This image depicts a winged Ruskin flying over London, under the guiding star of “High Art,” sprinkling roses beribboned with the titles of his art criticism. Image Courtesy The Public Domain Review under a Creative Commons License.

As theories of degeneracy[1] gained currency in the latter part of the nineteenth century, literary critics increasingly used rhetoric of pathology (that is, of health and sickness) to discuss authors and their works.[2] As Arata explains, critics interpreted literature deemed “degenerate” (for unsavoury topic matter, for example) as “symptom and sign of its author’s pathology” with the potential to operate as “an instrument of contagion” to its readers (“Strange Cases” 173). As apparent in the works of not just art and literary critics, but also that of psychiatrists, political theorists, scientists, and sociologists, Victorian thought interwove literature and morality with the body, often implying that the disabled or ill body manifested moral disorder.

The passage below from the first instalment of “Fiction, Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin’s series of literary criticism published in The Nineteenth-Century, strikingly illustrates this rhetoric. In this piece, Ruskin complains about the Victorian fascination with the “analysis of physical corruption,” which he argues has become “the most valued material of modern fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy” (943). Ruskin believed that Victorian fiction was preoccupied with depicting scenes of death and characters with illness and disability, and that this preoccupation was caused by increased urbanization and industrialization.  In the section below, the bulk of which is a footnote to a section referring to this fiction as a “cretinous school,” Ruskin argues that disabled characters are the product of the authors’s brain disease.

[T]he effectual head of the whole cretinous school [of fiction with characters with disability] is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame;[1] and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like Poor Miss Finch,[2] in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.*

… 

* The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity[3], complicated with grossness. …  In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all the figures of the Lay Goblin,[4] Pacolet,[5] Flibbertigibbet,[6] Cockledemoy,[7] Geoffrey Hudson,[8] Fenella,[9] and Nectabanus[10]; in Dickens it in like manner gives Quilp,[11] Krook,[12] Smike,[13] Smallweed,[14] Miss Mowcher,[15] and the dwarfs and wax-work of Nell's caravan[16]; and runs entirely wild in Barnaby Rudge[17], where, with a corps de drame composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in ribands—carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content without shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in two wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love of thorniness… . The two frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London (the baboon with the mirror,[18] and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation[19]) are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque [20]under this influence... .

[I]t is always to be remembered that the evil and good are alike conditions of literal vision: and therefore also, inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the first elements of all Scott’s errors were in the milk of his consumptive nurse, which all but killed him as an infant … and was without doubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness.

Ruskin, John. “Fiction, Fair and Foul.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 7 (June 1880): 941-962. Literary Theory Full-Text Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999. 

• Arata, Stephen D. Fictions of Loss in the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996.

• ---. “Strange Cases, Common Fates: Degeneration and the Pleasures of Professional Reading.” Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means. Ed. Robert Newman. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996. 171-190 Print.

• Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. The Corporealities Series. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan P, 2004. Print.

• Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1989.