The Finger: A Handbook by Angus Trumble – review

Kathryn Hughes will never look at fingers in quite the same way again
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girl showing paint-stained fingers
Photograph by Martin Poole/Getty Images

It would be usual and convenient to start a review of this kind of book – a study of the human finger in its many cultural contexts – with a quick list of all the ways that digits have poked themselves into our vernacular – "getting your fingers burned", "to finger someone", "put your finger on it" . . . leading up to a climactic "to give someone the finger". But that doesn't quite work for a British readership, because we don't, by and large, give anyone the finger. Nor do we throw anyone a V sign (the rude kind) much any more. We are lost, really, between two generations of finger insults, the old Anglo-Saxon two-digit version and the new, globally recognised but not universally adopted single finger.

  1. The Finger: A Handbook
  2. by Angus Trumble

Such difficulties point up the fact that fingers, like the rest of our bodies, are cultural objects. Of course they don't feel like it, soldered as they are on to the end of our hands by hard biology. There's something called the Hox gene, which ensures that we mostly get the right number (this gene also, intriguingly, governs the numbers game when it comes to the development of the penis and clitoris. Apparently, we could almost have five of each, were it not wasteful from an evolutionary point of view, not to mention greedy).

Still, the fact remains that what we do with our fingers is less dependant on their physical arrangement than what we feel about them. And this, in turn, is governed by our place and moment in history. How a 21st-century British woman uses her digits would amaze, titillate or possibly disgust both her great grandfather and her second cousin living on the other side of the world.

Angus Trumble is an art historian, so it is the way fingers look that concerns him most. There is little here, for instance, about opposable thumbs and the other kind of evolutionary detail that so preoccupied Raymond Tallis in his recent Michelangelo's Finger. Instead, Trumble starts his survey with some ghostly little hand paintings that were left all over caves in southern France and Spain in the later ice age.

The fact that so many of these tiny handprints have fingers missing presents an immediate interpretative problem. Is this the effect of frostbite, or a hunting accident, or some ghastly ritual punishment? Or could it be that the digits are carefully bent over to produce some special sign for anyone who came blundering along later? Pinched between the twin juggernauts of biology and culture, these ancient fingers refuse to give up their meaning.

Sign language is another place where fingers are required to act as fumbling ambassadors between the material and cultural world. Numerous systems have been designed over the years, catering for everyone from the hearing impaired to religious orders obliged to observe the rule of silence. Each language has developed its different vocab, laying waste to the idea that there is any such thing as "natural" language, a universal one-to-one fit between an object and the finger twitch used to describe it. The sign for "cat" in one language could easily refer to "dog" in another.

Often, too, metaphor and metonymy intervene. For instance, in the sign language used at the medieval monastery at Cluny, in France, the gesture for "trout" was the same as that for "woman", on the grounds that female costume at that time incorporated a pleated headdress that resembled a fish. In theory, this should have led to all sorts of ghastly misunderstandings. However, since Benedictines are not allowed to catch, gut and fry women, confusion was kept to a happy minimum.

This slippage between the physical world of the finger – its waggling, scratching reality – and its cultural value gets pointed up most obviously in the 19th century. The Victorians had a thing about fingernails, determined to read moral character from the bit of horny protein that lies at the end of each digit. Someone whose fingertips were all flesh with buried nails could never be capable of sublime thought, although they'd probably make a brilliant bookkeeper.

The truly refined had something called a "filbert nail", which was a demure, rosy, pink oval with a delicious white crescent tip. The pre-Raphaelites were as picky about filbert nails as they were about bee-stung lips. And yet, as Trumble points out perplexedly, a filbert is actually a kind of walnut. Anyone who had nails that were actually brown and crinkly would, it is safe to say, be bundled out of the artist's studio and down to the kitchen and given some potatoes to peel.

One way of covering up your walnut (as opposed to filbert) fingertips would be with nail polish. In a fascinating section Trumble explains how the glove business took a dive in the mid-20th century once women routinely started colouring their fingertips scarlet. He seems genuinely sad about this, wistfully listing all the lovely varieties of hand-coverings a lady could avail herself of in the Edwardian period, before wrapping up with: "a really fine kid glove, with its rows of unthinkably minute stitches, is an object of exceptional beauty". This slightly panting detour leaves you feeling that there is nothing simple or even particularly wholesome about fingers. Nine out of 10 of those phrases – "not lifting a finger", "to be under someone's thumb", "a finger in every pie" – are derogatory, and many are downright filthy.

Trumble also points out that the fingers are the only bit of another person's body that you routinely see naked. By the end of this enchanting but slightly creepy book I honestly didn't know where to look.


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