The Victorian Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, and Identity, Past and Present

In an age of social media and self-curation, bodies are critical to how we construct and present our identities. The roots of this lie in the nineteenth century, when the body became a powerful mechanism for reading inner qualities from external appearances. Our project interrogates and challenges this inheritance by studying the Victorian hand.

Since prehistory, humans have used the hand to navigate and symbolise themselves and their place in the world through art and craft, touch and manipulation. However, it was in the Victorian era when the hand came to function as a way of negotiating the complexities of a globalised, urbanised, technologised modernity. Hands proliferated in textual, visual, material, and symbolic form as markers of character, class, race, gender, and sexuality.

Artists cast hands of the 'great and good' to capture their noble character, while eugenicists classified criminal and racial 'types' through fingerprints and measurements. From surgeons to factory 'hands', they embodied the morality of work, while charities offered a 'helping hand' to the needy. Our project uses history to stimulate dialogue about the place of emotional embodiment in our personal and social lives, revealing the hand's vital role as both a tool of objectification and an agent of self-empowerment.

Our historical research aims to uncover how hands: shaped racial, gender, sexual, and class identities in an increasingly complex and globalised world; performed and symbolised labour and skill in an age of mechanisation; expressed emotion through touch, symbolising love and loss, sex and death; manifested care and compassion, professionally and philanthropically;

complicated authenticity and deceit in a newly fluid and pluralistic society.

Sharing our findings through ten workshops and a programme of co-produced creative practice, our objectives are to establish how: Victorian hands and haptic practice inform current understandings of embodied selfhood; acts of making and repairing shape personal and professional identities in the digital age;

hands express creative impulses and promote wellbeing; people relate to their hands as they age; hands offer insights into the ways in which bodies can both communicate truth and deceive us.

Our innovative methodology will provide new insights into the lived experience and dense symbolic meaning of the Victorian hand and its legacies. We will use our historical research to understand society's contemporary fascination with constructing identity and achieving fulfillment through the body, working with non-academic stakeholders to inform critical thinking about the present.

We will disrupt stereotypes and gender biases around hands and craft, emotions and bodies, through reflection on 'different' hands (young and old, abled and disabled, and varied genders and ethnicities). We therefore address UKRI Strategic Objective Priority 5.1 to secure better health, ageing and wellbeing and three of the UN's Sustainable Development Goals: Good Health and Wellbeing; Achieve Gender Equality; and Reduced Inequalities.

Our project will advance academic scholarship, promote wellbeing, and generate creative interventions that communicate the relevance of the arts and humanities, exciting popular interest among those intrigued by the Victorians and the role of the body in making us who we are.