In this highly original and impressive work, Sharrona Pearl explores the seemingly endless fascination of the Victorians with the human face and its relationship to both the individual within and the social world beyond. Physiognomy, she argues, became culturally salient in the nineteenth century because it offered a set of tools for comprehending the rapidly changing social landscape of an industrializing world. Its power lay in its protean nature, which made it accessible for amateurs as well as specialists: physiognomy was “a slippery and flexible concept that changed with every interrogation, every elucidation, every user, and every use” (2). By connecting physiognomy to the chaotic, complex social world in which it thrived, Pearl has produced both a compelling history of physiognomy and a rich history of Victorian culture.

About Faces is structured thematically, as Pearl traces physiognomic practice across a series of diverse discursive and visual sites: urban journalism, the theater, portraiture, racial caricature, photography, and science. The effect is to splinter physiognomy into myriad specific types of physiognomy: there was no “physiognomy,” only many physiognomies. Consequently, About Faces offers a nuanced story without a clean, linear narrative: physiognomy does not begin with the slavish application of Lavater's ideas or end with Freud's inversion of the self-face relationship. Instead, physiognomy was applied wherever the Victorians found it useful. Race is a case in point. Victorian racial anxieties could be assuaged by an accessible practice that could, at least through caricature, firmly secure boundaries between human groups and alleviate fears of racial invisibility. As Pearl demonstrates, images of the Irish became increasingly simian over the course of the nineteenth century. Her analysis of this genealogy is detailed and subtle, demonstrating the emergence and exaggeration of the pug nose and prognathous jaw with the aid of well-chosen, arresting images. Facial representation, she conclusively shows, was inseparable from political and economic dominance: the more threatening the Irish became, the more distinct and inferior their image appeared. Similarly, a heterogeneous Jewish population was collapsed into a single stereotype incorporating both Sephardic and Ashkenazi elements: long coat, beard, and the Jewish nose, which emerged in the early nineteenth century.

If racialized physiognomy was designed to reify difference and fix hierarchy, physiognomy was used in a quite different fashion in the asylum. Photography, Pearl suggests, was adopted by Hugh Welch Diamond at the Surrey County Lunatic Asylum as not merely a classificatory technique but a diagnostic and therapeutic one. Diamond's images were intended to form part of a program of rehabilitation. Changes in self-presentation—disheveled clothing, uncovered hair—were the surest way of demonstrating the progress of mental illness. However, the mutability of these symbols meant the trajectory toward insanity could be reversed. Physiognomy, Diamond suggested, did not reveal something innate about the self but something potentially transformable and, hence, curable.

Physiognomy, to adopt more contemporary parlance, could be used to demonstrate either the ineluctable power of biology or the transformative power of culture, depending on the purpose of the practitioner. Physiognomy, in other words, provides an ideal lens through which to explore many of the practical and intellectual contradictions of Victorian culture. Most people appear to have used physiognomy in one form or another with little idea of, or concern for, physiognomy's origin or epistemological nature. Physiognomy perhaps appeared most formal and instrumental when applied to theatrical practice, but even here, there was room for a talented actor to escape facial determination, if only momentarily. This reveals another interesting dimension of the story: physiognomy always objectified but, equally, always empowered. Hence, we can conclude that physiognomy was neither a tool of oppression nor one of liberation. Physiognomy might have helped structure and perpetuate racial and social hierarchies, but its suppleness meant nobody could escape objectification: “the evaluators, however, were also the evaluated—with physiognomic technology, no one was in total control” (38).

Inevitably, in a book so rich and original, there will be some minor flaws. For this reviewer, Pearl's claim that the nineteenth century saw a demonstrable shift from the physiognomic analysis of individuals toward that of groups appeared rather open to question. Clearly, some late Victorians, notably Galton, did use physiognomy to make broad claims about the traits of groups like criminals. However, Pearl's own evidence militates against such a simplified thesis: we find physiognomy being applied in so many ways that such a generalized trajectory of development appears almost teleological. Her story of physiognomy is surely one of perpetual and disorienting mutation rather than linear progression. This, however, is a minor quibble. Like James Secord's Victorian Sensation (Chicago, 2001) and Alison Winter's Mesmerized (Chicago, 1998), books with which it deserves comparison, About Faces is a vivid, elegant, and exciting work, which demonstrates the centrality to Victorian culture of seemingly marginal practices and peripheral works. It demonstrates the importance of visual practice not by appeal to grand meta-narratives but by paying attention to the messiness and richness of life on the ground. For these and other reasons, it deserves a wide readership.