“3. “Brought Up by Hand”” in “Dickens’s Idiomatic Imagination”
CHAPTER 3 “Brought Up by Hand”
The Manual Outlay of Great Expectations
It is not easy to be done with a civilization of the hand.
—Roland Barthes, “The Plates of the Encyclopedia” (1982)
Forcing Dickens’s Idiomatic Hand
There is a good reason why John Butt and Kathleen Tillotson (1957) did not include a chapter on Great Expectations (1860–61) within their pioneering study of Dickens’s compositional practices in Dickens at Work.1 Simply put, there has never been much to analyze in the way of planning documents for this novel. Dickens, uncharacteristically for this late period in his career, maintained no working notes, no number plans, no “memoranda.”2 As Edgar Rosenberg (1999, 477) has framed it, “compared with the ample documentation we have for Dickens’s other works, the pickings are slim.” The only notes Dickens made while composing Great Expectations consist of but three individual sheets, and even these pertain solely to the novel’s final episodes.3 It has never been quite clear why Dickens forwent the planning stages of Great Expectations when such documented planning had been his practice since Dombey and Son. Of course, it is well known that the slumping sales of All the Year Round (due to Charles Lever’s poorly performing novel A Day’s Ride) prompted Dickens “to strike in”4 personally—altering the time frame for his “new book” from an originally intended monthly format to a weekly serialization in his own journal. What is not well known and what has not been posited until now is that Dickens had learned from his experiences with Dombey and Bleak House that he could organize a novel around a governing idiom relatively quickly—especially if he started with the idiom itself.
This may partially explain Dickens’s confidence that he could “strike in” with a novel of his own for his magazine with very little time for preparation. Once the decision was made to intervene, he moved quickly. He had to. There were less than eight weeks from the time of his decision to the projected debut of the novel in the December 1, 1860 installment of All the Year Round. Sometime in mid-September, he wrote to John Forster that “a very fine, new, and grotesque idea has opened upon me.… It so opens out before me that I can see the whole of a serial revolving on it, in a most singular and comic manner.”5 By October 4, he assured Forster that he would be finished with “the first two or three weekly parts to-morrow” and that “the name is GREAT EXPECTATIONS.” Dickens’s swift and resolute determination of the title is another factor that reflects the unusual rapidity and confidence with which his new story materialized. This was not at all typical for an author who had found it difficult to begin many of his most famous works and, once he did, often vacillated for months between as many as twelve titles for those same novels.6 Then, a mere twenty days after the original letter to Forster, on October 24, Dickens reported to Wilkie Collins that “four weekly numbers have been ground off the wheel, and that at least another must be turned before [they] meet” on November 1. By the end of October, Dickens had exceeded his goal: he had finished the first eight chapters of Great Expectations—up to Pip’s first visit to Satis House where he meets Miss Havisham and Estella.
Such unparalleled production in so short a time has subsequently inclined critics to view the novel’s genesis in terms of economic exigency.7 J. Hillis Miller (1958, 250), for example, initiated this line of inquiry when he wrote that “never, perhaps, was the form of a great novel conceived as the response to so practical a concern.” Rosenberg (1972, 308) observed “from a strictly commercial point of view … necessity, it would appear, was never more pressingly the mother of invention than in producing Pip and Magwitch and Joe: their incubation period seems to have been uniquely brief.” Robert Patten (1978, 287) has more recently asserted that “both the timing and the form of the story were … determined by economic considerations.” I wholeheartedly agree with these long-standing and generally uncontested assessments, but I will argue that a crucial and, indeed, a guiding idiomatic dimension to Great Expectations also emerges out of Dickens’s formal and economic requirements to move the novel so quickly from its imaginative beginnings to its weekly publication. My aim is to follow the arc of this early imaginative activity, starting with its germinating idiom, which I maintain not only establishes the parameters of the novel’s narrative and thematic development but also reflects its very specific sociohistoric moment.8
Great Expectations is as complex as any of Dickens’s best fiction, but its complexity is heightened by a retrospective first-person narrative viewpoint that necessarily constrains the manner in which he could present an “end-directed” fictional piece via weekly installments. After all, Pip (and presumably Dickens) knows from the opening pages how things will generally turn out in the end for the major characters. Dickens had already told John Forster before he started writing that he had alighted on the central “pivot on which the story will turn” (House et al. 1965–2002, x, 325). Daniel Tyler (2011) maintains that “one of the novel’s great accomplishments” is Dickens’s “ability to wrest a sense of devastating unknowability of the future from a narrative that he knew, in its larger and smaller structures, its story and its sentences.” A principal reason Dickens was able to accomplish this so successfully in Great Expectations, and to accomplish it in an expedited compositional time frame with almost no planning, is because he organizes the novel—especially in its early stages—around a probing exploration of the relationship between nature and nurture which reaches its crystallization in the idiomatic phrase of being “brought up by hand.” Unlike the idioms that I contend shape Dickens’s imaginative processes in earlier novels, an overwhelming majority of readers are likely to recall this expression’s prevalence in Great Expectations. It is genuinely hard to miss because of its repetition in the mouths of nearly every major character: Pip, Mrs. Joe, Joe, Pumblechook, Estella, Miss Havisham, and so on. As such, this obviousness marks a new stage in Dickens’s growing tendency to “imagine” idiomatically. In the earlier novels, Dickens seems to write his way into what eventually becomes their guiding idioms. We shall see, however, as Dickens’s conscious tendency to rely on unique idiomatic expressions grows, so too does the subtlety, depth, and even indispensability of his reliance on them.
There is also an important aberration embedded within the uniqueness of the “brought up by hand” idiom that has salient implications for the early stages of Great Expectations’ composition. Dickens invokes the idiom or a derivation of it more than thirty times in Pip’s story, though he does use it previously in his oeuvre but only on a single occasion and only in one other novel. That single instance outside of Great Expectations occurs in the first sentence of the second chapter of Oliver Twist (1837–39) where the narrator tells us, “For the next eight or ten months, Oliver was the victim of a systemic course of treachery and deception—he was brought up by hand” (Dickens [1837–39] 2003, 6). This anomaly is interesting because at the end of the same letter in which Dickens informed Forster that he had arrived at “the pivot on which [Great Expectations] will turn,” he also wrote, “To be quite sure I had fallen into no unconscious repetitions, I read David Copperfield again the other day, and was affected by it to a degree you would hardly believe” (House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 325). The young David Copperfield, like the young Oliver Twist, is also “brought up by hand” in the idiom’s sense of physical abuse. At the outset of David Copperfield, it is primarily Mr. Murdstone’s violent hand that quite literally delivers the euphemistic “firmness” that comes to define his time as David’s new stepfather (Dickens [1837–39] 2003, 56). Murdstone frequently hurls books at David, violently clutches his arm, and boxes his ears before the culminating moment at the end of chapter 4 where David reports that Mr. Murdstone “beat me then, as if he would have beaten me to death” (56, 57, 65, 69). Once he is sent away to school at Salem House, of course, it is the cruel hand of Mr. Creakle that continues to make David “flinc[h] with pain” (94). So Dickens uses the idiom once at the outset of Oliver Twist and then, ten years later, begins his only other first-person novel by describing in considerable detail how another unfortunate child is figuratively brought up by hand through physical abuse.
At the phrase “no unconscious repetitions,” the editors of the Letters of Charles Dickens—Madeline House, Graham Storey, Kathleen Tillotson, and Margaret Brown (1965–2002, ix, 325)—attach a footnote that reads, “There are no repetitions of Copperfield in Pip’s story.” I disagree with this dream team of Dickensian scholars but only on the narrow grounds of their footnote’s categorical certainty. Does not Dickens’s act of rereading the physically abusive David Copperfield as he starts his only other first-person novel all but guarantee that there will be at least a few unconscious repetitions? This vexing question aside, what, almost more importantly, of its inverse corollary? Are we to take his letter to Forster to mean that there are no unconscious repetitions but that there are conscious repetitions in Great Expectations? The answers to these important questions are impossible to solve definitively because Dickens left no planning documents for Great Expectations. Nonetheless, I argue that the sheer number of times Dickens uses the “brought up by hand” idiom—especially, as we will see, in the opening chapters of the novel—make it almost certain that Dickens identified it early on as a central imaginative conceit, one strong enough to bear the narrative and thematic weight of a new fictional work requiring weekly publication.9 That said, through the process of idiom absorption we have encountered in other novels, the idiom then soaks into the text in ways that Dickens may or may not have been fully aware. His conscious idiomatic intentions, in other words, do not exhaust the significance of what the idiom may mean in many other, perhaps unintentional, contexts. The larger point is that we can learn from these various idiomatic extensions important new things about Dickens’s creative process and about this famous novel’s historical complexities as well as its thematic anxieties.
The expressions I treat in previous chapters on Dombey and Bleak House are integral to the way those novels create theme and meaning, but the case with the “brought up by hand” idiom in Great Expectations is of an altogether different order. Here, it is the sine qua non of the novel because of its particular narratological and historical indispensability. Pip, Joe, Biddy, Miss Havisham, Estella, Molly, and finally, Magwitch must be “brought up by hand” (lacking certain kinds of biological parental care) for the narrative to unfurl the way it does. Moreover, each character’s literal hands become potential sites of the utmost importance in connection with the idiom because of the novel’s historical timing. This ratcheted-up reliance on the figurative idiom and its literal embodiments thus emerges in lockstep with the exigencies of the novel’s publication history and from the evolutionary preoccupations of the cultural moment in which the text was composed week to week. This part of my argument is informed by Mikhail Bakhtin’s (1981, 356) notion that “language in its historical life, in its heteroglot development, is full of such potential dialects” that “intersect with one another in a multitude of ways.” Even so, unlike the idioms I treat in other chapters, I am far from the first critic to notice Dickens’s repeated use of this idiom (and the general preponderance of “hands”) in Great Expectations.10
But my interest in hands, idiomatic and literal, differs significantly from that of other critics in its historical specificity. I trace how Dickens’s sense of being “brought up by hand” affects virtually every dimension of the novel’s formal and thematic features but with an emphasis on what Bakhtin (1981, 362, 346; emphasis original) calls the historical contemporaneity of “a specific linguistic consciousness”—against whose common, everyday phrases “reveal even newer ways to mean.” We shall see the ways in which the “socioverbal intelligibility” of the idiom in Dickens’s first post-Darwinian novel is of a piece with the cultural moment of evolutionary anxiety that riled up so many readers in the 1850s and 1860s. This will allow us to reassess not only how Britons perceived the anxious relationship of nature to nurture via newly popularized evolutionary theories but also how Dickens’s own views about such a fundamental relationship informed his changing ideas about religion, class, gender, labor, and race over the course of his career.
Handling Idiomatic Narrative Contingency
As I have posited, there are good reasons to speculate that Dickens knew very early on that he had seized on an idiomatic expression that would prove extremely versatile for the thematic and narratological purposes of a new novel which required accelerated imaginative development. In the twenty days (between October 4 and 24) that Dickens had “push[ed] himself hard” writing the first four weekly numbers (chapters 1–8), he employs variations of the “brought up by hand” idiom fifteen times (out of about thirty more generalized usages in the novel as a whole).11 It first surfaces—and resurfaces—in the opening paragraph of chapter 2, which ran in the first weekly installment of the novel in All the Year Round (December 1, 1860):
My sister, Mrs. Joe Gargery, was more than twenty years older than I, and had established a great reputation with herself and the neighbours because she had brought me up “by hand.” Having at that time to find out for myself what the expression meant, and knowing her to have a hard and heavy hand, and to be much in the habit of laying it upon her husband as well as upon me, I supposed that Joe Gargery and I were both brought up by hand.
She was not a good-looking woman, my sister; and I had a general impression that she must have made Joe Gargery marry her by hand. (7–8; emphases mine)
Here, we see, from the idiom’s earliest instantiation in the novel, Pip comically but cruelly assigning a figurative, and also quite literal, meaning to his being “brought up by hand.” The literal sense of the expression—to be manually spoon- or bottle- as opposed to breastfed—had been known in the British lexicon since at least the mid-eighteenth century when several medical treatises included it in their titles. For example, Michael Underwood’s 1784 A Treatise on the Diseases of Children was subtitled “With Directions for the Management of Infants from the Birth; Especially Such as Are Brought Up by Hand.” Charlotte Mitchell (1996) points out that the phrase was used much more widely, however, during the time of Great Expectations’ publication. Isabella Beeton’s (1861, 486) best-selling Book of Household Management bears this out. Beeton’s popular text contains an entire chapter on nonbreast infant feeding titled, “Rearing by Hand” (1040–44). The following visualizations (figures 14 and 15) provide some additional context for the idiom’s growing prevalence in British newspapers and journals at roughly the time Dickens was publishing Great Expectations. The spikes that occur in the expression during this time (1859–64) reveal even more of what we already know about Dickens’s tendency to anticipate (and participate in) his culture’s changing idiomatic lexicon.
