SOURCE: Hollington, Michael. “Dickens and Cruikshank as Physiognomers in Oliver Twist.” Dickens Quarterly 7, no. 2 (1990): 243-54.

[In the following essay, Hollington proposes that Dickens and Cruikshank related to each other as rivals in the art of physiognomy with their depiction of the characters in Oliver Twist.]

The aim of this essay is to explore in outline the nexus of relationships between writer, illustrator and reader in the representation of human appearance in a novel where it becomes clear at a very early stage that this is a question of considerable significance. The first metamorphosis of state undergone by the infant Oliver is a fall into a world of signification and interpretation based upon external appearance. Initially wrapped in a blanket, he is at first indecipherable, immune to any attempt to penetrate his outer wrapping and locate him in a system of differences: “it would have been hard for the haughtiest stranger to have assigned him his proper station in society.” But once he is dressed by the old woman who serves as his nurse in a workhouse hand-me-down outfit of calico that is an ample surface for observation to work upon, he is “badged and ticketed, and fell into his place at once—a parish child—the orphan of a workhouse” (3; ch. 1). From henceforth he will be subject to innumerable operations that attempt to decipher him from his appearance.

Using a concept familiar to Dickens and Cruikshank, it seems appropriate to label this ubiquitous habit in Oliver Twist a physiognomical system. Questions of how to wield it—what constitute, for example, “correct” or reliable interpretations of external signs and what may be erroneous ones—form a central preoccupation of the novel, focusing, for instance, quite prominently around the issue of whether or not Oliver's appearance brands him for some fatal outcome. There is, I believe, a concerted effort of author and illustrator to set up a dynamic around the acts of attention and observation that are involved in our reading of text and image, in which the variegated insufficiencies of physiognomical interpretation on display are offered as a stimulus to induce us to provide necessary correctives. Ideologically speaking, what is at work in this presentation of physiognomy, at least at the most immediately apparent level, is a democratic appeal to the use of common powers of observation and discrimination between, for instance, (to cite a simple example) the relative importance of “natural” signs of the physical body and of the secondary signs offered typically by clothes. A somewhat problematic hierarchy of physiognomical intelligence seems to be imagined, whereby the reader may, if he or she sufficiently transcends the obviously limited talents of the physiognomers at work within the text itself, achieve the status of insight that author and illustrator, collectively and individually, assume as their own, and may reach even beyond this in a gesture towards some absolute and divine infallibility of interpretation invested in God or Nature or Providence that is glimpsed on many occasions in the novel.

I shall begin by considering a relatively simple example of an illustration that seems to me to go all out to offer clues to aid a correct physiognomical interpretation: this is ‘Oliver recovering from the fever,’ the illustration to chapter 12, first published in August 1837.

At its center is a portrait of the woman who will turn out to have been Oliver's mother. It is placed near the top of the illustration, surrounded in clearly symbolic fashion by some of the darkest shading in the plate to indicate interpretative difficulty, but nonetheless occupying an extremely prominent position above Oliver, and as the culminating point of a diagonal ascending movement from left to right that leads the eye from the inclined, upward-looking, long-sighted Mr. Brownlow (with his upward-tilting nose) to Mrs. Bedwin in contrapposto to the figure in the portrait. She can be said to “preside” over the illustration, and to offer essential leads to its decipherment.

It is clear from the text that the precise moment upon which the illustration concentrates is of importance here. Oliver has been looking at the portrait and asking questions of Mrs. Bedwin about its intensity, its appearance of being in communication with him, and she, fearful of its possible effect upon his delicate health, has turned him round so that he can no longer be excited by it. The effect is to place the spectator of the image into precisely the position that has just been occupied by Oliver, so that he/she may further ponder the mystery. We take in the calm, orderly domesticity of the scene in part through a pattern of contrasts—compare the peaceful fireside cat here with the boisterous ones in the Bumble/Mrs. Corney illustration, icons of the domestic strife the marriage upon which the pair are about to embark will entail, or the large basin which had contained broth in the center of the picture with the empty begging-bowl in the scene when Oliver asked for more. This is Mrs. Bedwin's room; her association with maternity in general, and Oliver's dead mother in particular, has been clinched by her musing: “What would his mother feel if she had sat by him as I have, and could see him now!” (68; ch. 12). That the portrait should have found its way to her room, and that she stands in the illustration as a mediator between Oliver and his mother, her hand on the back of his chair, are further indicators of how the image must be read. ‘Oliver recovering from fever’ is Oliver beginning to find his way home and rediscovering his true identity. The vertical plane that relates him to his mother, proposing facial resemblances such as a straight nose and a high forehead, stands as a clue to the correct reading of appearance based on innate and essential feature rather than upon the merely superficial aspects of clothes, etc., in an appeal to us to “get the message.”

