At some point within the past couple of years I read a 19th century English novel - it might have been Thackeray's Vanity Fair? - that drove me slightly bonkers with its repeated references to shaking someone's fingers (possibly finger, singular?) rather than hand, because behind that loomed a galaxy of tiny details lost in translation

As you mention David Copperfield later, there’s also:
“Miss Murdstone, who was busy at her writing-desk, which was covered with letters and papers, gave me her cold fingernails, and asked me, in an iron whisper, if I had been measured for my mourning.”