SOURCE: Curtis, L. Perry, Jr. “Physiognomy: Ancient and Modern.” In Apes and Angels: The Irishman in Victorian Caricature, pp. 1-15. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Curtis discusses the role of physiognomy in shaping cultural beliefs about the Irish in Victorian England. Physiognomy was applied in nineteenth-century novels and graphic satire, and its semi-scientific nature appeared to lend credibility to English beliefs about the mental and moral inferiority of the Irish.]

In the year 1880 Gustave de Molinari (1819-1912), the Belgian political economist and radical essayist, published a series of epistolary articles on the condition of Ireland in the Journal des Débats. Molinari's survey of the Irish scene may not have equaled Gustave de Beaumont's notable inquiry of the 1830s in breadth of knowledge and depth of insight, but there was one passage in his appraisal of Anglo-Irish relations which shows him to have been a perceptive observer of social and political realities. England's largest newspapers, he wrote, “allow no occasion to escape them of treating the Irish as an inferior race—as a kind of white negroes [sic]—and a glance at Punch is sufficient to show the difference they establish between the plump and robust personification of John Bull and the wretched figure of lean and bony Pat.”¹

Molinari deserves credit for having spotted one of the more widespread images of the Irish which was entertained by educated and respectable Victorians who habitually thought in categorical terms about the so-called races of man. The allusion to “white Negroes” points up a vital ingredient in the cluster of prejudices which operated so pervasively in Great Britain against not only Irishmen but Negroes and other non-Anglo-Saxons whose assumed inferiority was even less open to dispute or qualification. These prejudices were continually being reinforced by a number of assumptions and axioms about the physical and mental traits of mankind. In the case of the Irish there were many slurs and aspersions on the tips of British tongues in the Victorian era, all of which reflected the conviction that Englishmen and Irishmen were separated from one another by irreconcilable differences not only of religion and culture but, above all, of temperament.

There was, of course, more than one image of the Irish competing for a place in the minds of Victorians, and not all of those images were as derogatory as Molinari contended. Those who cherished either positive or negative images were usually shrewd enough to concede the existence of more than one type of Irishman. But it would be quite incorrect to assume that the category of “white Negroes” was the lowest possible common denominator into which the Irish Celt could be placed. The student of Anglo-Irish relations in the nineteenth century is bound to encounter sooner or later enough evidence to establish that the fall of the stereotypical Irishman from a state of disgrace in Anglo-Saxon eyes took him farther down the scale of mankind or, rather, the Hominoidea, so that by the 1860s the “representative Irishman” was to all appearances an anthropoid ape. Among the forces that accelerated Paddy's degeneration was the assumption that there were qualities in Irish Celts which marked them off as a race or breed quite distinct in looks and behavior from those who claimed Anglo-Saxon, Danish, or Norman ancestry in the British Isles. Granting that there were indeed some noticeable differences between Englishmen and Irishmen in terms of behavior and physical features, those differences were not sufficient in themselves to explain the belief of so many Victorians that the physical and mental traits of Irish Celts and Anglo-Saxons were not only profoundly antithetical, but also could not be altered except through massive miscegenation.

If educated Victorians—and by Victorians we do not mean just the English upper middle classes—had done no more than construct mutually derogatory comparisons between Irishmen and the Chinese, Hottentots, Maoris, Aborigines, Sudanese, and other “barbarians,” life might have been a shade less harsh for the vast majority of Irish Catholics.² But some Victorians on both sides of the Atlantic went further by discovering features in Irish character which they took to be completely simian or anthropoid. In cartoons and caricatures as well as in prose, Paddy began to resemble increasingly the chimpanzee, the orangutan, and, finally, the gorilla. The transformation of peasant Paddy into an ape-man or simianized Caliban was completed by the 1860s and 1870s, when for various reasons it became necessary for a number of Victorians to assign Irishmen to a place closer to the apes than the angels. How and why the feckless, amusing, bibulous, and apolitical stage-Irishman or Teague of an earlier epoch evolved into the distinctly dangerous ape-man of the later nineteenth century constitutes the central theme of this study.

The study of images, that is, those relatively inflexible impressions which some people entertain at all times about other people, can be approached from many avenues. The actual choice of direction depends on what kinds of evidence appear to yield the most valuable information about both the image itself and the reasons why that particular image was so attractive to the holder. Virtually all images are sustained by a conglomeration of value judgments, usually expressed in adjectival form, about the apparent mental and physical traits of the group in question. Without this array of ascribed features most images would simply sink or dissolve in a sea of vague impressions. In order to understand Victorian images of the Irish, a task which includes Irish images of the English as well as of themselves, we must look first at the combination of physical and mental traits which were most often assigned to that singular category known as Paddy. Instead of trying to compile an annual register of English, Scottish, and Irish images of each other, drawn from such sources as newspapers, pamphlets, diaries, and letters, the present study is confined to the nature and meaning of those physiognomical features which Victorians were so fond of applying to whole regions and countries. Only by probing into what might be called the popular scientific lore of the Victorian age can we begin to appreciate the full significance of Paddy's degeneration into a rather hairy ape-man.

