Hands in Dickens: Neuroscience and Interpretation

In an essay for The Guardian of March 1, 2003, entitled “Hands that mould the imagination,” the well-known novelist Sarah Waters, author of Tipping the Velvet and Fingersmith, describes in some detail how her memory of Molly’s hands in Great Expectations had stayed with her and gradually came back to consciousness as she wrote one of her own novels, Affinity. The piece is reprinted on the Penguin website.¹ It begins as follows:

A curious thing happened to me while I was writing my second novel, Affinity. The novel is set in the 1860s, partly in a women’s prison, partly in an upper-middle-class home. It’s a rather gothic novel, full of twists and reversals, and for the purposes of theme and plot there’s a foregrounding at certain moments of hands – the drawing of attention, for example, to the strong, possibly sinister, hands of at least two female characters. As I was putting the book together, I was dimly aware that the hands I was describing were recalling some other hands to me; and at last I realised whose those were. They were the scarred and powerful hands of Jaggers’s housekeeper, Molly, in Great Expectations – that ‘wild beast tamed,’ as Wemmick dubs her. His phrase is telling: Molly’s hands are over-determined in Dickens’s text because of the secret to which they gesture – the final secret of the book, the secret of Estella’s criminal origins – but I’d always been impressed and unsettled by what seemed to me to be the novel’s frankly fetishistic treatment of them, the oddly magnified space they occupy within its narrative economy. Now, writing Affinity, striving after a fetishized and magnified literary effect of my own, I realised that they had lodged themselves in my imagination, much as a splinter would; and, like a splinter, they had worked their way to the surface of my mind as part of a creative process over which, it seemed to me, I had disquietingly little control.

That splinter in Waters’s imagination is a fine metaphor for the creative mind at work. More than that, it is characteristic of the way some of us, perhaps all, respond to the details of what we read. Memory, not always conscious, overlaps with imagination as we put ourselves into the situations described or evoked. We may not be going on to write a new story for ourselves, but discoveries in neuroscience during the past fifteen years, especially the controversy over mirror neurons, have shown that, if we respond at all to what we read, we are, however minutely, imitating what is happening in the text. This has come to be called “simulation.” ² Those hands in Dickens are indeed rather special but one way to understand what is so impressive about them, and why Waters remembered them, is to see how skillfully Dickens activates for us their sheer physicality. “Fetishized and magnified” they may be, but Molly’s hands form part of a larger pattern within the novel, and their importance also evokes other and similarly important hands elsewhere in Dickens’s fiction.

The incident to which Waters is referring occurs in chapter 26. Jaggers is “leaning back in his chair biting the side of his forefinger” when he offers the young men assembled at his table a demonstration of his power over the housekeeper. “Suddenly, he clapped his large hand on the housekeeper’s, like a trap, as she stretched it across the table. So suddenly and smartly did he do this, that we all stopped in our foolish contention.” Overcoming her reluctance, he insists that she show her hands:

“Molly,” said Mr. Jaggers, not looking at her, but obstinately looking at the opposite side of the room, “let them see both your wrists. Show them. Come!”

He took his hand from hers, and turned that wrist up on the table. She brought her other hand from behind her, and held the two out side by side. The last wrist was much disfigured – deeply seamed and scarred across and across. […]

“There’s power here,” said Mr. Jaggers...