1 10 26 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/2801aa92aa2224374845c84bdb5513e9.jpg 4ba7219b7bb946b5699bb3fe72b3c624 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mary Barton. Frontispiece. C. M. Relyea, illustrator. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. New York: The Century Co., 1906. Scan by Jennifer Janechek. Description An account of the resource A black and white illustration shows a young woman wearing a shawl and dress, standing beside a chair. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “Didst thou mark how poorly Jane Wilson looked?” asked he, as they wound up their hard day’s work by a supper eaten over the fire, which glowed and glimmered through the room, and formed their only light. “No, I can’t say as I did. But she’s never rightly held up her head since the twins died; and all along she has never been a strong woman.”<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> “Never sin’ her accident. Afore that I mind her looking as fresh and likely a girl as e’er a one in Manchester.” “She cotched her side again a wheel.<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a> It were afore wheels were boxed up. It were just when she were to have been married, and many a one thought George would ha’ been off his bargain; but I knew he weren’t the chap for that trick. Pretty near the first place she went to when she were able to go about again, was th’ Oud Church, poor wench, all pale and limping she went up the aisle, George holding her up as tender as a mother, and walking as slow as e’er he could, not to hurry her, though there were plenty enow of rude lads to cast their jests at him and her.” <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> John Barton is alone with his daughter, Mary, discussing the appearance of Jane Wilson, wife of George Wilson. In a quite heartbreaking scene earlier in the novel, her twin boys pass away during their infancy from a fever, presumably typhoid. <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> According to Foster, “cotched” means “caught” (87). </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mary Barton. Frontispiece. C. M. Relyea, illustrator. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. New York: The Century Co., 1906. Scan by Jennifer Janechek. Description An account of the resource References to disability abound in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848): Margaret experiences progressive blindness from cataracts (though at the end of the novel she is said to regain her sight); the aging Alice becomes blind, deaf, and is eventually incapacitated by a paralytic stroke; and some of the hand-loom weavers are disfigured by vitriol attacks from the striking factory workers. But perhaps the most historically situated instance of disability in the novel is that experienced by Mrs. Jane Wilson, who is introduced to us as “a delicate, fragile-looking woman, limping in her gait” (7, ch. 1). As the passage below indicates, Mrs. Wilson received some sort of orthopedic injury that gave her a permanent limp while working in a factory. John Barton tells his daughter, Mary, that “[s]he cotched [caught] her side again a wheel” (87). Her injury likely resulted from contact with a flywheel, which the OED defines as “[a] wheel with a heavy rim, attached to a revolving shaft, in order either to regulate the motion of the machinery, or to accumulate power.”<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> Mr. Barton notes that the accident occurred “afore wheels were boxed up” (87), an apparent anachronism because according to Shirley Foster, editor of the 2006 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mary Barton, the novel is supposed to be set around 1834-40 (ix), and the mandatory “boxing up” of wheels did not occur until the passage of the Factory Act of 1844. Mrs. Wilson’s injury serves a larger function than drawing attention to factory reform, for it connects with the novel’s broader project of insisting upon the common bond of the Manchester factory workers and the mill owners—an interdependent relationship that, in her view, ultimately promoted the progress of society. In her preface, Gaskell explains that the factory worker and the mill owner are “bound to each other by common interests”—that the suffering of one must affect the other (3). In this worldview, the condition of a worker’s body discloses the successes or evils of industrialization, and a body injured in a factory incident would necessarily indict a physically harmful system of labor promoted by capitalism. Mrs. Wilson’s disability would thus present a problem to the middle-class reader: it would force the reader to confront his or her involvement in perpetuating a factory system that physically damaged human bodies. <div>Note <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> “Fly-wheel.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2015. Web. 16 November 2015. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 86-87. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1848 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Title A name given to the resource Mary Barton Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elizabeth Gaskell Language A language of the resource English Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen. <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905495.2013.867659?journalCode=gncc20">“Orthopaedic Disability and the Nineteenth Century Novel.”</a> Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 36.1 (2014): 1-17. </li> <li> Hutchins, B. L., and A. Harrison. <a href="https://archive.org/details/historyoffactory014402mbp">A History of Factory Legislation</a>. London: P. S. King & Son, 1911. Internet Archive. Web. 11 November 2015. </li> <li> Sanders, Mike. “Manufacturing Accident: Industrialism and the Worker’s Body in Early Victorian Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.2 (2000): 313-329. </li> </ul> https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c392364e16b17477096cb4d98a9d801e.pdf b3e3db832ed2c6354884a83d63aa0076 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Illustration of The Heir of Redclyffe by Kate Greenaway. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890, page 89. Image courtesy Clare Walker Gore. Description An account of the resource This black and white illustration shows Amy and Laura flanking Guy, wearing the fashions of the late nineteenth-century (tight skirts with a bustle on the women and a bowler hat on the man) rather than those of the mid-century when the novel was published. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “ ‘You don’t know what a bore it is to lose the one bit of quicksilver in the house!’ said he, yawning. ‘I shall only drag out my existence here till you come back.’ ‘You, Charles, the maker of fun!’ said Guy, amazed. ‘It is a case of flint and steel,’ said Charles; ‘but be it owing to who it will, we have been alive since you came here. You have taken care to be remembered . We have been studying you, or laughing at you, or wondering what absurdity was to come next.’ ‘I am very sorry—that is, if you are serious. I hoped at least I appeared like other people.’ ‘I’ll tell you what you appear like. Just what I would be if I was a free man.’ ‘Never say that, Charlie.’ ‘Nay, wait a bit. I would never be so foolish. I would not let the best hunter in the country go when I had wherewithal to pay for him.’ ‘You would not have such an ill-conditioned self to keep in rule.’ ‘After all,’ continued Charles, yawning, ‘it is no great compliment to say I am sorry you are going. If you were an Ethiopian serenader, you would be a loss to me. It is something to see anything beyond this old drawing-room, and the same faces doing the same things every day. Laura poking over her drawing, and meditating upon the last entry in Philip's memorandum-book, and Amy at her flowers or some nonsense or other, and Charlotte and the elders all the same, and a lot of stupid people dropping in and a lot of stupid books to read, all just alike. I can tell what they are like without looking in!’ Charles yawned again, sighed, and moved wearily. ‘Now, there came some life and freshness with you. You talk of Redclyffe, and your brute creation there, not like a book, and still less like a commonplace man; you are innocent and unsophisticated, and take new points of view; you are something to interest oneself about; your coming in is something to look forward to; you make the singing not such mere milk-and-water, your reading the Praelectiones is an additional landmark to time; besides the mutton of to-day succeeding the beef of yesterday. Heigh-ho! I'll tell you what, Guy. Though I may carry it off with a high hand, ‘tis no joke to be a helpless log all the best years of a man's life,—nay, for my whole life,—for at the very best of the contingencies the doctors are always flattering me with, I should make but a wretched crippling affair of it. And if that is the best hope they give me, you may guess it is likely to be a pretty deal worse. Hope? I've been hoping these ten years, and much good has it done me. I say, Guy,’ he proceeded, in a tone of extreme bitterness, though with a sort of smile, ‘the only wonder is that I don't hate the very sight of you! There are times when I feel as if I could bite some men,—that Tomfool Maurice de Courcy, for instance, when I hear him rattling on, and think—’ ‘I know I have often talked thoughtlessly, I have feared afterwards I might have given you pain.’ ‘No, no, you never have; you have carried me along with you. I like nothing better than to hear of your ridings, and shootings, and boatings. It is a sort of life.’ Charles had never till now alluded seriously to his infirmity before Guy, and the changing countenance of his auditor showed him to be much affected, as he stood leaning over the end of the sofa, with his speaking eyes earnestly fixed on Charles, who went on: ‘And now you are going to Oxford. You will take your place among the men of your day. You will hear and be heard of. You will be somebody. And I! – I know I have what they call talent – I could be something. They think me an idle dog; but what’s the good of doing anything? I only know if I was not – not condemned to – to this – this life,’ (had it not been for a sort of involuntary respect to the gentle compassion of the softened hazel eyes regarding him so kindly, he would have used the violent expletive that trembled on his lip;) ‘if I was not chained down here, Master Philip should not stand alone as the paragon of the family. I’ve as much mother wit as he.’ ‘That you have,’ said Guy. ‘How fast you see the sense of a passage. You could excel very much if you only tried.’ ‘Tried? And what am I to gain by it?’ ‘I don’t know that one ought to let talents rust,’ said Guy, thoughtfully; ‘I suppose it is one’s duty not, and surely it is a pity to give up those readings.’” Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) was Charlotte M. Yonge’s first bestseller, establishing her reputation as an enjoyable as well as an improving novelist; as one critic wrote nearly twenty years later, “Anything written by the author of ‘The Heir of Redclyffe’ is sure not only to find a good number of readers, but to provide them with good pabulum.”<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Its hero, Guy Morville, is not only a morally serious and deeply Christian young man, but also the heir to a gothic castle, a fierce temper, and an ancient feud with the other branch of the Morville family, represented by his irritatingly priggish cousin Philip. The two are brought together when Guy comes to stay with his Edmonstone cousins (with whom Philip also lives), and although Guy makes every effort at conciliation, Philip’s unacknowledged jealousy causes a rift between them. Despite Philip’s efforts to thwart their romance, Guy marries the younger Edmonstone sister, Amy – his dealings with her family highlighting Philip’s unworthy action in becoming secretly engaged to the older Edmonstone sister, Laura – but on their honeymoon in Europe, sacrifices his life by nursing Philip through a near-fatal fever. The family feud is finally settled upon Guy’s death, as Philip retrospectively recognises his true worth, and the Christian allegory of Guy’s life and death is brought out in the novel’s famously tear-jerking conclusion. Although this summary of the novel’s main action suggests that disability does not play much part in the narrative, in fact, Amy and Laura’s disabled brother, Charles, is very much at the forefront of the novel. Although he is confined to his couch as a result of his tubercular hip, he offers an amusing and insightful commentary on all the action of the novel, acting as Guy and Amy’s confidant, seeing through Philip’s pretensions to moral superiority, and modelling for the reader, through his own reaction to Guy, what we might have to gain from reading the novel. Yonge was to become famous for her saintly invalids – typified by Margaret May in The Daisy Chain – but Charles is anything but a saintly character. In contrast to Guy, he is frequently selfish, spiteful, sarcastic and impatient, but he is also capable of great loyalty, kindness and stoicism. As a sympathetic and believable character, Charles is perhaps the Edmonstone with whom the reader is most likely to identify, and Yonge offers a sensitive and realistic portrayal of his struggle to come to terms with physical impairment. Although, as in the passage below, Charles is shown to resent his physical suffering and immobility, he is shown to be a valuable member of the Edmonstone family, better able to advise his mother and sister than his impetuous and easily-led father, and he is finally shown as Amy’s closest companion in her widowhood, promising to help her bring up her daughter. Moreover, his own relationship with Guy is dealt upon at such length that it comes to seem almost as important as the marriage plot from which he is excluded. <h3>Note</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> ‘Review of The Caged Lion’, John Bull, 1870, 413–14.</div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Heir of Redclyffe. (1853) London: Macmillan, 1888. Pages 70-71. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen, ‘ “The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple”: Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge’s “The Heir of Redclyffe”’, Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 117-131. </li> <li> Budge, Gavin. "Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe." Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 193-223. </li> <li> Wells-Cole, Catherine, "Angry Young Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge." In Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture. Ed. Andrew Bradstock. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. </li> <li> Walker Gore, Clare. "'Setting Novels at Defiance': Novel Reading and Novelistic Form in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 10.1 (2014) </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource The Heir of Redclyffe Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource "Guy was pacing the terrace with Laura and Amabel." Illustration of The Heir of Redclyffe by Kate Greenaway. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890, page 89. Image courtesy Clare Walker Gore. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charlotte Yonge Charlotte Yonge Invalidism Masculinity Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c24bb49345922dc355286858f26cd699.jpg 7fb7e84ea1b0218036a1aa552809b727 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Sol Eytinge, Jr. "Mrs. Clennam and Arthur Clennam" from the Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. Description An account of the resource Mrs. Clennam, seated in a two-wheeled chair in her bedroom, listens to her adopted son, Arthur Clennam, speak. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it, from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face, between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence. 'In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains—I have begun, and I must speak of such things now, mother—some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into all my father's dealings, for more than two score years. You can set these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover the truth. Will you, mother?' He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not more immoveable in its two folds, than were her firm lips. [ . . . ] There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently—still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off the blow. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mrs. Clennam, seated in a two-wheeled chair in her bedroom, listens to her adopted son, Arthur Clennam, speak. Sol Eytinge, Jr. "Mrs. Clennam and Arthur Clennam" from the Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871. Scan by <a title="Illustration for Little Dorrit" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/eytinge/74.html">Philip V. Allingham</a>. Description An account of the resource Little Dorrit, first published in monthly installments between 1855 and 1857, is arguably Charles Dickens's most disability-focused novel. In this later and darker work, Dickens uses the trope of disability to emphasize the disease—social, economic, and otherwise—threatening to debilitate London. The language of disability pervades the text—from the educator wryly named "Mr. Cripples" to the "maimed table" and "crippled wardrobe" (53) in the Clennam household to the Clennam house itself, which appears to "[lean] on some half dozen gigantic crutches" and which ultimately collapses (46). Furthermore, there are countless references to characters with mobility impediments in various forms—from Giovanni Cavalletto's leg injury, which results from a collision with a Mail coach, to the train-like Pancks's allusion to the mobility challenges faced by men with wooden legs. These references call attention to the central figure of disability, Mrs. Clennam, who has not left her room for twelve years because of a "rheumatic affection" with "attendant debility or nervous weakness" (49) and who can only conduct business in her room because of the limited mobility afforded by her two-wheeled chair. A variety of diseases plague the cityscape—bureaucratic inefficiency, epitomized in the Circumlocution Office; a mania for credit and speculation, attested to by the fantasies of those living in Bleeding Heart Yard and whose dangers are evidenced by Mr. Merdle's life and death; the social disease of poverty, whose effects are exacerbated, rather than diminished, by England's debtors' prisons—but the one that Dickens most prominently develops through the trope of disability is the moral and religious disease embodied by Mrs. Clennam, whose vengeful ire has poisoned her familial relations and whose hard-heartedness has seemingly rendered her "stony"—as the narrator says, "she lived and died a statue" (827)—and thus immobile. Mrs. Clennam's unwillingness to forgive causes her body to become one of the many forms of prisons in the novel. To highlight her moral stagnation and rigidity, Dickens depicts her as rheumatic, with only slight mobility enabled by her wheeled chair. However, it is somewhat unclear whether Mrs. Clennam requires the use of a wheeled chair or whether it is a form of self-punishment, exacted because of her commitment to an Old Testament mode of justice. For when blackmailed by Mr. Blandois, she runs through the streets of London to secure the papers that would disclose her secret about her adopted son, Arthur Clennam. While she seems to attribute the feat to a sort of adrenaline—"This is not recovery; it is not strength; I don't know what it is" (822)—the excerpt selected here, with its reference to her "moving power" and her "swift and sudden action of her foot" (64), seems to grant Mrs. Clennam a mobility that is discordant with her bedridden state. In this excerpt we also see Mrs. Clennam raise her hand to protect herself from an imagined "blow" that might be read as her self-condemnation for her sins, which she might expiate, or at least contain, through self-imprisonment. Such a reading is troubling, to be sure, because it supposes Dickens to be using disability as a form of punishment for moral wrongs. However, it is not out of character for an author so heavily influenced by the nineteenth-century science of physiognomy to treat disability symbolically.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Despite his co-optation of disability as trope, Dickens includes in Little Dorrit a quite profound meditation on the continuum of ability.