Because physical appearances in general and facial features in particular form an indispensable part of every national, racial, ethnic, social, and sexual stereotype, we must venture back beyond the descriptions of Irishmen in the nineteenth century to classical antiquity, when some of the theories about human nature and behavior with which we are concerned first made their appearance in written form. Recognizability of the type or group in question constitutes a necessary part of the stereotyping process, and no stereotype is complete unless it possesses a more or less unique set of features. The attribution of physical and mental traits to any given type of man belongs to what used to be called physiognomy, a branch of the science of man which may well be as old as man himself. Neither entirely clinical nor occult in its so-called methods, and by no means confined to any particular country or culture, physiognomy may be construed as the art cum science of judging character and temperament from the features of the head and face, the body, and the extremities. Physiognomy has always had a strong appeal to those people who seek a simple and painless way of assessing their fellow human beings without having to resort to astrology, palmistry, or medical examination.³

At first sight the theory and practice of physiognomy may seem to have little connection with Victorian images of the Irish, but then first sights, whether of ideas or faces, can be notoriously misleading. Victorian novels, for example, abound with passages which depict the facial features and stature of the principal characters. Examples of this long-established literary habit may be found in a variety of works ranging from Sir Walter Scott and Lord Lytton to Charles Kingsley, Dickens, Trollope, Disraeli, and Kipling. All of these writers sought to inform their readers about the characters and personalities of their protagonists by means of brief but vivid descriptions of their physical traits. In many cases ethnicity, or the patterns of behavior assigned by Victorians to men of Saxon, Danish, Norman, or Celtic ancestry, also figured in these physiognomical sketches. A good example of the technique may be found in W. Steuart Trench's romantic historical novel, Ierne, A Tale, wherein the hero, Donald O'Sulevan Beare, is introduced in the following manner:

His nose was more Grecian than aquiline, a well formed compromise between the upturned nostril of the Celt and the Norman tendency to the eagle's beak; whilst his short upper lip and expressive mouth seemed to portray a temperament unusually quick.⁴

Donald's beautiful young sister, Ierne, receives much the same kind of physiognomical treatment:

Her stature was tall. Her appearance was very singular, and she seemed to partake of qualities belonging both to Saxon and Celt. Her hair was auburn. … But though her hair was Saxon, her eyes were purely Celt, large, dark, and rich; and the contrast between her chestnut hair and dark eyes, eyelashes and eyebrows was very striking. Her nose was Grecian, and her upper lips short and expressive.⁵

The physiognomical device was used by Charles Dickens when he portrayed Thomas Gradgrind in Hard Times:

The emphasis was helped by the speaker's square wall of a forehead, which had his eyebrows for a base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker's voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial.⁶

Who was “Phiz” (Hablot K. Browne), the famous illustrator of Dickens' works, if not a gifted physiognomist? Physiognomical observations abound in The Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. A. Conan Doyle was, of course, a doctor who had been trained at Edinburgh to observe the minutest features of both cadavers and patients. Perhaps the best known example of this device in criminal fiction is Professor Moriarty's remark upon meeting Holmes for the first time at 221 Baker Street: “You have less frontal development than I should have expected.”⁷ Novelists still use the principles of physiognomy in order to convey to their readers the essence of a character's personality before the plot or story has progressed far enough to reveal his real nature. Such obvious features as color of hair and eyes, complexion, shape and size of forehead, nose, mouth, ears, and lower jaw, especially the chin, are used as a form of code by novelists, not to mention other kinds of men and women, to reveal the inner being of the person being described.

One final example of the physiognomical device in literature deserves to be quoted at this point, because it illuminates several facets of the problem that concern us. Mat Brady, the villain of Emily Lawless's haunting novel about rural life in the Burren country of County Clare, Hurrish, A Study, is first encountered by the reader behaving like a lecher toward the purest girl for miles around:

After her in full pursuit followed a man—unwieldy, red-faced, heavy-jawed, brutal—a sort of human orang-outang or Caliban, whose lumbering action and coarse gesture had something grotesque and even repulsive about them, as [if] it were a parody or perversion of humanity.⁸

Later on, Brady fails in his attempt to shoot the hero, Hurrish O'Brien, who flushes the villain from his hiding place and closes in for what turns out to be the unintentional kill:

Then, like a beast, he [Brady] turned at bay, and like a beast's was the face which presented itself,—the lowering brow, the huge jaw, the mouth distorted and gnashing with rage and terror! A hideous sight—to dream of, not to tell—a man in the likeness of a beast, worse than the very ugliest variety with hoofs or claws.⁹

Emily Lawless was not only of impeccable Anglo-Irish stock, being the daughter of Lord Cloncurry, but a woman in love with the Celtic soul of Ireland; and the virtuous, noble Irish peasants of her story were all endowed with features far removed from those of “the great red-headed, half-tipsy Caliban” who met his just fate beneath Hurrish's shillelagh.