However, it is still important to point out that despite the idiom’s growing circulation in various contemporary Victorian contexts, it was extremely rare to encounter it in a nineteenth-century British novel. The rarity in this case is actually quite staggering. In my corpus of 3,719 novels, the idiom is used in a single instance only twelve times by ten novelists. This underscores two interrelated points. First, Dickens employs the “brought up by hand” idiom more times (15) in Great Expectations’ first eight chapters than we encounter throughout an entire corpus of 3,700 novels. Second, for every other nineteenth-century novelist in the corpus, the expression is a one-off snippet, a dash of contemporary parlance of the kind Dickens himself first employed it in Oliver Twist. This demonstrates what we saw in the introduction’s data: that Dickens is in the vanguard of his profession in terms of his use of idiomatic language in his novels. Even as these idiomatic expressions become more and more prevalent (at least in millions of pages of British newspapers and journals), other nineteenth-century novelists do not include them in their fictional discourse. But more important than simply the mere absence of idiomatic language in the case of other novelists is Dickens’s ability to imagine idiomatically as he singles out particular workaday body idioms and elevates them to inform—and in the case of Great Expectations, to give actual thematic and narrative form—to his most sophisticated novels.
The malleability of the “brought up by hand” idiom serves many purposes for Dickens, all of which lie at the core of Great Expectations’ earliest and most urgent concerns. To be “brought up by hand” in the sense that Pip assigns it to Mrs. Joe is, of course, to be subject to all manner of violent physical abuse of the kind we witness at the outset of David Copperfield. However, the idiom also probes more generally the relationship between nature and culture (nature and nurture) that develops into one of this novel’s central preoccupations. As the British Newspaper and British Periodical data suggest generally—and as Isabella Beeton’s best-selling chapter on “Rearing by Hand” reveals more specifically—Victorians were becoming increasingly fascinated by the differences between the “natural” and the “artificial” and particularly by the consequences in terms of the predictability of characterological traits contained therein. These anxieties surrounding the distinctions between the “natural” and the “artificial” may be traced in both the tone and the content of Beeton’s (1861, 1040–41; emphasis original) opening sentence, for example: “As we do not for a moment wish to be thought an advocate for an artificial, in preference to the natural course of rearing children, we beg our readers to understand us perfectly on this head; all we desire to prove is the fact that a child can be brought up as well on a spoon dietary as the best example to be found of those reared in the breast.” Whereas Beeton’s focus is clearly with the narrow physical ramifications (and possibilities) pertaining to an infant’s mode of “natural” or “artificial” feeding, Dickens widens the idiom’s scope to explore the relationships between his characters’ natures (in the dispositional sense) and their various upbringings to the extent that none of his other novels can match. Simply put, Great Expectations is a novel fixated on how the nurture of virtually every character relates—both positively and negatively—to her or his dispositional (and eventually biological) “nature.”
The most immediate and influential exploration of the relationship between one’s disposition and one’s upbringing occurs, unquestionably, with Pip. Upon the conclusion of his first devastating visit to Satis House (a scene still a part of Dickens’s first twenty-day burst of composition), the adult Pip retrospectively reflects on the cruelties and consequences of what U. C. Knoepflmacher (1988, 83) aptly calls his much older sister’s “non-nurturant” upbringing:
My sister’s bringing up had made me sensitive. In the little world in which children have their existence whosoever brings them up, there is nothing so finely perceived and so finely felt, as injustice. It may be only small injustice that the child can be exposed to; but the child is small, and its world is small, and its rocking-horse stands as many hands high, according to scale, as a big-boned Irish hunter. Within myself, I had sustained, from my babyhood, a perpetual conflict with injustice. I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me. I had cherished a profound conviction that her bringing me up by hand, gave her no right to bring me up by jerks. Through all my punishments, disgraces, fasts and vigils, and other penitential performances, I had nursed this assurance, and to my communing so much with it, in a solitary and unprotected way, I in a great part refer to the fact that I was morally timid and very sensitive. (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 63; emphasis mine)
This hindsight reflection on the experience of being “brought up by hand” is not only discerning, pellucid, and heartfelt, but its conclusions are absolutely necessary for the structural and thematic outlay of the entire novel. Specifically, the final sentence where Pip refers to how his bringing up “by hand” made him “morally timid” and “very sensitive” identifies the two major—and eventually converging—strands of narrative tension that must be established from the start in order for the novel to unfold the way it does. His moral timidity prevents him from doing “what [he] knew to be right” as he steals provisions from his house for the escaped convict in the novel’s opening scene, thereby tying Pip to a pervasive sense of criminality and guilt that surfaces throughout the novel. Next, Pip’s extreme sensitivity blindly rivets him to Estella despite her own heartless “nature” and her repeated warnings for him stay away. Perhaps Herbert Pocket captures the disastrous implications of this sensitive but blind attraction most succinctly when he predicts that the collision of Estella, made hard-hearted by her “bringing-up,” with Pip, “whom nature and circumstances made so romantic,” will “lead to miserable things” (250). Thus the moral timidity and extreme sensitivity which Pip directly attributes to his sister’s “bringing him up by hand” in the novel’s early sections operate as complementary parts of the narrative’s most essential machinery.
Dickens’s conception of Estella is also refracted, although through a slightly different prism, by the idiom of “being raised by hand.” We know, for instance, that Estella comes to Miss Havisham as a “mere baby” and, as such, may have been reared by hand in Beeton’s literal sense—a possibility that Estella often reinforces on several important occasions by addressing Havisham coldly as her “Mother by adoption” (304, 364).12 As is the case with Pip, Dickens makes sure to emphasize with Estella those elements of her rearing that are figuratively more important than the possibility of Miss Havisham’s literal feeding by hand rather than by breast. Bringing Estella up “by hand” means to Havisham that she will be able “to mould [Estella] into the form that her wild resentment, spurned affection, and wounded pride, found vengeance in” (399).13 In an attempt to “save [Estella] from a misery like [her] own,” Havisham unabashedly tells Pip, “I adopted her to be loved. I bred her and educated her, to be loved. I developed her into what she is, that she might be loved” and to “wreak revenge on all the male sex” (399, 240, 177). We know, in Estella’s own words, that such an upbringing “in that strange house from a mere baby” deprives her of the ability to feel or to dispense feeling in return (267). She has been brought up instead knowing only how “to deceive and entrap” (311).
The important point here is to recognize the extent to which Estella’s “bringing up by hand” works to establish and fulfill narratological imperatives—even if we learn of them later in the novel. Just as in the case with the sensitivity and moral timidity that develops in Pip as a result of being “brought up by hand,” it is necessary that Estella’s upbringing (by hand) makes her haughty and unfeeling. For it is precisely this aspect of her “nature” (which is really the product of her nurture) that establishes one of the novel’s principal vectors of narrative tension after Pip’s first visit to Satis House. And there is an important symmetry in Dickens’s invocation of literal hands in his deployment of the figurative idiom. Mrs. Joe’s abusive hand prompts Pip’s moral timidity and emotional sensitivity in ways that allow the plot to be intertwined with early taints of criminality and unrequited love. Similarly, Estella’s willfully dismissive behavior toward Pip during their first meeting at Satis House results from “the days when [Estella’s] baby intelligence was receiving its first distortions from Miss Havisham’s wasting hands” (312; emphasis mine).
Even the originating decision that lands the baby Estella in Miss Havisham’s wasting hands is predicated on a belief about the ways nurture affects nature. Jaggers tells Pip (in the hypothetical “put the case”) that he “held a trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up” (413). He then justifies his decision to have Estella “brought up by hand” in a virtuoso summation of experiential knowledge regarding how profoundly nurture can affect nature:
Put the case that he [Jaggers] lived in an atmosphere of evil, and that all he saw of children, was, their being generated in great numbers for certain destruction. Put the case that he often saw children solemnly tried at the criminal bar, where they were held up to be seen; put the case that he habitually knew of their being imprisoned, whipped, transported, neglected, cast out, qualified in all ways for the hangman, and growing up to be hanged. Put the case that pretty nigh all the children he saw in his daily business life, he had reason to look upon as so much spawn, to develop into the fish that were to come to his net—to be prosecuted, defended, forsworn, made orphans, be-devilled somehow.… Put the case, Pip, that here was one pretty child out of the heap, who could be saved. (413)
As if to corroborate the accuracy of what we might call Jaggers’s avant la lettre, thoroughly Foucauldian14 sociodemographic assessment of Estella’s optative fate15 had he allowed her to be brought up by her mother’s instead of “by [Havisham’s] hand,” the chapter containing this quotation ends with Jaggers’s hypothetical come alive in a client’s desperate visit to his office. Pip tells us that “Mike, … the client whom [he] had seen on the very first day [in Jaggers’s office] … who, either in his own person or in that of some member of his family, seemed to be always in trouble (which in that place meant Newgate), called to announce that his eldest daughter was taken up on suspicion of shoplifting” (415). Nurtured in such an “atmosphere of evil,” the text implies, would have made Mike’s daughter’s fate and Estella’s interchangeable: “both [would] develop into the fish” that would become caught up in what Foucault calls prison’s “carceral net” (297). Later in this chapter, we will reassess the extent to which parts of Estella’s and other characters’ “natures” remain fixed despite various nurturing elements that would seem to make them otherwise.
For now, though, I would like to continue focusing on how the “brought up by hand” idiom helped Dickens imagine and compose Great Expectations with uncharacteristic speed and decisiveness from the time of its early conception in October 1860. As Schlicke (1999, 252) and others have observed, “Dickens appears to have proceeded with [this novel] with untroubled confidence.” He notes more specifically that “the months during which Great Expectations was in progress are singularly free of the cries of anguish which punctuated his composition of other novels” (253). Schlicke arrives at essentially the same conclusion as Rosenberg (1999, 469), who writes that “Dickens seems to have had the main action of Great Expectations fairly well mapped out from the early stages of composition and could dispense with most of the working plans as he went along, nor did he bother with the incidental reminders and queries—names, sequence of action, problems of ‘tone’—that we find in other Mem[oranda].”
I maintain that this is the case in part because Dickens was able to depend so heavily on the deep wells of imaginative possibility that the “brought up by hand” idiom made possible—especially in terms of the novel’s abiding interest in the relationships between nature and nurture. So dynamic is the idiom as an originating principle in Great Expectations that the expression even has important narratological implications for the conception of those who manage to break the abusive cycle which is so often attendant on it. Joe Gargery, for instance, is without a doubt the best example of a character, conceived of very early on, who manages to resist the cyclical pattern of abusive behavior which governs much of the interaction among characters.16 In chapter 7, one of the chapters that Dickens composed in his original burst of writing to stay ahead of what he called the “story-demand” of the weekly publication format, Joe tells Pip of how he, too, was “brought up by hand”: “My father, Pip. He were given to drink, and when he were overtook with drink, he hammered away at my mother most onmerciful. It were a’most the only hammering he did, indeed, ’xcepting at myself. And he hammered at me with a wigour only to be equaled by the wigour with which he didn’t hammer at his anwil” (46).
Unlike Mrs. Joe’s conspicuously disdainful association with the idiom, though, Joe believes his father is “good in his hart” and for that reason Joe works “tolerable hard” (without complaint) to support him until his death (47). Here, Dickens emphasizes the difference between Pip’s parental figures by interpolating the story of Joe’s upbringing with “the muscular blacksmith’s” admission that his marriage to Mrs. Joe has been characterized by the same abusive dimension of the “brought up by hand” expression as Pip: “ ‘A little redness, or a little matter of Bone, here or there, what does it signify to Me?’ ” (142, 48). The only cycle that Joe repeats, though, is one of protection; he makes clear that he only wishes he could protect Pip and absorb all of Mrs. Joe’s physical abuse the way he did for his mother.
