Clasped hands

You will probably have noticed by now that I like typologies.

There seems to have been a fashion on London gravestones between about 1890 and 1910 for a carving of clasped hands. There are inumerable examples in Tower Hamlets Cemetery. Here are 9 fairly well-preserved ones.

It seems to be generally agreed that the pair of hands are usually a husband and wife or occasionally a parent and child.  The hand with straight fingers is the hand of the recently deceased. The hand that is clasping is either a partner who had died already and is helping the newly released soul to Heaven, or it is the hand of the partner left behind saying farewell. Generally a male hand has a straight cuff and sometimes a button. A female hand generally has a frilled cuff. No one seems to know for sure the meaning of the pointing index finger of the clasped hand.

If anyone is, or knows, an expert in Victorian sentimental symbolism, I would love to ask their opinion.