But the illustration also stands out against a background of false appearance and interpretation to which Oliver has hitherto been captive. It is the culmination of a series, in all of which Oliver is centrally figured, that underscores the misinterpretations of his appearance with which he is beset, and which can be arranged in some sort of spectrum or hierarchy. The simplest and grossest, perhaps, is that which interprets him by means of his name. Oliver is wrongly named “Twist,” a mere alphabetical accident perpetrated by Bumble. It leads bad readers of appearance in the novel—Grimwig, Mrs. Sowerberry, Bumble, and the gentleman in the white waistcost—to imagine that there is a “twist” in his nature as well as his name, and that he is essentially and inevitably destined to be hung for his moral crookedness—his name gets elided to “gallows” by the policeman who locks him up at Hatton Garden police court (61; ch. 11).

The physiognomical evidence of the illustrations dismisses whatever temptation we might have to believe those who misread Oliver by emphasis of the complete absence of “twisting” from his characteristic physical appearance. Oliver is constantly associated with firmness and uprightness, often by comparison with those around him—he is the straightest and calmest figure in ‘Oliver asking for more,’ for instance, and when he is “rescued” by Nancy and Sikes, it is Fagin, who bends in mock humility; Charles Bates, who succumbs to a paroxysm of gesticulation; or the Artful Dodger, who curls his fingers into Oliver's pocket. The word “twist” is regularly applied to others—to Noah Claypole, for example, who writhes and twists his body “into an extensive variety of eel-like positions” (39; ch. 7) when Bumble gets called to witness the enormity of Oliver's crime in attacking him—but never, other than as his name, to Oliver himself. The tell-tale contrast is shown in ‘Oliver plucks up a spirit,’ which pits Oliver the upright in a profile that emphasizes the straightness of his nose against Claypole, the bent and angular coward, “twisting” his body beneath the table.

From these gross errors about name and nature we may move next to those who are taken in by pretense and contrivance. ‘Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends,’ is a useful example here. The sarcastic title proclaims that what we witness here is a piece of acting, a part of the theater of the streets. Oliver's face is certainly contrasted with all the others, but despite the crowd of spectators there is no one within the frame of the picture to read his predicament; these are mere street onlookers, members of that class of gawpers who in Paris, where the activity is thought to be endemic, are called badauds. Women, as frequently in Dickens poor physiognomers, form a significant proportion of the crowd duped by Nancy's histrionics. The absence of any intelligent observer represents an invitation to the reader capable of interpreting the misspelled “sel” of the sign overhead to supply the missing understanding.

Turning next to the criminal figures in the novel, I think it can be shown that these by and large have very sharp but inherently limited physiognomical skills which are marked by their strict relationship to purely “professional” concerns. Unlike the “affectionate friends” crowd, Bates and Dawkins are skillful readers of the signs of the street, expert at looking out for good victims from whom to steal; they even have specialized terminology to denote such powerful signifieds (“A prime plant”, they say of Brownlow—57; ch. 10). But the illustration of the subsequent theft contains a figure whose eavesdropping conveys deeper insight. There, in deep shade at the left of the image is the bookseller who sees what others miss sight of (“I saw that this boy was perfectly amazed and stupefied by it,” he later tells Mr. Fang's court [65; ch. 11], and who seems to invite the reader to take on a similar role.

The eavesdropping motif is repeated in more complex but this time essentially comic form in the scene of the burglary, where there are two sets of observers of Oliver in a moment of supposed crime—Sikes on the one hand, Brittles and Giles on the other. But neither is especially observant: in the subsequent illustration, Dr. Losberne is able to persuade the latter that they did not see what they did see, inviting us as readers of this image to share the joke as he pulls back the curtain like a showman revealing his exhibit—again, noble and straight-nosed.