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> The narrator describes Mrs. Clennam's sickroom as the central meeting place of the "fellow travellers" who are a recurring image in the novel: "Which of the vast multitude of travellers . . . climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and re-act on one another, which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey's end, be travelling surely hither?" (195). Here we see Dickens ruminating upon the suddenness with which one might arrive in the sickroom, for as the narrator says, "[T]he travellers to all are on the great high-road; but it has wonderful divergences, and only Time shall show us whither each traveller is bound" (196). By making it the space through which many of the central characters in Little Dorrit pass, even as visitors, Dickens reminds his reader of the transitory nature of ability. Thus, in a novel that plays with reversals between independence and dependence, we might also find Dickens commenting upon the fragility of ability. For as the sexton with his fixation on the birth, marriage, and death books housed in his church says, "[W]hat makes these books interesting to most people is—not who's in ’em, but who isn't—who's coming, you know, and when. That's the interesting question" (194). In these lines, Dickens's readers—fellow travellers on the road of life—are called to acknowledge their place on the continuum of ability. Although Dickens uses disability as trope in a problematic manner, his depiction of Mrs. Clennam and her sickroom challenges the consideration of ability and disability as discrete categories, thus showing his attitudes toward disability to be more complex than might be initially presumed. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Nineteenth-century physiognomy encouraged the belief in a direct relationship between someone's facial features and his or her character. For more on this subject, see Sharrona Pearl's About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), Lennard Davis writes of this continuum of ability as follows: "Able-bodied (or temporarily able-bodied) people safely wall off the severely disabled so that they cannot be seen as part of a continuum of physical differences" (7). In other words, disability is not a fixed category; there is no "them" and "us," "able" and "disabled," as if disability were a binary term. Rather, it is a fluid identity, one that we might have at various points in life or through its entirety. According to Davis, the temporarily able-bodied, not wanting to face the fact that they, too, will be disabled one day, construct barriers—linguistic, ideological, and otherwise—to protect themselves from having to acknowledge this reality. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. London: Penguin, 2003. 63–64. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Relation A related resource <ul><li> Barrett, Edwin B. "Little Dorrit and the Disease of Modern Life." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25.2 (1970): 199–215. </li> <li> Janechek, Jennifer. "Dombey and Son." Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts. <http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/37> </li> <li> Rodas, Julia. "Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability." Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004): 51–97. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Little Dorrit Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charles Dickens Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Material Culture Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/0716ee2ac2a3af085eeab54188f8c9be.jpg 8e1e92cdc18d954bd8ffda527651241e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “It is important to society to know whether Mesmerism is true. The revival of its pretensions from age to age makes the negative of this question appear so improbable, and the affirmative involves anticipations so vast, that no testimony of a conscientious witness can be unworthy of attention. I am now capable of affording testimony; and all personal considerations must give way before the social duty of imparting the facts of which I am in possession.” “Those who know Mesmerism to be true from their own experience are now a large number; many more, I believe, than is at all supposed by those who have not attended to the subject. Another considerable class consists of those who believe upon testimony: who find it impossible not to yield credit to the long array of cases in many books, and to the attestation of friends whose judgment and veracity they are in the habit of respecting. After these there remain a good many who amuse themselves with observing some of the effects of Mesmerism, calling them strange and unaccountable, and then going away and thinking no more about them; and lastly, the great majority who know nothing of the matter, and are so little aware of its seriousness as to call it “a bore,” or to laugh at it as nonsense or a cheat.” “A besetting sickness, almost disabling me from taking food for two years, brought me very low; and, together with other evils, it confined me to a condition of almost entire stillness, — to a life passed between my bed and my sofa [. . .] From that time, I lay still; and by means of this undisturbed quiet, and such an increase of opiates as kept down my most urgent discomforts, I passed the last two years with less suffering than the three preceding. There was, however, no favourable change in the disease. Everything was done for me that the best medical skill and science could suggest, and the most indefatigable humanity and family affection devise: but nothing could avail beyond mere alleviation. My dependence on opiates was desperate.” “A few days after the arrival of my kind Mesmerist, I had my foot on the grass for the first time for four years and a half [. . .] I never before was in the open air, after an illness of merely a week or two, without feeling more or less overpowered; but now, under the open sky, after four years and a half spent between bed and a sofa, I felt no faintness, exhaustion, or nervousness of any kind” “[f]rom the early summer of 1839, I was, till this autumn, a prisoner from illness. My recovery now, by means of mesmeric treatment alone, has given me the most thorough knowledge possible that Mesmerism is true” “After my medical friend’s avowal<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> of his hopelessness, however, I felt myself not only at liberty, but in duty bound, to try, if possible, the only remaining resource for alleviation. I felt then, and I feel now, that through all mortification of old prejudices, and all springing up of new, nobody in the world would undertake to say I was wrong in seeking even recovery by any harmless means, when other hope was given up by all: and it was not recovery that was in my thoughts, but only solace. It never presented itself to me as possible that disease so long and deeply fixed could be removed; and I was perfectly sincere in saying, that the utmost I looked for was release from my miserable dependence on opiates. Deep as are my obligations to my faithful and skilful medical friend, for a long course of humane effort on his part, no one kindness of his has touched me so sensibly as the grace with which he met my desire to try a means of which he had no knowledge or opinion, and himself brought over the Mesmerist under whom the first trial of my susceptibility was made.” “I put in a claim for my experiment being considered rational. It surely was so, not only on account of my previous knowledge of facts, and of my hopelessness from any other resource, but on grounds which other sufferers may share with me;— on the ground that though the science of medicine may be exhausted in any particular case, it does not follow that curative means are exhausted” <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Martineau is referring to Thomas Greenhow, her physician and brother-in-law. Greenhow, according to Martineau’s personal letters, had, in the course of treating her for uterine tumours he considered incurable by traditional methods, proposed that she attempt a course of mesmerism. She writes that he introduced her to the famous mesmerist, Spenser Hall (1812-1885). However, Greenhow refuted Martineau’s claims in his <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=7VkXAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">“Medical Report on the Case of Miss H—M—.”</a> </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Mesmerism<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> was the term used by Victorians for the procedure during which the practitioner, or mesmerist, would fix his or her (usually his) gaze on a subject or make passes over their body in order to treat and even cure disabilities and illnesses such as consumption, tuberculosis, rheumatism, and gout. Although many traditional physicians considered mesmerism to be quack medicine practiced by charlatans on weak and gullible patients, some lay-practitioners, radical physicians, and patients saw power in the therapy. Author and social theorist, Harriet Martineau, who had written extensively on her own deafness and invalidism, was one such proponent of the curative properties of mesmerism. She claimed that a course in mesmerism had cured her of the uterine tumours that had disabled her to the point that she had become confined to a sickroom and had produced a significant improvement in her deafness. In 1844, Martineau published a series of letters entitled <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=te8DAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#http://books.google.ca/books?id=te8DAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0%23v=onepage&q&f=false">“Letters on Mesmerism”</a> in the Athenæum with the intention of educating her readers and fellow “sufferers” on the healing power of mesmerism. She hoped that her letters would confirm the scientific validity of mesmerism and that this would strengthen the movement of patients taking control over their own medical cases and assuming some of the power and authority of the medical profession. Ultimately, her candid description of her mesmerism and recovery prompted increased debate on the procedure and resulted in copious letters to her from disabled and ill persons asking for further information on her mesmerism and requests from traditional physicians seeking additional details of her recovery. However, Martineau’s publication also resulted in a barrage of disparaging responses to the Athenæum that questioned her ability to evaluate mesmerism’s effect on her health, that stated that she did not meet the intellectual conditions required to determine the efficacy of the therapy, and that implied that any beneficial results of procedures such as mesmerism reported by patients could only be called, as we would say today, a placebo effect. Martineau’s “Letters on Mesmerism” as well as the public responses to her publication are striking illustrations both of the debate between patients and physicians for authority over the disabled or ill body during the Victorian period and of Martineau’s role in this debate. <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> This procedure was based on the work of eighteenth-century physician, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who called his theory “animal magnetism ” and who believed that individuals who possessed natural healing powers could harness the strength of the mind and control a fluid permeating the entire universe to cure any illness considered incurable by traditional medicine. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Martineau, Harriet. “Letters on Mesmerism.” London: Athenæum. (23 November 1844): 1070-1072. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1844 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nadine LeGier Relation A related resource <ul><li>Kaplan, Fred. Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.</li> <li> Ryall, Anka. “Medical Body and Lived Experience: The Case of Harriet Martineau.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 34.4 (2000): 35-53. </li> <li> Tatar, Maria. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1978. </li> <li> Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U Of Chicago P, 2000. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Letters on Mesmerism Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Harriet Martineau Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource “Treatment of consumption and tuberculosis by mesmerism” from The Illustrated Practical Mesmerist by William Davey, c1854. Courtesy of Wellcome Images under a Creative Commons License (L0000487). Harriet Martineau Invalidism Mesmerism https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4cd50619512b935cd2e56ad46ac87159.jpg 0a6119d4f0f4af87e16fcfa70628613b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “Yes, commander, I took the business [of being a tinker]. Such as it was. It wasn’t much of a beat—round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there—poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till they’re past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master’s earnings. But they didn’t come to me. I warn’t like [my master]. He could sing ’em a good song. I couldn’t! He could play ’em a tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a pot but mend it or bile it—never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me.” “They were mighty particular. You would pass muster in a crowd, Phil!” says the trooper with a pleasant smile. “No, guv’ner,” returns Phil, shaking his head. “No, I shouldn’t. I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing to boast of then; but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and swallering the smoke; and what with being nat’rally unfort’nate in the way of running against hot metal, and marking myself by sich means; and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got older, almost whenever he was too far gone in drink—which was almost always—my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time. As to since; what with a dozen years in a dark forge, where the men was given to larking; and what with being scorched in a accident at a gas-works; and what with being blowed out of winder, case-filling at the firework business; I am ugly enough to be made a show on!” Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee. While drinking it, he says, “It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you, commander. You remember?” “I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun.” “Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall—” “True, Phil—shouldering your way on—” “In a night-cap!” exclaims Phil, excited. “In a night-cap—” “And hobbling with a couple of sticks!” cries Phil, still more excited. “With a couple of sticks. When—” “When you stops, you know,” cries Phil, putting down his cup and saucer, and hastily removing his plate from his knees, “and says to me, ‘What, comrade! You have been in the wars!’ I didn’t say much to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so strong and healthy and bold as you was, should stop to speak to such a limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you, delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was like a glass of something hot, ‘What accident have you met with? You have been badly hurt. What’s amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us about it!’ Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!” cries Phil, who has started from his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. “If a mark’s wanted, or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me. They can’t spoil my beauty. I’m all right. Come on! If they want a man to box at, let ’em box at me. Let ’em knock me well about the head. I don’t mind. If they want a light-weight to be throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> let ’em throw me. They won’t hurt me. I have been throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!” With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered, and accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to clear away the breakfast. <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> These refer to “codes of rules for wrestling,” differing in from county to county (961). </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource While many of Charles Dickens’s novels and nonfiction works depicted people with disabilities, his novel Bleak House, published serially over 1852-1853 and in volume form in 1853, is veritably full of characters with bodies and minds deemed disabled due to deafness, illness, epilepsy, senility, invalidism, asthma, gout, paralysis, injuries, and disfigurations. Interestingly, Dickens’s treatment of disability in the novel is neither wholly realistic nor wholly caricaturized: at times the novel reduces disabilities to symbols of a broken social system—as is the case with Grandfather Smallweed’s deafness and paralysis and his wife’s senility—while at others it exposes how the social environment of the person with disability produces the meaning of disability—as is often the case with Phil Squod and Esther Summerson’s respective disfigurements. The selection below depicts one of the latter instances. In it, Phil Squod, who requires the support of the wall for getting around the room, describes the various injuries and events that gave him his many scars and mobility impairment. While the scarring and altered mobility originate in his working-class occupations, which might suggest symbolism of the exploitation of the working class, Phil’s description of his experience emphasizes the social interpretations of, and prejudices against, his disability, as well as his own delights in the abilities and appearance of his supposedly deficient body. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Norman Page. London: Penguin, 1971. 422-23. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Relation A related resource <ul><li> Burgan, Mary. “Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies.” American Literary History. 14.4 (2002): 837-844. Web. </li> <li> Gurney, Michael S. “Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House.” Literature and Medicine. 9 (1990): 79-92. Web. </li> <li> Michie, Helena. “‘Who is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurment, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.” Novel 22.2 (1989): 199-213. Print. </li> <li> Montwieler, Katherine. “Reading, Sympathy, and the Bodies of Bleak House.” Dickens Studies Annual. 41 (2010): 237-263 Print. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The illustration shows Grandfather Smallweed being carried in to a gallery, where he is met by Trooper George and his friend Phil Squod. “Visitors to the Shooting Gallery” by Hablot K. Browne. From Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853. Title A name given to the resource Bleak House Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Literature Mobility Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/223e90d53a50a30669bcdec5a4411574.jpeg 44ccb11f742b60fa912395d02a2ae58e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A woman swathed in the robes of a Greek goddess measures two children with a ruler that reads: “Haec est regula recti” (“This is the model of straightness”). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. [T]here is no higher pleasure, no greater distinction, no more exalted exercise of the human mind, than that profession which has for its object the benefit of our species, and the mitigation and removal of those ills to which all of mortal birth are subjected. To the visitation of deformity this remark applies with double force, for the deformed have been regarded as loathsome in body, and depraved in mind; they have often isolated themselves from their fellow creatures; persecution of them has ever been sanctioned by the Mosaic ceremonial, which admitted the unblemished alone to the dignity of priesthood. Possessing all the feelings, and susceptible of all the impulses which animate the breast of man, frequently morbidly sensitive from the consciousness of their deformity, adorned with genius, gifted with wit, graced by fortune and by birth, crowned with learning,--still is the deformed man exposed to the derision of the heartless, and is shut out from the world simply because nature has played some freak by which he differs from his fellow mortals. Nevertheless, history records the names of many whose spiritual excellence overcame their bodily deformity: Socrates, Aesop, Alexander the Great, whose head his said to have inclined slightly to the left shoulder, the illustrious Lord Burleigh, Pope, Talleyrand, Sir Walter Scott, Flaxman, and Byron, were all deformed in different degrees.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> I believe the sole instance recorded by the classic poets of female deformity is a woman named Kutila, who lived to be a hundred, she is spoken of by Pliny, and also by Juvenal. A facetious Englishman, named Hay, has written an Essay on Bodily Deformity, in which he good-naturedly and sensibly vindicates those labouring under such an affliction from the stigma so ungenerously cast upon them.