In Changing Hands, his wide-ranging study of novels from Frankenstein to The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Peter Capuano contends that the one-two punch of rapid industrialization and evolutionary theory transformed the hand into the most ideologically resonant and fraught part of the body. Beginning with the observation that idiomatic expressions like “hand-to-hand combat” and “the handwriting on the wall” have lost their literal meaning, Capuano turns to the embodied hand—the hand as flesh and blood, not as figure—to argue for its central place in nineteenth-century British literature and culture. Capuano makes a brief nod in the direction of macrodata (a computer-assisted study of 3,500 nineteenth-century novels revealed that hands are the most frequently mentioned body part), but for the most part he sticks to more traditional literary approaches, such as historical contextualization and careful reading. The result is a series of superb, sometimes revelatory, readings of nineteenth-century British novels.

According to Capuano, the nineteenth century starts badly for the hand, which finds itself in competition with the “machine-made appendages” of the factory (47). Moreover, the open machinery of the early factory caused thousands of workers to lose fingers, hands, and arms, and such injuries are frequently highlighted in accounts of the factory throughout the 1820s and 1830s. It is in this context that defenders of the hand came to prominence. The most notable for Capuano is Sir Charles Bell, a London surgeon who treated victims of industrial accidents and whose popular Bridgewater Treatise The Hand became an unlikely bestseller in the 1830s. In it, Capuano notes, Bell insists upon the superiority of the God-made hand at precisely the moment human hands “were being outperformed, displaced and mangled by machinery” (53). Capuano identifies this tension between the divine hand of God and the iron hand of machinery as animating early industrial texts from pro-industrial tracts to early anti-factory novels.

Capuano also examines mechanization and its relationship to nineteenth-century constructions of gender, which leads him to the unusual pairing of Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley (1849), an account of the Luddite rebellions, with Thackeray's Napoleonic epic, Vanity Fair (1847). Reading Shirley as a history of the origin of the separate spheres, Capuano parallels the underemployment of weavers' hands, made redundant by new machinery, and the overemployment of middle-class women's hands, which are consigned to unpaid (and pointless) domestic handicrafts. And while Thackeray's social satire unfolds a great distance from the woolen mills of Brontë’s Yorkshire, Capuano nevertheless asserts that Thackeray's portrait of Becky Sharp as masterful manipulator has its origins in the same anxieties about the hand found in Brontë’s investigation of early industrialism. Becky squeezes, shakes, and stabs her way to the top of British society, and thus her hands do appear to be a “remarkably generative site for female agency” (99). However, any actual link between Becky's manipulations and the manufacturing sector is hard to discern. The connection might have been strengthened had Capuano invoked those other agential hands during the industrial revolution—the female “hands” or mill workers who briefly appear in Shirley but otherwise dominated much of the industrial debates in the 1840s.

Indeed, one weakness of Changing Hands is that Capuano occasionally depends too heavily on an “in the air” mode of argument to pin individual novels to a larger cultural context. This method is most evident in the chapters that focus on the pressures exerted by evolutionary discourses on the hand. Even before Darwin published Origin of the Species (1859), Capuano contends, reports detailing the similarities between the gorilla and human hand made the Victorians uncomfortable. Capuano turns to Great Expectations (1861) and Daniel Deronda (1876) to argue that, in the face of this evolutionary evidence, writers underscored the uniqueness of human identity through the hand. Indisputably striking is the fact that both novels script the hand as the primary sign of identity: Pip uncovers the mystery of Estella's parentage through her hands, while Daniel's hidden Jewish heritage is revealed in his hands. However, the brilliance of Capuano's reading of Daniel Deronda, which answers long-standing questions about Daniel's Jewish body, arises from not from his contextualization of the novel within evolutionary discourses but rather from his drawing on the mystic Jewish practice of Kabbalah, which claims the hand as “the most visible” sign of the “Jewish soul” (173).

In contrast, when Capuano moves from the hand to handwriting as “the body fingerprint” (236) and thus the primary method of identification, the analyses he offers are models of smart contextualization. For example, Capuano's examination of legal handwriting in Bleak House (1853) in relationship to the advertisements for mechanized and manual modes of writing published alongside the novel's monthly parts beautifully exemplifies how advertising and fiction reinforced each other in the nineteenth century. Similarly, his reading of Lady Audley's Secret (1862) makes a strong case for handwriting being set against the new and mechanical. Linking Lady Audley to modernity through her mastery of train schedules and telegrams, Capuano notes that Lady Audley's social mobility is forestalled by Robert Audley's ability to positively identify her through her handwriting. In both novels, the handwritten serves as a reminder of an inimitable individuality that the machine can neither replace nor efface.

Capuano promises to expose what has been “hidden in plain sight” (11), and he makes good on that promise. It is striking how often handwriting, as well as the hand, function as major elements of plot in nineteenth-century British novels. For many nineteenth-century novelists, the hand served as an important metonym through which they could explore what it meant to be human. Historians as well as literary critics will find much to engage them in Capuano's well-researched and compelling inquiry into how the hand emerged in the nineteenth century as the body part that embodies the human.