of the third volume (1789), however, the magazine had grown tired of waiting for a set of orderly rules and, in the ten-page review, more or less laughed at the pretensions of the ‘scientist.’14

The most favorable review appeared in The European Magazine (1790): “His examples are apposite, and his triumph complete over the pretendedly incredulous, who assert that the human countenance is not the index to the human heart.”15 But the greatest praise for Lavater was given by Thomas Cowper (or Cooper) whose “The History of Physiognomy” (published originally in Memoirs of the Manchester Literary Society, II, ca. 1791) pictured him as the man who rescued the science from the obscurity into which it had fallen and who revived it through his close and scrupulous observation.16 The periodicals in their reviews of Cowper's work were both judicious and persuasive in their treatment of the whole problem of physiognomy and of Lavater in particular.17 Another ‘history’ ran for two full years in The Gentleman's Magazine, connecting physiognomy with the medical and philosophical traditions of the western world and praising Lavater's work highly.18 It was indeed a study difficult to deny.

All this publicity had its effect, and in the decades that followed the publication of the Physiognomy many travellers from all nations called on Lavater at his home in Zurich. In 1777 the Emperor Joseph II had a long talk with the pastor on physiognomy, and in the 1780's many aristocrats, including the Grand Duke of Russia and Prince Edward of England, visited him.19 As early as 1774, an Englishman who had traveled in Switzerland and married a Swiss girl wrote what was perhaps the first English reference to Lavater's work:

April 24 [1774] Have you learned to paint? If you have I wish I could get a small profile of your father, to send to a learned man abroad who is making a collection of Heads in order to establish his system of Physiognomy.20

The writer, a Mr. Hutton, was followed by many English travellers, particularly in the 1790's, who wished, from curiosity or respect, to see the author of the famous Physiognomy. Although they remained rather sceptical, they gave generally favorable accounts of the man as both pastor and physiognomist, the most famous reports being those by William Coxe and Helen Maria Williams. In keeping with the nature of reviewing at the time, journalists often summarized these accounts at length with the result that Lavater's name and a sketch of his theories reached a still wider audience.21

Lavater was also mentioned in contemporary Englishmen's correspondence. William Cowper was one who kept the physiognomist in mind, especially when deceived by a solicitor:

June 4, 1785 A certain short man with a rosy round face and a protruberant belly, calling himself Mr. Crawford … attended us one day last week with a petition from his church for assistance towards payment of a debt incurred by rebuilding their meeting-house. … Notwithstanding that physiognomy has, by the ingenious Mr. Lavater, been at length improved into a science, yet having never made it my particular study, I am with reason apt to distrust my own skill in the interpretation of features. On this occasion, however, a better opinion of my proficiency would have been advantageous to myself, and I should have done the object of it no wrong.

The whimsy of this early letter has no part in one written five years later:

April 17, 1790 I am very much of Lavater's opinion, and persuaded that faces are as legible as books, only with these circumstances to recommend them to our perusal, that they are read in much less time, and are much less likely to deceive us. Yours gave me a favourable impression of you the moment I beheld it … I will add that I have observed in you nothing since that has not confirmed the opinion I then formed in your favour. In fact, I cannot recollect that my skill in physiognomy has ever deceived me, and I should add more on this subject had I room.22

At the same time (1788), however, the rationalist, Hannah More, bewailed Lavater's popularity, coupling his efforts with those of equally famous pseudo-scientists:

In vain do we boast of the enlightened eighteenth century, and conceitedly talk as if human reason had not a manacle left about her … and yet at this very time Mesmer has got an hundred thousand pounds by animal magnetism in Paris, and Mainaduc is getting as much in London. There is a fortune-teller in Westminster who is making little less. Lavater's physiognomy books sell at fifteen guineas a set. The divining-rod is still considered as oracular in many places. … Poor human reason, when wilt thou come to years of discretion?23

A somewhat more gentle but clearly sceptical reaction was that of the famous Irish novelist, Maria Edgeworth, and of her militantly intellectual and progressive family. In 1791, writing to her beloved aunt, Mrs. Ruxton, she says:

Lavater is to come home [to Clifton, England, where the Edgeworths were staying] in a coach to-day. 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.24

Later (1802) she indicates to Mary Sneyd some knowledge of Lavater's theories and also reveals a more sympathetic attitude:

Isabella of Aragon, or Lord Chesterfield, or both, call a good countenance the best letter of recommendation. Whenever Nature gives false letters of recommendation, she swindles in the most abominable manner. When she refuses them where they are best deserved, she only gives additional motive for exertion. … And after all, Nature is forced out of her letters sooner or later. You know that it is said by Lavater, that the muscles of Socrates' countenance are beautiful, and these become so by the play given them by the good passions. …25

Although she did make use of physiognomical descriptions in her letters, she did not transfer this technique to her novels which were written in a very spare style.

