n Victorian culture the physical body was regarded as a text, a sign-system that could be ‘read’ as a representation of a person’s character, emotions, moral nature, race or ethnicity, social status, values and belief-systems. The face was the primary site of this construction and viewed, within the terms of the pseudo-science of physiognomy, as a legible screen in which the various features could be interpreted. Physiognomy was mainly concerned with the face in repose, and pathognomy, the study of passing emotions as registered in facial expressions, added another dimension to the concept of the human ‘phiz’ as a sure indicator of thought and personality. It was not only the face, however, that was believed to be a site of representation. Hands, likewise, were considered to be important indicators of interior qualities, with the hand in stasis and in movement being taken as other versions, we might say, of writing in skin, bone and muscle.
The human body was codified in this way, and although the notion of a legible face or hand is scientifically unsound and largely arbitrary – why, for example, would brown eyes be a sign of strength? – the claims of physiognomy and its related subsets were hugely influential and adopted, as a cultural norm, throughout Victorian art and literature. Dickens, notably, was heavily influenced by these theories, and it is a commonplace to note how he inscribes his characters’ personalities in their outward appearance. His writing of the face, facial expressions, body types and gestures has long been explored in detail, and some scholars, working in parallel, have examined his writing of the significant hand.
Illustrator Charles Green shows Miss Havisham pointing at her decayed wedding cake with her stick, revealing her withered hand. [Click on all the images for more information.]
This motif, Peter Capuano observes, is practically unmissable, there being a huge ‘number of hand-related references’ (187) in his fiction. One text, Great Expectations (1860), has been the subject of special attention. In this novel, Charles Forker claims, the ‘language of hands’ is ‘an indispensable shorthand for individualizing character’ (260) and state of mind; speaking of Havisham’s digits, for instance, he notes how her ‘withered hands’ are revealing of ‘her unhappiness’ and seem to encapsulate her sadness (280). Criticism by Forker, Forsyth and Capuana extend this focus to the other characters in the novel. But all of Dickens’s texts could be examined in the same terms. One fiction in which hand imagery is pronounced, but has never been the subject of such scrutiny, is A Christmas Carol (1843). Dickens’s treatment of hands in his yuletide allegory is highly significant.
Hands, Character, and Emotions
A Christmas Carol contains some dozens of references to hands, fingers, palms and movements involving the hand. Dickens’s focus, in line with his treatment of the motif in his other works, is two-fold, using his image to represent character and emotion. In each case, the author draws heavily on contemporary writing about the meanings of human digits, and his representations in A Christmas Carol can be decoded by using an intertextual methodology.
A person’s ‘kind of temperament,’ Richard Beamish observes in The Psychonomy of the Hand (1865), can be detected by studying ‘certain general signs’ (57) in the configuration of the hand, and this is true of several of Dickens’s characters. Tiny Tim, his personality diminished by poverty and illness, has a ‘withered little hand’ (Dickens 95); Ignorance and Want are similarly characterized in hand-imagery, having been touched not by youthfulness but by the ‘stale and shrivelled hand’ of old age (118), which has robbed them of vigour and hope. Of central significance, however, is Scrooge’s set of fingers. Dickens famously describes him as ‘a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone … a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous old sinner’ (3), and this catalogue amply defines his personality.
Harry Furniss shows Scrooge clenching his fist as the philanthropists appeal to him.
The closedness of Scrooge’s metaphorical hand resonates across several meanings. First of all, his fist acts to suggest his secretive nature as a miser who is self-absorbed and only concerned with selfish desires (Beamish 22); in effect, his hand is another version of Dickens’s image of the miser as an oyster, closed inside his shell (Dickens 3). Scrooge’s fist also connotes his ‘anger,’ ‘vexation,’ ‘doubt’ and ‘suspicion’ (Beamish 21–22), as well as his duplicity and (self-) deception, and Dickens especially works on the contrast between the secrecy of the ‘clenched fist’ and the open hand, which according to Beamish expresses ‘joy, confidence, and abandon’ (21–22). Scrooge has none of these emotions, at least not at the beginning of the novelette, and it is noticeable that he initially hides his palms by putting his hands in his pockets (Dickens 31, 52). Dickens uses the hand, in other words, to focus on a nexus of closed hands/closed natures and open hands/open nature. Scrooge is a closed nature with closed hands, but the Ghost of Christmas Present has an ‘open’ (78, 134) and ‘capacious palm,’ the sign of being ‘generous’ (101).