As physiognomers, Brittles and Giles are at the level of Blathers and Duff, and beneath that of the existentialist counterparts of the criminals, for in the “low public-house” on Little Saffron Hill, “even by that dim light no experienced agent of police would have hesitated to recognise … Mr. William Sikes” (92; ch. 15). Merely professional physiognomy is shown in a larger perspective: it soon becomes apparent that Fagin and his associates are fundamentally naïve in assuming they can bend Oliver towards their ends; they do not take into proper account the fundamental “nature” that is expressed in his appearance.

It is, in fact, a cardinal tenet of the Dickensian physiognomical system that profound observation and insight into character are dependent upon moral goodness. But it is interesting here that the “good” characters in the novel also experience difficulty in deciphering facial appearance. Brownlow is an important example: “there is something in that boy's face,” he muses when he first sees Oliver, but he fails in his initial attempt to identify the connection in his mind (61; ch. 11). This, despite the fact that he proceeds in classical physiognomical fashion, attempting to place Oliver in a spectrum, calling “before his mind's eye a vast amphitheatre of faces,” amongst them “strangers peering intrusively from the crowd.” The passage seems to suggest that the problem of correct facial recognition is bound up, not only with the moral discernment of the observer, but with the issue of the multiplicity and anonymity of appearances in the streets of a city. Brownlow will later claim to Monks that he gained an intuition of Oliver's true nature at first sight: “when I first saw him in all his dirt and misery, there was a lingering expression in his face that came upon me like a glimpse of some old friend flashing on one in a vivid dream,” but for the time being it is to remain only an inkling (355; ch. 49).

By contrast, Oliver's half-brother Monks, who first sights him on the very same day, again as a consequence of his exposure in the streets of London, recognizes him straight away. Some complexities in the conception of physiognomy in Oliver Twist are now to be glimpsed, I think. It is, in fact, the evil Monks who seems to be the sharper physiognomist, no doubt through some innate affinity of blood but also perhaps because of his inverted religiosity. Monks is a haunted figure attempting to work evil, but burdened with the recognition that, in the long run at least, good will prevail; and his gloomy fatalism also enters into his physiognomical activity. He experiences the recognition of identities as a nightmare: “If a crowd of devils were to put themselves into his exact shape, and he stood amongst them, there is something that would tell me how to point him out” is his response to Fagin when (the pair in turn eavesdropping on Oliver at the Maylies) he asks him whether he's sure it's Oliver (228; ch. 34). We begin to grasp that besides the democratic appeal in physiognomy there is also a reference to a religious plane.

Thus it is not only from the perspective of narrative withholding that Brownlow's intuition can be at first only partially realized. In the mode of the Hogarthian progress, text and illustrations seek to assert the workings of a providential agency in human affairs which will bring things round in the end but which offer along the way gradual revelations that cannot be immediate and total but are of their essence piecemeal and fragmentary (Hill 1981). There is a sense of increasing concentration in the sequence of images, signified first through the progressive reduction in the number of figures represented. The essence of the earlier illustrations is their theatricality, incorporating both multiple participants and an audience that observes and interprets; later the focus will narrow to a single figure which the reader is invited to study intently. It is interesting that Dickens appears to signal this change of focus in a letter to Cruikshank advising him not to illustrate the scene of Sikes's escape: “it is so very complicated, with such multitude of figures, such violent action, and torch-light to boot, that a small plate could not take in the slightest idea of it” (Letters 1: 440).

It is interesting, too, that there is a hint here of disunity between author and illustrator (Dickens seems to be criticising Cruikshank's habit of filling his illustrations to the brim with figures and arabesques). It is time to shift focus somewhat, and to see Oliver Twist as something other than a harmonious unified collaboration in which the role of physiognomy is unequivocal. By tilting the text more towards its multiple social and historical contexts, we may perceive some of the ambivalences and fissures that beset physiognomy at this precise moment of its history in England.

As Roger Cooter and others have suggested, physiognomy is part of the radical culture of the French revolutionary period. Its use in various arts and sciences expressed a faith in the possibility of techniques of observation that would bring out underlying truths and criticize prevailing political and social oppressions. Though its deeper roots appear fundamentally idealist, it was presented in this period, particularly in such presumed refinements as the science of phrenology, as a materialist method that might produce precise and infallible laws to the reading of human character.

