SOURCE: Tytler, Graeme. “Lavater and Physiognomy in English Fiction 1790-1832.” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 7, no. 3 (April 1995): 293-310.

In the following essay, Tytler identifies Lavaterian principles of physiognomy in British literary portraiture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, discussing works by Ann Radcliffe, Sir Walter Scott, and Jane Austen.

The study of physiognomy in the novel has become an established domain of literary criticism, with scholars intent on showing ways in which novelists of different nationalities were influenced by the physiognomic theories of Johann Caspar Lavater (1741-1801).¹ The present essay, while consistent with earlier studies in aims and methods, surveys a transitional period in the development of physical character description in the English novel, and suggests some of the hazards as well as the benefits of comparative studies of this kind.

Until recently, critics of the major works of English fiction seldom came across Lavater's name and were thus...