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> He was himself deformed. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socrates">Socrates</a> (c. 469-399 BC), an ancient Greek philosopher, was considered by some ugly to the point of deformity; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aesop">Aesop</a> (c. 620–564 BC), was an ancient Greek fabulist sometimes depicted as a hunchback; <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_the_Great">Alexander the Great</a> (356-323 BC) was the King of Macedon who united Greece; <a href="http://www.britannia.com/history/r-cecil.html">Lord Burleigh</a> (Robert Cecil, 1563-1812), a powerful Elizabethan politician, had a slight hunch back; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Pope">Alexander Pope</a> (1688-1744) a satirical English poet, had a hunch back; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Maurice_de_Talleyrand-P%C3%A9rigord">Charles Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord</a> (1754-1838), a politician and aristocrat who survived the French Revolution, had a clubfoot caused by Marfan syndrome; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walter_Scott">Walter Scott</a> (1771-1832), nineteenth-century novelist, was lame; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Flaxman">John Flaxman</a> (1755-1826) a neoclassical sculptor, had a shoulder deformity; <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Byron">Lord Byron</a> (1788-1824), a Romantic poet, was born with a club foot. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Member of Parliament <a title="William Hay" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Hay_(MP)">William Hay</a> (1695-1755), who had a hunch back, wrote what is now considered the first personal memoir of deformity in 1754. See William Hay. Deformity: An Essay. Ed. Kathleen James-Cavan. Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2004. </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Tamplin, Richard William. Lectures on the Nature and Treatment of Deformities, Delivered at the Royal Orthopaedic Hospital, Bloomsbury Square. London: 1846. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1846 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Relation A related resource <ul><li>Borsay, Anne. “Disciplining Disabled Bodies: The Development of Orthopaedic Medicine in Britain, c.1800-1939.” Social Histories of Disability and Deformity: Bodies, Images and Experiences. Ed. David M. Turner and Kevin Stagg. New York: Routledge, 2006.</li> <li>Bourrier, Karen. “Orthopaedic Disability and the Nineteenth-Century Novel.” Nineteenth-Century Contexts. 36.1 (2014): 1-17.</li> <li>Klenerman, Leslie. The Evolution of Orthopaedic Surgery. London: Royal Society of Medicine, 2002.</li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Frontispiece from Nicolas Andry's Orthopaedia. A woman swathed in the robes of a Greek goddess measures two children with a ruler that reads: “Haec est regula recti” (“This is the model of straightness”). Image Courtesy the Wellcome Institute for the History of Medicine under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Lectures on the Nature and Treatment of Deformity Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Tamplin, Richard William Description An account of the resource Orthopaedic medicine began as a general practice of child rearing in France with Nicolas Andry’s Orthopaedia (1741). (Andry’s work was translated into English in 1743.) In the mid-nineteenth century, orthopaedic medicine became a specialized branch of surgery that aimed to surgically correct asymmetries in the human frame, ranging from club foot to wry neck to hunch back. The <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Royal_National_Orthopaedic_Hospital">Royal Orthopaedic Hopsital of London</a>, which began as a small institution in Bloomsbury Square in 1838, had moved to Oxford Street by 1865, and treated over 1600 cases of “deformity of all kinds”, according to surgeon William Adams, annually.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> The following excerpt, from surgeon R. W. Tamplin’s 1846 series of lectures, brings to the fore several ideas associated with orthopaedic disability in the nineteenth century. Firstly, orthopaedic disability, rather than being seen as a variation in human form that may or may not need any intervention, became seen as an individual medical “problem” that needed to be treated through specialized surgery. In addition, orthopaedic disability was presumed to have a strong emotional impact on the individual, who would feel isolated from the community; this emotional impact, rather than any medical issue, was often given as one of the primary reason to operate on a person with a disability. A second emotional effect that orthopaedic disability might have on an individual was to spur them to “overcome” their disability by achieving great success, as Tamplin notes in his list of eminent individuals below.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Nineteenth-century thinkers seemed to associate orthopaedic disabilities and their presumed emotional excesses with men in particular, though there is no reason to think that orthopaedic disabilities affected men in greater numbers than women. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> William Adams. Lectures on the Pathology and Treatment of Lateral and Other of Forms Curvature of the Spine. London: 1865, page 9. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> As disability studies scholars have noted, this overcoming narrative can have the pernicious effect of making it seem as though people with disabilities must achieve great success in order to compensate for a perceived lack. </div> </div> Medicine Mobility Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/fb7ce80138920dad18666487654cbcc2.jpg 5af8776fd4134ba5d848c9cf861eabe0 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 449 Height 552 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Mrs. Skewton, seated in a three wheeled chair in a crowded street, is greeted by a gentleman who tips his hat to her. Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), “Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity”, from Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1847. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. Victorian Web. <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/104.html>. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. In this manner the Major and Mr Dombey were walking arm-in-arm, much to their own satisfaction,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> when they beheld advancing towards them, a wheeled chair, in which a lady was seated, indolently steering her carriage by a kind of rudder in front, while it was propelled by some unseen power in the rear. [ . . . ] ‘Why, what the devil have we here, Sir!’ cried the Major, stopping as this little cavalcade drew near. ‘My dearest Edith!’<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> drawled the lady in the chair, ‘Major Bagstock!’ The Major no sooner heard the voice, than he relinquished Mr Dombey’s arm, darted forward, took the hand of the lady in the chair and pressed it to his lips. With no less gallantry, the Major folded both his gloves upon his heart, and bowed low to the other lady. And now, the chair having stopped, the motive power became visible in the shape of a flushed page pushing behind, who seemed to have in part out-grown and in part out-pushed his strength, for when he stood upright he was tall, and wan, and thin, and his plight appeared the more forlorn from his having injured the shape of his hat, by butting at the carriage with his head to urge it forward, as is sometimes done by elephants in Oriental countries. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Mr. Dombey and Major Bagstock have just arrived in Leamington, a British resort town famous for its medicinal springs. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Edith Granger is Mrs. Skewton’s daughter. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dombey and Son Description An account of the resource Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–1848) attests to his career-long interest in chair-bound characters<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>—characters who, because of illness, injury, or egotism, are confined or confine themselves to a “wheeled chair” (alternately referred to as the “Bath wheeled chair” or the “Bath chair”). In this particular novel, Dickens provides two examples of Victorian chair users: Paul Dombey, who, when ill, travels by wheeled chair so that he can sit by the sea with his sister; and Mrs. Skewton, an elderly lady who travels in a wheeled chair to perpetuate an illusion of wealth and social status. The former he renders sympathetic, while the latter he depicts as a figure of falseness—a heap of makeup and clothes that almost melts into the chair with which she joins her body. This excerpt from Dombey and Son, in which Mrs. Skewton is first introduced to the reader, illustrates Dickens’s perhaps harsh treatment of Mrs. Skewton and invites readers to consider the reasoning behind certain prejudices against chair users. In his depiction of the relationship between Mrs. Skewton and her page, Withers, Dickens engages with past and contemporary criticism directed toward people who travel by chair. In the novel, Withers is reduced to a beast of burden, “butting at the carriage with his head” like an elephant (317). To further his point, Dickens later describes Withers as another animal: “toiling after the chair, uphill, like a slow battering-ram” (321). Dickens’s furious humor levels an attack on Mrs. Skewton for her treatment of Withers as though he were an animal, an object for her personal use. To better understand Dickens’s portrayal of Mrs. Skewton, a brief history of the wheeled chair’s evolution from the sedan chair is necessary. First used in London by the Duke of Buckingham in the early seventeenth century, the sedan chair was less a “chair,” per se, and more of an enclosed box with glass doors and a detachable roof that was carried through the streets of London by two or more porters (alternately called “chairmen”), with “link-boys,” or torch bearers, employed to light the way for nighttime journeys. Patronized primarily by the wealthier classes of society, the sedan chair received much negative attention from the public, in part because the sedan chairs often collided with and injured pedestrians and in part because the public viewed the technology as demeaning to the chairmen. As evidenced by nineteenth-century periodicals, the negative discourse surrounding the sedan chair continued well past its era of usage. For instance, one anonymous writer for Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts suggests that seventeenth-century Londoners “grumbl[ed] indignantly at the pride of the man [the Duke] who employed his fellow-creatures to do the service of beasts of burden” (91–92).