The assumption that physical features and mental or emotional states are bound together in the same physiological system is an ancient one, and the once reputable science of physiognomy boasts a past littered with weighty treatises and discourses dealing with the interaction of physical and mental traits in both animals and man. Although regarded for centuries as that branch of science dealing with the diagnosis and cure of disease or organic disorders, classical physiognomy also involved a certain amount of divination and fortune-telling. For those who wish to believe that the face never lies, that the eyes are windows into the mind or soul, and that the color of hair and eyes or the shape of the nose and mouth reveal temperament, physiognomy was and is the answer. By the early 1800s physiognomical dogma had become part of the popular scientific folklore, and men from all walks of life in every part of Europe relied to some degree on this method of “seeing through” their neighbors as well as strangers from other lands.

This is not the place to recapitulate all the varieties and vagaries of physiognomical lore from ancient to modern times, but a brief summary of the main body of thought may serve to place Victorian images of the Irish and other peoples in their proper context. Physiognomy was, indeed, an international phenomenon, with its most renowned students and practitioners coming not only from ancient Greece and Rome but also from France, Spain, Italy, Germany, and England during the Enlightenment. Educated men and women all over Europe, not to mention other continents, accepted this body of scientific lore as the next best thing to gospel. Just as physiognomical theories traversed national frontiers, so they crossed class lines within each of those countries, and entered every level of education from elementary schools to universities. Physiognomical convictions could be found among the most educated and prosperous families as well as among those members of the working classes who believed in “the evil eye” or dreaded meeting strangers with red hair on the road. In Victorian England some of the most ardent exponents of this theory were those university-educated or self-taught men, mostly medical doctors, clergymen, antiquarians, natural scientists with a modest private income, minor civil servants, and army officers, who called themselves ethnologists and anthropologists.

In ancient Greece, physiognomy formed a branch of physiology and was considered an indispensable method of detecting organic as well as emotional disorders in people. According to the Hippocratic school of physiology, facial features provided infallible clues to the somatic and pneumatic or life-giving qualities of mankind. Even a cursory examination of skin, hair, and eyes, and size and shape of face was sufficient to reveal the nature of the humors and pneuma which determined health and behavior. In the Hippocratic schema the four moist humors of blood, phlegm, black and yellow bile—which corresponded to the four basic elements of fire, water, earth, and air—were supposed to exist in harmonious balance within every healthy body; and this simple geometrical pattern provided men of science and the healing arts with an authoritative basis for dividing mankind into the sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric types.¹⁰ The essay On Physiognomy attributed to Aristotle served to reinforce Hippocratic physiognomy. This influential treatise explained how facial features, complexion, color and texture of hair, as well as voice and posture revealed not only the “natural passions of the soul,” but human affinities with animals as well. These physical features provided a way of ascertaining the extent of a man's fortitude or timidity, good nature or irascibility, impudence or torpor, and so forth. The Aristotelian assumption that “the soul and body sympathize with each other” underlies all subsequent theories of physiognomy. Aristotle's ideal man possessed symmetrical, harmonious features matched by an equally balanced temperament made up of the right proportions of all four humors.¹¹ Neither too sanguine nor melancholy, neither too phlegmatic nor choleric, neither too hairy nor hairless, neither fat nor thin, this Aristotelian archetype survived more or less intact into the Victorian period, when it became the model of the manly, respectable, and self-controlled English gentleman so highly prized among the governing and educated classes. Hippocratic and Aristotelian physiognomy was reinforced as well as revised in the second century a.d. by Galen whose synthetic physiological system combined aspects of Hippocratic humoralism with newer views about the role of the pneuma in causing disease and abnormal behavior.

Although diffuse in theory, deficient in method, and subjective in practice, physiognomy remained a relatively coherent and definitely popular body of beliefs and axioms for the next thousand years. In spite of revisionist disputes and satirical attacks, the basic faith of physiognomists in the symbiotic relationship of physical and mental traits lived on, proving itself highly resistant to that inexorable and often mysterious process which textbook writers have called “the rise of modern science.” Neither Vesalius's contributions to anatomy nor Harvey's discovery of the constant circulation of the blood succeeded in driving out the baser coinage of popular physiognomy with its humoral bias. Many Europeans and Englishmen continued to prefer a less clinical and more simplistic approach to human behavior and character, although some began to eschew the descriptive method of the Aristotelian school for a more anatomical and physiological perspective. Regardless of the method espoused, most physiognomists continued to insist that the salient features of the head and face revealed the character of the individual as well as the type to which he belonged. To the informed observer the face was like an elaborate contour map which could be read at a glance. Every physiognomist had his favorite feature which served as a kind of skeleton key to unlock the secrets of human motivation and behavior, some preferring the forehead, others the nose, eyes, ears, mouth, and so on.

