1530 Reviews of Books
SHARRONA PEARL. About Faces: Physiognomy in Nine-
teenth-Century Britain. Cambridge: Harvard University
Press. 2010. Pp. xii, 288. $49.95.
Anyone who has read a Charles Dickens novel has en-
countered physiognomy at its wittiest extreme. To take
just one example from Hard Times, we find the school
headmaster Mr. Gradgrind described as having a
“square wall of a forehead,” a mouth that is “wide, thin
and hard set,” and a head “all covered with knobs.” The
message is no less clear now than it was then: Grad-
grind’s rigidly analytical character is written all over his
body.
The idea that the face opened a window to the soul
is at the heart of physiognomy, an ancient set of beliefs
and practices that Sharrona Pearl takes on in this book.
Pearl’s study focuses on an especially interesting mo-
ment in the history of physiognomy, namely the Vic-
torian era in Britain. Most provocatively, she argues
that the changes that physiognomy underwent in this
period helped to shift British national identity away
from its focus on the individual and toward a “new kind
of generalized group diagnosis” (p. 187). In other
words, as Britain reached its fin-de-siècle, the signifi-
cance of Mr. Gradgrind’s squareness lay less in what it
said about Mr. Gradgrind and more in what it said
about a certain British type.
This study is well worth reading for its sixth chapter
alone (the strongest in the book), which unpacks this
intriguing argument about selfhood. Pearl argues here
that once physiognomy adopted photography as a tool,
it became possible to fix faces into averages. These ag-
gregate physiognomies in turn fueled eugenics, Charles
Darwin’s studies of emotions, fingerprinting, and other
biological and anthropological research throughout the
empire. She argues that each of these scientific pursuits
drew fundamental inspiration from the physiognomic
belief that “the notion of the self was relevant only in-
sofar as it represented deviation from the norm” (p.
188). The conception of the self as a deviation from the
norm is a powerful one in the historiography of mo-
dernity, and Pearl’s points add some unexpected addi-
tional depth to this line of inquiry.
The rest of the book is more of a mixed bag, though
I suspect this stems mainly from the difficult nature of
the subject. Pearl has performed incredibly wide-rang-
ing research across medicine, the theater, literature,
and the visual arts. Her reach even extends to Victorian
puppetry. This eclecticism gives us a clue as to why the
subject might be so difficult to handle: physiognomy
was everywhere in Victorian culture. Its presence is so
diffuse that one can imagine the amount of work Pearl
must have done simply to define where her subject be-
gan and ended.
With that said, the reader is still left with a text that
can be hard to follow. To take an example, in one two-
page spread Pearl discusses the concept of the “face-
less” masses, reflexivity of the gaze, speed of use as an
advantage of physiognomy, artistic and political uses of
physiognomy, and what different facial features meant
AMERICAN HISTORICAL REVIEW
without any clear indication of how these subjects are
related.
I also wish Pearl had done more to define the intrigu-
ing concept of “shared subjectivity” that she introduces
early in the book. Pearl wants to use this notion to chal-
lenge the prevailing historiography, which holds that
nineteenth-century science pushed inexorably toward
objectivity. Her goal has great merit, and it is a com-
pelling idea that physiognomic perception, while sub-
jective, was not hopelessly idiosyncratic. Still, what ex-
actly a shared subjectivity is requires considerably more
discussion than it receives here, particularly since the
introduction presents the concept as central to the
book’s analysis.
In some parts of the text, I also craved more detail—
for instance, examples of how stage actors, theater man-
agers, and portrait painters “expanded the range of
Downloaded from http://ahr.oxfordjournals.org/ at New York University on May 9, 2015
physiognomically meaningful signs” (p. 103). More em-
pirical ballast in several parts of the book would better
clarify and substantiate some of the broad claims that
the author makes.
While this book is uneven, Pearl should be com-
mended for taking a real risk with this project, a risk
that she made yield many payoffs. I suspect this study
will spark many other scholars to investigate the history
of physiognomy more closely, and that is worth its
weight in gold.
ELIZABETH GREEN MUSSELMAN
Southwestern University
NADJA DURBACH. Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows
and Modern British Culture. Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press. 2010. Pp. xiii, 273.
$39.95.
What are the cultural meanings of freakery, and why
did the practice of displaying human oddities flourish
during the Victorian age and then die out after World
War I? Nadja Durbach takes up these questions
through case studies of five notable freak show perfor-
mances: Joseph Merrick, aka the “elephant man”; Lal-
loo, a conjoined twin; Krao, or the “missing link”;
Maximo and Bartola, the so-called “Aztec Lillipu-
tians”; and the falsified African shows that enjoyed
their heyday at the end of the nineteenth century. In
each instance Durbach ransacks the relevant archives
and digs up much new material. As an example of deep
archival research into select cases, the book is superb,
with supporting evidence drawn not only from pub-
lished sources but also the largely scattered collections
of ephemera (playbills, tickets, programs) that have
survived from the time. The decision to drill down into
a few well-known peculiarities yields, however, a cer-
tain insistence and tedious repetition as well as a larger
problem of making sweeping claims dependent on se-
lective sampling. Of the myriad performances of the pe-
riod she focuses on a handful, but why these were se-
lected and how they compare to the large number
beyond is never adequately explained. What is missing
in this approach is the subtle texture and careful, nu-
DECEMBER 2010