Chapter 5 interrogates the multiple meanings of dismembered hands in the 1880s as the changes made by Reconstruction were steadily clawed back. Given the centrality and materiality of touch, the representation of hands is not only verbal but also visual – the author interrogates how hands are not just imagined in text but also imaged in drawings and cartoons. At the core of the chapter are some of the drawings Thomas Nast made about the politics around Reconstruction. Then the chapter moves from images of interacting hands to actual shaking hands during the twenty-fifth anniversary of the battle of Gettysburg, which brought together veterans of both the Army of the Potomac and the Army of Northern Virginia in 1888. The chapter ends with A Hazard of New Fortunes, by William Dean Howells. Hazard is especially interesting because of a secondary character, Berthold Landau, a German 1848-er who lost his hand in the Civil War. Overlaid by a North-South romance, Hazard’s ambivalence toward Landau and Howells’s decision to kill him off are another sign of the abandonment of white commitment to Black freedom.

This chapter focuses on skill, and considers how the sixteenth-century imperial kiln administrators managed their workforce. Skilled craftsmen were in high demand, but they were difficult to control. Most of the workers were mobile; they could take their labour to the imperial kiln, but also find work in the private kilns. The repeated attempts of the kiln administrators to identify skilled workers and bind them to the imperial kilns, and their ongoing expressions of concern over the issue of skilled labour underscore how difficult it was to get hold of good craftsmen. Circulation and mobility characterized the workers' presence in Jingdezhen. The more goods and people circulated and flowed between the various spaces, the more the adminstrators sought to assert their control over it those flows, and the wider the discrepancies between the written representations of the idealized circumstances the administrators envisioned and the actual patterns of movement and flow of resources and skills. Ultimately, the kiln administrators had to reconcile themselves to their inability in asserting control over the labour force. Material and human resources were fluid and flowed relatively freely through the mazelike veins of the Jingdezhen network.

The ancient concept of ‘gesture’ had no place in the brave new world of Stanislavskian naturalism. Rhetorical gesture was understood as an adjunct of speech, hardwired to speech in the idiom of modern brain science. Classical gesture: refused to separate the physical person of the orator from his moral and intellectual capacities. The gestures of a Ciceronian speech were deemed to be implicit in the words. Renaissance gesture: raising the question of whether gesture is teachable. Shakespearean gesture: I focus on Bertram Joseph’s controversial research into gesture, and examine his work with Shakespearean actors presenting Macbeth at the Mermaid. Baroque gesture: contrasting Le Faucheur’s practice in the pulpit with the new approaches of Descartes and Le Brun. Enlightenment France: F. Riccoboni’s argument for an intelligent actor in control of his movements. Enlightenment Germany: Lessing’s desire for ‘individualizing’ gestures was not well received by actors. Engel followed Lessing in quest of detail, but Goethe return to tradition in order to find a language of the body that would support the delivery of verse.