Contents
List of Illustrations
Introduction: The Half-Lives of Hands
Part I: Maneuvering Through Natural Theology and Industry
Chapter 1. Shifting from Gaze to Grasp: “Odious Handywork” in Frankenstein
Chapter 2. The Anatomy of Anglican Industry: Mechanical Philosophy and Early Factory Fiction
Part II: Manufacturing and Manipulating the Separate Spheres of Gender
Chapter 3. Luddism, Needlework, and the Seams of Domesticity in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley
Chapter 4. Etiquette and Upper-Handedness in William Thackeray’s Vanity Fair
Part III: Handling the Perceptual Politics of Identity after Darwin
Chapter 5. The Evolutionary Moment in Dickens’s Great Expectations
Chapter 6. Racial Science and the Kabbalah in Eliot’s Daniel Deronda
Part IV: Plotting the Novelty of Manual Narratives
Chapter 7. Handwriting and the Hermeneutics of Detectionin Dickens’s Bleak House
Chapter 8. Narrative Red-Handedness in Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret and Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
Conclusion: The Victorians, the Twentieth Century, and Our Digital Present
Notes
Bibliography
Index