Faces of the People

Richard Altick

• Physiognomy in the European Novel: Faces and Fortunes by Graeme Tytler
  Princeton, 436 pp, £19.10, March 1982, ISBN 0 691 06491 1
• A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th-century Paris by Judith Wechsler
  Thames and Hudson, 208 pp, £18.50, June 1982, ISBN 0 500 01268 7

‘There’s no art to find the mind’s construction in the face,’ said King Duncan in the fourth scene of Macbeth. But there was, and Shakespeare knew this. Almost at the moment he was writing the play, a new law required that anybody who professed ‘a knowledge of phisnognomie’ – one version of the name by which the practice of reading character in facial features was known to the learned – was to be ‘openly whipped untill his body be bloudye’. Obviously, physiognomy was then regarded with some scepticism. But Francis Bacon, the harbinger of modern science, was not among the doubters. He thought physiognomy had ‘a solide ground in nature’ so long as it was not ‘coupled with superstitious and fantasticall arts’ such as astrology and even sorcery, with which, as the Elizabethan prohibition implies, it was often associated.