No discussion of physiognomy in the modern period would be anything less than hollow without some passing reference to the work of Johann Kaspar Lavater (1741-1801), Pieter Camper (1722-89), Johann Friedrich Blumenbach (1752-1840), Sir Charles Bell (1774-1842), and James C. Prichard (1786-1848). Lavater was a Zurich-born cosmopolite and minister who had no formal training in anatomy or physiology. His first essay on physiognomy appeared in 1772 heralding almost thirty years of investigation of this subject. In the best tradition of philosophic rationalism. Lavater compiled his famous Physiognomical Fragments “for the Promotion of the Knowledge and Love of Mankind,” but his analysis of faces and character proved that he was more of an impressionist and intuitionist than a rationalist in practice.¹² The Lavaterian method, such as it was, consisted of a close scrutiny of the features of head and face followed by an attempt to define the character of each in terms supposedly more precise than his predecessors. A universalist by nature, Lavater tried to incorporate the countenances of animals as well as humans into his system. He surveyed the noses, eyes, mouths, and lower jaws of nations, races, regions, towns, families, and individuals with equal confidence in his own judgment. Despite criticism of both his emphasis on the facial features and neglect of the emotions and their expression, Lavater won a commanding place among the physiognomists of the world, and royalty as well as other leading dignitaries visited him in Zurich in order to have their characters read.

Lavater's prolific writings spurred physiognomical investigations all over Europe, including Holland, where Pieter Camper combined both art and science in order to differentiate higher from lower forms of vertebrate life. What caused Camper no little concern was the width of the gap which separated the races of man from the quadrumana and other animals. Camper solved the problem to his own satisfaction by devising the facial angle or line which was supposed to mark clear distinctions between the skulls—and therefore the intelligence—of monkeys, orangutans, Negroes, Kalmucks, and Europeans. The facial angle was formed by the intersection of two lines, one running diagonally or vertically, as the case might be, from the forehead to the foremost point of the front teeth or incisors, and the other running horizontally from the opening of the ear to the nostrils.¹³ This relatively, if not alarmingly, simple device permitted Camper to contrive a scale of animal and human evolution or progress from primitive to civilized life, the intervals between each stage being gauged by the size of the facial angle in each category. Although he did not popularize the terms orthognathism and prognathism, Camper reinforced the notion that the position of the lower jaw and mouth in relation to the upper portion of the face and skull was the decisive criterion of organic development from primitivism to civilization. The facial angle of his tailed monkey's skull measured 42°, that of his orangutan 58°, compared with the skull of a young Negro at 70°, and that of a Kalmuck also at 70°. Camper then compared these figures with the facial angle of his European skull—a selective sample of one, needless to say—which measured 80°. The angles of his Grecian and Roman busts ranged from an ideal 90° to 95°. Camper concluded from his survey of cranial types that the normal, that is to say, desirable, facial angle for European men lay between 70° and 80°. Any angle less than this was by definition a sign of barbarism or more primitive life, and anything higher than 80° belonged to the realm of wishful thinking or to that of diseases like hydrocephalus.¹⁴

Although the distinguished naturalist and anthropologist of Göttingen, Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, disputed the validity of Camper's facial angle, his own treatise on comparative anatomy and human variety played a part in perpetuating certain myths about the races of man. This relatively cautious and critical scientist questioned the notion that Negroes were inherently and permanently inferior to Caucasians and other primary races in terms of potential intelligence, and his reasons for rejecting Camper's angle still carry conviction.¹⁵ His fivefold division of the races of man into the Caucasian, Mongol, Malay, Ethiopian, and American groups was eventually adopted by many anthropologists. Blumenbach was a staunch monogenist who believed that all the nonwhite races were essentially degenerations from the original Caucasian stock. His emphasis upon the morphological differences between the white and nonwhite races, however, did little to discourage the notion, so appealing to Europeans, that it was better to be a Caucasian than a member of any other race.¹⁶

Another important contributor to the art cum science of physiognomy was Sir Charles Bell, the distinguished Edinburgh surgeon and student of the nervous system, who published an important treatise in 1806 entitled Essays on the Anatomy of Expression in Painting.¹⁷ Like both Lavater and Camper, Bell was also an artist. Unlike them, however, he was a student of pathognomy, and he turned his attention to the operation of the muscles and nerves which conveyed changing emotions to the surface of the face. Like any good surgeon-artist, Bell took pains to analyze and then draw the range of human emotions from love and hate to laughter and madness. Pathognomy, or the study of the passions and emotions as expressed in the face, did not end with Bell. His work won the respect of Charles Darwin, whose The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, published in 1872, carried forward this investigation by closer comparison of facial expressions in men and animals. Darwin explicitly denied any concern with physiognomy, but his work overlapped that of Lavater and Camper as well as Bell at several points.¹⁸