Both Cruikshank and Dickens were affected by this culture—the former, “cradled in caricature” twenty years prior to the birth of his collaborator, a major figure in the Regency period, working for a radical publisher and producing caricatures directed against the political and social abuses of the time. Yet, as Cooter argues, materialism in England was on the retreat after the Napoleonic wars (5, 25, 62-4, 94), and physiognomy had, in order to survive, gradually to realign itself with religion. I believe that we can trace aspects of this tension between materialism and idealism in the role of physiognomy in Oliver Twist.

Yet another, not unrelated issue must also be introduced. For Cruikshank in particular, physiognomy was strongly linked with the art of caricature, with seizing upon a characteristic feature of appearance and exaggerating it. Yet in the tradition bequeathed by Hogarth (despite the evident contradictions offered by his own artistic practice) caricature was regarded as an inferior kind of art which could not reach the serious level of realist art with its ability to capture the soul of human passions.

It seems to me not implausible to suggest that physiognomical illustration in the 1820s and 30s—the latter a period in which caricature begins to decline—is gradually and probably always only partially tinged with the same brush as an activity unworthy of the serious artist. Daniel Nikolaus Chodowiecki had provided the Swiss physiognomist Johann Kaspar Lavater with hundreds of illustrations to his physiognomical text; he appeared to be unafraid to declare himself a servant of the new science (Brinitzer 245-69). Cruikshank, too, in the 1820s, seeking to emancipate himself from subservience to the radical publishers, began his activity as a publisher in his own right with the highly popular and successful Phrenological Illustrations, establishing his own claims as a serious physiognomer. But in the succeeding years there is perhaps evidence of a climate of opinion swinging towards satirical presentation of physiognomy and phrenology as themselves fashionable fads. Kenny Meadows is a name to mention in this context for his satirical Sketches from Lavater which appeared in the “Gallery of Comicalities” in Bell's Life in London (Everitt 245).

At any rate, if we turn to Sketches by Boz we find a strikingly ironic reference to physiognomy in the sketch “Doctor's Commons,” the narrator proclaiming his inability “to claim any credit as a physiognomist again, for, after a careful scrutiny of this gentleman's countenance, we had come to the conclusion that it bespoke nothing but conceit and silliness, when our friend with the silver staff whispered in our ear that he was no other than a doctor of civil law, and heaven knows what besides” (26: 102). The passage of course mocks physiognomy only to reinstate the truth of accurate observation, but in his “Full Report of the Second Meeting of the Mudfog Association” published in Bentley's Miscelleny in September 1838, Dickens refers humorously to phrenology in a passage where the “Mudfog Association for the advancement for Everything” invites the public hangman to bring along a skull for their deliberation. At first he substitutes a coconut, which doesn't prevent Mr. Blubb from a disquisition upon its organ of destructiveness; and when he subsequently procures the real thing “there appeared to be some doubt ultimately whether the skull was Mr. Greenacre's, or a hospital patient's, or a pauper's, or a man's, or a woman's, or a monkey's” (27: 395).

In this dual perspective, then, of rival self-assertions as serious artists, and of increasing skepticism about the exact scientific truth, certainly of phrenology and perhaps also of physiognomy, I think we can place some of the tensions between Dickens and Cruikshank as physiognomers in Oliver Twist. “I earnestly begged of him to let me make Oliver a nice pretty little boy” wrote Cruikshank in 1871 (The Times, 1871: 8), claiming that he did so in order to bolster the book's appeal to the market of female readers, and asserting that the image of Oliver changes for the handsomer after the early illustrations. It is interesting to connect this assertion with ‘Oliver claimed by his affectionate friends,’ where women, as we noted earlier, are represented as poor physiognomers; some sort of contradiction would appear to be indicated. Physiognomical ambivalence and difference were also surely heightened by the extent of each writer's identification with the products of their imagination—Dickens, for instance, with Sikes in his murder of Nancy, Cruikshank with Fagin in the condemned cell. Vying with each other for control, each sought to stamp his own version of physiognomical truth upon the text, the tension generated by this rivalry to some extent the generator of the resulting intensity of the novel.

