What do we mean​ when we call someone a ‘character’? It’s often a way of indicating that a person habitually says or does things that most people wouldn’t say or do. It might be that the character makes risqué jokes, or that he likes to abseil down tall buildings while wearing a pink Spider-Man costume, or that he’s actually just a pain in the arse. My intuition is that men are more likely to be described as characters in this sense than women, and that this is an instance of the habitual and invisible sexism embedded in normal usage. Sometimes that sexism becomes explicit, as when Alexander Pope begins his ‘Epistle to a Lady on the Characters of Women’ with ‘Nothing so true as what you once let fall:/“Most Women have no Characters at all.”’

In that couplet Pope was responding to a long-standing tradition that linked character with maleness. When sometime around 320 BCE Theophrastus wrote the text which became known as his Characters, the thirty types of person he described in what survives of that work were all male. There is the Garrulous Man, who is the type of person ‘who says to anyone he meets that he is talking nonsense … and that he knows it all himself, and if he listens he’ll find out about it’, and the Grouchy Man (my own character type) who ‘if he stumbles in the street, he is apt to curse the stone … He won’t sing or recite a speech or dance.’ The maleness of these figures is not surprising, given the political and social position of women in Theophrastus’ Athens. But the word ‘character’ (like the word ‘type’) could be thought of as rootedly androgynous: in its earliest uses it meant both the stamp or the seal that leaves an impression on a softer material and the imprint which is left behind. Hence both the ‘male’ stamp and the ‘female’ imprint could equally be regarded as characters. Pope was aware of this awkward detail and (characteristically) put his thumb on the scale by insisting that women were ‘matter too soft a lasting mark to bear’, so they could neither be the stamp that makes a character nor retain its imprint.

But ‘being a character’ is only one of the ways we now use this complex word. In book clubs up and down the country people complain that ‘I didn’t like the characters,’ and the same phrase appears in umpteen two-star reviews of novels on Amazon. This usage tells us something about the way contemporary readers typically engage with fictions, and perhaps also something about the way humans now habitually engage with other humans. Talking about a fictional character allows us to make moral judgments about a text and position ourselves in relation to it. We also tend to see the people around us as having characters about which we might make judgments and have opinions, or from which we might instinctively shrink. Those characters are in part fictions of our own making. We turn our experience of a series of behaviours by another person, sometimes supplemented by their reputation, into a notion of their character – which means something like ‘the pattern that underlies their actions’ – and we then form attitudes to that construction of their character. In doing so, we are in part judging the creations of our own imagination, since a person’s character will always be something which we invent and think we know rather than something graspable out there in the world. We are also, perhaps, trying to control or tame the people around us by constructing them as characters. It allows us to persuade ourselves that we know, if not exactly what they will do next, then at least the kind of thing they might do next. A sense of his character might give me some confidence that when I tell Professor Oblomov that he needs to move from his elegant corner office to a smaller, damper one in the basement he will not hurl his laptop at my head.

The word ‘character’ imposes coherence on the distinct actions of a person in a way that is both summative of their past actions and predictive of what they might do in the future. It says, in effect: ‘This person has a disposition to do X and Y, so in such and such circumstances I would expect her to do Z.’ ‘He has a bad character’ might mean the person in question has dealt crystal meth or sold faulty used cars, and therefore that he would screw you over if given half a chance. The characterisation ‘He writes like a dog’ implies a similar sense that we know in advance the kind of crappy prose a particular person is likely to churn out, since styles have characters too, and characters can have styles of speech or writing.

‘That was so out of character’ is the forgiving flipside of character-based ethics. It might mean: ‘Rachel is normally generous, but on this occasion unaccountably stole the last chocolate biscuit.’ The point at which an out-of-character action becomes itself a behaviour so frequent as to be regarded as characteristic is often tricky to determine. How many times can Rachel steal the last biscuit before we start to think it is in Rachel’s character to steal biscuits? (Probably not more than three times: Rachel, you have been warned.) That uncertain tipping point between characteristic and uncharacteristic actions is one reason why our attitudes towards one another tend to flicker and never quite settle, and is part of what makes other people exciting. We constantly form and update our notion of what a person’s character might be, and constantly shuttle in our view of others between judgments about their particular actions and judgments about their underlying dispositions. We do that without necessarily being conscious that we are doing so. And we ourselves might take a quiet pleasure from time to time in doing things that we know will appear to be out of character, because having an established character can be a kind of prison.