<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> While the chairs were most often used by those for whom walking was a burden, their support by lower-class muscle caused the public to reject them wholesale as an unnecessary luxury. In the nineteenth century, the sedan chair became increasingly obsolete as it was replaced by the wheeled chair, which was initially introduced in Bath, Leamington, and other seaside health spas as a means to transport the ill to the mineral water baths. Contrary to their wheel-less predecessors, which were owned or hired by the “able-bodied” and “disabled” alike, Bath chairs were used almost entirely by those who could not walk easily. The demographic of chair users shifted in another way: whereas the sedan chairs were primarily employed by elite society, wheeled chairs, because cheaper to hire, were more accessible to middle class patrons. Despite these changes, the wheeled chair still attracted hostilities, particularly owing to its effect on the chairmen, who often developed orthopedic impediments of their own while working. For example, in “The Bath-Chair Man’s Story,” Florence Marryat’s chairman-protagonist references his “old round back,” which results from his constant stooping (516).<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Prejudices against wheeled-chair users as lazy—choosing to ride rather than walk—and as demeaning and debilitating the lower-class chairmen continued to solidify during the nineteenth century. In characterizing Withers alternately as a battering ram and as an elephant, then, Dickens underscores the class dynamics inherited by the wheeled chair from its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precursor. Dickens alludes to such class tensions when he portrays Mrs. Skewton as “calling to the page with all the languid dignity with which she had called in days of yore to a coachman with a wig, cauliflower nosegay, and silk stockings” (320). Her use of the wheeled chair thus exposes her to the narrator’s and the reader’s critical gaze, especially because she travels in it not out of necessity, but rather as a display of the wealth and status that she, in actuality, lacks. As the narrator indicates, after becoming accustomed in her youth to travel by barouche, Mrs. Skewton “[maintains] the wheeled chair and the butting page: there being nothing whatever, except the attitude, to prevent her from walking” (319). Attending to the various elements that contributed to the assemblage of the Victorian wheeled chair—the page, the chair user, and the chair itself—Dickens highlights the objectification of an often forgotten participant, the chairman, thereby positioning prejudices against chair users as, at least partially, class-based. Mrs. Skewton’s pretense of need and her mistreatment of Withers contribute to her removal from readerly sympathy until she becomes terminally ill and truly dependent upon the aid and support of others. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> This preoccupation of Dickens’s was first noted by M. J. Lesser in “Dickens and the Chair-Bound.” See below for full reference. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> “Sedan-Chairs.” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 12.580 (9 February 1895): 91–93. British Periodicals. Web. 14 June 2013. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Marryat, Florence. “The Bath-Chair Man’s Story.” Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers 22 (March 1868): 507–20. British Periodicals. Web. 13 June 2013. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. London: Penguin, 2002. 316–17. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1847 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mrs. Skewton, seated in a three wheeled chair in a crowded street, is greeted by a gentleman who tips his hat to her. Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), “Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity”, from Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1847. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. <a title="Victorian Web" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/104.html" target="_blank">Victorian Web</a>. <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/104.html>. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Fawcett, Trevor. “<a title="Fawcett Chair Article" href="%3A//condor.depaul.edu/cchaden/bath/chairtransport.html" target="_blank">Chair Transport in Bath: The Sedan Era</a>.” Bath History. Vol. 2. Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 1988: n. page. See <://condor.depaul.edu/cchaden/bath/chairtransport.html </li> <li> Lesser, M. J. “Dickens and the Chair-Bound.” Dickensian 73.381 (January 1977): 25–32. </li> <li> Sussman, Herbert and Gerhard Joseph. “Prefiguring the Posthuman: Dickens and Prosthesis.” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 617–28. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Class Literature Mobility Novel Prosthesis Technology https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4e666e957ca572d0e5c1b82159c1a7e2.jpg 0f79da7c2f9d8878cc73865aada87311 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 712 Height 868 Bit Depth 8 Channels 1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Jane and Rochester reunite. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “It is time some one undertook to re-humanize you,” said I, parting his thick and long-uncut locks; “for I see you are being metamorphosed into a lion, or something of that sort. You have a ‘faux air’ of Nebuchadnezzar in the fields about you, that is certain, : your hair reminds me of eagles’ feathers; whether your nails are grown like birds’ claws or not, I have not yet noticed.” “On this arm, I have neither hand nor nails;” he said, drawing the mutilated limb from his breast, and shewing it to me. “It is a mere stump—a ghastly sight! Don’t you think so, Jane?” “It is a pity to see it; and a pity to see your eyes—and the scar of fire on your forehead; and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well for all this; and making too much of you.” “I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and my cicatrized visage.” “Did you? Don’t tell me so—lest I should say something disparaging to your judgment. Now, let me leave you an instant, to make a better fire and have the harth swept up. Can you tell when there is a good fire?” “Yes; with the right eye I see a glow—a ruddy haze.” “And you see the candles?” “Very dimly—each is a luminous cloud.” “Can you see me?” “No, my fairy: but I am only too thankful to hear and feel you.” “When do you take supper?” “I never take supper.” “But you shall have some to-night. I am hungry: so are you, I dare say, only you forget.” Summoning Mary, I soon had the room in more cheerful order: I prepared him, likewise, a comfortable repast. My spirits were excited, and with pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper, and for a long time after. there was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him: all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lied; and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead: his lineaments softened and warmed. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jane Eyre Description An account of the resource Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 sensation, Jane Eyre, ends with a dramatic climax in which the hero is blinded and maimed. This ending is often read as a symbolic castration. Richard Chase first proposed this Freudian reading of Rochester's disabilities in a 1948 essay, arguing that "Rochester’s injuries are, I should think, a symbolic castration. The faculty of vision, the analysts have shown, is often identified in the unconscious with the energy of sex."<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Peter Pickrel summed up the argument thus: “Charlotte Brontë’s spinsterish sensibilities were such that his [Rochester’s] rampant sexuality had to be tamed before he could become a suitable husband for a nice early-Victorian heroine like Jane Eyre”.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert found that the opposite was true thirty years later, and that though Brontë really did wish to castrate Rochester, the urge came from her anger at being a woman author in a patriarchal society rather than from her spinsterish inability to handle her hero's sexuality.<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Recent disability studies readings of Jane Eyre, collected in The Blindman and the Madwoman, have overturned this critical chestnut. Critics have found an erotics of care-giving in the Jane-Rochester dyad, and an emphasis on interdependence. In this scene from the penultimate chapter of the novel, Jane returns after an absence to find Rochester has been blinded and maimed in an attempt to save his estranged wife from a fire she has set to Thornfield. Rochester is surprised to find that Jane finds him as attractive as ever. Far from suggesting that Rochester’s sexuality has been tamed, the couple’s playful banter and the tactility of their rapport now that Rochester is blind and must feel Jane to see her suggest an erotic side to disability. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Chase, Richard. “The Brontës, or, Myth Domesticated.” Forms of Modern Fiction. Ed. William Van O'Connor. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1948. 108-109. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Pickrel, Peter. "Jane Eyre: The Apocalypse of the Body." ELH 53.1 (1986): 165-82. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane's Progress.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brontë, Charlotte Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard Nemesvari. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999 [1847]. 537-538. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1847 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource "You are altogether a human being Jane? You are certain of that?" Jane stands facing the viewer, clasping Rochester's hand, who is seated in a chair with his back to the viewer. F.H. Townsend illustration to the second edition of Jane Eyre, 1847, Chapter 37. Image in the public domain courtesy of <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AP422b.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bolt, David, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth Donaldson, eds. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. </li> <li> Carpenter, Mary Wilson. <a href="http://differences.dukejournals.org/content/17/3/52.refs">“Blinding the Hero.”</a> Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.3 (2006): 52–68 </li> </ul><ul><li> Chen, Chih-Ping. "Am I a Monster?": Jane Eyre Among the Shadows of Freaks.” Studies in the Novel. 34.4 (Winter 2002): 367-384. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Amputation Blindness Charlotte Brontë Literature Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/a9178b0976e7e9469414bbe1402bd9a9.jpg e9d8b4c3033e1e55d20ab05da377d182 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 511 Height 800 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String byline_title:Rights and Images Department byline:National Portrait Gallery London headline:NPG 2193; Charlotte Mary Yonge by George Richmond source:National Portrait Gallery London caption_writer:National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg.org.uk credit:National Portrait Gallery London caption:by George Richmond, watercolour and chalk, 1844 date_created:02.05.2012 copyright_notice:© National Portrait Gallery, London object_name:NPG 2193; Charlotte Mary Yonge special_instructions:Unauthorised reproduction prohibited. For authorisation contact rightsandimages@npg.org.uk www.npg.org.uk city:London, St Martin's Place, WC2 0HE country:United Kingdom IPTC Array a:13:{s:12:"byline_title";s:28:"Rights and Images Department";s:6:"byline";s:32:"National Portrait Gallery London";s:8:"headline";s:49:"NPG 2193; Charlotte Mary Yonge by George Richmond";s:6:"source";s:32:"National Portrait Gallery London";s:14:"caption_writer";s:49:"National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg.org.uk";s:6:"credit";s:32:"National Portrait Gallery London";s:7:"caption";s:47:"by George Richmond, watercolour and chalk, 1844";s:12:"date_created";s:10:"02.05.2012";s:16:"copyright_notice";s:36:"© National Portrait Gallery, London";s:11:"object_name";s:30:"NPG 2193; Charlotte Mary Yonge";s:20:"special_instructions";s:105:"Unauthorised reproduction prohibited. For authorisation contact rightsandimages@npg.org.uk www.npg.org.uk";s:4:"city";s:34:"London, St Martin's Place, WC2 0HE";s:7:"country";s:14:"United Kingdom";} Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource This watercolour and chalk portrait shows a young, ringletted romantic version of Charlotte Yonge.  Portrait by George Richmond (1844). Courtesy <a title="National Portrait Gallery" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/" target="_blank">National Portrait Gallery</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Portrait of Yonge" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw06981/Charlotte-Mary-Yonge?" target="_blank">NPG 2193</a>). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. The Doctors were right, and the Consecration morning was the last of full consciousness. From the hour when she had heard the sound of Alan’s bells,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> her ears were closed to earthly sounds. There was very little power of intercourse with her, as she lingered on the borders of the land very far away, where skill and tenderness could not reach either body or spirit. Often the watchers could not tell whether she was conscious, or only incapacitated from expression, by the fearful weight on her breath which caused a restlessness most pitiable in the exhausted helpless frame, wasted till the softest touch was anguish. Now and then came precious gleams when a familiar voice or some momentary alleviation would gain a smile, or thanks, and they thought her less restless when Richard read prayers beside her, but words were very rare, only now and then a name, and when in most distress, ‘it will soon be over,’ ‘it will soon be over,’ occurred so often, that they began to think it once her solace, and now repeated habitually without meaning. They could not follow her into the valley of the shadow of death, but could only watch the frail earthly prison house being broken down, as if the doom of sin must be borne, though faith could trust that it was but her full share of the Cross. [...] It was midnight, on the longest night of the year; Ethel was lying on her bed and had fallen into a brief slumber, when her father’s low, clear voice summoned her: ‘Ethel, she is going!’ There was a change on the face, and the breath came in labouring gasps. Richard lifted her head, and her eyes once more opened; she smiled once more. ‘Papa!’ she said, ‘dear papa!’ He threw himself on his knees beside her, but she looked beyond him, ‘Mamma! Alan! oh! there they are! More! more!’ and, as though the unspeakable dawned on her, she gasped for utterance, then looked, with a consoling smile, on her father. ‘Over now!’ she said – and the last struggle was ended. That which Richard laid down was no longer Margaret May. Over now! The twenty-five years’ life, the seven years’ captivity on her couch, the anxious headship of the motherless household, the hopeless betrothal, the long suspense, the efforts for resignation, the widowed affections, the slow decay, the tardy, painful death agony – all was over. Nothing left, save what they had rendered her undying spirit, and the impress her example had left on those around her. The long continuance of the last suffering had softened the actual parting; and it was with thankfulness for the cessation of her pain that they turned away, and bade each other good-night. Ethel would not have believed that her first wakening to the knowledge that Margaret was gone, could have been more fraught with relief than with misery. And, for her father, it seemed as if it were a home-like, comfortable thought to him, that her mother had one of her children with her. He called her the first link of his Daisy Chain drawn up out of sight; and, during the quiet days that ensued, he seemed as it were to be lifted above grief, dwelling upon hope. [...] Jennings [was] added to the bearers, their own men, and two Cocksmoor labourers, who, early on Christmas Eve, carried her to the Minster. Last time she had been there, Alan Ernescliffe had supported her. Now, what was mortal of him lay beneath the palm tree, beneath the glowing summer sky, while the first snow flakes hung like pearls on her pall. But, as they laid her by her mother’s side, who could doubt that they were together?” Book 2, Chapter 25, pages 645-648 <h3>Note</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> The bells were paid for by Margaret's fiance, Alan Ernescliffe, a sailor who died overseas before they could be married, and endowed the new church at Cocksmoor in his will. The lovers are shown to be united in death through the church, as they never could be in life. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Daisy Chain Description An account of the resource Yonge’s 1853 novel The Heir of Redclyffe was the bestseller which made her name, but it was The Daisy Chain (1856) which cemented her reputation. In the preface, Yonge describes it as “a Family Chronicle” (v), and this was the genre with which she came to be most closely associated. The novel tells the story of the eleven May children,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> who lose their mother in the opening chapter. Yonge was to become famous for her portrayals of invalids, and disabled characters abound in all her major novels: Charles Edmonstone in The Heir of Redclyffe, Ermine Williams in The Clever Woman of the Family (1865) and Geraldine Underwood in The Pillars of the House (1873). Margaret May is perhaps Yonge’s most archetypal representation of an invalid; injured in the carriage accident which kills her mother, she never walks again, spending seven years as an invalid before succumbing to a wasting illness. Margaret’s patience and resignation, developed during her years confined to her couch, are a powerful influence on her impulsive younger sister, Ethel, whose maturation forms the novel’s main narrative arc. It is Margaret who persuades Ethel to give up her attempt to keep pace with her brother Norman’s classical studies in order to focus on her daughterly duties, and whose decline and death make way for Ethel to take her place as the mother-substitute in the family. Margaret herself is said to be “perfectly content and happy”, knowing “the temptation of her character had been to be the ruler and manager of everything, and she saw it had been well for her to have been thus assigned the part of Mary, rather than of Martha” (633). She repeatedly suggests that she would have enjoyed managing a household and a social life, to the point of being domineering and worldly, like her sister Flora, had not the enforced passivity of invalidism enabled her to achieve a submissive, and truly Christian, attitude. Yonge’s depiction of Margaret’s invalidism had great cultural resonance: in 1866, a critic for the Saturday Review wrote that “An angelic being with a weak spine, who, from her sofa, directed with mild wisdom the affairs of the family or the parish, was a favourite creation of our lady-novelists of the pre-Braddonian period.” (438-9)<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> The author mentions Yonge as one of a group of novelists, including Elizabeth Sewell and Dinah Mulock Craik, who were famous for their interest in invalidism. Although this subject was seen as distasteful by some twentieth century critics – Georgina Battiscombe describes Margaret as “a sad bore” (94) and Q. D. Leavis was revolted by Yonge’s “morbid” preoccupation with “permanent invalid[s]” (153) – more recently, critics have begun to point out the powerful aspects of Margaret’s representation as an invalid. Before bequeathing her place to Ethel, she achieves a central place in the domestic sphere which is Yonge’s focus and ideal, and thus succeeds in transforming her enforced immobility into a source of indirect power. The following extract is taken from her death-bed scene. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> The family reappear in subsequent novels, including The Trial (1864) and The Pillars of the House (1874). <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> “Novels Past and Present”, Saturday Review, 21.546 (April 1866), pp.438-440. Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835-1915) became famous for her ‘sensation’ novels, such as Lady Audley’s Secret (1862) and Aurora Floyd (1863), notorious for their shocking plot-lines and sensuous heroines. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Yonge, Charlotte Mary Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Yonge, Charlotte. The Daisy Chain, or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle. 1856. Macmillan: London, 1879. Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Macmillan Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This watercolour and chalk portrait shows a young, ringletted romantic version of Charlotte Yonge. Portrait by George Richmond (1844). Courtesy <a title="National Portrait Gallery" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/" target="_blank">National Portrait Gallery</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Portrait of Yonge" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw06981/Charlotte-Mary-Yonge?" target="_blank">NPG 2193</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li> Battiscombe, Georgina, Charlotte Mary Yonge: The Story of an Uneventful Life. Constable: London, 1943. </li> <li> Chen, Mia, ‘ “And there was no helping it”: Disability and Social Reproduction in Charlotte Yonge’s The Daisy Chain’, Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, 4.2 (Summer 2008) </li> <li> Leavis, Q.D., ‘Charlotte Yonge and “Christian Discrimination”’ Scrutiny. 12 (March 1944): 152-160. </li> <li> Sturrock, June, Heaven and Home: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate Over Women Victoria, B.C.:University of Victoria, 1995. </li> </ul> Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Portrait of Charlotte Yonge (1844) by George Richmond. Courtesy <a title="National Portrait Gallery" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/" target="_blank">National Portrait Gallery</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Charlotte Yonge Portrait" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw06981/Charlotte-Mary-Yonge?LinkID=mp04969&search=sas&sText=charlotte+yonge&role=sit&rNo=0" target="_blank">NPG 2193</a>). Charlotte Yonge Class Gender Invalidism Literature Mobility Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/145eea89916fbad772e9418fb8ae923f.jpg ecb1ed3f15257f9d554a70913a4d24b1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource "It was a sight to see, a deed to record." Black and white illustration of Slope bending over Signora Neroni, who lies on her invalid couch. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. She had fallen, she said, in ascending a ruin, and had fatally injured the sinews of her knee; so fatally, that when she stood she lost eight inches of her accustomed height; so fatally that when she assayed to move, she could only drag herself painfully along, with protruded hip and extended foot in a manner less graceful than that of a hunchback. She had consequently made up her mind, once and for ever, that she would never stand, and never attempt to move herself. Stories were not slow to follow her, averring that she had been cruelly ill-used by Neroni, and that to his violence she owed her accident. Be that as it may, little had been said about her husband, but that little had made it clearly intelligible to the family that Signor Neroni was to be seen and heard of no more. […] Madeline Neroni, though forced to give up all motion in the world, had no attention whatever of giving up the world itself. The beauty of her face was uninjured, and that beauty was of a peculiar kind. Her copious brown hair was worn in Grecian bandeaux<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> round her head, displaying as much as possible of her forehead and cheeks. Her forehead, though rather low, was very beautiful from its perfect contour and pearly whiteness. Her eyes were long and large, and marvelously bright; might I venture to say, bright as Lucifer’s<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>, I should perhaps best express the depth of their brilliancy. They were dreadful eyes to look at, such as would absolutely deter any man of quiet mind and easy spirit from attempting a passage of arms with such foes. There was talent in them, and the fire of passion and the play of wit, but there was no love. Cruelty was there instead, and courage, a desire of masterhood, cunning, and a wish for mischief. And yet, as eyes, they were very beautiful. The eyelashes were long and perfect, and the long steady unabashed gaze, with which she would look into the face of her admirer, fascinated while it frightened him. She was a basilisk<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> from whom an ardent lover of beauty could make no escape. Her nose and mouth and teeth and chin and neck and bust were perfect, much more so at twenty-eight than they had been at eighteen. What wonder that with such charms still glowing in her face, and with such deformity destroying her figure, she should resolve to be seen, but only to be seen reclining on a sofa. Her resolve had not been carried out without difficulty. She had still frequented the opera at Milan; she had still been seen occasionally in the saloons of the noblesse<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a>; she had caused herself to be carried in and out from her carriage, and that in such a manner as in no wise to disturb her charms, disarrange her dress, or expose her deformities. (75-76) <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> A bandeaux refers to a narrow band of ribbon worn around the head, as a kind of headdress. Especially popular in Regency fashion, the ribbon could be made from a variety of materials, such as velvet or silk, and might be worn both formally and informally. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Lucifer is the name given to the rebellious archangel who falls from heaven and becomes known as Satan. Here Trollope plays on the notion of the Signora’s literal and figurative “fall” from beauty and grace. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Ancient writers describe the basilisk as a reptilian creature with a loud, frightening hiss and fatal breath. Like Medusa, the basilisk’s very look had the power to destroy its viewer. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> Of noble birth or rank. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Barchester Towers Description An account of the resource Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857), the second novel in his “Chronicles of Barsetshire” series, details the public ecclesiastic conflicts between the newly powerful Evangelicals of the Church and the reigning Tory conservatives. However, the private realm of the novel’s accompanying domestic plot offers a fascinating depiction of a physically disabled woman who captivates men with her beauty and sensuality. Signora Madeline Neroni, Trollope’s crippled seductress, forms a stark contrast to Trollope’s chaste and comparatively dull heroine, Eleanor Bold. As with many disabled women in nineteenth century novels, Madeline’s physical defect is linked to her transgressive sexuality—a physical manifestation of dubious morality. Her legs are irreparably damaged as a result of the violence of a husband who has abandoned her, and the novel seems to frame the injury as due punishment for succumbing to pre-marital sex. Like the many disabled female figures of sexual excess Martha Stoddard Holmes describes, Madeline functions only as a catalyst to the able-bodied heroine’s romance plot before disappearing from view in order to alleviate the anxiety her body generates. Yet, as modern feminist critics note, the spectacle of Madeline’s damaged body makes Trollope’s text a key site for tracing historical links between domestic abuse, sexuality, and disability. As Kate Lawson suggests, Madeline “keep[s] the image of the maimed body before us, the tantalizing yet repellent reminder of a—perhaps–grotesque act of domestic violence. Her disfigurement is both a source of continual fascination, of curiousity, and…repulsion” (57). Trollope describes Madeline’s defective body in shocking detail, making the reality of her damaged body visible for the reader. Yet, paradoxically, her meticulous construction of herself as beautiful, elaborately adorned, and sexually desirable depends upon her careful concealment of her crippled limbs. This consistent tension between grotesque display and mysterious veiling haunts Madeline’s character throughout the novel. Suzanne Rintoul notes that her “always only partially visible disability marks a break-down in representation and interpretation for those who work to circumscribe their identities through her abnormal body,” arguing that this “indecipherability” exposes the flaws of the community that surrounds her (7). Ultimately, the spectacle of the Signora’s body, always simultaneously hidden and revealed, invites a complex reading of female disability, agency, and the politics of display, as well as the notion of the mutilated woman’s body as evidence of unspoken violence between men and women. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Trollope, Anthony Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Melina Moore Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource "It was a sight to see, a deed to record." Black and white illustration of Slope bending over Signora Neroni, who lies on her invalid couch. Illustrated by Hugh M. Eaton (New York: the Century Co, 1902): 252. Image courtesy<a title="Wikimedia Barchester Towers" href="http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Barchester_Towers"> Wikimedia Commons</a> under a Creative Commons license. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, The Corporealities Series (Ann Arbour: U of Michigan P, 2004). </li> <li> Lawson, Kate. “Abject and Defiled: Signora Neroni’s Body and the Question of Domestic Violence in Barchester Towers,” Victorian Review 21:1 (1995) 53-68. </li> <li> Rintoul, Suzanne. “The Mysterious Woman and Her Legs: Scrutinizing the Disabled Body in Barchester Towers,” Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 7.1 (2011). Available <a href="http://www.ncgsjournal.com/issue71/rintoul.htm">online.</a> </li> </ul> Anthony Trollope Gender Invalidism Literature Mobility Novel