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  • Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body by Peter J. Capuano
  • Kathy Rees
Peter J. Capuano. Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body. U of Michigan Press, 2015. Pp. xv + 323. $80.00.

Think about the idea of “hands” in Dickens’s novels, and you will find examples everywhere. From Mrs. Joe’s famously vicious raising of Pip “by hand,” to Quilp’s servant who walks on his hands, or from the metonymic mass of distant “Hands” in Coketown, to the close-up of Scrooge’s tight-fisted hand, Dickens’s work is saturated with references to this (literally) pivotal body part. In Changing Hands, Peter Capuano revels in the diversity of Dickensian hands, as he ranges across “Fagin’s dirty fingernails, Miss Pecksniff’s lily hand, Stephen Blackpool’s steady grasp, and Uriah Heep’s sweaty palms,” not to mention Thomas Gradgrind’s “squarely pointing square forefinger” (127). But this is not a book of sweeping gestures (one becomes very aware of one’s own propensity for hand-related puns), but a very lucid and perceptive reading of Victorian “handedness” in the nineteenth century novel.

Capuano might have been tempted to devote the entire book to Dickensian hands, but wisely he concentrates on Great Expectations and Bleak House, historicizing these works alongside six other canonical texts, in relation to contemporary discourses on science, race, religion, industry and gender. Capuano engages with the novelistic treatment of the “embodied” or literal hand at a time when this body part was being supplanted by the machine. Changing Hands comprises four parts, each of which explores a specific aspect of “hand-reading.” In Part One, Capuano shows how in Frankenstein, the creature’s hands are figured as “man-made instruments gone murderously wrong” (5), embodying the injurious factory machinery that maimed so many workers’ hands. Part Two addresses the function of hands to reveal gender issues. In Shirley, for example, Brontë contrasts the deficit of [End Page 67] male weaving work, among the suffering Luddites, with the surfeit of female needlework imposed upon frustrated middle-class women. In his analysis of Vanity Fair, Capuano reads Becky Sharp’s manual activity in the drawing room in relation to contemporary etiquette manuals to expose the subversive nature of her gestural vocabulary. In Part Three, Capuano explores hands in Great Expectations and Daniel Deronda to consider Victorian anxieties not simply about race and ethnicity, but the fragile barrier between the human and the animal. Part Four poses the question why, at the very moment when industrialization was threatening the future of penmanship, the plots of Dickens’s Bleak House, Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret, and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde all explicitly hinge on the physicality of handwriting. Despite the extensive critical corpus that attends each one of these novels, Capuano’s concentration on hands generates a new story.

With its 450-plus allusions to hands, Great Expectations (1860–1) is a rich source for Capuano. He situates this text in the “evolutionary moment,” marking its emergence from the decade of the 1850s which began with the English “discovery” of the gorilla and ended with Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859), a period when Victorians struggled with notions of ancestry. He captures the morbid fascination with the similarities between the skeleton of the human and the gorilla. The idea of the gorilla as the “missing link” was reinforced by the structure of its hand which, like that of its human counterpart, comprised twenty-seven bones. Dickens probes these ideas by treating hands as indicators of a character’s class, race, or even species.

Capuano’s insights into identity, as emanating from the hand, are compelling. By reference to contemporary works such as Beamish’s Psychonomy of the Hand (1843), he shows how the popular stereotype of Irish people as racially “Other” manifests itself in the figure of Jaggers’s servant, Molly, whose murderous hands mark her out not only as criminal but even bestial. Equally interesting is the case of Jaggers, whose abnormally large hands with the “great forefinger” suggest a connection to manual labor and to working-class origins, which he must...

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