That process of character building and character reconstruction is a deep element in the way sociable beings work with and think about other members of their society. Character serves as a heuristic for our adventures with others, a provisional set of assumptions that can be modified, but which may be resistant to modification, about what someone else is likely to say or do. We are surprised, sometimes, when our imagined idea of another person’s character is overturned by the reality of their behaviour – and novels and dramas and even epics often magnify such moments: Agamemnon’s wife murders Agamemnon; Achilles sulks in his tent; Madame Merle turns out to be an adulteress. Nonetheless, I suspect most of us are not so frequently surprised by the actions of our peers that we would be willing to give up the notion of character altogether, and see ourselves and others instead as a constantly evolving project of randomly connected actions. The thread or the plot of a life that we weave in our minds about other people grows from constructions of what is and is not characteristic of those we meet or think we know.

That has risks attached. When we have few actions on which to form a predictive hypothesis about the behaviour of others, our projections of character can turn into or rely on prejudice. We judge the shabby unshaven man in the corner of the bus station as the kind of character likely to beg for money and stink of gin. We then overhear a conversation that reveals he has a PhD in engineering and is a refugee from his country of birth. Character beliefs build on vapour, congeal into something solid and can then dissolve once more.

Katie Ebner-Landy’s The Character Sketch as Philosophy is pitched between intellectual history and philosophy. It tells the story of the reception and dissemination of Theophrastus’ character sketches, but also does much more than that. Ebner-Landy argues that the character sketch occupies a valuable zone of philosophical argument between systematic ethics and fiction. This way of doing philosophy, she suggests, fell from favour with David Hume’s Inquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748), which sought to explicate the principles underlying human conduct rather than portray instances of virtue or vice in the form of characters. After Hume, the character sketch ‘was no longer considered de facto as a third way of writing moral philosophy or as a vehicle for knowledge’. Ebner-Landy also contends that philosophy is the poorer for having banished the character sketch, and that it should be revived.

The reception history of Theophrastus’ Characters (which might be a fragment of a larger ethical treatise, or lecture notes, or part of a treatise on comedy, or instructions on how to represent character types in speeches) is complex and extended, although the idiom of the character sketch is quite simple. It goes: ‘The Untimely Man is the kind of person who …’ then lists typifying behaviours, such as ‘he sings to his girlfriend when she has a fever.’ The Characters became popular in early 16th-century Europe for a number of reasons. One was philological. The text is a nightmare, so scholars could display their critical chops by collating manuscripts and making conjectural emendations, as Isaac Casaubon did in his great editions of 1592 and 1599. Casaubon was also one of the first to argue that the Characters was an ‘intermediate genre between the writings of philosophers and poets’ and offered ‘a description of the way men endowed with this or that virtue or vice tend “as such” to behave’. He believed that Theophrastus wrote a lost section that described virtuous characters, which would balance the vices and quirks described in the characters which survive. This inspired later writers of character sketches in the vernacular, such as Joseph Hall in 1608, to supply the characters of such paragons as the Good Magistrate, whose ‘breast is the ocean whereinto all the cares of private men empty themselves’, and whose temperate and impartial love of justice bears so little resemblance to Hall’s king, James I, that it is easy to imagine that Hall invented him as a gentle rebuke to his monarch.

The Characters also attracted early modern readers for deeper reasons. Theophrastus evokes transhistorical types, like the Chatterbox or the Over-Zealous Person, but at the same time he lists behaviours specific to the mores of his own time and place to illustrate the kinds of thing such persons do. So the Chiseller, or money-grubber, ‘is apt to ask for his own share of any coins that are found in the street by his slaves, citing the proverb “Hermes is impartial.”’ The Rumour Monger peddles fake news that ‘Polyperchon and the king were victorious in battle’ and similar titbits of Athenian gossip. So the character sketch combines a transhistorical type (a kind of person we have all met) with transient historical detail (the people we meet don’t babble about Hermes or Polyperchon, but we still recognise them as belonging to this type). This made the Characters perfectly attuned to a later humanistic taste which was radically conflicted in its view of antiquity. Ancient texts might be valued both as records of permanent moral truths and as evidence of the cultural and behavioural differences between antiquity and modernity. So Hall could update the Characters with a version of Theophrastus’ Rumour Monger (whom he calls the Busy Body), who claims to know ‘whether Holland will have peace’, rather than what Polyperchon had got up to. That combination of attitudes towards antiquity is evidently inconsistent, or at least characterised by a desire to have one’s cake and eat it; yet this inconsistency underpins most forms of humanistic activity even today. We read old stuff because it’s old and tells us about the pastness of the past. But we also read old stuff because it means something now.