Other novelists knew Lavater's Physiognomy and used the pseudo-science in their fiction although there is little real evidence of particular borrowings.26 Thomas Holcroft, the radical, the translator of the most popular editions of Physiognomy, was a defender of Lavater and his theories. “Monk” Lewis, the gothic novelist, was listed as a subscriber of the Henry Hunter edition. Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin translated and abridged the work in 1788 “with the liveliest interest,” and when the Swiss pastor visited England in 1792, he escorted Mary to a masquerade with the artist, Fuseli, an old friend of his youth in Zurich.27 Later, Mary's husband, the famed political theorist, novelist, and editor, William Godwin, rejected Gall's theory of phrenology as a version of determinism and although he only reluctantly praised Lavater, he appreciated the insistence on free will in the Physiognomy, finally declaring that “nothing can be more certain than that there is a science of physiognomy.”28 When his daughter, the future wife of Shelley, was born in 1797, he had “an enthusiastic student” of Lavater write a lengthy report on the significance of the infant's features.29 Each of these writers used interpretations of facial details in presenting their fictional characters, indicating their absorption of a point of view sympathetic with that of Lavater.

In non-satiric novels of the late XVIIIth century I have discovered only three direct references to Lavater: Charlotte Smith, Desmond (1792) and Marchmont (1796) and Anna Maria Porter, The Hungarian Brothers (1807).30 Miss Porter's comment was little more than an aside—“I'll never trust Lavater again”—but Mrs. Smith, the most popular of the late XVIIIth-century English novelists, except for Ann Radcliffe, developed the references over a number of pages. In her works, as with so many others of her time, ‘sensibility’ was the quality that caused one to reveal his emotions by, and to read another's in, a ‘speaking face.’ It was a principle which encouraged tears, blushes, and blanchings in not only the heroine but the hero as well. An inexpressive face could well be proof that one had an insusceptible heart and, therefore, was untrustworthy if not actively villainous. A part of her basic technique in her novels was to comment on the facial expressions of all her characters and to account for these expressions since they were significant in the world of the novel and for the reader's understanding and visualization of that world.

In both Desmond and Marchmont, her heroines—intelligent, sensitive, and stoical—proudly declare themselves Lavaterians in spite of powerful and cold-hearted opposition, and, significantly, judge characters correctly by their faces.31 Mrs. Smith accepted Lavater and emphasized the importance of the changed physiognomy, using this physical change as evidence of an interior one. Furthermore, minor characters were regularly introduced to the reader by descriptions that were interpreted (by both Mrs. Smith and the characters in the novels) exactly and completely. These descriptions accurately prepared the reader, as well as the observer in the novel, for the rôle the character was to play in the action.32

On the stage Lavater was satirized as “Lord Visage” in a farce, False Colours (1783). This attack was somewhat blunted by the review in The Monthly Review, XI (1793), 410-413, written by Thomas Holcroft.

… Lord Visage, we think particularly objectionable. He is a physiognomist, and in his character Lavater is satirized, or, to speak more accurately, burlesqued. A poet, who does not consider the moral effects of his satire, is, in our opinion, highly culpable. Any attempt to make men believe that the countenance of man does not bear visible signs of individual propensities, and of vicious or of virtuous habits, is immoral, because it is false; and though there may be persons who pretend to more physiognomical science than they have acquired, and who therefore individually may deserve ridicule, yet, to ridicule the science itself without this discrimination, or without making the audience understand that the satire is levelled at such mistaken individuals but not at the science itself, is equally censurable.

Actually, the English stage was very kind to Lavater in James Robinson Planche's Lavater, the Physiognomist; or, Not a Bad Judge which was first performed in London during March and April (at least), 1848 and was sufficiently well received to appear again as late as 1867.33 Besides testifying to the simple endurance of Lavater's fame since his name apparently still meant something to a theater audience, the play presented him as the hero, not a myopic or simply generous fool. Throughout the play he is a warm, benevolent, and acute man, something of a Sherlock Holmes and Will Rogers as well as a genuine physiognomist.

