Post by Admin on Sept 8, 2020 15:17:50 GMT
Any thoughts on Criminal Physiognomy?
I know the Victorians were big on it. I remember reading a phd thesis on the Illustrted Police News that said that they often pandered to the minds of old women that wanted to see the pictures of criminals so that could assess whether they were guilty or not.
If think it was there and I think this is it:
oro.open.ac.uk/50380/1/Whole%20Thesis_complete%20for%20printers.pdf
'There is also evidence to suggest that the newspaper’s illustrations attracted a number of regular purchasers. Thomas Wright, journeyman engineer, recalled how during the latenineteenth century hislandlady, an outwardly respectable, ‘clean, industrial, honest old woman’, would regularly ‘sup’ the IPN ‘full of its horrors’. In particular she ‘read’ the portrait illustrations and:Being fully persuaded that the so-called likenesses in it were life-like portraits, she would comment upon them, saying that one had a hanging look, that villain was written on the face of another, or that she could see murder or burglary peeping out of the eye of a third. Nor was she at all disconcerted, or her belief in her own powers as a physiognomist in the least shaken, when it was sometimes pointed out to her that she had taken the victim of a murder to be the perpetrator of it.'
Something on it here:
www.oldpolicecellsmuseum.org.uk/content/learning/that-criminal-look
Of course, its referred at best as a psudo science but I was glancing at the Black Kalendar and thought that it was probably a really good source of faces to 'consider'.
I have often thought that most murderers look 'mean', but are all 'mean' people murderers?
I know the Victorians were big on it. I remember reading a phd thesis on the Illustrted Police News that said that they often pandered to the minds of old women that wanted to see the pictures of criminals so that could assess whether they were guilty or not.
If think it was there and I think this is it:
oro.open.ac.uk/50380/1/Whole%20Thesis_complete%20for%20printers.pdf
'There is also evidence to suggest that the newspaper’s illustrations attracted a number of regular purchasers. Thomas Wright, journeyman engineer, recalled how during the latenineteenth century hislandlady, an outwardly respectable, ‘clean, industrial, honest old woman’, would regularly ‘sup’ the IPN ‘full of its horrors’. In particular she ‘read’ the portrait illustrations and:Being fully persuaded that the so-called likenesses in it were life-like portraits, she would comment upon them, saying that one had a hanging look, that villain was written on the face of another, or that she could see murder or burglary peeping out of the eye of a third. Nor was she at all disconcerted, or her belief in her own powers as a physiognomist in the least shaken, when it was sometimes pointed out to her that she had taken the victim of a murder to be the perpetrator of it.'
Something on it here:
www.oldpolicecellsmuseum.org.uk/content/learning/that-criminal-look
Of course, its referred at best as a psudo science but I was glancing at the Black Kalendar and thought that it was probably a really good source of faces to 'consider'.
I have often thought that most murderers look 'mean', but are all 'mean' people murderers?