Not the least remarkable feature of physiognomy was the way it spilled over into other fields and disciplines associated with human behavior. Many working anthropologists, ethnologists, craniologists, zoologists, and medical doctors relied unwittingly or otherwise on physiognomical assumptions in their efforts to classify the races and subraces of man. If the more prognostic and divinatory dimension of physiognomy fell by the scientific wayside, the belief in the intimate connection of physical and mental traits did not suffer from undernourishment. A good example of the persistence of that belief may be found in James Cowles Prichard's Researches into the Physical History of Man, published in London in 1813.¹⁹ In his spirited defense of the monogenist thesis that all the races of man descended from a single act of creation or pair of parents, Prichard accounted for the external physical differences among men as proof of the “natural law of diversification.” Convinced of the “specific unity” of man, he sought to reconcile the variety of pigmental and facial features in man with scripture in order to refute the polygenist school once and for all. Prichard was an unabashed physiognomist who insisted that physical features revealed not only ethnicity and ancestry, but character and temperament. His division of Europeans into the four familiar categories of the sanguine, phlegmatic, melancholic, and choleric types, based on color of skin, hair, and eyes, illustrated the extent of his borrowing from the Hippocratic and Aristotelian schools.

According to Prichard's classification, the sanguine type was marked by reddish hair, blue eyes, and a ruddy complexion. The temperament accompanying these features was not only “acute” but emotional, hedonistic, and somewhat irritable. The phlegmatic man had light or sandy hair, light grey eyes, and a pallid complexion. Owing to weak blood circulation, this type suffered from torpor and muscular inactivity and tended to be deficient in cheerfulness and vitality as well as “dull and insensible.” The choleric man had black curly hair, dark eyes, a swarthy complexion, and a “thick rough hairy skin.” Closer in some respects to the sanguine type, he was strong-minded and more easily angered than men of lighter hue. The melancholic type also had black or dark hair and eyes and a dark complexion, but his hair was lanky, his skin yellowish, and his pulse slow. He suffered from torpor of the nervous system and weak blood circulation and was therefore highly susceptible to insanity and other kinds of mental disorder.²⁰ Prichard's taxonomy did not go unchallenged during the next few decades, but his conviction that skin color and facial features corresponded with the four humors and explained character or mental traits was repeated by more than one prominent anthropologist as late as 1885.²¹ The interdependence of pigment, complexion, and facial features on the one hand, and national and racial character on the other was regarded as axiomatic by most members of the anthropological and ethnological societies in Victorian England as well as by their analogues on the continent, and in a more generalized form this physiognomical belief was shared by Victorians from all walks of life and regions of the British Isles.

The work of Anders Adolf Retzius (1796-1860), the Swedish ethnologist and craniologist, provides another example of the ubiquity of physiognomical lore. Although not a physiognomist in any formal sense, and having more in common with English craniologists like J. Barnard Davis and J. Thurnam than with Lavater or Camper, Retzius sought to differentiate the races of man on the basis of skull types. Retzius's international reputation owed less to his comparative analysis of Swedish and Finnish skulls than to his reliance on a new index to distinguish the races of man. By means of the cephalic index, or ratio of the maximum breadth and length of the cranium, he divided mankind into two main categories, the dolichocephalics or longheads and the brachycephalics or roundheads. The cephalic index became one of the standard gauges used by ethnologists and craniometrists around the world.²² Retzius also attached much significance to prognathous and orthognathous features, a concern that recalled Camper's facial angle owing to the assumptions underlying this criterion. This emphasis on prognathism seemed to confirm old beliefs that a protruding jaw and receding forehead in man indicated mental as well as physical similarities with anthropoid apes. The application of calipers and measuring tapes to skulls after the early 1840s gave many scientists of man a new sense of confidence in the precision of their methods, even though craniologists could not effectively distinguish between male and female skulls in practice. For all their wealth of data, these men usually began and ended their craniological studies on the premise that some frontal, parietal, occipital, and zygomatic developments were morally, intellectually, and aesthetically better than others. The old equation between size of cranial cavity or brain and intelligence thus lived on in the best craniometrical circles.

Physiognomy also permeated such newer disciplines as phrenology and criminal anthropology. Phrenology, defined as the science of mental faculties as revealed by examining the external form of the skull, became a fashionable cult in Europe and America after 1815, largely on the strength of its three forceful apostles, F. J. Gall, J. K. Spurzheim, and G. Combe. In some respects, the high priests of phrenology were latter day physiognomists, armed with an impressive vocabulary and a technique designed to reveal mental traits. This was merely divination by another name. In the middle decades of the century, phrenologists filled public lecture halls and their consulting rooms with rapt believers, including Richard Cobden and George Eliot, bent on having their heads examined for a modest fee. Phrenology had the advantage over physiognomy of dynamic leadership and an apparently authentic map of the mental faculties in the brain. The laying on of hands by phrenologists, whose fingers probed for cranial declivities and protrusions indicating the degree of such things as amativeness, philoprogenitiveness, and combativeness, must have had a therapeutic function also. From Edinburgh the Phrenological Journal (1824-47) spread the gospel of Gall and Spurzheim among the faithful and the curious, and its pages were filled with “phrenoscopes” or analyses of famous heads, past and present.²³

