Explore the symbol of hands in one or more of Charles Dickens's novels

Hands are symbolically loaded. Charles R. Forker asserts that Dickens ‘knew instinctively that next to voice and face an actor’s hands are his most useful possession - that in fiction as in the theatre, gesture is an indispensable shorthand for individualizing a character and dramatizing action and response’.[1] Indeed, sifting through the history of sign language in his work Show of Hands, David F. Armstrong emphasises the remarkable ability of the hand to indicate the internal psyche. He states, ‘the hand is capable of degrees of contrast with respect to symbolic distinctions that gestural behaviour involving other parts of the body, for example through changes in facial expressions, is not’.[2] Hands are therefore not just functional physical tools, but are imbued with their own nuanced language. Through gesticulation, hands reinforce the spoken word, corroborating noun with knuckle. In social situations they perform as a means of greeting and of establishing intimacy; hands joined in prayer figuratively open up a portal to God. Even mundanely, a bitten finger or a clenched fist can indicate a profusion of unspoken feelings. That many of Dickens’s novels are crammed with hands is testament to the physical and symbolic importance of the motif. This essay will consider the language of hands in the novels Hard Times (1854), Bleak House (1853) and Great Expectations (1861), three texts across which hands appear burnt, bitten, and cruel, imbued with the toil of the characters who grope their way through gloomy Dickensian worlds.         In his work The Hand (1834), Charles Bell explores the physical power of the hand, noting that ‘the whole frame must conform to the hand, and act with reference to it’.[3] This notion is illustrated in Hard Times, as the workers of Coketown who toil daily in the ‘lurid’ factories are identified by their utilitarian function as labourers: ‘Hands’ (71).[4] Indeed, Dickens demonstrates that they are their own ‘race’ (66), ‘who would have found more favour with some people if Providence had seen fit to make them only hands, or, like the lower creatures of the sea shore, only hands and stomachs’ (66). The workers are represented or even symbolically displaced by the ‘Hand’, a label which establishes their squalid status. It is subtly ironic that the name which identifies the nature of the Hands’ labour simultaneously reduces them to anonymity. The Coketown workers therefore ‘conform to the hand’ as they are defined collectively by the physical tool with which they labour; as John Harrison observes, ‘the Coketown ‘Hands’ are […] ‘something’ to be worked so much and paid so much, to be ‘infallibly settled’ by ‘laws of supply and demand’’.[5] Yet in this sense, the noun ‘Hands’ does not just indicate the hand as a physical tool or as a disparaging label, but as a means of measuring productive effort: ‘so many hundred Hands in this Mill; so many hundred horse Steam Power’ (71). There is thus a ‘doubleness’ to the way in which the hand operates as a symbol: the workers are represented with the noun ‘Hands’, and this ‘symbol’ is then used to measure the production of ‘so many hundred horse Steam Power’. The hand becomes a dual site of signification: a sign of inferiority and a measurement of capacity. In this sense, Dickens demonstrates the way in which the hand also becomes an ‘unstable’ site of signification as it can operate both practically and imaginatively. [1] Charles R. Forker, ‘The Language of Hands in Great Expectations’, Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 3 (1961), 280-293 (p. 280). [2] David F. Armstrong, Show of Hands (Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2011), p. 2. [3] Charles Bell, The Hand (London: W. Pickering, 1834), p. 20. [4] Charles Dickens, Hard Times, ed. by Kate Flint (London: Penguin, 2003), p. 95. Further references are to this edition. [5] John Harrison, ‘Dickens’s Literary Architecture’, Papers on Language and Literature, 36 (2000), 115-138 (p. 124).