Even such an unlikely genre as poetry offered a tribute to the pseudo-science. One English advocate of physiognomy, William Sotheby, wrote a long ‘scientific’ poem of some fourteen pages on the subject. Revealing his acquaintance with Lavater's treatise, he defended the study against the charges of determinism that opponents presented, and praised it as a new and exact science.34

But as might well be expected from the extremes of style and conception, the Physiognomy drew considerable satirical fire.35 Satirical ‘letters’ appeared in The Gentleman's Magazine (1790, 1799, and 1808).36 As with most of the satire, no special aspect of physiognomy was systematically attacked, but the rather extravagant comparisons Lavater made between men and animals were applied to actual situations with ludicrous results. One letter (1808) had a curious tone for all of its critical attitude, revealing clearly the disappointment of the author over the lack of system in the science. Musaeus' essay-like work, first published in Germany in 1778-1779, was translated by Anne Plumptre in 1800.37 Not much of a novel, the Travels is a genuinely funny satirical catch-all, and although Lavater and physiognomy are apparently the main objects of attack, actually Musaeus is more worried about the mental climate that produces and accepts the tenets that man is naturally good and should judge by the heart, not the head.38 The first extended English satire was Flim-Flams! by a well-known journalist-editor, Isaac Disraeli.39 In contrast to Musaeus' tone of quiet, almost bemused, innocence, Disraeli's work is clever and lively, even vigorous, and it is focused more precisely on specific excesses in scientific investigation, reminding one of the third voyage in Gulliver's Travels. Peter Camper, Erasmus Darwin, and William Godwin, as well as Lavater,40 all received darts, and one must confess that Disraeli's apparent lack of a specific motivating philosophy weakens the sting in his novel. In the anonymous and rather amateurish The Physiognomist, A Novel (ca. 1815),41 the author prefaced his light comedy (really a novel of manners) with a disclaimer of ridiculing physiognomy: he wished only to present the delusions of a physiognomist, “Mr. Ossaman,” who is not grounded in anatomy and physiology. Lavater is not treated harshly and, as with many critics of physiognomy, the author was more concerned with the brash neophyte's certitude in off-hand physiognomical readings than with any intrinsic qualities of the science itself.

A final note on the reaction to, or simply awareness of, Lavater and his work may be established by an examination of various encyclopedias. Without exaggerating the stature of such collections, it is fair to say that they are, in general, more serious and carefully developed works than the periodicals, and reveal a more judicious analysis of physiognomy, its significance, and relative popularity.

The first edition ([1768]-1771) of the Encyclopedia Britannica, or, A Dictionary of Arts and Sciences had no mention of either physiognomy or Lavater. But in the second edition (1778-1783) Lavater was discussed for a half column in the two-column entry for “physiognomy.” The author accepted the general theory of the pseudo-science, relating it to Cartesian physiology, but was clearly concerned about the possibility of organizing the data and interpreting it with precision and certitude. The rise of interest in Lavater and his work was clearly evidenced by the third edition (1797) in which the editors gave “physiognomy” ten columns, half of which were devoted to Lavater and his theory. Accepting the Swiss as the most important contributor to the study of physiognomy since Aristotle, the writer (as did Lavater himself) cautioned that the science had made no more than a beginning and, after praising Lavater's close observation, criticized him for letting his imagination outstrip his judgment. His “tone of enthusiasm … is certainly very opposite to the cool patient investigation befitting philosophy.” Other encyclopedias of the period were similarly cautious. The Rees Cyclopedia (Phila., 1812; London, 1819 was unavailable) gave Lavater one column and physiognomy, emphasizing Lavater, six full pages (physiology received only one and a half columns), favorable of the pseudo-science but less so for Lavater's work; Nicholson's British Encyclopedia (Phila., 1818, Second American Edition) took much from Rees but the nine and a half pages have a considerable amount of very favorable comment on Lavater added; The Edinburgh Encyclopedia (Phila., 1832, First American Edition) gave Lavater (1819) two pages, physiognomy (1823) one and a half columns, all rather noncommittal, but the author assigns the study to the past; Penny Cyclopedia (1833-1843) accepted only acquired physiognomy in its one-column treatment of Lavater, two-thirds of a column on physiognomy; Encyclopedia Londinensis (1810-1825) derived two columns on Lavater (1814) from The Monthly Review and Annual Register which argued that this popularity was at an end at the turn of the century, and, under “physiognomy,” gave a fourteen-page (with four full-page plates) summary and analysis with the emphasis on the rising science of phrenology, ending with a comment with which most seemed to agree: “Upon the whole, viewing the many contradictions and errors both of Lavater, and of Gall and Spurzheim; and considering, that mankind in general have granted their assent to no one rule under either system; we cannot but conclude, that the efforts, hitherto made for reducing physiognomy to a science, however praiseworthy, have been almost nugatory.”