And this is crucial for the outlay of the novel because it galvanizes the bond between Joe and Pip as fellow sufferers who both endure being brought up by hand. It also cements a major component of the narrative arc to end where Joe eventually does bring Pip up by hand, literally, but in nearly all the positive nurturing senses of the idiom. After Pip falls into a prolonged and delirious state of depressive illness near the end of the novel, it is Joe who nurses (nurtures) Pip back to health—a renurturing that is as definitively restorative as it is decidedly manual:
I asked for a cooling drink, and the dear hand that gave it to me was Joe’s. (463)
I was slow to gain strength, but I did slowly and surely become less weak, and Joe stayed with me, and I fancied I was little Pip again. (466)
In the old unassertive protecting way … Joe wrapped me up … carried me down to [the carriage], and put me in, as if I were still the small helpless creature to whom he had so abundantly given the wealth of his great nature. (466–67; emphasis mine)
For, the tenderness of Joe was so beautifully proportioned to my need, that I was a little child in his hands. (466)
Joe patted the coverlet on my shoulder with his great good hand. (471)
Joe’s restoring touch was on my shoulder. (475)
Holly Furneaux (2009, 222) has noted how the “tactile language” of Joe’s nursing in this scene “atones for Pip’s suffering at the hands of the other members of the forge household” because “it comprises belated reparation for the child Pip’s abuse by Mrs. Joe that Joe had felt powerless to prevent.” Furthermore, Pip’s emphasis on the ways in which Joe’s restorative touch induces a return to a childlike state suggests that natures are not immutably defined by the originating acts of nurture. That is, one may be renurtured by people or events that can alter one’s supposedly unchanging nature. There’s no doubt, for example, that Pip becomes a better person after acknowledging these and other salutary interactions with Joe’s “great nature” throughout the novel (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 467).
Somewhat paradoxically but no less integral for the novel’s larger narrative demands, Magwitch is also a character for whom being “brought up by hand” has important implications. When we meet him just two pages into the opening chapter, his “savage” demeanor and violent behavior—not to mention his escape from the prison ship—ostensibly link him to untold levels of depraved criminality. This is just the point, though; his crimes are as yet untold, and the reader (along with Pip) need to assume the worst in order for the taint of his presence to haunt the text the way it does until he returns from New South Wales later in the novel. Since Dickens availed himself of no working notes, it is of course impossible to know for sure what he had in mind for Magwitch as he composed the first eight chapters in the burst of writing he completed in October 1860. There are clues, however, such as when Pip meets the stranger in the Jolly Bargemen who stares at Pip while stirring his drink “not with a spoon that was brought to him, but with a file” (77; emphasis original). This, along with the stranger’s gift of “two fat sweltering one-pound notes,” renews in Pip the feeling that he is “on secret terms of conspiracy with convicts” (78–79). Other clues from early on are perhaps deliberately misleading. For example, Magwitch’s brutal seizure of the “other [escaped] convict” would seem to implicate him in the most vicious and violent criminal activity. Despite this, Joe exhibits his almost to-good-to-be-true humaneness when he says, “God knows you’re welcome to it [the stolen pork pie].… We don’t know what you have done, but we wouldn’t have you starved to death for it, poor miserable fellow-creatur” (40). These lines, and their sentiment, are more important than they might seem because they predict how Magwitch’s own experience of being brought up by hand affects his nature and, hence, the true makeup of his nonviolent (bank-note forging) criminality. The unsolicited lie Magwitch offers the constables about stealing food from the Gargerys is certainly, therefore, meant to protect the young Pip in the near term, but it is also an acknowledgment of Pip’s help that establishes the longer arc of connection between them at the novel’s outset.
Furthermore, Magwitch’s lie also aligns with what we eventually learn later regarding the primary motivation for his criminality and, crucially for the argument I am tracing, how he came to be a criminal in the first place—that is, how he was nurtured into a life of criminality like the one Jaggers predicts for an orphaned Estella and like the one we witness in his client Mike’s eldest daughter. Essentially, Magwitch tells Pip that he steals to eat and to keep himself alive:
I’ve no more notion where I was born, than you have—if so much. I first became aware of myself, down in Essex, a thieving turnips for my living. Summun had run away from me—a man—a tinker—and he’d took the fire with him, and left me wery cold.… So fur a I could find, there warn’t a soul that see young Abel Magwitch, with as little on him as in him, and either drove him off, or took him up. I was took up, took up, took up, to that extent that I reg’larly grow’d up took up.… They always went on agen me about the Devil. But what the Devil was I to do? I must put something into my stomach, mustn’t I? (347–47)
Needless to say, this admission verifies that Magwitch, too, was brought up by hand as an orphan (yet another connection to the child Pip). And it explains to some extent how he ended up as Compeyson’s not unwitting but also not completely knowledgeable underling—a fact that becomes reiterated in the novel’s dominant manual idiom when Magwitch tells Pip that he was “always under [Compeyson’s] thumb” (350). Further invocations and narratologically requisite senses of the idiom also have their roots in the novel’s opening scenes. Magwitch vows to repay the young Pip’s actions with the profits gained from a reformed life of manual work, raising sheep and cattle, in New South Wales by which he can manipulate Pip’s London upbringing. Hence the two one-pound notes given to the young Pip “that seemed to be on terms of the warmest intimacy with all the cattle markets in the country” (79). Indeed, as J. Hillis Miller (1958, 250; emphasis original) remarked long ago, “the central motif of Great Expectations, the donnée with which Dickens began, was the secret manipulation of Pip’s life by Magwitch the convict.”
As we have seen in each chapter of this study, once Dickens alights on an imaginatively productive idiomatic expression—an idée fixe—to follow Miller’s formulation, he (consciously and unconsciously) delights in creating a dynamic array of literal and figurative word playing which extend the idiom’s pertinence. À la Wittgentsein (1997, 7), the demarcated “rules” of language are only contextual rules, always awaiting possibility-enhancing creative reformulation through idiomatic wordplay. Such extended wordplay is one of the principal ways idioms become organically absorbed into the novels. In Great Expectations, these manual absorptions are legion, such as when Magwitch claims to describe his upbringing (quoted above) “short and handy” (346); when he informs Pip that he made him a gentleman “single-handed” (321); when Joe asks Pip if he will “take [him] in hand in [his] learning” (48); when Pumblechook offers to take Pip “with his own hands to Miss Havisham’s” for the first time (52); when Pip is “taken red-handed” to be apprenticed in the forge (104); when Pip suspects Orlick “of having had a hand in that murderous attack” on Mrs. Joe (132); when Herbert renames Pip “Handel” (179); when Pip manages the “whole business” of diverting money to his friend’s budding career so “that Herbert had not the least suspicion of [Pip’s] hand being in it” (299); when Jaggers tells Pip that his unnamed benefactor will remain a profound secret until “it is the intention of the person to reveal it at first hand by word of mouth” (138); when Wemmick informs Pip that “there’s only one Jaggers, and people won’t have him at second hand” (199); when we learn that Compeyson “writes [in] fifty hands” (428); and so on. It is as if the text becomes enthralled with its own self-propelling idiomatic energy.
At other times, though, the movement between idiom’s literal and figurative registers is much more nuanced. One of the best examples of this kind of idiomatic subtlety centers on Pip’s interactions with Joe’s comically obnoxious uncle, Pumblechook. Pumblechook exceeds even the indignant Mrs. Joe as the character who most often invokes the “brought up by hand” expression. He uses it eight times, in reference to Pip’s upbringing—all but one of which appear in the novel’s early chapters. After a litany of reminders of how grateful Pip should be to have been “brought up by hand” and to have had Havisham assume the financial responsibility of apprenticing him to Joe, Pumblechook participates in the physically abusive sense of the original idiom as he violently grabs Pip “by the arm above the elbow,” exclaiming that “this boy must be bound, out of hand.… Bound out of hand” (104). The repetition here strongly suggests Pumblechook’s belief that to be “brought up by hand” is tantamount to being “bound out of hand”—another characteristically brilliant cross-phrasal association that extends the reach of the originating idiom. Indeed, given the barrage of manual idioms that cascade through this scene as Pumblechook expresses his desire to expedite the process of having Pip “bound out of hand” by personally accompanying him to the Magistrates’ Hall where the apprenticeship is recorded, Mrs. Joe’s sycophantic response seems like another one of Dickens’s brilliant inside jokes: “ ‘Goodness knows, Uncle Pumblechook,’ said [Mrs. Joe] (grasping the money), ‘we’re deeply beholden to you’ ” (104; emphasis mine).
The comic effect of the idiom becomes physically reembodied later on in the scene when Pumblechook encounters the newly endowed Pip. The former bullying uncle who, just pages earlier, cannot seem to resist an opportunity to remind Pip that he has been “brought up by hand” and therefore must be “bound out of hand,” turns suddenly and obsequiously deferential. It is thus comically appropriate that Pumblechook’s new state of fawning is embodied in his absurd inability to refrain from shaking Pip’s hands:
“Call it a weakness, if you will,” said Mr. Pumblechook, getting up again, “but may I? may I—?”
It began to be unnecessary to repeat the form of saying he might, so he did it at once. How he ever did it so often without wounding himself with my knife, I don’t know.
“And your sister … which had the honour of bringing you up by hand! It’s a sad picter that she’s no longer equal to fully understanding the honour. May—” (154; emphasis mine)
Here, the literal and idiomatic movement of the scene recapitulates the narrative movement of the novel. Dickens alternates between, and so conflates, the figurative and the literal dimensions of the novel’s principal idiom at the important narrative juncture where Pip’s upbringing—“by hand” and “out of hand”—becomes (seemingly) divorced from his new life as a London gentleman. Such alternation between obtrusive and subtle dimensions of the idiomatic register aligns with Bakhtin’s (1981, 302) sense of how “common language” operates in prose fiction more generally: “the author exaggerates, now strongly, now weakly, one or another aspect of the ‘common language,’ sometimes abruptly exposing its inadequacy to its object and sometimes, on the contrary, becoming one with it, maintaining an almost imperceptible distance.”
Coming to Grips with Manual Anxieties
No matter how bluntly or subtly Great Expectations’ dominant idiom appears, however, it is crucial to consider how it partakes of a “common language” in ways that far outstrip its mere familiar linguistic idiomaticity (as an expression of upbringing). The sense of being “brought up by hand,” in other words, because of its isolation of a body part that preoccupied ordinary Britons in the 1850s and early 1860s, also had an additional purchase on the collective Victorian conscience that has so far gone unnoticed in critical appraisals of the novel. Dickens was composing Great Expectations at a time when readers were transfixed by scientific developments that placed the human hand at the center of urgently interrelated debates about animality, class, race, and gender—all of which have enormous implications for understanding the interconnectedness between nature and nurture invoked by the novel’s principal idiomatic formulation. This “socio-verbal intelligibility,” contends Bakhtin (1981, 346) in a coincidentally germane formulation, “is very important for coming to grips with the historical life of discourse.” Doing so involves thinking about how common language, “the language of everyday life” in Bakhtin’s words, “tastes of the context and contexts in which it has lived its socially charged life” (296, 293). Hands, and just about anything relating to them, it turns out, could not have been more socially charged when Dickens was writing Great Expectations in the immediate aftermath of The Origin of Species’ publication (1859).
Stone’s observations concerning Dickens’s ability to consolidate seemingly disparate and insignificant resources is as important now for my point about the imaginative richness and timeliness of the “brought up by hand” idiom as they were when he made them over fifty years ago. “Dickens was always a snapper up of unconsidered trifles,” Stone (1970, 118) asserted. “His genius made those trifles meaningful, and when an image or association held a special emotional charge for him … he unconsciously sifted out every scrap of consonant material scattered through … even as a magnet sifts out every scrap of iron scattered through a heap of dust” (118). The body part isolated in the “brought up by hand” idiom did not hold a special emotional charge for Dickens only, though; the entire atmosphere and cultural lexicon of the late 1850s in Britain was disrupted by the magnetic pull of its socially charged life.
