The Touching Hand: Manual Contact and Industrial Labour in <i>Mary Barton</i>

This article argues that the hand in Elizabeth Gaskell's novel Mary Barton (1848) is a sensory organ, one that enables Gaskell's working-class characters to address the ills of industrialism. Victorian social commentators such as Thomas Carlyle, Charles Babbage and John Ruskin draw on the hand to illustrate the impact of machine culture on workers. The hand that emerges from their influential accounts tend to be an insentient instrument. In contrast, Charles Bell's treatise The Hand (1833) reminds his contemporaries that the sense of touch is an inalienable component of the hand. Sharing Bell's insight, Gaskell dramatizes her concern with labourers in Manchester through the ability of their hands to receive and convey sensory stimuli. When the mechanic Jem Wilson touches the body of the industrialist Harry Carson, Jem's touch erases the class boundaries that antagonise the two men. Described in terms of her encounter with industrial labour, Mary Barton's manual contact with Jem and its aftermath alleviate Victorian anxiety about factory work. Alice Wilson's manual exploration of her sailor nephew's face solves the problems of delay and separation characteristic of her career. The drama of touch in Mary Barton restores tactility to Victorian manual imagination. Gaskell establishes touch as a unique means of understanding workers' social and familial life in industrial England.