Any analysis of Lavater's Physiognomy and its impact must necessarily be limited because of the contradictions implicit in the work itself as well as the utter lack of any systematic criteria or conclusions for reading the face. Many commentators quite rightly charged that the work defied any attempt at ordering its elements and without this order it was impossible to ‘use.’ But the vigor and enthusiasm as well as the conviction of Lavater attracted people sufficiently for the Physiognomy to be cited as an authority for a man of sensibility's personal conception of “physiognomy.” It is certain that the popularity of Lavater's volumes stands as testimony and, in part, cause of a sustained, general, and rather confident, albeit ill-defined, interest in perceiving the reality of a man through his physical appearance. The descriptions and interpretations of the sentimental heroine and the gothic villain, as well as the later Byronic hero, were possible and effective only in the context of Lavater's regeneration of the traditional science of physiognomy.

Notes

  1. LXIII (1801), 79. The most recent biography is Mary Lavater-Sloman's Genie des Herzens (Zurich und Stuttgart, 1955).

  2. The implication in the obituaries is that the peak of the mania for his Physiognomy was unjustly over. See esp. The Monthly Magazine (April 1801). This was, of course, not true, to judge from the history of the editions.

  3. Charles Darwin, Autobiography, ed. Francis Darwin (New York, 1950), 36.

  4. For a complete listing of the publications see my unpublished dissertation, “The Development of the Use of Physiognomy in the Novel” (Johns Hopkins University, 1960), Appendix C.

  5. William Blake did three plates for the Hunter translation, as well as the frontispiece for a 1788 translation of Lavater's Aphorisms on Man which the artist annotated with many favorable comments. See Thomas Wright, The Life of William Blake (Olney Bucks, Eng., 1929), 21, 96; and Geoffrey Keynes, The Writings of William Blake (London, 1927), I, 85, 117. See also Keynes, Blake Studies, 1949.

  6. Alexander Walker, former lecturer in anatomy and physiology at the University of Edinburgh, wrote that although Lavater lacked sufficient anatomical and physiological knowledge, his work “is nevertheless the most valuable work which has appeared on physiognomical science.” Physiognomy founded on Physiology and applied to Various Countries, Professions and Individuals (London, 1834), 216-217.

  7. Page 91; cf. 13, 106. This is one of the bases for his argument against ideal painters. Ignoring Lavater's remark “The handsomest painters were the greatest painters” (63), one can justly say he offered core testimony in the quarrel between the “ideal” (“the specious, intoxicating general likeness,” 153) and the “minute” (“Truth must ever be preferred to beauty,” 153) painters. “Whoever does not copy the truth and order of nature, falsifies” (173). All citations are to Essays on Physiognomy, trans. by Thomas Holcroft (London and New York, n.d.), 18th edition. This is the most common edition, probably because of its low price. The C. Moore translation, Essays on Physiognomy (London, 1797), has some material that Holcroft eliminated: Vol. IV, 189-191, 200-202 on handwriting; 323-324 on hair and beards; all of Lecture XII in volume I throws a greater emphasis on environment.

  8. Lavater, 145, 146, 157; 159: “I do not say the physiognomist should finally determine by a single sign; I only say it is sometimes possible.”

  9. Cf. Baudelaire, The Mirror of Art, tr. Jonathan Mayne (New York, 1955): “I see only individuals. … Each individual is a unique harmony. … This is so true that Lavater has established a nomenclature of noses and mouths which agree together, and he has pointed out several errors of this kind in the old masters. … It is possible that Lavater was mistaken in detail; but he had the basic idea. Such and such a hand demands such and such a foot. … Thus each individual has his ideal” (“Salon of 1846,” 84-85). Again, in the same volume, see “The Exposition Universelle, 1855: Ingres,” 204.

