The Victorian Hand

A mural featuring a man in overalls and a cap, gesturing with his hands. Surrounding him are a train, eagle, highland cows, stag, wind turbines, and castles, set against a blue sky.

🤝 AI is back in the headlines and still can’t get hands right.

In this month’s blog, our Research Associate Helen Victoria Murray looks at Glasgow’s arts community response to a proposed AI-generated mural.

Read the full blog to explore the debate: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/ai-s...

We are delighted to invite you to take part in The Work of Mending workshops with @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social at The Royal College of Surgeons of England!

This series of creative workshops explores the meaning of hands and handwork, past and present.

Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/cc/the-work-...

🎥 In Robert Wiene’s The Hands of Orlac (1924), hands are the protagonists. After a train accident, a pianist receives transplanted hands from a murderer, which seem disturbingly autonomous and reflect early twentieth-century anxieties about prosthetics, fingerprinting, and modern medicine.

We're so excited about these workshops. Stay tuned for more news soon about dates.

Image: ‘Method of applying rubber surgical gloves’ from Modern methods for securing surgical asepsis (1908) by Edward Harrison, from the Library of the Royal College of Surgeons of England.

Black and white image showing a person helping another put on a glove. The glove is open, filled with water, as one hand slides in.

We are delighted to be partnering with @hunterianmuseum.bsky.social at The Royal College of Surgeons of England in our research on hands, craft and haptic skill in the nineteenth century!

Stay tuned for news about our collaboration and how to get involved!

We’re delighted to announce the first workshops in our Work of Mending series, in partnership with The Quilters’ Guild. These hands-on, research-led workshops explore what hands do and what they mean in historical and contemporary handwork.

Tickets: www.eventbrite.com/cc/the-work-...

The Work of Mending The Work of Mending is a series of research-led, hands-on workshops exploring what hands do and what they mean across histories of making, repairing and caring.

@victorianhand.bsky.social is running a series of workshops exploring our hands as agents of making & mending in collaboration with the Quilters' Guild & @collegeofsurgeons.bsky.social. You can sign up for the QG workshops here with dates for the RCS to follow:
www.eventbrite.com/cc/the-work-...

A patchwork quilt features vintage, monochrome portraits of women, accented with embroidery. A blue fabric piece and beige, circular embroidery are in progress. Emotive and historical feel

🙌 Two weeks on from The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity conference, we reflect on the stimulating contributions of scholars, artists and makers who explored the hand across historical, cultural and creative contexts.

Read our latest blog here: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/conf...

A huge thank you to all our delegates for joining The Hand: Emotion, Embodiment, Identity!

Your ideas, questions and conversations made the conference such a rewarding and inspiring event. We are grateful to everyone who contributed and helped make it a success 🤝

✋ This 1845 daguerreotype captured the branded hand of Jonathan Walker - marked ‘SS’ for ‘slave stealer’ after he tried to help enslaved people escape Florida. Intended as punishment, it became an abolitionist symbol, though his story often overshadowed those of the enslaved people he sought to aid.

A vintage prosthetic arm lies on a textured surface. The metal hand, detailed with joints, is palm-facing up. A strap extends from the arm's base. Historic, mechanical.

⚔️ Götz von Berlichingen lost his hand to a cannonball in 1504 and commissioned an iron prosthesis with hinged, lockable fingers for use in battle.

He later adopted a more advanced model - one of the earliest functioning mechanical prosthetic hands - which he used across his military career.

Portrait engraving of a man seated, holding a pencil and notebook. He wears a suit with a high collar and has sideburns. In the background is a framed painting of a ship at sea.

🌎 What happens when a travel writer navigates the world through touch?

This month’s blog explores the journeys of James Holman, the self-described ‘Blind Traveller’, and how his haptic encounters challenged the visual conventions of travel writing.

www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/the-...

A faint image of the bones inside a hand with a wedding ring. The picture is framed with green card with the title 'Hand mit Ringen [Hand with Ring]' and stamped by Wurzburg University.

In 1895 Wilhelm Conrad Röntgen discovered mysterious ‘X-rays’. His image of his wife’s hand - bones and wedding ring visible - captivated Europe.

X-rays transformed medicine, revealing the body’s interior without surgery. Early radiologists paid a price, as missing hands became a mark of the work.

🧵 We are delighted to be partnering with The Quilters’ Guild!

The Guild aims to give quilt-making the status it deserves as a craft and an art and its Quilt Collection preserves our patchwork and quilting heritage.