Fragments of physiognomy also found their way into criminal anthropology during the 1870s and 1880s. Physiognomists had always been interested in detecting violent and criminal tendencies in the face, and Francis Galton's efforts in the 1870s and after to devise a taxonomy of human types by means of anthropometric and psychometric tests—not to mention his technique of composite photography—led him directly to the study of criminals. Galton's composite pictures of murderers and thieves, as well as Jewish and phthisic or tubercular types, contained the implicit, if not explicit, statement that the face was indeed a mirror of the criminal, ethnic, or pathological interior of every man. The net effect of Galton's researches into “human faculty” and the laws of transmission of mental traits was to suggest that men were born criminals, geniuses, officers, rankers, or inherently superior and inferior, and that there was little they could do to change their lot.²⁴ Galton's work on composite stereotypes impressed the greatest of late-nineteenth-century criminal anthropologists, Cesare Lombroso (1836-1909), whose classic study, L'Uomo delinquente, published in 1876, and other writings represented a hodgepodge of sociology, psychology, penology, physical anthropology, and physiognomy, as well as a good measure of wishful thinking.²⁵ Lombroso was to modern criminology what Blumenbach was to modern anthropology, and his investigation of the etiology of political as well as social crime, including the backgrounds of rebels and revolutionaries, had a marked impact on many contemporaries, not to mention devoted disciples like Gustav Aschaffenberg in Germany.²⁶

Like most branches of science, physiognomy spawned some extravagant treatises that made Lavater's work look systematic and objective. James W. Redfield's Comparative Physiognomy, published in 1852, pushed the frontiers of physiognomy beyond Lavater by likening Prussians to cats, Negroes to elephants and fish, Englishmen to bulls, Turks to turkeys, Chinese to hogs, Americans to bears, Russians to geese, and Irish to dogs. In fact, he equated proverbial “Irish eloquence” with the barking of dogs. He wrote:

Compare the Irishman and the dog in respect to barking, snarling, howling, begging, fawning, flattering, backbiting, quarrelling, blustering, scenting, seizing, hanging on, teasing, rollicking, and whatever other traits you may discover in either, and you will be convinced that there is a wonderful resemblance.²⁷

After dwelling on the Irishman's capacity for enjoying both pleasure and pain and his love of intoxication, Redfield drew a sharp distinction between the genuine Irishman of Ireland, resembling the noble Irish wolfhound and St. Bernard, and the noisy Irish immigrant in America and elsewhere, who was more like “a scavenger-dog of the city and the great variety of whining, barking, howling, snarling, snapping dogs. …”²⁸

Two Americans by the names of Samuel and Anna Cherry, with a fetish for ears, wrote a book called Otyognomy, Or the External Ear as an Index to Character, which was published in 1900. Another savant in England adopted noses as the key to personality and discussed Greek, Roman, Jewish, cogitative, and other nasal varieties in his Nasology (1848).²⁹ But these diverting variations on the Lavaterian theme should not be allowed to obscure such relatively sober works as G. B. A. Duchenne's Mécanisme de la Physionomie humaine (1862), L. P. Gratiolet's De la Physionomie et des Mouvements d'Expression (1865), Paolo Mantegazza's Physiognomy and Expression (1890),³⁰ and Paul Hartenberg's Physionomie et Caractère (1908).

In spite of numerous advances in anatomy, physiology, and medical pathology since the time of Galen, the assortment of ideas, assumptions, axioms, and fantasies which may be subsumed under the heading of physiognomy still influenced many well-educated scientists and laymen in the nineteenth century. If men trained at the best medical schools in Europe as well as in London and Edinburgh imbibed large doses of physiognomy from their teachers of anatomy and physiology, and if doctors continued to rely on facial features to provide clues not just to disease—which at times made good clinical sense—but also to character, imagine how widespread these beliefs were among the public at large. Indeed, some of the truest believers in the remnants of classical physiognomy were found in the anthropological and ethnological societies of London where they presented papers saturated with physiognomical data and speculations about the races of man. The leading members of these societies, men like James Hunt and John Crawfurd, had a habit of extolling Caucasians with features like their own, while pointing out the inherent, even permanent, shortcomings of those with contrasting facial and pigmental features. The advent of increasingly quantitative and ethnocentric forms of physical anthropology helped to provide many middle- and upper-middle-class Victorians with scientific justification for believing that they stood at the very top of the tree representing the races of man. The bottom limbs of that tree were occupied by such groups as Hottentots, Negritos, African Bushmen, and Australian Aborigines.

