I Hold Physiognomy to be Infallible: Charles Dickens's Hunted Down and the Criminal Face.

This paper will examine Dickens’s short story Hunted Down (1860) which is, I shall suggest, a work about reading and misreading.

Critics, including Eike Kronshage, have argued that the work highlights Dickens’s growing impatience with both phrenology and physiognomy. I shall argue that the story instead marks a shift in the author’s interest in faces, moving from the “speaking face” of his early fiction, to a fascination with those who cannot read, or choose to ignore, physiognomic traits. Referring to the trial of the poisoner, William Palmer, and briefly engaging with Great Expectations, I will consider how Dickens sought to assimilate face-reading into a more psychologically complex form of realism.