It is hardly an overstatement to say that prior historical, philosophical, and religious conceptions of human hands became radically destabilized in the two decades before Dickens composed Great Expectations.17 This is because, with the popularization of new evolutionary theories in the mid-nineteenth century, hands had begun to lose their privileged status as the primary site of physical differentiation between humans and other (“lower”) animals. Since time out of mind, philosophical and Western religio-anatomical tradition celebrated the hand as the essential feature of human beings. This line of hand privileging among religiously trained anatomists and secular philosophers runs remarkably straight from John Bannister and Charles Bell to Immanuel Kant and Martin Heidegger. Jacques Derrida’s (2005a, 185) brilliant coinage of the term humainisme (humanualism) aptly locates the importance of this exceptionalized hand to age-old conceptions of human identity. In religious terms, such privileging no doubt stems from the Judeo-Christian Bible’s scriptural allusions of divine power that directly connect “the hand of God” to the hands of the Israelites. Think, for instance, of the connection between God (“who created man in His own image” [Genesis 2:27]) “stretching out” His “mighty hand” (Exodus 4:19–20) to Moses’s parting of the Red Sea by “stretching out his hand” (Exodus 14:21) over the waters, or “the finger of God” that creates the commandments (Deuteronomy 9:10) and the plagues (Exodus 8:19).18 The late sixteenth-century work of Bannister and the early nineteenth-century work of Bell represent only two salient examples of the long iconographic tendency to link anthropomorphically God and human hands. Bannister’s Historie of Man (1578) employs the “hand-in-hand” image of God and man, an updated version of which is still used to this day by the Royal College of Physicians (figure 16)—where God’s hand emerges from gilded clouds to touch the human hand below. Two hundred and fifty years after Bannister, in 1833, Sir Charles Bell’s best-selling Bridgewater Treatise on The Hand explored how the “mechanism and vital endowments of the human hand” constituted “the last and best proof of that principle … which evinces design in the creation” (38).19
Dickens owned a copy of Bell’s Treatise, which was personally inscribed to him by Bell’s widow, Marion.20 How such an explicitly “design”-oriented text may have influenced Dickens’s ideas about hands in Great Expectations remains to be seen. For now, it is enough to recognize just how pervasive this overarching sense of anatamo-religious human exceptionalism via God’s hand really was through the first part of the nineteenth century. The deeply entrenched, nearly automatic belief in the religio-anatamo-inflected exceptionalism of the human hand began to shift dramatically in the 1840s, however, when a tandem of scientific and fictional work brought anxieties about the relationship between humans and anthropoid apes to a far greater swath of the English public. In 1844, Robert Chambers’s Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation became one of the first English works to bring a theory of evolution (known as the development hypothesis) to popular audiences. Because it provided an organic theory for species creation and because it was first published anonymously, Vestiges had many detractors. As Adelene Buckland (2021, 430) has shown, though, Dickens was not one of them. He praised the book in an 1848 Examiner review for having “created a reading public not exclusively scientific or philosophical” that “awaken[ed] an interest and a spirit of inquiry in many minds” (Dickens 1848, 787). Nonetheless, widespread criticism in other circles seemed only to greater publicize and, hence, to increase the book’s popularity. The more Vestiges was analyzed at publicly attended scientific meetings and condemned from pulpits and lecture platforms, the more it was borrowed from circulating libraries and read (Secord 2000, 37). A passage from Vestiges that would have been alarming to this wider audience was the assertion that human “hands, and other features grounded on by naturalists as characteristic … do not differ more from the simidae than bats do from the lemurs” (Chambers [1844] 1994, 266). Chambers’s deployment of a double negative here somewhat jumbles the radical controversy of his central point: that the hand may not have been so essentially characteristic of humans after all.
A chilling piece of fiction that appeared at about the same time amplified this uneasy notion that animals, particularly apes, could possess hands. The April 1841 installment of Graham’s Magazine contained Edgar Allan Poe’s ([1841] 1985, 262) story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” This new kind of detective tale chronicled a gruesome double murder in the heart of “civilized” Paris, which involved a young woman “strangled to death by manual strength.” The detective August Dupin famously solves the mysterious murders only by eventually recognizing that “the dark bruises, and deep indentations of finger nails” (252) match Georges Cuvier’s “minute anatomical and generally descriptive account of the large fulvous Ourang-Outang” known for its “gigantic stature … prodigious strength and … wild ferocity” (264). These narratives featuring what Susan David Bernstein (2001, 255; emphasis original) appropriately calls the “anxiety of simianation”—in both their scientific and fictional iterations—reveal that the deep discomfort about the possibility of evolutionary proximity between humans and other primate species was becoming more and more known (and feared) in the decades leading up to the watershed event of Darwin’s 1859 Origin of Species.21
Throughout the 1850s, man’s superiority over animals was vehemently debated by what the Victorians referred to as the “development hypothesis.” But it was not until the publication of the Origin of Species that a viable mechanism (natural selection) for evolution seriously challenged the notion of a universal law created by a designing and almighty lawgiver. One of the very few passages in the Origin containing an explicit reference to human beings discusses, with a similar confidence as Chambers’s analogous formulation, how the human hand resembles the extremities of presumably “lower” animals: “the framework of bones [is] the same in the hand of man,” Darwin (1996, 387) writes, as in the “wing of a bat, fin of the porpoise, and leg of a horse.” Otherwise, Darwin famously excluded human anatomy from his original formulation of natural selection, and yet its conspicuous absence, as Gillian Beer (1983, 59–60) notes, only made the subject more prominent for Victorian readers who considered the Origin to be “centrally concerned with man’s descent.”22 Theories of racial degeneration multiplied in dizzying fashion as reports of the newly discovered gorilla began to circulate among scientists. A full gorilla skeleton reached the British Zoological Society in 1851 and an entire gorilla body (pickled in alcohol) in 1858. These events, along with the popular African travel books of Paul du Chaillu, helped make gorillas a common topic for the general public in England during the late 1850s. Propelled by Darwin’s new theory of evolution, the preoccupation with a “missing link” between the human and the gorilla developed into a full-fledged cultural phenomenon. Virtually every British newspaper and magazine, including Dickens’s own, printed stories referencing “man’s nearest relation.”23
What propelled the Victorian fascination with gorillas was how much these newly discovered animals resembled humans in various ways. Du Chaillu’s (1861, 60) account of his first gorilla sighting confirms the extent to which their general stature invoked comparisons to humans: “they looked fearfully like hairy men,” he wrote. Du Chaillu, building on Darwin’s interest in the “framework of bones,” was even more unsettled to discover how closely gorillas resembled humans from a skeletal perspective. His detailed anatomical comparisons revealed similarities in the cranium, spine, and pelvis, but they repeatedly fixated on the exact same number of bones (twenty-seven) in the human and gorilla hand (418). These comparisons far more explicitly amplified what had been somewhat buried in Chambers’s Vestiges and Darwin’s Origins: that the human hand’s supposedly divinely ordained (“designed”) exceptionality was not so exceptional after all in the larger animal kingdom.24
Indeed, the horror for many for many Victorians in the years immediately following Darwin’s Origin was the possibility that God may have had no hand at all in the order of the natural world. This was clearly a topic in which Dickens took a particular interest, though it is not often remarked upon because of his fierce critiques of overt religiosity in other, mostly secular social contexts.25 He nonetheless exhibits throughout his fictional career (up to Great Expectations) a definitive belief in the designing hand of God and, by extension, the exceptionalism embodied in the human hand. For example, in The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41), “Nature’s hand” and “Heaven’s work” combine to produce the angelic character of Little Nell, who is often described as “a creature fresh from the hand of God” (389, 401, 538). Even in his most famous novel about “hands,” Hard Times (1854), Dickens channels Charles Bell in asserting that “the forest of [mechanized] looms” in Coketown are nothing compared to the divinely constructed human hands that operate them. “Never fear, good people of an anxious turn of mind,” says the narrator, “that Art will consign Nature to oblivion. Set anywhere, side by side, the work of God and the work of man; and the former, even though it be a troop of Hands of very small account, will gain in dignity from the comparison” ([1854] 2003, 65). Perhaps sentiments like these account for why Dickens received a year later, in 1855, a special sixth edition copy of Sir Charles Bell’s Bridgewater Treatise on The Hand: Its Mechanism and Endowments as Evincing Design inscribed “with kind regards from Marion Bell” (the author’s widow).
But Bell’s treatise, which advocated for a perfect, God-given human hand, shared shelf space in Dickens’s library at Gad’s Hill alongside Chambers’s Vestiges of Creation, Darwin’s Origin of Species, and Du Chaillu’s Explorations and Adventures in Equatorial Africa—inscribed “To Charles Dickens, Esq., with the author’s kind remembrances”—and Richard Owen’s Memoir on the Gorilla.26 We shall see, then, that if Dickens was not “of an anxious turn of mind” regarding the manufacturing status of human hands while writing Hard Times, he was considerably more anxious about their evolutionary status while composing Great Expectations six years later.
As I have suggested in discussing Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” the uneasy Victorian fascination with the gorilla was heightened by the fact that the animal’s deadly ferocity was distinctly not a matter of redness in tooth and claw. The reports coming back to England in the late 1850s, like Poe’s story, dramatized how the gorilla attacked not with its formidable teeth but rather with its bare “hands.” Du Chaillu (1861, 62) had described this supposed method of attack in considerable detail: “This animal lies in wait in the lower branches of trees, watching for people to go to and fro; and, when one passes sufficiently near, grasps the luckless fellow with his [“lower hands”], and draws him up into the tree, where he quietly chokes him.” Moreover, a prominent piece in Punch magazine called “The Missing Link” (1862, 165) bluntly revealed how quickly and readily Britons co-opted contemporary evolutionary theory for colonial purposes in order to help differentiate themselves from their “lower” Irish subjects: “A gulf, certainly, does appear to yawn between the Gorilla and the Negro. The woods and wilds of Africa do not exhibit an example of any intermediate animal. But this, as in many other cases, philosophers go vainly searching abroad for that which they would readily find if they sought it at home. A creature manifestly between the Gorilla and the Negro is to be met within some of the lowest districts of London and Liverpool by adventurous explorers. It comes from Ireland, whence it has contrived to migrate; it belongs to a tribe of Irish savages.”
L. Perry Curtis, Patrick Brantlinger, and many others have demonstrated that Victorians readily adopted this rhetoric of biological hierarchy to draw connections between the simian and the Irish—a lower “race” regarded as subhuman in the English imagination long before Darwin. Therefore, the idea of an intermediary animal—one that Thomas Carlyle in Chartism (1839) believed had “sunk from decent manhood to squalid apehood”—seemed to fit all too well given the supposedly Irish predilection for violence and physical labor (Carlyle 1842, 28). Their status as Europe’s only Caucasian “savages” was deeply entrenched by the time Carlyle wrote that the “uncivilized” Irishman “is there to undertake all work that can be done by mere strength of hand … for wages that will purchase him potatoes” (28). This description of physically demanding manual labor became literalized shortly thereafter in Richard Beamish’s popular work, the Psychonomy of the Hand (1843). What many Victorians thought of as a uniquely Irish combination of racial otherness, violence, and capacity for manual labor may be seen in the life-size “tracings of living hands” which accompanied every edition of Beamish’s text through the 1850s and 1860s.
These full-page plates appeared at the end of Beamish’s Psychonomy, and readers were encouraged to trace their own hands on top of them as a means of direct physical comparison. The affiliation between the gorilla and the manual-laboring navvy is implied both by proximity (plate numbers 1 and 3 of 30) and by shape, but also by nationality and race. Beamish (1843, 6) states that “the more the palm dominates over the fingers in the hand of man, the more the character approaches to that of the brute, with instincts low and degrading.” Since the discovery of gorillas (figure 17) and the massive influx of Irish navvies (figure 18) into the British workforce occurred more or less simultaneously, large palms and short powerful fingers were interpreted not only as indicators of a “natural” propensity to handle shovels, pickaxes, and barrows but also as signs of a racialized animality itself. The fact that Beamish’s hand plates do not include color—as they easily could have at least in terms of darker shading—supports Pamela Gilbert’s (2019, 283) recent finding that “color was far less important than skeletal structure to racial distinctions” in England and the Continent (as opposed to the United States).