Scrooge’s tight fist further embodies his greedy and money-loving character as he metaphorically grinds out his wealth by holding others to the grindstone of exploitation. According to C. S. D’Arpentigny, one of the main theorists of the significant hand, ‘the habit of keeping the thumb’ closed inside the hand as it forms into a fist is a sure sign of ‘a sordid and avaricious’ (174) nature, the gesture of a person who holds everything only for himself.
That greed is more generally revealed, of course, in the movement of the fingers: ‘squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping …’ (Dickens 3). Scrooge’s name is a fusion of screw and gouge, and the action of his metaphorical hand is another version of his scraping moniker. The violence of his gouging and squeezing is in sharp contrast to the touch of the Ghost of Christmas Past, which is ‘gentle as a woman’s (46), and the movement of Scrooge’s hands, in the form of diverse gestures, is equally significant as a representation of his transformation from avarice to generosity, from joylessness to happiness.
He starts off, as already noted, as a man of closed and static gestures; his hands barely move as he encloses himself in frigid selfishness and reveal nothing of his deeper feelings beyond his cold contempt for the world at large. As he begins to change, however, his hands reveal his emotions in a series of choregraphed, codified movements. As he deals with the revelations of the visions, his gestures are melodramatic expressions of anguish, regret and sometimes delight: he clasps them together when he revisits his childhood (47), and shows his inner turmoil, once released from his psychological burden, in the form of hands that tremble and shake excitedly (158).
Indeed, Scrooge’s transformation is more generally revealed in his progress from closed and inanimate hands to open hands in motion, which represent his renewed engagement with society and his willingness to express generous emotions and to be generous with his money. Dickens focuses on two main signs: hands that rub together vigorously; and hands that shake other hands. Fezziwig rubs his hand in celebration at the Christmas Eve dance (57) and Dickens emphasises Scrooge’s ‘rubbing his hand and splitting with a laugh’ (156) when he sends the boy off to fetch the turkey at the end of the text. It is also noticeable that once he is spiritually reborn he is willing to shake hands with a charity man and promise a donation (156) – a gesture he coldly declines when the request for assistance is made at the beginning of the text.
Harold Copping's illustration of the reformed Scrooge patting a little girl on the head.
We can see, in short, how the opening of Scrooge’s hands is a symbol of his reform. The oyster opens, we might say, just as his unclasping hands signify a greater psychological and emotional honesty. He would not have changed, however, were it not for the final, terrifying vision of the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, which accuses him of wrongdoing with a pointing finger (138, 150), and points to his (Scrooge’s) untended grave (150). It is almost as if that digit acted to prise open Scrooge’s closed hands, enabling him, finally, to achieve an emotional equilibrium and learn the lessons of generosity and giving.
Dickens’s writing of the hand might be read, finally, as an important element in his patterns of significant imagery. He figures the hand as a resonant motif and uses it to underscore Scrooge’s psychological development. The author’s treatment in A Christmas Carol is also explicable in terms of his wider concern with ‘significant hands’ (Capuano 216) – a catalogue of digits that includes Gradgrind’s pointing finger in Hard Times (1854), Fagin’s dirty fingernails in Oliver Twist (1838), Uriah Heep’s slimy handshake in David Copperfield (1850) and Captain Cuttle’s hook in Dombey and Son (1848). Like Scrooge, all of these characters can be read by looking at their hands (or their surrogates) as part of the author’s fascination with the legible body.
Link to Related Material
- Review of Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, ed. Peter J. Capuano & Sue Zemka
- Three Studies of Hands by Sir Edward John Poynter (1836-1919)
Bibliography
Primary
Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Chapman & Hall, 1843.
Secondary
Capuano, Peter. ‘Handling the Perceptual Politics of Identity in Great Expectations.’ Dickens Quarterly 27, no. 3 (September 2010): 185–208.
D’Arpentigny, C. S. The Science of the Hand. Translated by E. D. Heron – Allen. London: Ward & Lock, 1886.
Forker, Charles R. ‘The Lay of Hands in Great Expectations.’ Texas Studies in Language and Literature 3 (1961): 280–293.
Forsyth, N. ‘Hands in Dickens.’ Dickens Quarterly . 32, no. 3 (September 20215): 211–220.
Created 15 July 2023