Whether seen from a scientific, social, or cultural perspective, the Victorian images of the Irish as “white Negro” and simian Celt, or a combination of the two, derived much of its force and inspiration from physiognomical beliefs. But this image was not just an indigenous artifact produced by and for Englishmen alone. Virtually every country in Europe had its equivalent of “white Negroes” and simianized men, whether or not they happened to be stereotypes of criminals, assassins, political radicals, revolutionaries, Slavs, gypsies, Jews, or peasants. This Victorian image of the Irish was in fact only one product of a polygonal prism of images which refracted much the same light in as many different directions as there were outgroups for Europeans and Englishmen to worry about. No matter if the people or races being measured and physiognomized lived in Europe, Africa, Asia, or America, the refracted image worked in the same way to enhance the self-esteem of the beholder at the expense of those being stereotyped. European and British anthropologists, many of them with the best of monogenistic intentions, gave their scientific authority to these images and stereotypes simply because they subscribed unquestioningly to the orthodox ethnocentrism of their day, class, and country.

Reasons of space prevent anything more than a passing allusion to two other sources of anti-Irish prejudice in England which reinforced this ethnocentric outlook. These were religious and class prejudices as they operated in the minds of middle- and upper-class Victorian Protestants against lower-class Irish Roman Catholics. Since these prejudices are discussed in more detail below, it need only be mentioned here that for most Englishmen the word “Irishman” usually evoked such loaded terms as Papists and peasants. Since prejudices based upon marked differences of religion and social class had flourished so long in English and Scottish minds where Catholic Irishmen were concerned, it was all the easier for some Victorians to conclude that the relative paucity among Irishmen of skilled workers and professional men proved beyond all doubt that the Irish were an inferior people incapable of self-help and therefore unfit to govern themselves through Anglo-Saxon institutions.

If educated and responsible Victorians had formed such unfavorable impressions of Irish Celtic character, their images of Negroes and other nonwhite peoples were even less flattering; and Irishmen could at least console themselves with the fact that they occupied a rung on most, although not all, of the English-made ladders of racial development somewhat above their African cousins. But what concerns us here is not the entire prism of English images of other peoples, but the way in which the science of man and the art of caricature—working both independently of one another and at times together—helped to harden as well as perpetuate the stereotypes of “white Negroes” and simianized Celts.

Notes

1. Molinari spent some years in Paris as a young man writing for the more advanced radical newspapers before returning to his native Brussels in 1851 to take up the chair of political economy at the Museum of Industry. His letters to the Journal des Débats on the condition of Ireland were later published under the title, L'Irlande, le Canada, Jersey. Molinari's phrase “une variété de negres blancs” appeared in translation in a leader in The Times of London on 18 September 1880.

2. For a brief and allusive treatment of these comparisons, see L. P. Curtis Jr., Anglo-Saxons and Celts, pages 49-65. Field Marshal Wolseley once referred to the Sudanese “murderers” of his good friend Colonel Stewart in 1884, while on the Nilotic expedition, as “cowardly skulking reptile[s] such as this country and Ireland produces in large numbers.” Quoted in Adrian Preston, editor, In Relief of Gordon, page 57.

3. There is no modern, let alone definitive, history of physiognomy from Hippocrates to the present, but a useful introduction to this subject may be found in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, volume 21, pages 550-52, in an article by Professor Alexander Macalister of the Faculty of Anatomy at Cambridge University. One of the classic texts on physiognomy in the pre-Lavaterian era was produced by the Neapolitan savant, Giambattista, Della Porta, entitled De Humana Physiognomonia (1586), which passed through numerous editions in the seventeenth century.

4. Second edition, page 6.

5. Ibid., pages 57-58.

6. Hard Times (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, Inc., 1966), page 1.

7. Modern Library edition, 1946, page 596.

8. Pages 12-13.

9. Ibid., pages 125-26.

10. The original version of the nature of the four moist humors may be found in Hippocrates, Works, translated by W. H. S. Jones, pages 2-41, 62-95. A brief discussion of classical physiology appears in Charles Singer, A Short History of Anatomy and Physiology from the Greeks to Harvey, pages 9-36. Classical humoralism was given a new lease on life in this century when the neurophysiologist, Pavlov, divided his dogs in the laboratory into the four humoral categories or temperaments of the Hippocratic school in order to classify and explain their reactions to stress and various stimuli. This same classification was also applied to the victims of shell shock and combat fatigue by some doctors in British hospitals during World War II. See William Sargant, The Battle for the Mind, pages 29-63.

11. Aristotle's writings on the physiognomy of animals and man may be found in The History of Animals of Aristotle and His Treatise on Physiognomy, translated by Thomas Taylor, pages 421-46.

12. One of the most popular versions of Lavater's work was the translation by Thomas Holcroft, Essays on Physiognomy (fifth edition, 1848). This edition also contained the following useful account, “The Memoirs of the Life of the Author Compiled Principally from The Life of Lavater, by G. Gessner.” The eighteenth edition of this work was published in 1885.

13. For Camper's anatomical and physiognomical theories, see T. Cogan, editor, The Works of the Late Professor Camper on the Connection between the Science of Anatomy and the Arts of Drawing, Painting, Statuary. The illustrations of Camper's facial angle, … are taken from Tables I and II which were published in 1794 and bound into this edition.