Theophrastus’ Characters may also have served a more practical function in early modern England. As populations in urban centres increased (that of London more than doubled in the second half of the 16th century), the character sketch became a way of taxonomising and making sense of the confusing bustle of people who spilled out onto the streets, mingled at bookstalls or hung around the royal court. Character sketches are potentially a guidebook to a confusing world, and so were hungrily absorbed by other forms of urban writing such as epigram and satire – and it is not surprising that Hall boasted of being the first English satirist a decade before he became the first English writer of character sketches. Theophrastus influenced satirical dramas that represented people dominated by ‘humours’ or fixed dispositions. The characters of the Foppish Courtier, the Gull, the Angry Boy and the Malcontent, all of which strut through early modern English drama and satire, are the product both of observation and of seeing the world under the aspect of the character sketch. The key feature of such character types, though, is that they are not us. Witnessing such types in action, or reading about them, might have a morally beneficial effect, which was duly foregrounded in Casaubon’s edition: they embody behaviours to be avoided and so instruct by negative example.

This function of the character sketch plays a major part in Ebner-Landy’s defence of the form. She sees Theophrastus’ Characters as a work which does politics (and, she argues, a more democratic politics than many scholars have ascribed to Theophrastus) through descriptions of bad conduct. His characters are negative examples of virtue politics, in which some forms of behaviour are conducive to life in a society, while others, such as meanness or untimeliness or being oligarchic, are antipathetic to it. This strong thesis about the underlying political nature of the Characters enables her to explain why during the English Civil War and Commonwealth the character sketch became a form with which to encapsulate and attack the attitudes of an enemy group or nation. The ‘True Character’ of Bishops (hypocritical) or Brownists (likewise) or Malignants (the clue is in the name) were laid bare ‘for the purpose of showing people whom they need to fear, avoid and keep at bay’. Character sketches could also become caricatures (a word which did not enter the language until the mid-18th century). Andrew Marvell’s poem ‘The Character of Holland’ from the early 1650s, which presents the Low Countries as a patch of English land spewed up from the sea and then zealously preserved by a bunch of beer-swilling, butter-munching aliens, is an instance of the way that the national character sketch could become an anthem to xenophobia. Other later 17th-century character sketches, such as the Marquess of Halifax’s Character of a Trimmer (1688), trod a more moderate course, commending a political position that ‘trims’, or steers a path between different political extremes.

The historical narrative of The Character Sketch as Philosophy shifts to France for the latter part of the 17th century (so skips over both Halifax and Marvell) and shows the way La Bruyère’s Caractères (1688) used satirical character sketches to examine not just behaviours but motives, and thereby sought to ‘inspire a reader to search for a moral framework’ in which those motives might be reformed. That led to Hume’s Inquiry, which Ebner-Landy argues marked the critical shift from character-based ethics towards an attempt to find (as Hume put it) ‘those Principles, which regulate our Understandings’. Hume moved from ‘the easy and obvious’ manner of doing ethics through the character sketch to ‘Moral Philosophy or the Science of Human Nature’, which sought to anatomise moral behaviour and reveal its underlying skeleton. It may be that Shaftesbury’s Characteristicks of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times (1711) deserved at least a walk-on part in this wider story, because Shaftesbury’s title implies that his moral focus is not on ‘characters’ in the sense of individual types but on the common ‘characteristics’ of moral behaviour, and of what Shaftesbury terms the ‘moral sense’ that he believed is present to some degree in all people. Hume’s Inquiry may have been less of a break and more like the conclusion to a gradual transition in ethical thinking, in which specific characters were overwritten by attempts to map general characteristics of humanity. But Ebner-Landy is both provocative and suggestive in proposing that it was Hume rather than Kant who in effect separated philosophical ethics from literature by abandoning the middle ground that had been occupied by the character sketch. That left the creation of characters as a zone for writers of fiction, and reserved the dry ground of abstract principles as a realm over which the philosophers became king.

Big cultural​ changes are rarely monocausal. Readers, at least from the 1730s onwards, seem to have wanted a kind of character writing which allowed for hidden curlicues and surprises – in which, say, a highwayman, or a con-artist like Defoe’s Moll Flanders, or a bastard like Fielding’s Tom Jones, displayed energy or charm or ingenuity or generosity which offset their public character. That dynamic representation of character as allowing for surprises and hidden private zones remained a vital feature of the novel. So Dickens’s Wemmick in Great Expectations is typified as a diligent clerk ‘with a square wooden face, whose expression seemed to have been imperfectly chipped out with a dull-edged chisel’ when he’s in the office, but at his castle-like home he softens into a cucumber-growing collector of legal curios. That form of representation, which offers both a typifying view of character and allows for a surprising hinterland of apparently uncharacteristic behaviour, is well suited to large urban societies. Dickens’s secluded squares and back alleys are the physical counterparts of the hidden aspects of his characters, who might have a concealed benevolent nature or a nasty secret tucked away behind an apparently characteristic façade. In a commercialised urban society you might need initially to make sense of those you bump into on the street or meet in a coaching inn by categorising them as a character type. Then you might do business with them or become friends with them and discover that they are more than, or different from, the character which you had initially supposed them to have. That element of surprise is crucial to complex realist literary fictions, and is why literary fictions are both ethically and intellectually more complex – and more valuable because more complex – than the character sketch. They allow that the ugly duckling might turn out to be a swan, or vice versa. Hume may have killed off the character sketch at the theoretical level, but the development of these complex fictions, along with the social and economic changes that fostered them, left the character sketch looking like a poor relation of the novel, from which it could learn, and which it could absorb and transcend – as it did with travel narratives and saints’ lives and romances and works of urban ethnography and many other kinds of writing.