There is also more than ample evidence that Dickens followed Carlyle in his belief that the Irish were “a racially repellent group” (David 2002, 91). During his visit to America in 1842, Dickens took time out from his denunciation of the racist brutality and injustice of chattel slavery to describe an Irish colony in the Catskill mountains as decidedly “ruinous and filthy,” claiming with a particular deafness to their status as desperate refugees from a famine-ravished Ireland that they were all “wallowing together” in a mess of pigs, dogs, pots, dunghills, refuse, straw, and standing water (91). This disparaging language regarding the Irish reappears when Oliver Twist runs away to London. The young Oliver’s first impressions of the outskirts’ “wallowing” “filth” are unmistakably connected to the Irish who live there (63). The narrator remarks that “the lowest orders of Irish (who are generally the lowest orders of anything) were wrangling with might and main”—this last part itself a centuries-old French idiom linking laboring power (“might”) to Irish hands (“main”). Dickens’s 1853 piece titled “The Noble Savage” in Household Words makes similar comparisons. Here, Dickens implies that the “plunging and tearing” Zulu “Kaffirs” would be “extremely well received and understood [in the Irish House of Commons] at Cork” (1853, 338–39). Then at the end of May 1859, only four months before Dickens started writing Great Expectations, his own magazine (All the Year Round) set exactly this aspect of the gorilla’s reputed manual savagery against the backdrop of middle-class industriousness in a piece titled “Our Nearest Relation” (1859, 114; emphasis mine): “The honey-making, architectural bee, low down on the scale of life, with its insignificant head, its little boneless body, and gauzy wing, is our type of industry and skill: while this apex in the pyramid of brute creation [the gorilla], the near approach to the human form, what can it do? The great hands have no skill but to clutch and strangle.” Thus apehood, Irishness, and manual labor became biologically constituent in the Victorian imagination just as Dickens began to conceive of the “brought up by hand” idiom for Great Expectations in October 1860. Commenting on the proliferation of similar articles containing a more general evolutionary focus which appeared in Household Words and All the Year Round, George Levine (1986, 256) maintains that “Dickens was both aware of what was happening in the world of science and convinced that the new developments had real significance for ordinary life.”27
My point is that Dickens’s interest in contemporary scientific developments and their pertinence to “ordinary life” extended the various meanings—figurative and literal—of the “brought up by hand” idiom he alighted on as he charged himself to begin composing Great Expectations so quickly in October 1860. Indeed, just months after his magazine published the above piece describing “the portentous power of grasp” in the gorilla hand, Dickens predicates an absolutely crucial thematic and narrative detail—Estella’s “brought up by hand” status—on her estranged biological relationship to a working-class Irish character (Molly) who murders a rival twice her size by strangling her with her bare hands: “held by the throat at last and choked,” as Wemmick tells Pip (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 393). Such racialized parallels would be less worthy of identification if Dickens had not committed himself to two things. First, to beginning the novel with an emphasis on the various ramifications resulting from idiomatic and literal nurture “by hand” and second, to conspicuously highlighting Molly’s Irishness throughout the text. In terms of the latter, Molly is known as a traditionally lower-class Irish nickname for the proper name Mary, and Wemmick’s early indication to Pip that she has “some gypsy blood in her” is a powerful confirmation of Terry Eagleton’s (1995, 3) notion that Gypsy blood in the nineteenth-century novel was “simply an English way of saying that [the character] is quite possibly Irish.”
The possibility of Molly’s Irishness, as well at its relation to the “brought up by hand” idiom, moves about as close as it can to probability, though, if we consider a piece by William Moy Thomas that Dickens oversaw in a July 1853 edition of Household Words. The narrator in the article, titled “Market Gardens,” is led through a tour of the agricultural fields outside of London where the crops are (manually) “cultivated by the spade” rather than “by the plough” (Thomas 1853, 409). We learn from the narrator of the only individually named worker in the piece under these circumstances: “A number of women are pulling gigantic rhubarb stalks, and loading barrows. I observe a considerable difference in the rapidity with which some do their work; and my conductor conforms my observation. ‘That young Irishwoman, yonder,’ he says, ‘with her gown pinned up behind, and her bare arms, as brown as mahogany, will get through twice as much work in a day as some of our [British] people. We give her two shillings a day; most of them get only a shilling or eighteenpence. How are you, Molly?’ ” (413; emphasis mine). Then, on the next page, the narrator marvels at an exceptional-looking plot where cauliflowers are flourishing. The conductor farmer explains that “each one, I may say, is regularly nursed and brought up by hand” (414; emphasis mine). Did Dickens consciously recall the details of this article, right down to the (Irish) name of the female Irish worker, seven years later when he set out to write a story prominently featuring the same idiom and the powerful working hands of a lawyer’s housekeeper on which a crucial part of the novel depends? Maybe, maybe not. But the fact that he edited this piece, no matter what he consciously recalled when he was composing Great Expectations, is potentially important and relevant despite our inability to make conclusively determinate claims about it.
What we do know conclusively is that Dickens held prejudicial views toward the Irish, which are evident in his earliest fiction and that, far closer to his beginning Great Expectations—in late May 1859—he edited a four-page article in All the Year Round on “Our Nearest Relation” (1859, 112) in which “the recently discovered Gorilla” shares a kind of wanton predilection for violence with the Irish. These specifics should also be situated in the much larger context of how often the English saw rebelliousness and violence “as an Irish character flaw” in general (Brantlinger 2011, 138).
Aviva Briefel (2015, 2, 22) has shown how “racialized hands were vital to literary portrayals of [British] colonial relationships” as they more and more “became productive sites for the Victorian ‘desire for race’ to be played out.” This plays out in Great Expectations most vividly through Jaggers’s relationship with his Irish housekeeper who is referred to on five occasions as “a wild beast tamed” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 202, 392, 394). The convergence of Molly’s racialized ethnicity, capacity for rebellion, and violent “nature” reaches its most ideological, subjective, and narratological distillation in the dramatic scene where Jaggers pins her hands to the table for Pip and the other gentlemen in training to view: “ ‘There’s power here,’ said Mr. Jaggers, coolly tracing out the sinews [of Molly’s hand] with his forefinger. ‘Very few men have the power … this woman has. It’s remarkable what force of grip there is in these hands. I have had occasion to notice many hands; but I never saw anything stronger in that respect, man’s or woman’s, than these’ ” (214; emphasis mine). Jaggers’s compulsive and seemingly bizarre admiration of Molly’s hands further anatomizes (literalizes) the general association of criminal behavior with animality as we have seen associated with both Magwitch and Pip, but it also establishes a pivotal fulcrum in the novel’s tightly plotted narrative. To fulfill the necessities of both theme and plot, Molly must be biologically connected to both Magwitch and Estella—but we (readers), like the as-yet unaware Pip, must not be able to predict such a narrative-cinching connection. The “remarkable force of grip” in Molly’s hands must be, in the novel’s early to late-middle stages, an untraceable allusion to her previous crime and the centerpiece to Pip’s eventual discovery of Estella’s “origins”—her supposedly true “nature” beyond Havisham’s nurture. As such, this manual affiliation adds new and refracted meanings to the text’s central concern with the relationships between nature and nurture first expressed idiomatically in the various scenarios where so many characters are “brought up by hand.”
A significant component of this particular idiom in Great Expectations resides in the anxiousness it engenders. Put more specifically, the idiom and its attendant focus on literal hands becomes part and parcel the culture’s anxiety regarding the fragility of the barrier between the human and the animal that had been most recently, and most profoundly, destabilized by Darwin’s theory of interconnection between species—the recognition of which constitutes an almost inexplicable gap in Dickensian evolutionary criticism.28 Thus, the “nurture” of being “brought up by hand” is never far away from the violence it represents in Pip’s (and Joe’s, Magwitch’s, and Estella’s) upbringing. At the same time the text is concerned with the nature of nurture, it is also preoccupied by the “animalistic” capabilities of the hand that were blurring the heretofore distinct line between human and animal. In this sense, the specter of manual strength and strangulation that becomes explicitly articulated in the story of Molly’s crime also haunts the novel in a series of other scenarios involving characters of all classes. Consider, for instance, how Matthew Pocket’s sister Camilla’s feigned and overwrought concern for Miss Havisham’s health manifests itself as a melodramatic weakness in her own throat. “Put[ting] her hand to her throat,” Camilla claims to be subject to so many anxious “chokings” that Pip wonders if she will “drop and choke when out of view” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 86, 88). Magwitch assures the constables in the opening scenes that had he not been stopped, he would have strangled Compeyson in the ditch: “I’d have held to him with that grip, that you should have found him [dead] in my hold” (37). Later in the narrative when Pip is attacked in the limekiln, the perpetually “slouching” Orlick gloats over his ability destroy Pip at any time by strangling him: “I could have took your weazen [throat] betwixt this finger and thumb and chucked [choked] you away dead” (428). The pervasive specter of strangulation even appears in genteel contexts far removed from immediate physical violence such as when Pip, in conversation with Herbert about their mounting debts, makes an analogy between facing their financial “affairs” and “tak[ing] the foe by the throat” (275).
It is this emphasis on clutching power—transferred from “animals” to humans—and embedded within the idiomaticity of the text’s dominant expression of the relationship between nature and nurture that extends the imaginative horizon by which Dickens composed this novel so quickly, so efficiently, and most importantly, so in sync with his era’s evolutionary interests and concerns. As a result, the idiomatic expression of being “brought up by hand” proved wide enough to include the imaginative coordinates around which nearly all of the novel’s complicated events and themes could be mapped. Such a fecund and timely linking of idiomatic potential and cultural preoccupation uniquely fits Bakhtin’s (1981, 356–57) most Darwinian model for language alteration: “Language in its historical life, in its heteroglot development, is full of such potential dialects: they intersect one another in a multitude of ways; some fail to develop, some die off, but others blossom into authentic languages. We repeat: language is something that is historically real, a process of heteroglot development, a process teeming with future and former languages.” The fact that so much of Great Expectations’ characterizations, themes, and plotting depend on the actual hands that are doing the “bringing up” means, in Bakhtinian terms, that Dickens had alighted on “a stage of genius—a sharpened dialogic relationship to the word—that in turn uncover[ed] fresh aspects within the word” or idiom (352; emphasis original). No matter how deep Dickens’s conscious intention goes in Great Expectations, his creation of a sharpened and yet expanded dialogic relationship between actual hands and the novel’s governing idiomatic expression reveals his exceptional ability to align idiomaticity with contemporaneity that we have encountered in previous chapters.
One way to calibrate the contemporaneousness of the Victorian concern with both gendered and “wild” hands is to consider the seemingly outré relationship between the real-life Arthur Munby and his servant-cum-wife, Hannah Culliwick. The Cambridge-educated Munby never worked with anything heavier than a pen, yet his diaries are replete with an eccentric attraction to the animalistic features of working female hands. Historians and literary critics have acknowledged the value of Munby’s diaries to constructions of mid-nineteenth-century gender and class anxieties but surprisingly not in relation to Great Expectations where these concerns surface as a particular form of evolutionary uneasiness in the immediate wake of the publication of Origin of Species.29 Consider the eerie similarity between the dramatic hand-trapping scene at Jaggers’s house and Munby’s diary recollection of an encounter with a servant in 1861:
I asked her to show me her hand. Staring at me in blank astonishment, she obeyed, and held out her right hand for me to look at. And certainly, I never saw such a hand as hers, either in man or woman. They were large and thick & broad, with big rude fingers and bony thumbs—but that was not very remarkable.… It was in her palms that she was unrivalled: and such palms! The whole interior of each hand, from the wrist to the finger-tips, was hoofed with a thick sheet of horn.… What must be the result to a woman of carrying about her always, instead of a true human hand, such a brutal excrescence at this? (Quoted in Reay 2002, 99–100, 128; emphasis mine)
Since there are no documented links between Dickens and Munby (not to mention the near simultaneousness of Dickens’s creation of the Jaggers-Molly relationship), it would be a mistake to dismiss their focus on powerful female hands as isolated instances of bizarre social deviance. Instead, if we view this kind of manual perversion as a culturally central phenomenon, it is possible to recognize the ways in which the deviant hand emerged as an important site of tension between new scientific theories of interconnectedness and a social heterodoxy that assigned innate, unalterable characteristics to gender, class, and animality. In a novel inordinately concerned with the precariousness of so many of these identities, Great Expectations’ literal and idiomatic attention to hands exposes the disturbingly relational—not immutable—nature of such categories.
Narrative Sleights of Hand
The fact that the novel’s most “wild” and violent hands (Molly’s) are biologically connected to its most refined hands (Estella’s) uncovers fresh aspects latent within the original “brought up by hand” idiom by making the expression’s literal body part a prime agent in the novel’s plot as well as a site of collapsed social signification. Here, I wish to build on Peter Brooks’s (1984, 24) influential claim that plotting is “the central vehicle and armature of meaning” in Great Expectations by exploring how the text’s aesthetics of embodiment make meaning not only carnal as Brooks notes but, even more specifically, manual. The semioticization of the body idiom eventually converges with the somaticization of the story line in Pip’s gradual but then abrupt realization that Molly’s “hands [are] Estella’s hands” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 391).