Moreover, to return to the question of the displacement of the physiognomical system from the plane of radical materialism onto the plane of religion, it is above all in the evil figures of Oliver Twist that this intensity is felt. The Gothic Monks is a revealingly symptomatic figure, attempting to cover up his shape in a black cloak (the obverse mirror image of his half-brother wrapped in a blanket at birth) in a vain attempt to hide the deformity that cannot however be suppressed: “‘you, who from your cradle were gall and bitterness to your own father's heart, and in whom all evil passions, vice, and profligacy, festered, till they found a vent in a hideous disease which has made your face an index even to your mind’” (336; ch. 49). At this level in Oliver Twist, we are meant to see a supernatural agency at work, imprinting warnings on evil human surfaces.

This “inverse sublimity” is felt by the evil figures themselves. Going against nature and order, they are intensely superstitious witnesses to the existence of an order beneath the surface of things. It is not only Monks, with his obsessive consciousness of Providence—Nancy hears him saying that the work of the Maylies “seemed contrived by Heaven, or the devil, against him” (273; ch. 40)—who makes continual reference to the supernatural; it is Sikes as well, even in jest, baiting Fagin with a description of him “shivering … like a ugly ghost just rose from the grave” (121; ch. 19), or reacting to Nancy's appearance at his sickbed by telling her she looks “like a corpse come to life again” (266; ch. 39). At the last he is conscious of being hunted down by God's vengeance, like the criminals in The Terrific Register of whom Dickens read as a boy.

And Sikes is surrounded in the end by a throng of faces—the rhythm of the prose expressing his anxious guilt—“On pressed the people from the front—on, on, on, in a strong struggling current of angry faces … there were tiers and tiers of faces in every window; cluster upon cluster of people clinging to every housetop” (345; ch. 50). Essentially the same configuration is to be found at the trial of Fagin, where “the court was paved, from floor to roof, with human faces” (358; ch. 53). Fagin attempts desperately to use his physiognomical skills, first on the audience—“in no one face—not even among the women, of whom there were many there—could he read the faintest sympathy with himself”—and then with the jury: “he could glean nothing from their faces; they might as well have been of stone” (359; ch. 59). But to no avail. There is a kind of physiognomical revenge—those who refused to read the signs of nature, who persisted in attempting to alter Oliver's nature by corrupting him, are now in their turn subject to the wrath of physiognomical judgment, the faces surrounding them representative of a readership now schooled in the art of interpreting exterior signs. It is said of Fagin in the courtroom that “he seemed to stand surrounded by a firmament, all bright with gleaming eyes”; it is an anti-paradise into which he is gathered, not the elysium of Revelations, with its 144,000 angels around the throne of God, but the hell of a nightmarish persecution by the human face.

Thus Oliver Twist seems to bear witness to a specific moment in the history of physiognomy. Both Cruikshank and Dickens regarded themselves, with reason, as sharp observers and interpreters of the surface of things, especially in the streets of London. But the tide was turning against the materialist physiognomy of radical culture. In shifting in onto another plane in conformity with the drift towards religion in the justification of physiognomy, they were able to create unforgettable images of an inverse sublimity, the supernatural seen through the lineaments of sordid and grotesque criminals. But it was an unstable achievement and alliance. Physiognomy had begun to lose its authority, and neither in the longer run would be able to remain content with any simple and confident view of the truth of appearance.

Works Cited

Brinitzer, Carl. Die Geschichte des Daniel Ch.: Ein Sittenbild des 18. Jahrhunderts. Stuttgart, 1973.

Cooter, Roger. The Cultural Meaning of Popular Science: Phrenology and the Organization of Consent in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1984.

Cruikshank, George. “The Origin of Oliver Twist.” The Times [London]. 30 Dec. 1871: 8.

Dickens, Charles. The Letters of Charles Dickens. Ed. Madeline House and Graham Storey. 6 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965-89.

———. Oliver Twist. Ed. Kathleen Tillotson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1966.

———. Sketches by Boz. London: Chapman and Hall [1897]. Vols. 26 and 27 of Gadshill Edition. Ed. Andrew Lang. 38 vols.

Everitt, Graham. English Caricaturists and Graphic Humourists of the Nineteenth Century. 2nd ed. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1893.

Hill, Nancy K. A Reformer's Art: Dickens' Picturesque and Grotesque Imagery. Athens: Ohio UP, 1981.