Stay tuned for more information about our collaboration and how to get involved!

Professor Bashord is standing in front of a screen displaying an image of the inked palm print of a gorilla, taken in London Zoo in 1936. The print shows the creases and lines of the palm.

Professor Bashford takes a question from the audience during the Q&A. Behind her, the slide shows a book titled The Psychonomy of the Hand.

We were thrilled to welcome Professor Alison Bashford to @globalaffairslu.bsky.social yesterday to discuss her new @uchicagopress.bsky.social book, Decoding the Hand.

Thank you to everyone who came along to hear insights into the entangled histories of science, medicine and magic!

Lovely to be at Alison Bashford’s talk @lancasteruni.bsky.social as a part of the @victorianhand.bsky.social project.

#Lancaster! Join Alison Bashford tonight, Nov 12 at 5pm, @globalaffairslu.bsky.social (with @victorianhand.bsky.social) as she discusses her new book, Decoding the Hand: A History of Science, Medicine, and Magic. #HistSTM #HSTM #HistSci #BookTour #Palmistry buff.ly/jsJZ7Kp

A red fist, representing collective power, emerging from a crowd of workers waving the red flag.

✊ From the late 19th century, socialist movements adopted the raised fist as a symbol of unity and strength.

One of the first depictions was by Hungarian artist Mihály Biró in 1912. His image of a fist emerging from factories toward parliament in Budapest visualised the power of collective action.

General registration is now open for our upcoming conference The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment and Identity at London College of Fashion, 8-9 January!

Visit our website to register: www.thevictorianhand.uk/conference

Black and white photo of a man sitting on a chair with prosthetic arms stroking his head and arms.

This month’s suitably spooky blog post is from our Research Associate, who has been speaking with the dead in the archives of the Society for Psychical Research!

Read here: www.thevictorianhand.uk/gallery/spir...

A black and white poster with photographs of hands in motion on the right hand side.

We are delighted to announce that the plenary speakers for our upcoming conference are Dr Sarah Jackson, Professor Peter J. Capuano and Caroline Seymour!

Visit our website for more information: www.thevictorianhand.uk/conference

A palm print at the top of a document, with the whirls and lines of the palm and fingerprints clearly visible.

In colonial India, William Herschel introduced fingerprinting in the 1850s to authenticate identity on legal documents.

Influenced by colonial ideologies, his experiments laid the foundations for modern forensic identification, codifying the hand as a scientific marker of identity.

#handoftheweek

A photograph in the negative of a handprint with caterpillar-like bristles emanating from the fingers and palm, supposedly showing the human soul.

A fuzzy picture of a palm print, with what looks like white clouds apparently showing the human soul.

We’re launching our #handoftheweek series!

This week is Dr Hippolyte Baraduc, who tried to photograph the human soul via 'the most perfect organ after the brain', the hand.

Baraduc’s photos blend science and occult, showing how hands were seen as windows onto the inner self in the 19th century.

How might hands reveal an inner self – a soul, a character, an identity?

Join us on 12 November at Lancaster University to explore this question with Professor Alison Bashford (University of New South Wales) as she presents her book, Decoding the Hand.

Tickets: thevictorianhand.uk/alison-bashf...

We are pleased to annouce that Dr Ross Cameron @rosscmrn.bsky.social has joined The Victorian Hand team as a Public Engagement Fellow at @lcflondon.bsky.social!

Watch this space for upcoming annoucements about public engagement activities and ways to get involved with The Victorian Hand.

A plaster cast of the hands of GF Watts, one folded over the other.

Time feels tangible in these casts...
Over on the Victorian Hand project blog, our Research Associate @helenvmurray.bsky.social reflects on her trip to Watts Gallery to research their extensive collection of plaster cast hands..
www.thevictorianhand.uk/blog-touchin...

Quick correction: our email address is victorianhand@fashion.arts.ac.uk - note the dot!

A 2 page spread from a Victorian drawing manual, showing hands, pointing in opposite directions. Text reads: "Last day to submit! The Hand: Emotions, Embodiment, Identity, an Interdisciplinary Conference. London College of Fashion, 8-9 January 2026"

🙋Don't forget! The call for abstracts for our conference on The Hand closes at midnight tonight!

All abstracts should be sent to victorianhand@fashionarts.ac.uk

We can't wait to go through all the incredible submissions we've received, so we can hand-craft a fantastic programme.
Watch this space!

Don't forget to submit to victorianhand@fashionarts.ac.uk by Monday 22 September!