Dickens, cognition, and cross-modal vision and touch: Seeing and feeling in Dickens's hand-eye, railway metaphors (Charles Dickens)

This work explores Charles Dickens's person-machine metaphors in terms of cognitive visual perception, cross-modal hand-eye interaction, kinetic motion, and shape. The research integrates studies from three fields: cognitive neuroscience, metaphoric and embodied visual imagery in literature, and primary source history of technology notes on steam locomotion engineering during the industrial revolution. I interrelate cognitive experiments on (1) cross-modal vision and touch, (2) visual capture, and (3) similarity of motion style in metaphor resolution. I apply this template to Dickens's metaphors, railtalk that concocts a similarity of motion style between person and machine so that both share similar-looking, railway motor movement.; The industrial revolution is specified here as the railway age in order to highlight the perceptual presence of its leading machine, the steam locomotive. During the locomotive revolution, manual labor closely associated with the hand transforms to mechanical production more distantly seen with the eye. Our focus: hand-eye. The engine's mechanical action was patterned after human joint action; it visually embodied all the manual trades of the day. Dickens's person-machine metaphors register this handeye shift in tools and labor. He delights in what he calls the "nice distinctions of sight and touch" seen in a new "external world" of labor that is enlivened by the people's "several dexterities." His figures embody the motions and motives of steam railway locomotion and its economic market in joint-stock shares under the two Railway Manias. Novels include "Familiar Epistle," "Mugby Junction," "By Rail to Parnassus," Dombey and Son, Our Mutual Friend, and Pickwick Papers.; Cognitive sources speak to the cultural construction of the body-mind organism. Industrialism's widespread use of visual imagery increases visual cognitive skills. Visual metaphors enable a populace to both confront the incongruities of their changing times and accommodate mechanical development. Cognitive sources include Elaine Scarry, Ellen Esrock, Antonio Damasio, Randolph Easton, Catherine Dent, Raymond Gibbs, Stephen Kosslyn, and Hiram Brownell.