  10. Alexander Cozens presented a curious study like the one here proposed in the question. His Principles of Beauty Relative to the Human Head (London, 1778) was luxuriously illustrated and equipped with transparent over-lays so the reader could combine various foreheads, noses, etc., to form beautiful faces with various significances.

  11. See my dissertation (f. n. 4 above), “The Development of the Use of Physiognomy in the Novel,” Appendix D, for a complete list of notices of Lavater in British periodicals.

  12. The Monthly Review, LXVI (1782), 496.

  13. LXVIII (1783), 619.

  14. LXXVIII (1788), 545-555.

  15. The European Magazine, XVII (1790), 343. See also The Lady's Magazine, XX (1789), 409-413.

  16. This conclusion is deduced from concurring emphases in the reviews since I was unable to obtain a copy of this publication.

  17. See European Magazine, XIX (1791), 122-126, 204-208; Scots Magazine, LXII (1800), 462-466; and Universal Magazine, CVI (1800), 359, 423. The Monthly Review, VI (1791), 190-191, again entered a dissenting opinion, labeling Cowper a materialist.

  18. The Gentleman's Magazine, LXXX (1799), 948. Cf. The Gentleman's Magazine, LXXXIV (1814), 524. Other writings that helped spread the ideas of physiognomy are: Isaac Disraeli, Curiosities of Literature (Boston, 1833), I, 204-207, “Physiognomy”; this was a very popular book, the edition used being the seventh; John Ferriar, Illustrations of Sterne (London, 1798), one chapter was devoted to “noses” and Lavater was considered an authority, 118, 138; Leigh Hunt, The Reflector, A Collection of Essays (London, [ca. 1811]), 424-429.

  19. Lavater, LXXX ff., CXIX, CXXIII, and CXXV.

  20. The Early Diary of Frances Burney, 1768-1778, ed. A. R. Ellis (London, 1889), I, 301.

  21. See the many editions of William Coxe, Travels in Switzerland (1789) and Helen Maria Williams, Sketches of the State of Manners and Opinions in the French Republic towards the close of the Eighteenth Century (1801). See also A. Yosy, Switzerland (London, 1815); Robert Gray, Letters during the Course of a Tour (London, 1794); Lord Gardenstone, Travelling Memoranda (London, 1794); and Nicolai Karamsin, Travels from Moscow (London, 1803). See the reviews in The Monthly Magazine I (1790), V (1791), XV (1794); The Scots Magazine, LX (1798); The Lady's Magazine, XXIX (1798); Evangelical Magazine, X (1802); and The Monthly Review, XLIV (1804).

  22. The Correspondence of William Cowper, ed. Thomas Wright (New York, 1904), III, 304, 451-452; see also III, 303-305.

  23. Annette M. B. Meakin, Hannah More (London, 1911), 270-271.

  24. Quoted in Life and Letters of Maria Edgeworth, ed. Augustus J. C. Gare (London, 1894), I, 18.

  25. Life, I, 82. See also Life, I, 84, 89, 130. For other comments, see Lord Granville: Private Correspondence, ed. Castalia, Countess Granville (New York, 1916), I, 163. One of the first Englishmen involved with things German was Crabb Robinson, who but mentioned Lavater in his letters; see Crabb Robinson in Germany: 1800-1805, ed. Edith J. Morley (London, 1929), 49, 173; and The Diary, Reminiscences, and Correspondence of Henry Crabb Robinson, ed. Thomas Sadler (Boston, 1870), I, 122; II, 215. See also H. W. Thompson, A Scottish Man of Feeling: Some Account of Henry Mackenzie (New York, 1931), 287, and Edmund Phipps, Memoirs of the Political and Literary Life of Robert Plumer Ward (London, 1850), II, 132.

  26. Even in the famous section on “Noses” (II, xxvii ff.), Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy has no discussion of physiognomy. This part, as well as his “bibliography” on noses (III, xxxv-xxxviii) was misinterpreted by John Ferriar who wrote, in his Illustrations of Sterne (London, 1798), a long and learned section (100-144) on noses to show that Sterne was a plagiarist. He cited Lavater as an authority on noses (118, 138).

  27. Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Mary Wollstonecraft (Boston, 1888), 180, 108.