14. Camper explained his methods of obtaining the facial angle and other skull measurements in Part 1, chapters 3-4, of this work. He arranged his small collection of skulls on a shelf in his study in the following order: “apes, orangs, negroes, the skull of an Hottentot, Madagascar, Celebese, Chinese, Moguller, Calmuck, and divers Europeans.” Ibid., page 50.

15. Blumenbach criticized Camper's angle because it did not take into account any lateral extension of the face, and because Camper lacked an adequate sample of skulls that might have shown how much variation existed in facial lines or angles within the same national or racial unit. He also accused Camper of inconsistency in applying his criteria of measurement to the skulls in his possession. See The Anthropological Treatises of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, translated and edited by Thomas Bendyshe, pages 121-24. Further strictures on the facial angle may be found in An Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species by Samuel Stanhope Smith, edited by Winthrop D. Jordan, pages 178-181.

16. The standard English translation of Blumenbach's classic work was produced by Thomas Bendyshe under the auspices of the Anthropological Society of London in 1865. This edition contains extracts from his dissertation, De Generis Humani Varietate, first published in 1775, as well as from his Contributions to Natural History (1790).

17. Bell also cast some doubt on Camper's theories about the connection between national character, facial beauty, and facial angle. For his discussion of skulls and head forms, see the second essay, pages 23-48. The drawings of “rage” and “madness” on pages 139 and 153 respectively bear some resemblance to Erskine Nicol's striking portrait of a wild Irishman, called “Home Rule,” reproduced in Mrs. S. C. Hall's Tales of Irish Life and Character (London, 1909), facing page 24.

18. Darwin denied any concern with physiognomy, which he defined as “the recognition of character through the study of the permanent form of the features,” page 1. For his praise of Bell, see pages 2-3, 9, 49-50. One wonders if the alleged objections of Captain Fitz-Roy of the Beagle to the size and shape of Darwin's nose in 1831 may not have soured the scientist on Lavaterian physiognomy for the rest of his life.

19. Prichard, Researches into the Physical History of Man. For his monogenist convictions, see especially the preface and chapters 1-3.

20. Ibid., pages 165-73. For Prichard's views on Celtic physiognomy and ethnology, see ibid., pages 526-35, and also The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations. There is a helpful discussion of Prichard's contributions to the treatment of mental illness in England in Denis Leigh, The Historical Development of British Psychiatry, volume 1, pages 148-209.

21. Traces of classical humoralism may be seen in John Beddoe's work, The Races of Britain, A Contribution to the Anthropology of Western Europe. Beddoe derived many of his working assumptions from such physical anthropologists and craniologists as Paul Broca, Rudolf Virchow, and J. Barnard Davis.

22. Relatively little of the work of Anders Adolf Retzius (1796-1860) was translated into English during his lifetime, but an exception was his “Present State of Ethnology in Relation to the Form of the Human Skull” in Annual Report of the Smithsonian Institution, 1859, pages 251-70.

23. Anyone interested in phrenology should consult not only Alexander Macalister's article in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, 11th edition, pages 534-41, but John D. Davies's study of the American varieties, Phrenology, Fad and Science. Besides London and New York, Edinburgh provided a most sympathetic climate for this cult. The Phrenological Journal and Miscellany published there was continued from 1838 to 1847 as The Phrenological Journal and Magazine of Moral Science, new series, in ten volumes. The Phrenological Magazine of London, edited by A. T. Story, which ran from 1880 to 1896, was incorporated with the Phrenological Journal of New York in the latter year.

24. Karl Pearson, The Life, Letters and Labours of Francis Galton. See especially volume 2, pages 87-125 for discussion of inherited traits and eugenics and pages 285-307 for Galton's work on composite photography and archetypes. See also F. Galton, Hereditary Genius.

25. Among the other relevant works of Lombroso from the physiognomical point of view are L'Anthropologie criminelle and Criminal Man, edited by Gina Lombroso-Ferrero.

26. See Aschaffenberg, Crime and Its Repression, translated by Adalbert Albrecht, originally published in Germany in 1903.

27. Redfield, Comparative Physiognomy or Resemblances Between Men and Animals, pages 253-58.

28. Ibid., pages 257-58.

29. Eden Warwick, Nasology: Or, Hints Towards a Classification of Noses. The real name of this connoisseur was George Jabet, who also wrote Notes on Noses. Unfortunately, there is not enough space to discuss the strong narcissistic element in physiognomy, but the note of self-admiration that runs through many of these treatises should not be ignored. In Dr. Joseph Sims's book, Physiognomy Illustrated; Or Nature's Revelations of Character (London, 1872), which reached its ninth American edition in 1889, the final chapter is entitled “Perfection of Character.” Under this same heading, there appears on the last page (page 586) a portrait of Dr. Sims, “the author of this book.” Another interesting contribution from America to this field was Mary O. Stanton, Physiognomy, A Practical and Scientific Treatise (San Francisco, 1881).

30. The original edition of Mantegazza's book, La Physionomie et l'Expression des Sentiments was translated into English and published in London in 1890 as part of Havelock Ellis's The Contemporary Science Series.