Ebner-Landy, however, does not believe that the character sketch has had its day. She argues in a stirring epilogue that it should be revived as a mode of ethical thought. She supports that case with a rich body of examples, from Sartre’s character sketch of the Antisemite to the short stories of Lydia Davis and the novels of Tolstoy. She argues that the character sketch – such as the Mansplainer, the Antisemite or the Authoritarian – remains capable of doing political good. It can draw attention to hidden asymmetries of power and isolate modes of behaviour that otherwise might pass as unidentified and unobjectionable cultural norms. The contemporary character sketch could pinpoint behaviours that threaten social equipoise or social justice, just as Theophrastus’ sketch of the Oligarch did in the Athens of the fourth century BCE.

This call to revive the character sketch makes Ebner-Landy’s book more than an excellent piece of intellectual history. But it may underestimate the limitations and hazards of this form of writing. A character sketch of the Mansplainer, for instance, might say: ‘The Mansplainer is the kind of man who sits with his legs apart while he explains to the woman next to him why women’s football could never be any good.’ Such a sketch gives us a way of noticing and categorising a pervasive form of sexist boorishness, and could help to change the balance of what the philosopher Miranda Fricker has termed ‘social power’ by drawing attention to and thereby diminishing male linguistic dominance: ‘Like a spell, we call people mansplainers in the hope that mansplainers will not exist at all.’ That is undoubtedly a good aim. But a character sketch of the Mansplainer could not include (and this is an intrinsic limitation of the genre) any random additional element of a person’s character which did not fit the general descriptor of the Mansplainer. So a character sketch might say: ‘The Mansplainer recites a Ladybird Book version of the history of Israel to a Jewish woman who has lived in Israel for twenty years,’ but it would be contrary to the conventions of the genre to go on ‘and he works each Saturday in a soup kitchen for the homeless, is neurodivergent and is a connoisseur of oolong teas.’ In character sketches all the listed behaviours have to exemplify a single uniting characteristic, because the character sketch is at root a tool of moral simplification.

Character-sketching and caricaturing are close kin. Both are potentially tools of political and social othering. It is not a historical accident that the character sketch flourished during the English Civil War. It can help us to identify bad types of behaviour, but it can also flatten and polarise perceptions of other people. That makes it at best a mixed political blessing. Ebner-Landy argues that a character sketch of the Authoritarian would encourage us to think of authoritarianism not simply as a particular way of talking, or as a descriptor of those who hold a particular set of opinions, but as a deep-seated personality type which might derive from a wide range of ‘psychological and social issues’. She goes on: ‘If authoritarianism is not restricted to throwaway comments but is thought part of a total personality we may be less willing to have these character types in our circles.’ I am confident that this is saying more than ‘Good Democrats should not talk to Trumpian authoritarian bigots,’ since such a manifestly learned and thoughtful writer as Ebner-Landy would not wish to deepen the already cavernous political and social divisions in Western democracies.

But in saying that we should not tolerate the authoritarian ‘in our circles’ she is, I think, not just suggesting that character sketches of the Authoritarian will stop people being authoritarians, but that they will enable right-thinking people to assume that those who say things characteristic of authoritarianism are at a foundational level of their being alien. I would be the first to acknowledge that I unite the character of the Grouchy Man with that of the Wet Liberal Ironist, and perhaps it is just the latter aspect of my character that makes me squeamish about this element in Ebner-Landy’s argument. But it seems to me that her attempt to revive the art of the character sketch risks reviving another Athenian practice (which, incidentally, had been discontinued around a century before Theophrastus’ Characters): that of ostracism. I imagine that is not her intention. However, I am not convinced that what the present world – with its interlocked hatreds, its political polarisations, its relentless mutual simplifications, its multiple racisms, its memeifications and its antisocial mediafications of truth – really needs is the character sketch. Maybe what it could do with more of is a view of character which allows that even people with whom we disagree might be complex and contradictory, and that there might be more to them than the façade we see. Such a view of character might go along with a kind of moral wariness, or a willingness to recognise that the people we disagree with might at least to some degree be projections of our own fears and prejudices.