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The Giant Hands; or, The Reward of Industry is a children’s fairy tale by Alfred Crowquill, printed in London and New York by G. Routledge & Co. in 1856. It belongs to the series Alfred Crowquill’s Fairy Tales. Crowquill is the pen name of the English artist and writer Alfred Henry Forrester, who died in 1872.
The story is short. A poor boy, Willie, leaves his widowed mother to look for work. On the road a see-through, fleecy cloud appears across his path, and two enormous hands rise out of it. A voice from the cloud tells him it will help him as long as he stays industrious, and that nobody but Willie will see the hands. After that the hands lift him over a waterfall, crush a wolf, make a tent for him to sleep in, throw an ogress out of her castle window, carry him over the sea, plough a field, bridge a flood and make a ladder at a burning farmhouse.
I found this book through a YouTube video titled “1856 Book: God’s Giant Cloud Hands”. The book itself does not say the hands are God’s. The word “God” does not appear anywhere in the text. The hands are called “good hands” and “fairy hands”, and the voice in the cloud once speaks of “my kingdom, in which no idle hands are ever made” without saying whose kingdom it is. In the last paragraph Willie’s mother tells him that the hands are known to many, that they always help the willing and the good, and that they are “the powerful hands of Industry.” That is the moral of the title. Anyone who reads the hands as God’s is bringing that reading to the book. The book does not make it.
Read the full text with all the original illustrations.
Credits and public domain
The text and the illustrations are from Project Gutenberg eBook 10816. Project Gutenberg credits Internet Archive, the University of Florida, David Garcia and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team for producing it. The original scan is held by the University of Florida Digital Collections, UF00000419.
The book was published in 1856 and its author died in 1872, so it is in the public domain. I took out the Project Gutenberg header, footer and license, which are not part of the book, and changed nothing else in the text.