This crucial recognition by way of Molly’s and Estella’s hands is all the more worthy of attention because of its conspicuous departure from a long line of facially based character identifications that prevail in Dickens’s previous fiction. Perhaps the earliest example of Dickens’s tendency to locate buried filial relationships among characters in terms of faciality occurs in Oliver Twist (1837–39), with Mr. Brownlow’s linkage of Oliver and his mother through what the narrator calls “the affair of the picture” ([1837–39] 2003, 106). It begins when the gentleman arrives at the jail where Oliver is held for supposedly picking Mr. Brownlow’s pocket. Confused by something about Oliver’s appearance that jogs his memory, Brownlow says, “ ‘There is something in that boy’s face.… God bless my soul! where have I seen something like that look before?’ ” (80). We soon learn that “after musing for some minutes, the old gentleman walked with the same meditative face into a back ante-room opening from the yard; and there, retiring into a corner, called up before his mind’s eye a vast amphitheatre of faces over which a dusky curtain had hung for many years” (80). Brownlow believes the dim feeling of recognition he experiences “must be [his] imagination” until he enters a housekeeper’s sitting room and encounters Oliver “fix[ing] his eyes most intently on a portrait” with a “look of awe” (80, 90). The painting is, of course, a portrait of Oliver’s biological mother, and it is only then that Mr. Brownlow puts the connection together: “he pointed hastily to the picture above Oliver’s head, and then to the boy’s face. There was its living copy,—the eyes, the head, the mouth: every feature was the same” (93).
A similar process occurs in Bleak House (1852–53) when Guppy connects Esther’s face with the portrait of Lady Dedlock he encounters on his first visit to Chesney Wold—a connection that spurs his hasty marriage proposal ([1852–53] 2003, 110–12). The resemblance between Lady Dedlock’s face and her biological daughter’s is also what sends Esther into a state of “unaccountable agitation” on confronting her likeness in a church gathering at the estate: “But why her face should be, in a confused way, like a broken glass to me, in which I saw scraps of old remembrances; and why I should be so fluttered and troubled (for I was still), by having casually met her eyes; I could not think” (292). Throughout the middle sections of the novel, Esther says, “her [Lady Dedlock’s] face retained the same influence on me as at first” (366). And in the arresting scene in which Lady Dedlock finally reveals her true identity as Esther’s mother, Dickens isolates the face, above all else, as the primary site of identification. Here is Esther’s account of the experience: “I was rendered motionless. Not so much by her hurried gesture of entreaty, not so much by her quick advance and outstretched hands, not so much by the great change in her manner, and the absence of her haughty self-restraint, as by something in her face that I had pined for and dreamed of when I was a little child; something I had never seen in any face” (578; emphasis mine). This tendency to connect improbable affiliations among his characters by way of facial features was so prevalent, in fact, that it eventually led G. H. Lewes (1872b, 152) to ascribe the “coincidences” of countenance in Dickens’s novels to an overabundance of physiognomy books in his Doughty Street library. As we have already seen, though, by the time Dickens began to compose Great Expectations at Gad’s Hill, his study’s bookshelves were also stocked with many important books by Bell, Chambers, Darwin, Owen, and Du Chaillu, all of which focused to some degree on the natural history of manual appendages.
Dickens builds on the dim but accruing senses of filial identification that appear in Oliver Twist and Bleak House, but he doubles down on them in Great Expectations’ hands. And here, the shift in the primary mode of identification between Molly and Estella from faces to hands is essential. Not only is it an extension of the “brought up by hand” idiom that simultaneously adheres to the novel’s unfurling narratological and thematic demands, but it is also one whose unique dispersal throughout the text reflects the culture’s evolutionary anxieties. The improbability of the biological association between mother and daughter, of course, rests on the putative chasm of difference between what their respective hands mean in the era’s symbolic perceptual economy: if Molly’s hands connote animality, violence, and lower-class labor, then Estella’s signify refinement, beauty, and upper-class leisure.
And yet for much of the novel, Dickens actively abets and even endorses the misinterpretation of these categories as separate, self-contained entities through the depiction of feminine gesture at Satis House. He often figures Miss Havisham’s class leverage, for example, as a barely perceptible but consistent combination of verbal and manual directive. Over and over again, Miss Havisham’s orders for Pip to play, to sing “Old Clem,” and to walk her around the decrepit bridal table are accompanied by the same “impatient movement of the fingers of her right hand” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 59, 62, 83). What complicates Pip’s mistake is the fact that Estella appears to inherit a capacity for similar behavior as she uses her “white,” “taunting hand” to reinforce her inaccessibility during Pip’s torturous early visits to Satis House (65, 238). Read in retrospect, this extension of and twist on Estella’s “bringing up by hand” operates as something of a narrative red herring. It apparently affiliates Satis House with a Ruskinian notion of gentility as an organic sensibility where the “fineness of Nature” is figured as a category of (natural) breeding (Ruskin 1852, iii, 117). Unable to even consider the notion of a less-than-aristocratic Estella, therefore, Pip is blinded by the Victorian ideology that unilaterally tended to convert differences in the acquisition of culture (nurture) into differences of nature.30
Dickens intensifies this crucial inability to comprehend the constructed relationships between high and low in Pip’s repeated failure to identify the connection between Estella’s and Molly’s hands. After the dramatic hand-taming scene at Jaggers’s dinner party, the text subtly but consistently aligns Molly’s animality with Estella’s recalcitrance almost exclusively by way of gestural similarity. Estella’s insistence that she possesses “no softness, no—sympathy—[no] sentiment,” for instance, becomes acutely unsettling to Pip because of how often it is accompanied by “a slight wave of her hand” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 237, 238, 264, 269). Her proclamation of insensitivity, combined with the movement of her gesturing hand, on one of these occasions sends Pip into one of his most uncanny and puzzling meditations: “As my eyes followed her white hand, again the same dim suggestion that I could not possibly grasp, crossed me. My involuntary start occasioned her to lay her hand upon my arm. Instantly the ghost passed once more and was gone. What was it?” (237–38; emphasis original). After this interaction, the question—“What was the nameless shadow?”—revisits Pip each subsequent time he encounters Estella’s hands in virtually any capacity (264; emphasis original). And as we have seen with idiomatic expressions in other chapters, Dickens delights in playing with, punning, and reworking idiomaticity into literalizations of which his characters and perhaps even he may not be fully aware. For instance, in the same conversation where Estella reminds Pip that he “was not brought up [by hand] in that strange [Satis] house from a mere baby,” she nonetheless tells him that she is “beholden” to him and concludes the very same sentence by saying, “There is my hand upon it” (267). Considering this accrual of manually inflected idiomatic language, it is understandable that hearing and seeing as much in relation to Estella’s actual hands during this scene causes Pip “to be all alight and alive with that inexplicable feeling [he] had had before” (269).
The repetition of “that inexplicable feeling” alongside Pip’s initial failure to identify the connection between Estella’s and Molly’s hands plays a significant role in creating the narrative tension necessary for a story told in weekly installments, but it also exposes Pip’s crucial misunderstanding of the relationship between nature and nurture which resides at the core of the “brought up by hand” idiom. Estella’s beauty and inaccessibility lead Pip to assume that there is something natural about her class position, an assumption that exemplifies par excellence Bourdieu’s notion that social values tend to become invisible as acts of culture. Indeed, Pip suffers from a form of habitus that legitimates (and thus delimits) categories in a society that encourages people to recognize as valid and “truthful” the kinds of everyday ritual, dress, and actions which make people appear to be the flesh-and-blood incarnations of their social environments.
We witness this misperception poignantly in the scene where Pip and Wemmick visit Newgate Prison to kill time before Pip is scheduled to meet Estella at the coach station. Feeling “encompassed by all [Newgate’s] taint of prison and crime,” Pip believes Estella to be all that is opposite such “taint”: “I thought of the beautiful young Estella, proud and refined, coming towards me, and I thought with absolute abhorrence of the contrast between the jail and her” (264). The “contaminat[ion]” Pip feels “from the soiling consciousness of Mr. Wemmick’s conservatory” culminates in seeing Estella’s “hand waving to [him]” from the coach window as it pulls up (264). The conjunction of what Pip takes to be the opposing markers of lower-class crime—shaking the hands of Newgate prisoners—and genteel refinement—Estella’s waving hand from the train window—once again sends Pip into the same bewildering meditation. “What was the nameless shadow,” he asks, “which again in that one instant had passed?” (264; emphasis original). Pip’s reluctance to draw connections at this point in the novel is exhibited perhaps most ironically in his objection to Estella’s professed incapacity for feeling by his asseverations that such emotional deficiency from one so beautiful “is not in Nature” (362). Estella’s succinct and double-sided riposte more accurately summarizes the interconnectedness between nature and nurture that Pip repeatedly fails to see: “It is in my nature,” says Estella. “It is in the nature formed within me” (362; emphasis original). The clarification Estella adds in the final sentence, here, correctly but confusingly exhibits her understanding that what Pip assumes is her “nature” is really her nurture by Miss Havisham—the eccentric nurture practiced by the woman who “brought her up by hand.”
Dickens is careful, however, to emphasize that Pip’s misunderstanding of the relationships between nature and nurture are not unique to him or to his class position. Miss Havisham, the woman who molds the largest portion of Estella’s constructed nature, also fails to understand the indiscriminately destructive power of her own nurturing. This misunderstanding reaches its finest narrative consummation when Pip reports what happens “the first time [he] had ever seen them opposed” (303). Utterly nonplussed upon hearing the “pot calling the kettle black” accusation from her “mother by adoption” that she has a “cold, cold heart,” Estella realizes that she must walk Miss Havisham through the paces of the relationship between one’s nurture and one’s nature:
“I begin to think,” said Estella, in a musing way, after another moment of calm wonder, “that I almost understand how this [disagreement] comes about. If you had brought up your adopted daughter wholly in the dark confinement of these rooms, and had never let her know that there was such a thing as the daylight by which she has never once seen your face—if you had done that, and then, for a purpose had wanted her to understand the daylight and know all about it, you would have been disappointed and angry?” …
“Or,” said Estella, “—which is a nearer case—if you had taught her, from the dawn of her intelligence, with your utmost energy and might, that there was such a thing as daylight, but that it was made to be her enemy and destroyer, and she must always turn against it, for it had blighted you and would else blight her; if you had done this, and then, for a purpose, had wanted her to take naturally to the daylight and she could not do it, you would have been disappointed and angry?” (306)
After this bravura articulation of the manner in which Miss Havisham has brought her up by hand, Estella answers her own question with devastating concision: “I must be taken as I have been made” (306).31
No matter how self-aware Estella is in terms of how she has “been made” by Miss Havisham’s nurture, however, she remains wholly uninformed about her biological kinship with her parents, Molly and Magwitch. Consequently, beneath her genteel aloofness and apparent refinement, there are important parts of Estella’s unconscious identity that link her disposition, as well as her hand movements, to Molly’s “wild,” “untamed,” and violent nature. Not only does she exhibit the violent capacity of her mother’s hands (and all of those who bring up their children by hand: Mrs. Joe, Pumblechook, Joe’s father) as she slaps Pip’s face “with such force as she had” while a young girl at Satis House, but she also appears attracted to the atmosphere of physical aggression itself. Watching Herbert and Pip’s bloody fistfight delights the young Estella so much that she offers Pip her only unsolicited amatory advance in the moments following the altercation: “There was a bright flush upon her face, as though something had happened to delight her. Instead of going straight to the gate, too, she stepped back into the passage, and beckoned me. ‘Come here! You may kiss me if you like’ ” (93). Interestingly, Estella shows her attraction to Pip not when he ceases to labor with his “coarse hands” in the forge as he would have thought but after he cuts them on Herbert’s teeth and confesses to feeling like a “species of young wolf, or other wild beast” (60, 93). Therefore, Estella’s attraction to physical violence—a violence that is apparent also in her seemingly inscrutable decision to marry the horse-beating Drummle—suggests the emergence of a long-buried barbarism that opens deeper, biological connections to her mother, Molly. Yet only in connecting mother and daughter by the appearance of their hands and the “action of their fingers” does Pip register a Darwinian truth that he, along with middle-class culture at large, deeply abhors: that criminality and civilization, violence and refinement, labor and wealth are always inextricably connected.
