Our Vision

Our project is the first historical study of the Victorian hand. Hands were one of the most important bodily signifiers of identity in the nineteenth century, and Victorians were obsessed with them, thinking and writing about them, painting, drawing, and photographing them, and casting, modelling, and displaying them. Their gestures and movements were understood to indicate or betray intimate thoughts and feelings. Their tactility connected the individual to their social and material worlds. Victorians imbued hands with multiple meanings as agents of expression and as forms of representation. Importantly for us today, the Victorian era laid the groundwork for our ideas about embodiment and its links to race, gender, class, and social and cultural value.

We will combine our historical findings with creative practice to explore the meaning of the hand today. In our digital age there is a renewed sensitivity to the role of embodied practice in fostering personal and professional wellbeing, which mirrors Victorian debates around mechanisation and craft in the industrial revolution. Hands are also critical to young people’s communication, identity, and social self-realisation in both real and virtual worlds. Generations Z and Alpha are exposed to bodies that are physically and digitally manipulated and augmented, including through AI. At the same time, the hand can function as an emotional shorthand, in the case of emojis, and as a form of ‘honest’ communication’. The hand can also trouble the relationship between external and interior gender identities through size and form.

In sum, we will use history to demonstrate to a broad audience the historical construction and ideological power of the emotionalised body, enabling participants to reflect on and challenge the ideas that shape their bodily experiences and sense of self, providing personal and professional insights and lifelong learning, and improving wellbeing and mental health.

  • considers how the hand functioned as a powerful marker of identity and difference, including race, gender, sexuality, and class, shaping and naturalising hierarchies of power, inequality, and oppression.

  • asks how the multiple meanings of hands constructed, complicated, and contested ideas of work in a changing society and economy.

  • uses the hand to expose the links between embodiment, emotional intimacy, and memory, and their changes, contradictions, and tensions across the life course.

  • explores the ways in which the hand served to care for, and repair, both social and physical bodies.

  • investigates how the hand promised self-knowledge while also challenging ideas of trust and queering the boundaries between scientific and spiritualist understandings of mind, body, and will.

Activities

Our project team will work our partners, collaborators, and the public in several ways. The two partners of the Victorian Hand are the Royal College of Surgeons of England and Quilters’ Guild. With their support, we will host ‘The Work of Mending’ workshops with hand sewers, and surgeons, where we will draw links between past and present understandings of manipular skill, adopting a historical-experiential approach that will enrich our analysis of hands and their meaning in the Victorian era and today. These workshops will be activity based, allowing participants to encounter and engage with related but unfamiliar haptic skills They will also provoke encounters with material culture such as quilts, surgical tools, and artificial skin. Each workshop addresses a theme: virtuosity; mending; the mind-body interface; pride in skill; visible and invisible touch; and ageing and skill. Participants will reflect on the personal and social value of hands, the emotions they elicit, and identities they construct.

We will also have a series of   ‘Hand on Heart’ workshops, working with students at the University of the Arts, London, and Lancaster University. In them, we will explore the emotions conveyed and disguised by the hand, and consider the challenges involved in reading meaning, authenticity, and identity from the body. No group is more busy or expressive with their hands than Generation Z; from emojis to the gestures of K-pop fan culture, hands increasingly convey feeling. Moreover, hands play an important role in gender dysphoria and trans identity. Drawing on the Victorian hand as a signifier of self and ‘other’, these workshops will use creative practice to engage young people in affirming activities that celebrate diversity and inclusivity.

Ruth Singer, an artist, and Lily ford, a filmmaker, will work with our project to create textile art and a series of films. They will translate our cutting-edge scholarship into relatable and engaging forms that have significant public appeal. Their work will be exhibited in two exhibitions scheduled for 2027 and will be shown at public events.