Description
Book SynopsisPearl reveals the way that physiognomy, the study of facial features and their relationship to character, shaped the way that people understood one another and presented themselves in 19th-century Britain. By showing how physiognomy gave people permission to judge others, Pearl holds up a mirror both to Victorian times and our own.
Trade ReviewAlthough this book is clearly a cultural history of Victorian Britain, the resonances of physiognomy with current preoccupations and events are poignant. With pervasive concerns about the alleged invisible threats in our midst, any technology or idea, old or new, that promises to reveal those threats tends to carry weight. As Pearl rightly concludes, the promise of establishing reliable links between appearance and underlying reality was played for high stakes--and still is. -- Alan Collins * Times Higher Education Supplement *
Pearl's book is a brilliant and original contribution to the history of visual culture. It bodes well for the career of a young scholar whose questions are difficult and whose answers are compelling. -- Sander L. Gilman * Bulletin of the History of Medicine *
In this smart, engaging book, Sharrona Pearl shows that we can see Victorian culture through new eyes if we learn to look, as the Victorians did, with a physiognomic sensibility. Actors, criminals, the insane, rushed Londoners, Irish, Jews: all came to be categorized in this new form of gaze. Pearl's inventive and expansive
About Faces recreates for us this most protean of nineteenth-century sciences. -- Peter Galison, Harvard University
This is a masterful study of how the Victorians came to see each other and themselves. Sharrona Pearl's witty, incisive, and pathbreaking book uses 'physiognomy'--the scientific study of faces--to tell us about the ways that the nineteenth-century British understood their rapidly changing social world, one face and glance at a time. -- Alison Winter, author of
Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian BritainTable of Contents* List of Figures * Acknowledgments * Introduction: Face Facts * Pocket Physiognomy: Sense in the City * Performing Physiognomy: Imitating Art and Life * Portrait Physiognomy: Communicating Character * Caricature Physiognomy: Imaging Communities * Photographic Physiognomy: Through a Mediated Mirror * Diagnostic Physiognomy: From Phrenology to Fingerprints * Conclusion: Seeing Ourselves * Notes * Index