The Labor of Hand Transformation
This Darwinian model of interconnectedness frames the entire novel in the sense that Pip’s bildung turns out to be the process by which he learns to comprehend and appreciate his relationship to the social, economic, and emotional value of his own and other previously maligned hands. Such development poses a figurative corollary to the literal transformation of Pip’s hands from coarse instruments of apprenticed labor in the forge to bejeweled appendages of leisure in his gentlemanly life. Nowhere does the contrast and connection between laboring and genteel hands appear more starkly than when Magwitch returns to Pip’s apartment in London—a plot event in the making since the novel’s second page that adds yet another and perhaps most salient dimension to what it means for Pip to be “brought up by hand.” In this reunion scene, Magwitch’s proclamation that he “lived rough, that [Pip] should live smooth” is not simply highlighted but brilliantly embodied by the physical interplay of Magwitch’s “heavy brown veinous” hands and Pip’s ringed and recoiling hands (319, 315). On seven successive occasions in this brief chapter, Magwitch attempts to embrace “both” of Pip’s hands, and Pip at first responds by “recoil[ing] from his touch as if he had been a snake” (320). Pip’s horrified withdrawal is a reaction to the realization that, without his knowledge, he has in fact, even as a gentleman, continued to be “brought up by hand.” But in this particular refraction of the idiom, his sister’s abusive hand is replaced by Magwitch’s laboring hand which has been applied so strenuously and profitably to sheep-farming operations after his criminal transportation abroad. This climactic replacement is fittingly underscored with characteristically incisive wordplay connected to the original idiom; not only has Magwitch brought Pip up by hand from another continent, but he assures Pip that his being brought up in a leisured, gentlemanly lifestyle has been accomplished entirely “single-handed” (321).
Furthermore, Magwitch’s hands appear “large,” “heavy,” “brown,” “veinous,” and “knotted” only when he returns from putting them to work in New South Wales (i.e., not in the novel’s opening pages when his “work” was criminal). This new characterization seemingly fulfills Friedrich Engels’s ([1876] 1968, 253; emphasis original) postulation that “the hand is not only the organ of labour, it is also the product of labour.” As we saw with the case of Molly, the size and strength of Magwitch’s hands would indicate a combination of wildness, barbarity, and criminality to nineteenth-century readers. In a Marxian sense, though, Dickens’s emphasis on the materiality of Magwitch’s hands underscores the physiological fact of human labor behind a money commodity that could not have been formerly more abstract to Pip. He admits as much when he confides in Herbert at the height of his confusion, “It has almost made me mad to sit here of a night and see him before me, so bound up with my fortunes and misfortunes, and yet so unknown to me” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 344).
This comment is also indicative of Pip’s continuing struggle to comprehend the new refraction of the novel’s organizing idiom. He assumes that he has been “brought up” to his gentlemanly status by Miss Havisham’s hand—a genteel hand so far removed from the labor that guarantees its gentility. Rather than immediately recognize such labor in the hand that has in reality brought him up to his leisured lifestyle, or perhaps because he recognizes it, Pip confuses a criminal hand that he speculates is “stained with blood” with a laboring hand that is marked by work (322). His unwillingness to acknowledge a hand so marked engages the more central problem of work’s increasing invisibility in the rapidly industrializing and capitalized economy in the decade before Great Expectations.32 Pip confirms his culture’s investment in this persistent separation of work and product when he laments early on in the novel that the only thing worse than being a manual laborer is being seen in the act of performing such labor: “What I dreaded was, that in some unlucky hour I, being at my grimiest and commonest, should lift up my eyes and see Estella looking in at one of the wooden windows of the forge” (108). In a further ironic twist on Karl Marx, Pip’s ignorance of where his fortune comes from is perhaps never so fraught with alienation than on the night when he perceives the hands that actually produced it. The agitation with which Pip receives Magwitch’s avowal that “I worked hard, that you should be above work,” therefore, comes not so much because of the convict’s former life as a criminal but rather because the producing hand has become literally and, thus, uneasily visible. Pip’s rise in class has been so swift and comprehensive (comprehensively associated, he mistakenly believes, with gentility) that the knowledge of being brought up by a laboring hand is at this moment in the novel nearly as rebarbative as being brought up by a physically abusive one.
Up until the point of Magwitch’s return, Pip has maintained a state of agitated unawareness regarding the connection between the money that sustains his leisured life and the labor (or not, in Havisham’s case) that underwrites it. The “social hieroglyphic” that Marx (1990, 132) sees connecting labor and money, though, becomes immediately decipherable when Magwitch enters Pip’s London apartment with his working hands outstretched.33 The physical features of Magwitch’s hands finally materialize the “mystical character” of the commodity that Marx attributes to its ability to embody human labor (240, 132). The size and color of his hands, along with their veins and knots, therefore serve as the text’s most important reminder of the Darwinian model of interconnectedness: that the idleness and prosperity of the privileged classes are always interconnected with and dependent on the labor of others—even when the intermediate stages remain unseen.
Indeed, all of the hands in Great Expectations end up idiomatically, literally, and thematically conglomerate. Given the novel’s early emphasis on the physical implications of being brought up by Mrs. Joe’s heavy hand, Pip’s time as an idle gentleman ends as aptly as it does abruptly in his attempt to save Miss Havisham from her burning house. The burns he sustains in the attempt to save Havisham render functionally useless the very hands on whose disengagement Pip’s Victorian gentility has been predicated since coming into his fortune. The fact that Pip burns his hands also further emphasizes how far his quest for gentlemanly status has taken him since he was “brought up by hand”/“bound out of hand” as an apprentice blacksmith—a vocation that required him to handle fire, burning coals, and molten iron on a daily basis. Regaining “the use of [his] hands” so that he can use them to row Magwitch safely out of the country thus becomes the most important object in Pip’s life and one necessary for him to recognize the immediate functionality and value of the burned hands he had earlier so contemptuously disowned as “coarse and common” appendages (404).
Moreover, if Pip’s emotional search for Estella’s true identity is a displaced search for his own identity, as Carolyn Brown (1987, 71) has usefully suggested, then the specific location of the disclosure of Estella’s history within the scene where Pip receives treatment for his burned hands is a brilliant masterstroke that merits closer scrutiny. Its brilliance lies in the seamless shift between the idiom’s figurative and literal registers even within a single sentence of dialogue. Here, the juxtaposition of Herbert’s family’s knowledge of Estella—how she was figuratively brought up by hand because of her mother’s, Molly’s, actions—merges with the literal convalescence of Pip’s burned hands: “ ‘It seems,’ said Herbert, ‘—there’s a bandage off most charmingly, and now comes the cool one—makes you shrink at first, my poor dear fellow, don’t it? but it will be comfortable presently—it seems that the woman [Molly] was a young woman, and a jealous woman, and a revengeful woman; revengeful, Handel, to the last degree’ ” (405).
Something remarkable happens in this passage’s treatment of Pip’s “shrinking.” The shrinking reaction is at once a physical response to having bandages removed from his blistered hands and an emotional flinch from learning of Estella’s low, violent, and criminal origins—a scenario that eerily confirms Beer’s (1983, 9) notion that “many Victorian rejections of evolutionary ideas register[ed] a physical shudder.” Pip shudders from confronting the reality that Molly and Estella, seemingly opposite Victorian social “species,” share the closest of biological affiliations.34 With their “natures” so similar, their only difference is a result of accidental nurture, where Jaggers happens to hold “a trust to find a child for an eccentric rich lady to adopt and bring up” (“by hand”) at the same Darwinianly chance time Molly happens to murder her rival (413). Thus, the causes of Pip’s physical, intellectual, and emotional pain are the same at this extraordinary moment, and their convergence in the novel’s most idiomatically and literally referenced body part draws attention to the ways in which the Victorian anxieties concerning the fragility of the once-impenetrable barrier between human and animal were transferred—often via the hand—to the period’s increasingly porous social boundaries.
Dickens eventually mitigates some of these anxieties by having the novel come full circle in terms of its original organizing idiom. Pip, at the novel’s conclusion, finally manages to escape the physical and emotional toll of having been brought up by hand (in all its senses) principally by breaking its abusive cycle in Joe-like fashion—participating as he does in “nurturing” Magwitch during his convict benefactor’s final days. And as we saw earlier with Joe’s nurturing touch—where an altogether new model of bringing Pip up by hand emerges—Dickens channels the lion’s share of intense sympathetic feeling between Pip and Magwitch through the hand. In a sequence at the end of the novel that Stone (1979, 330) has referred to as a “secret freemasonry of hands,” Pip yearns for contact with the once-criminal hands he so desperately sought to keep separate from his own: “Sometimes [Magwitch] was almost, or quite, unable to speak; then he would answer me with slight pressures in my hand, and I grew to understand their meaning very well.… I pressed his hand in silence, for I could not forget that I had once meant to desert him” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 459). Many subsequent critics have followed Stone’s lead in attempting to decode Dickens’s emphasis on hands in Great Expectations as part of a “fugitive,” “covert,” and “textually-established scheme” (Macleod 2002, 127, 129); as the site of “encryption for homosocial desire” (W. Cohen 1993, 221); or simply as “the end point of the novel’s metonymic logic” (Woloch 2003, 201). As I have endeavored to show, however, at least one of the meanings behind the pantomime behavior that ends Great Expectations is far from secret or “magical” (Stone 1979, 333). Instead, it offers a quite fitting resolution for a novel whose principal idiom is deeply embodied in the unique cultural moment when the hand was diagnostic of biological, social, and moral identity. The events at the end of the novel therefore provide a theater of new possibilities for what it might mean to be “brought up by hand.”
Considering Dickens’s use of the idiom in the context of contemporary cultural preoccupations also allows us to evaluate how its central body part could become a site where scientists and novelists alike reimagined positive progress and transformation alongside the existential angst often associated with the arrival of radically altered evolutionary paradigms. This is why I think it is important to acknowledge not only Dickens’s unnerving parallels between anthropoid apes and humans but also his punning and good-spirited use of Darwinian evolutionary thinking. Specifically, in the world of this novel, those who fail to adapt and to change never truly make any social or moral progress, and Dickens clearly revels in this idea as he concludes. Characters like the smarmy Pumblechook conspicuously (“May I?”) offer “the same fat five fingers” (Dickens [1860–61] 2003, 475) at the text’s beginning and at its ending. The previously illiterate Joe, over the same course of time, though, develops not only his laboring hand but his writing one as well: “Joe now sat down to his great work, first choosing a pen from the pen-tray as if it were a chest of large tools, and tucking up his sleeves as if he were going to wield a crowbar or sledge-hammer” (464). Likewise, it could hardly be more fitting for a character who is “brought up by hand” to become a man “by hand.” Pip’s moral development actually becomes manual development; the sensitivity and self-awareness of his character eventually merges with the sensitivity and self-awareness of his hands as he learns to value, among other things, the feel of “pretty eloquence” in Biddy’s wedding-ringed hand and the exquisite meaning of the “slight pressures” of Magwitch’s hand while his benefactor lay on his deathbed (459). Even his ability to thwart Jaggers’s “powerful pocket handkerchief” develops concomitantly with his ability to distinguish between criminality and manual labor, between hands that forge bank notes and hands that forge iron, and ultimately, between hands that “work” and hands that work (411). We might even say, in the spirit of Dickens’s idiomatic wordplay, that by learning to distinguish between hands that hurt and hands that help, the character nicknamed “Handel” finally manages to come to grips with being brought up by hand.
1. Butt and Tillotson’s book contains chapters on Sketches by Boz, Pickwick Papers, Barnaby Rudge, Dombey and Son, David Copperfield, Bleak House, Hard Times, and Little Dorrit.
2. Dickens’s Book of Memoranda (begun in 1855) includes a list of more than 125 possible names for fictional characters. Eleven of these names do eventually appear in Great Expectations: Magwitch, Provis, Clarriker, Compey (Compeyson), Pumblechook, Horlick (Orlick), Doolge (Dolge), Gannery-Gargery, Wopsell (Wopsle), Hubble, and Skiffins.
3. Stone (1987, 318) describes these three sheets as follows: “one sheet of notes (begun after the last stage had been written) reviews the central, already established chronologies in the novel and the consequent ages of the chief characters as the resolution starts to unfold; a second sheet of succinct memos (written … about halfway through the last stage) sets for the chief events and developments to be detailed in the remainder of the unfolding; and a third sheet of notes concerns the Thames tides—for use in constructing the episodes surrounding Magwitch’s attempted river escape.”
