Readers of Peter J. Capuano and Sue Zemka's Victorian Hands: The Manual Turn in Nineteenth-Century Body Studies, a collection of essays on Victorian representations and histories of the hand, will be struck by its impressive list of contributors. Featuring a who's who of leading thinkers in different subfields of Victorian studies, the collection explores “how the unique conditions of the British nineteenth-century shaped the modern emergence of our cultural relationship with our hands” (2). As both the editors and individual contributors note, this project builds on previous studies of the hand in nineteenth-century literature and culture. They include contributor Aviva Briefel's The Racial Hand in the Victorian Imagination (2015) and Capuano's Changing Hands: Industry, Evolution, and the Reconfiguration of the Victorian Body (2015).

There are several standout essays in the collection. They include Tamara Ketabgian's essay on William Dodd's amputation and autobiographical writing. Ketabgian revisits The Narrative of the Experience and Sufferings of William Dodd, Factory Worker (1841), offering an analysis of Dodd's complicated relationship to his own body and to the factory labor that shaped it. Her work, fascinating in and of itself, gains additional value from its careful reading of Dodd's life writing, which, as Ketabgian explains, has sometimes been misunderstood by scholars who assume Dodd lost his limb to a workplace accident.

Kate Flint's essay offers a brief history of photography that is focused on—and by—the human hand. Flint's fascinating reading of chemical stains on the hands of photographers, both amateur and professional, reveals how, as photography evolved, the meaning of stains changed, from “a badge of serious aesthetic and scientific engagement” to “an undesirable mark of slovenliness” (193). The collection's success in offering fresh readings of canonical novels is well represented by Zemka's essay on Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone (1868). Zemka's analysis connects the Indian Mutiny and bodily mutilation with what she terms the “manual-centrism” of Collins’ novel (109). Also noteworthy is Julianne Smith's informative discussion of the role of hands in both illustrations and stage adaptations of Charles Dickens's Bleak House (1853).

Unfortunately, the parts of this collection are stronger than the whole. More engaged editing could have reduced repetition in the collection and freed contributors from undertaking similar tasks in order to make similar points. Readers will notice what contributors presumably did not have an opportunity to notice: that the essays invest and then invest again in establishing, for example, the prevalence and importance of references to hands in the Victorian novel. Jane Eyre, The Woman in White, The Moonstone, Middlemarch, and Bleak House: the novels change but the authors make very similar opening moves in their essays, enumerating and sampling references to hands in a given passage from a novel in order to establish the importance of hands to that novel. It lay with the editors to minimize this sometimes stultifying repetition of actions, claims, and citations and to edit the essays so as to better highlight their originality and their unique contributions—contributions to the field which are, it is important to note, very valuable ones. Some proofing oversights also distract from the strength of contributors’ work.

While work in disability studies is very well represented in this collection by Karen Bourrier on Jane Eyre and by Tamara Ketabgian on William Dodd, it is hard not to lament the collection's cursory engagement with nineteenth-century deaf culture and the history of manualism, a history compellingly but not exhaustively explored by Jennifer Esmail in Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture (2013). That no mention is made of the importance of the experience of reading by touch to blind people in nineteenth-century Britain, a history explored by Heather Tilley's Blindness and Writing (2017), also feels like a missed opportunity. Fortunately, the strength of individual essays in this collection will more than reward readers for time invested in exploring this book. It will be interesting to see how Victorian Hands influences Victorian studies, a field that remains both committed to and shaped by attentiveness to the body.