Manual, the first film by our project filmmaker, Lily Ford, is now available to watch. Blending Victorian self-help culture with contemporary digital media, the film explores ideas of labour, self-improvement, class, gender and creativity through the enduring symbolism of the hand. Hear from Lily below about the inspiration behind the film and follow the link below to watch the full film.

Lily Ford on Manual:

Manual serves as a prospectus for The Victorian Hand project. It is a caper through themes of self-improvement, accomplishment and work. Manual relates to the hand, but also to the popular directive books that circulated in the nineteenth-century Anglophone world, providing instruction on everything from writing to behaviour. It seems to me that this is not so different from the ‘how-to’ mode of contemporary short-form video content. Both genres promote social capital in forms designed to be read or viewed in private, protected from public opprobrium.

Victorian self-help books and novels are quoted where they use hands to think though the challenges of living in a class-bound and gendered society: achieving literacy, improving practical thinking for young men, sublimating unacceptable energy in young women, or being active in the world, as Dorothea longs for in Eliot’s Middlemarch. I also wanted to introduce the wealth of imagery being collected by the project team, and reflect on its later resonances, from the physical traces of vocation and labour on hands, to the hand’s use in social profiling.

I enacted this clash of media regimes around an artefact from my own family, mindful of co-project lead Joanne Begiato’s favourite poem, Thomas Hardy’s ‘Old Furniture’. This mobile writing desk belonged to my great aunt, a late Victorian. Its leather writing surface bears the traces of her prolific correspondence habit, and in opening it out and exploring its recesses, I sense the ‘hands behind hands’ conjured by Hardy, deriving melancholy joy from his ancestors’ use of the old but everyday objects in his home. Here I reuse the desk, alongside my digital tools, and reproduction Victorian ‘scraps’ I was given as a little girl, to produce new connections and provocations.

- Lily Ford, director