4. Dickens to Forster, in House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 319.
5. House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 310; emphasis original.
6. We know from Dickens’s notes that he used up fully ten half sheets on working titles for Bleak House and seventeen for what eventually becomes David Copperfield. Many are also familiar with how close Little Dorrit came to being titled Nobody’s Fault. The most detailed and fascinating analysis of Dickens’s process in this last example is still chapter 9 of Butt and Tillotson (1957), which is titled “From ‘Nobody’s Fault’ to Little Dorrit.”
7. See also Fielding 1961.
8. For an alternate interpretation of the novel in terms of its lack of “planning” notes, see Stone 1970. Herein Stone contends that Dickens had met an “eccentric and wealthy lady” in boyhood and is therefore able to build his story around that haunting memory.
9. Although my sense is that Dickens was intentional in his choice of the “brought up by hand” idiom to begin the novel, and I agree with Stone (1987, 317) that “Dickens planned the book with great art and subtlety,” I disagree with Stone that Dickens “calculated every effect and nuance.” Instead, I think that at least some of the idiom’s refractions are organically and therefore somewhat unconsciously extended.
10. For a history of criticism focused on hands in Great Expectations, if not the actual “brought up by hand” idiom, see Forker (1961–62), Parish (1962), Moore (1965), Stone (1979), W. Cohen (1993), Macleod (2002), and Woloch (2003, 201). I have also contributed to this body critical work on hands in the novel. See Capuano 2015.
11. It is interesting to consider this in conjunction with the letter Dickens wrote to Charles Lever on October 6, 1860 explaining why Lever’s work was not performing well in All the Year Round: “Whether it is too detached and discursive in its interest for the audience and the form of publication, I can not say positively; but it does not take hold” (House et al. 1965–2002, ix, 321–22; emphasis original). Then, a week later (October 15), Dickens followed up: “For such a purpose, it does not do what you and I would have it do. I suppose the cause to be, that it does not lay some one strong ground of suspended interest.… Some of the best books ever written would not bear the mode of publication; and one of its most remarkable and aggravating features is, that if you do not fix [affix] the people in the beginning, it is almost impossible to fix them afterwards” (ix, 327–28).
12. Estella says that she was “brought up in [Satis] house from a mere baby” (267). Many influential critics assume that Estella was indeed “brought up by hand.” See, for example, Peter Brooks’s (1984, 134) claim that “Estella’s story in fact eventually links all the plots of the novel: Satis House, the aspiration to gentility, the convict identity, … bringing up by hand, the law.”
13. It is worth noting the cyclical dimension to the Havisham-Estella relationship. There is evidence that the young Havisham was also literally also brought up by hand. Herbert Pocket reveals that the young Havisham was “a spoilt child” because “Her mother died when she was a baby and her father denied her nothing” (180). This spoiling also leaves her completely unprepared to deal with her marital jilting—and so the cycle continues.
14. Foucault (1977, 255, 297) famously claims that “the delinquent is an institutional product” wherein “the prison fabricates delinquents” by repeatedly “bringing them back, almost inevitably” to its “carceral archipelago,” its “carceral net.”
15. I am using this phrase in the sense that Andrew Miller (2008) has developed. See, especially, chapter 7, “On Lives Unled.” For an analysis of counterfactuals and “the optative mood” in Great Expectations (in connection to moral reflection and realism), see A. Miller (2012).
16. Maya Angelou’s twentieth-century formulation that “hurt people hurt people” accurately describes many of the cycles of abuse we encounter in Great Expectations, and it is one that emphasizes the role of nurture in peoples’ “nature.” Joe is an exception as a hurt person who hurts no one.
17. For an analysis of how hands were first radically destabilized from their position as working appendages, see Capuano 2015, especially 1–16.
18. Early prose fiction constantly drew on the power of God’s hand. For just a few examples, see Robinson Crusoe (1719), where the shipwrecked Crusoe wonders if “the Hand of God” has meted out his punishment; considers whether “the distinguishing goodness of the Hand” saved his life; wavers back to a belief that “the Hand of God [was] against [him]”; and continues to mull over the prospect that “the present Affliction of [his] Circumstances” come from “[God’s] Hand” ([1719] 2008, 76–77). At the end of the century, in Fanny Burney’s Evelina (1778), when Evelina stops Mr. Macartney from committing armed robbery (which she perceives to be a suicide attempt), Macartney proclaims that “the hand of Providence seemed to intervene between me and eternity” ([1788] 2002, 231).
19. For a detailed account of Bell’s treatise on The Hand in the context of Victorian industrialization, see Capuano 2015, 42–67.
20. See Stonehouse 1935.
21. Since Dickens deeply admired Poe’s craft and met him in Philadelphia during his trip to the United States in 1842, it is likely that he would have been aware of this specific strain of manual anxiety before the 1850s. For an exploration of Poe’s popularity in England more generally, see Fisher 1999.
22. Scholars have continued to interpret the general nineteenth-century “evolution question” similarly. Most recently, for example, Pamela Gilbert (2019, 6) has noted how “the body became the center of an anxious elaboration of the human, from which the consideration of its shadow—the savage, the animal, the irrational—was never far.” My point is that this anxiety was never closer than when it involved specific questions about the hand.
23. Because Great Expectations has been conspicuously absent from Darwinian criticism (see footnote 28 for specifics), I feel that is important to recall Welsh’s (1971, 117) warning not to “underestimate the degree to which Dickens was aware of the intellectual ferment of his time.” There is no doubt that the major ferment at the time of Great Expectations’ composition was the publication of Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. I call attention to this here because in order to make an evolutionary-based argument about the specific ways the manual idiom operates in this novel, it is necessary to note the many foundational ways that Great Expectations is a deeply “Darwinian” text. In November 1859, Charles Darwin had punctuated decades of evolutionary debate with the publication of On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or, the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. The inclusion of the full title is relevant because its driving emphasis on “the Struggle for Life” (mentioned by Darwin more than fifty times in the first edition) informs the most basic dimensions of Great Expectations. On the novel’s first page, for instance, Pip refers to his “five little brothers … who gave up trying to get a living, exceedingly early in that universal struggle” (3), describes the convicts battling at the bottom of the ditch shortly thereafter as “bleeding and panting and struggling” (36), and refers to his bloody-knuckled fight with the “pale young gentleman” at Satis House as “the late struggle” (94). The sense of strength required in the struggle for dominance also forms the premise of Jaggers’s speculation regarding the marriage of Bentley Drummle and Estella. Jaggers frames even their romantic relationship as a struggle for “supremacy” where “the stronger will win in the end” (389, 390). Moreover, the random and chance contingencies necessary for the operation of Darwin’s theory of natural selection paradoxically “order” the events in Great Expectations more explicitly than in any other Dickensian novel. Pip famously muses on how his life would have unfolded had it not been for that one “memorable day” when he first encounters Miss Havisham and Estella: “Imagine one selected day struck out of it, and think how different its course would have been” (72). But then, of course, there is also “that chance intercourse” with the Magwitch (who later declares “What odds?”) which opens the novel (316, 319), the uncertainty Pip feels “exposed to hundreds of chances” in his gentlemanly life (248), and his eventual realization of the “coincidence” that Jaggers just simply happens to be the lawyer of both Miss Havisham and Magwitch (359). Given these alignments with the evolutionary ferment of the 1850s, it is neither coincidental nor surprising that Great Expectations configures many of its human characters on a hierarchical scale of animality. Magwitch, so cold and wet on the marshes where he spends the night waiting for assistance, expresses a desire to be better adapted to his environment, exclaiming, “I wish I was a frog. Or a eel!” (6). This establishes a pattern in the text where criminals (and as we shall see, manual workers) are represented “as if they were lower animals” (227), “wild beasts” (36, 93), dogs (19), snakes (320), and so on. Orlick “slouches” (112, 118, way more) “in his stagnant way” (131) from “the mud and ooze” (131, 422), and Pip, after the fight with the pale young gentleman, even “regard[s] [him]self … as a species of savage young wolf, or other wild beast” (92–93). Perhaps most tellingly, though, Mrs. Joe “pounce[s] upon [Pip], like an eagle on a lamb” (52). Thus, the character on whom Dickens mostly closely focuses the association of the “brought up by hand” idiom raises Pip not only by the jerks and blows of her hands but by a violent talon clamping associated with a ferocious bird of prey.
24. The Victorian public feared descent even as evolutionary biologists altered their definitions of anatomical species development to, in effect, reassert human supremacy with different rhetoric and body parts. Herbert Spencer (1872, 361; emphasis mine), for example, began to emphasize the “perfection of the tactile apparatus” in human as compared to ape hands while Richard Owen argued for the cerebral primacy of man—a position that would later form the basis of the vituperative public arguments between Samuel Wilberforce and Thomas Huxley.
25. As Dennis Walder (1981) has noted, Dickens had a complex relationship with contemporary religion.
26. See Stonehouse 1935.
27. More recently, Laura Peters (2013, 5) has affixed Dickens’s “formal” declaration of his avid interest in science of his day to his publication of “Review: The Poetry of Science” for The Examiner in 1848. I would add that Dickens was particularly interested in Darwinian evolutionary ideas in the months during his composition of Great Expectations. His journal All the Year Round published three anonymous but explicitly Darwin-focused articles more or less immediately after the Origin debuted in November 1859: “Species” (June 2, 1860); “Natural Selection” (July 7, 1860); “Transmutation of Species” (March 9, 1861).
28. Despite the pioneering work of Beer and Levine in the 1980s which broke open the field of Darwinian literary criticism, it is surprising that Great Expectations has received almost no evolutionary-centered attention—especially considering the fact that it is Dickens’s first novel after the publication of the Origin. As the post-colonic title of Beer’s Darwin’s Plots (1983) indicates, Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot, and Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Dickens is not a central concern of this groundbreaking text. When Beer (1983, 42) does discuss Dickens, though, it is in relation to Bleak House where “the sense that everything is connected” leads to a realization that all of the characters are “interdependent.” Even in her later book Open Fields: Science in Cultural Encounter, Beer (1996, 141) does not mention Great Expectations—continuing instead to identify Bleak House as the novel where “wickedness as well as danger” emerges from the “refus[al] to recognize that people are connected.” Levine’s Darwin and the Novelists (1988) still stands as the definitive work on Dickens in relation to Darwinian evolutionary thought. However, the chapter in this book titled “Dickens and Darwin” contains only two brief references to Great Expectations whereas Levine treats just about every other Dickens novel extensively and masterfully in terms of Darwin. Commenting on Dickens’s admittedly bizarre defense of Krook’s death by “spontaneous combustion” in Bleak House, Danny Hack (1999, 134) has maintained that “few critics put much stock in Dickens’s scientific sophistication.” Jay Clayton (2003, 95) acknowledges that Dickens maintained a keen interest in science throughout his career but believes that this “has been overlooked because none of his concerns figured prominently in evolutionary thinking.” Grace Moore (2004) makes no mention of Great Expectations’ evolutionary context in Dickens and Empire: Discourses of Class, Race and Colonialism in the Works of Charles Dickens, nor does Priti Joshi (2011, 292–300) in her chapter on “Race” in Charles Dickens in Context. Ivan Kreilkamp’s (2007, 81–94) “Dying like a Dog in Great Expectations” mentions Darwin only in a single footnote. More recently, Laura Peters (2013), in Dickens and Race, entirely excludes Great Expectations. For a notable exception to this general critical tendency to bypass the connections between Great Expectations and the circulation of contemporary evolutionary ideas, see Morgentaler 1998.
29. The key texts in relation to Munby and Culliwick are Hudson (1972) and Davidoff (1979). More recent studies of this relationship, not in conjunction with Great Expectations, include Stanley (1986), Pollock (1993–94), McClintock (1995), and Reay (2002).
30. My formulation, here, is indebted to Bourdieu 1984, 68.
31. For an alternate reading of this important scene in relation to Plato’s cave and Shakespeare’s King Lear, see A. Miller (2008, 185–86).
32. Although he does not connect their titles’ similarities, Richards (1990, 3) has argued that the “Great Exhibition” of 1851 inaugurated an “era of spectacle” where the display of Victorian commodities became physically and semiotically separated from their actual manufacture.
33. Note the difference between Pumblechook’s groveling attempts to shake Pip’s hands and Magwitch’s desire to hold and, presumably, to see the hands his strenuous efforts have kept free from manual labor.
34. A. Miller (2012, 783) discusses the novel’s “engagement with types and species” but does not draw any connection to Darwinian influence.
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