  28. Thoughts on Man (London, 1831), 3-4.

  29. C. Keegan Paul, William Godwin (Boston, 1876), I, 289.

  30. There is another instance of a character commenting on Lavater directly in the middle of the next century in George Borrow, Lavengro (1851), Chapter XXII. Discussing his acceptance of physiognomy at one stage of his life, Lavengro says, “I had become, in my own opinion, a kind of Lavater” (London, 1939), 134. I was unable to obtain the novel Prejudice; or Physiognomy by Azile D'Arcy (London, 1817). Since it was issued by the Minerva Press, I strongly suspect that it was sentimental, but I have no idea whether or not it expressed approval or disapproval of physiognomy.

  31. Desmond (London, 1792), II, 6; and Marchmont (London, 1796), III, 174-178.

  32. See esp. Marchmont, III, 236-237; Celestina (Dublin, 1791), III, 204-205, 265-266; also Celestina, I, 54; Desmond, I, 59, 78, 83, 205, 213; II, 268; Marchmont, I, 121; II, 64-65; III, 25, 27, 32; IV, 213-214.

  33. Lavator [sic] the Physiognomist; or, Not a Bad Judge (Boston, 1858?). See The Extravaganzas of James Robinson Planche, ed. T. F. D. Croker and Stephen Tucker (London, 1879), V, 328; The Diaries of Lewis Carroll, ed. R. L. Green (London, 1953), I, 253; and Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto, intro. Montague Summers (London, 1924), xxxix.

  34. Poems; consisting of a Tour through Parts of North and South Wales: Sonnets, Odes, and an Epistle to a Friend on Physiognomy (Bath and London, 1790). There was also a 1794 edition. Early in the next century a less sophisticated American wrote of the serpent and the fall of man and raised Lavater to the status of a direct instrument of God:

    Had but Lavater's science then been known,
    We had been happy, Paradise our own;
    Eve would have seen the craft, which lurk'd within,
    Perceived the Devil. …
    Then this our earth Millenium had been,
    Free from all death, from misery and sin. …

    Joseph Bartlett, Aphorisms on Men, Manners, Principles and Things … Physiognomy, a Poem; and the Blessings of Poverty (Boston, 1823). Bartlett accepted fully the comparison of man and beast and offered his own observations with a conviction equaling Lavater's. (Cf. Grenville Mellen, The Passions: A Poem [Boston, 1836] on Spurzheim.) In the XXth century Marianne Moore (“Then the Ermine,” Poetry, LXXXI [1952], 55) looks on the ideas of the physiognomist as an unfortunate but enticing retreat:

    Fail, and Lavater's physiography
              has another admirer
    of skill that axiomatically
    flowers obscurely.
  35. The most famous satire was “Über Physiognomik wider die Physionomen” by Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, first issued in 1777 (Göttinger Taschenkalender, 1778). An enlarged version appeared in 1778 (and often thereafter), and in 1783 Lichtenberg analyzed the devil's tail physiognomically in “Fragment von Schwanzen. Ein Beytrag zu den Physiognomischen Fragmenten,” Neues Magazin vor Aerzte, V (1783), 1-11 (published as an eight-page pamphlet the same year). These provoked replies from Lavater's champion, Johann Georg Zimmermann, the exchange being well documented in the periodicals of the day (see Gödeke, under “Über die Physiognomischen Fragmente”). Wilhelm Windelband, Die Philosophie der Aufklärung (Berlin, 1909), 449-473 deals with the Zimmermann-Lichtenberg controversy. For a more recent account, see Richard D. Lowenberg, “The Significance of the Obvious: an Eighteenth-Century Controversy on Psychosomatic Principles,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine, X (1941), 666-679.

  36. LX (1790), 893-894; LXIX (1799), 644-646; LXXVIII (1808), 1083-1086. See also the essay in The Looker-On (n15; April 28, 1792) as found in The British Essayists, ed. A. Chalmers (London, 1823), vol. XXXV.

  37. London, 1800. Reviewed briefly in The Scots Magazine, LXII (1800), 270, and The British Critic, XVI (1800), 215.

  38. See esp. I, ch. VI; II, chs. II, III, and more particularly, II, 153-154.

  39. Flim-Flams! or the Life of My Uncle and His Friends (London, 1806), 3 vols., a New Edition. I believe the first edition was 1805 (see The British Critic, October, 1805, for a review).

  40. For Lavater, see esp. I, 36-54, and II, 234-237.

  41. Though published in New York (1820), internal evidence indicates that it was written by an English writer. References to Gall and Spurzheim indicate that the first edition must have been issued no earlier than about 1805.

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Introduction

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