SOURCE: Tytler, Graeme. “Lavater and the Nineteenth-Century English Novel.” In The Faces of Physiognomy: Interdisciplinary Approaches to Johann Caspar Lavater, edited by Ellis Shookman, pp. 161-81. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1993.

In the following essay, Tytler considers the immense, if generalized, influence of Lavater's Physiognomischen Fragmente on the nineteenth-century English novel.

It is curious to reflect that when we celebrate the 250th anniversary of a famous person, we commemorate an event of which the celebrity himself almost certainly never had any conscious memory. Accordingly, there may be some who think that anniversaries should every now and then be occasions for commemorating events that were consciously experienced by the celebrity and remembered by him for the rest of his life. If so, then allow me to take advantage of that idea by noting that it is also just over two hundred years since Johann Caspar Lavater paid his one...