By the end of the nineteenth century, it was estimated that 86 per cent of the Irish population were literate. While more nuanced understandings of what that literacy might actually entail complicate this statistic, it was nevertheless the case that the overwhelming majority of the population – especially those of working or school age – could read and write with basic competency, and usually a great deal more than that. The resonances of literacy becoming an almost universal skill were profound in the everyday lives of many people, particularly perhaps those who were now significantly more literate than their parents or grandparents had been. Most obviously, it opened up new employment possibilities as literacy meant that working-class or lower-middle-class school-leavers could aspire to clerical and office-work which was probably more secure, better-paid and of higher status than previous generations of their family could have achieved. Particularly in Dublin, but also in other cities and even small towns, the army of clerks expanded rapidly during the late nineteenth century. Working alongside these clerks but performing a more highly-specialised form of literate work, the number of typists expanded even more rapidly. Where in 1901 there were 704 typists in Ireland, by 1911 there were 2,865, almost all of them women. Often proficient in shorthand as well, their working lives were founded on a very particular kind of literacy – a skill of the hands which produced uniform, mechanised writing at greater speed than had ever been possible before.

This era in which more and more people were regularly writing as well as reading coincided with a popular fascination with the hand itself, and specifically with a belief that the hand was a way of gaining particular insight into its owner's identity and character, or even into their future. One publication claimed simply that ‘[t]he hand of man is the key to his character. The hand is the picture of the brain’. This chapter will explore the intersecting forms this fascination with the hand took, from graphology (the interpretation of handwriting) and palmistry, to x-rays and the use of fingerprint technology in criminal cases. These diverse activities overlapped each other in a cultural landscape where scientific and occult practices often blurred into one in the public imagination.