Christopher Lukasik's Discerning Characters and Ann Fabian's The Skull Collectors illustrate the renewed scholarly interest in physiognomy, phrenology and ethnology. Both engage with the implicit politics of reading heads and faces through normative paradigms that define character according to physical attributes. Fabian examines the cultural insensitivity of those employed in gathering evidence to support the “scientific” racism developing in the nineteenth century. Lukasik sees the frequent visual references to portraiture and physiognomy within the seduction novels of the early republic as a reflection of the era's growing social instability. His analysis provides a useful supplement to Karen Haltunen's Confidence Men and Painted Women (1982), as well as a suggestive prequel to Charles Colbert's A Measure of Perfection: Phrenology and the Fine Arts in America (1997).

Lukasik argues that the predominance of seduction plots in the literature of the early national period must be understood in relation to the continuing public interest in portraiture. Visual character studies became increasingly accessible to the general public over the period through exhibitions of painting, through the inexpensive production of silhouettes, and later through daguerreotypes, lithographs, and the inclusion of engraved portraits in periodicals and books. Lukasik examines the way the meaning and significance of such portraits are established, and sometimes interrogated, in novels from Rowson's The Inquisitor (1793) through Cooper's early novels to Melville's Pierre (1852).

Two texts are central to Lukasik's analysis: Lavater's Essays on Physiognomy (1789–98) and Chesterfield's Letters (1775). Both were the subject of wide public commentary and debate. Chesterfield's Letters generated concern because it seemed to disseminate potentially dangerous models for dissimulation, suggesting that identity could be constructed through gesture and behaviour, thereby masking authentic social standing and character. Lavater, on the other hand, appeared to provide a means of reading and fixing character through the interpretation of physical signs. Taken together, these texts frame a debate on whether individuals can be read reliably.

It would have been easy for Lukasik to point to repeated oppositions between Chesterfieldian duplicity and physiognomic certainty. Even early texts such as Tenney's Female Quixotism (1801), as Lukasik demonstrates, do more than exemplify that principle concern of the seduction plot, the unmasking of a socially dubious suitor who has obtained a veneer of gentility. In Tenney's novel, as in Foster's The Coquette and elsewhere, false readings result, at least in part, from romantic projections of the observer's own desires onto the subject of the gaze. Lukasik also addresses the way perception can be manipulated within visual portraiture, both through the incorporation of social signifiers within the visual language of painting and through the subtle manipulation of physical features within the physiognomically informed images produced for popular consumption. Brown's Ormond (1799) and Melville's Pierre go further, suggesting that physiognomy is not a reliable indicator, that character remains unreadable. Nor is Lukasik's examination of portraiture concerned solely with unmasking villainy. In Cooper's Precaution (1820), Tales for Fifteen (1823), The Spy (1821), and The Pioneers (1823), it is the hidden aristocrat who is revealed rather than the rascal.

Lukasik's insightful close reading of the literature is well informed by extensive research in the wider print culture of the period. His study offers new perspectives on the novels, perspectives that are compelling and convincing enough to demand attention within future examinations of these authors' work, and more widely in the literature of the period.

The argument within Fabian's The Skull Collectors is more elusive, the style more anecdotal. Fabian's study might well have been subtitled Samuel George Morton, his circle, and their legacy, for Morton's influence pervades the book. Morton's links with the nineteenth-century phrenological and enthnographic communities is charted through figures such as George Combe, George Gliddon, Louis Agassiz, James Cowles Prichard, Francis Galton, and Henry Yarrow.

The Skull Collectors contains some fascinating stories illustrating the blend of curiosity, scientific zeal, Eurocentric values, and racism that ensured that contacts between Americans and native peoples would be plagued by distrust, and often by outright hostility. Some of the stories that cling to the collected skulls demonstrate this vividly. Such is the case with the catalogued cranium of a Feegee chief, Veidovi. He was taken captive and treated as a human specimen during an American expedition of exploration that circumnavigated the globe, carrying him, an unfortunate prisoner, to New York to die shortly after his arrival in 1842. Then there is the case of the skull, much coveted by the phrenologists, of the Native American William Brooks, a Christian convert from Oregon. Brooks died in New York during a fund-raising expedition in 1839. His artificially flattened head, a hallmark of his aristocratic lineage within his own community, excited phrenologists with what they themselves would have termed “acquisitiveness,” for the implications of his unusually shaped head demanded, in their view, further study. His head, buried by his physician protector in an unmarked grave, was much mourned by phrenologists as a lost rare specimen. The way Anglo-American values are privileged in cultural exchanges is further demonstrated through the contrast Fabian draws between the efforts made to secure decent burials for the Civil War dead and the treatment of the bodies of Native Americans, killed during the push westward, as suitable subjects for ethnographic collection during the same period.

Such telling narratives take pride of place in Fabian's well-researched book. However, her strategy has costs as well as benefits. The book is pervaded by a barely contained sense of outrage at cultural insensitivities and racist ideas. This indignation gives the book thematic coherence, but at the cost of a more nuanced examination of the intellectual history that would locate and contextualize the collectors' enterprise. The links between phrenology and reform are only acknowledged in passing. To learn about this area, one must go to a work like Stephen Tomlinson's Head Masters (2005). Precursors to Morton's scientific racism are not acknowledged. For this information, one must go elsewhere, perhaps to the useful collection edited by Christopher Fox et al., Inventing Human Science (1995). Indeed, even the arguments of the scientists themselves are largely missing from the pages of the book, reduced to a few racist precepts. If one wants to understand the intellectual tradition that produced the behaviour ably depicted in the book, one must look beyond Fabian's study to one such as Bruce Dain's A Hideous Monster of the Mind (2002). To understand the collecting mentality more fully, one needs to consult Harriet Ritvo's The Platypus and the Mermaid (1997). Despite its limitations, Fabien's study is a readable, enjoyable book that presents some useful case studies.