Abstract
In this new overview of the significance of physiognomical thinking from Johann Caspar Lavater to Francis Galton, Lucy Hartley traces the understanding of human expression through a range of scientific and aesthetic theories. Where some earlier treatments of nineteenth-century physiognomy (for instance, those by Graeme Tytler, Sally Shuttleworth, Jeanne Fahnestock, and Christopher Rivers) have stressed its influence on Victorian fiction, Hartley is more interested in its implications for the understanding of human character. [End Page 694] She examines varying ways of treating the expression of the emotions between the late-eighteenth and the late-nineteenth centuries and investigates their implications for assumptions about human origins and human nature. While charting the gradual progress from arguments for design to the beginnings of a more modern, materialist understanding of the human mind and body, she also demonstrates the continuing influence of physiognomical thinking on later science. She argues that in addition to shedding light on larger debates about "man's place in nature," physiognomical theorizing also can help illustrate changing definitions of what constituted scientific explanation during the period.
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