Tracing the Hand in Nineteenth-Century Poetry: William Blake, William Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson

Abstract

Despite the prevailing interest in the material production of literary works in Nineteenth-Century literary studies, the hand has been over-looked as an important part of the scene of writing. To Victorian poets, the hand is a symbol of inspired composition as well as a literal trace of the writer, but it is also charged with associations with both the sensation of touch and the exigencies of industrial labour. This thesis asks why there is a poetic preoccupation with hands in the works of William Blake, William Wordsworth, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Emily Dickinson. It then asks: what does this reveal about their understanding of the material and imaginative production of their works? More importantly, how does this change our understanding of their poetry? Through textual analysis and close work on the material production of texts, this thesis explores Blake, Wordsworth, Rossetti, and Dickinson’s creative engagement with the hand on both symbolic and material levels, tracing parallels and divergences between a range of their works with close reference to manuscripts, marginalia, illustrations, and variant editions. Drawing on Jerome McGann’s influential conception of a material network, this thesis further explores how there poets’ shared preoccupation with the role of hands within and beyond the frame of their work reflects broader concerns with the industrialisation of print culture and a sustained critique of the ravages of industrial labour on human creativity. In this sense, these poets mobilise images of the hand and valorise the hand-made as part of a conflicted recognition of their own compromised position within an industrial print culture that celebrated authenticity and originality, but depended upon mass production and market forces.