Composed, Altered and Transformed: The Other Self in Seventeenth-Century English Character-Books

Seventeenth-century books of characters were collections of short satirical essays which metaphorically applied the image of the typeface, with its different characters or fonts, to the description of the various persons, trades and places of London. The repetitive format of character-books and the commonplace cavilling at recurring types seem hardly compatible with psychological exploration. Drawing on the formal proximities between the character and the essay, this article nonetheless traces the contribution of the genre to representations of the self in the early modern period. This article first gives an overview of prevailing characterizations of fickle and self-obsessed types who do not know themselves, and then presents a brief analysis of the moral and ideological stigmatization of change evidenced in contemporary literature. But not all change was conceived of as negative. By focusing on a character collection entitled A Strange Metamorphosis of Man, this essay argues that character-writing, while expressing the human figure in its social form, could also serve to project the self in what could be called its natural form.