How to Read Character in Features, Forms, and Faces

How to Read Character in Features, Forms, and Faces is a popular guide to physiognomy by Henry Frith, the English writer and translator who produced a substantial body of popular books on various subjects during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The book belongs to the substantial Victorian and Edwardian literature on physiognomy, the supposed science of reading personality and character from the physical features of the face and body.

Physiognomy as a popular pseudoscience had a long history in European thought, going back at least to the work of the Swiss writer Johann Caspar Lavater in the late eighteenth century. The basic premise of physiognomic theory was that the inner character of a person was reliably expressed in the physical features of the face, the proportions of the head, the shape of the hands, and various other bodily characteristics. Practitioners claimed to be able to assess personality, intellectual ability, moral character, and various other traits by careful observation of these physical features, and the popular literature on physiognomy was substantial and continuously updated across the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Frith’s book is a typical example of late Victorian popular physiognomic writing. It works through the various features of the face and body that physiognomic theory considered significant, with extensive illustrations showing the various types of feature and the characters supposedly associated with each. There are sections on the forehead, the eyes, the nose, the mouth, the chin, the ears, the hands, the general bodily proportions, and various other features. Each section describes the various possible forms of the feature in question and offers physiognomic interpretations of what each form supposedly indicated about the bearer’s personality.

The book has no scientific validity by modern standards. Physiognomy is now understood as a pseudoscience that combined widespread cultural prejudices about appearance with elaborate pretensions to systematic knowledge. The specific claims about which features indicate which character traits are without empirical foundation, and the broader assumption that inner character is reliably expressed in outer appearance does not hold up to serious investigation.

The book is mostly of interest now as a document of late Victorian popular pseudoscience and of the kinds of personality assessment that ordinary educated readers of the period believed in. It pairs naturally with the broader Victorian phrenological and physiognomic literature.