1 10 13 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/330ec4540b1eaa1ced6a997f31704ba3.png 7bd31ae1f48e2961b4f55d86c291f079 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 This image is reproduced by courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. Description An account of the resource A white plastic glove with all the letters of the alphabet printed in lower case along the fingers and palm. 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 1880 to 1901 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 moment he evinced the independent desire to communicate with others by written words, I felt that the time had come to give him a means of forming written words for himself by teaching him his letters and a manual alphabet.” “For this purpose I adopted the plan, recommended by George Dalgarno, of writing the alphabet upon a glove. This glove I presented to him one morning as a new plaything He put it on his left hand, and then went to the card-rack, as usual, and presented me with the word for some object he desired; we shall suppose the word “doll.” I then covered up the word with the exception of the first letter, “d,” and directed his attention to the glove. After a little searching he discovered the corresponding letter upon the glove. I then showed him the letter “o” on the card, and he soon found it on the glove; and so with the other letters.” “After a little practice of this kind he became so familiar with the places of the letters that he no longer required to search, but pointed at once to the proper letter upon the glove. Every time he required a card from the card-rack I made him spell the word upon his fingers.” “In communicating with me it was unnecessary for him to wear the glove, as we both remembered the places of the letters. I kept up the practice of writing to him, as before, but required him to spell the words upon his hand while I wrote them on the board. He soon became so expert that he could spell faster than I could write, and often finished his sentence by guessing what I was going to add before I had written more than two- thirds. When this stage had been reached I often used the manual alphabet with him, instead of writing. I took his hand in mine and touched the places of the letters upon his hand. He did not require to look; he could feel where he was couched. He recognized the words in this way, however rapidly I spelled them upon his hand. As I had five fingers, I could touch five letters simultaneously, if I so desired, and a little practice enabled me to play upon his hand as one would play upon the keys of a piano, and quite as rapidly.” “I could also give emphasis by pressure upon the fingers, and group the words together as they would be grouped in utterance, leaving pauses, here and there, corresponding to the pauses made in actual speech.” “The more I used with him this means of communication the more I rejoiced in the fact that I had decided to employ an alphabet addressed to the sense of touch, instead of sight. It left his eye free to observe the expression of my face and the actions and objects which formed the subject of our conversation.” 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 A replica of the talking glove used by Alexander Graham Bell to teach George Sanders and, later, to communicate with Helen Keller. This image is reproduced by courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. Description An account of the resource In 1873 Alexander Graham Bell was employed to teach George Sanders, a five year-old congenitally deaf boy. As part of his instruction of Sanders, Bell used the ‘talking glove’ found in the 1680 book, Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor, by George Dalgarno (1628-1687), with slight modification. The letters of the alphabet were written on a glove in specific places on the glove’s surface. A sighted person would then spell words by touching the appropriate letter on the glove. Because of his success with this method of communication with George Sanders, Bell employed it when he met with Helen Keller in Washington in May of 1888. Keller, who was anxious to utilize any method that would allow her to communicate with others, was quite interested in this technology. On 15 May 1888, Anne Sullivan wrote to her former teacher at Perkins Institute for the Blind, Sophia Hopkins, to tell her that when the then-former Governor of Maine, Dr. Alonzo Garcelon, asked Keller what she would like to have as a present, Keller responded with “‘Some beautiful gloves to talk with.” Sullivan continues, writing that the “Doctor was puzzled. He had never heard of ‘talking-gloves’; but I explained that she had seen a glove on which the alphabet was printed, and evidently thought they could be bought. I told him he could buy some gloves if he wished, and that I would have the alphabet stamped on them” (Keller 261-62). While she could understand the potential the glove presented as a method of communication, Sullivan was also concerned by the accessibility of communication she saw with the glove. Dorothy Herrmann quotes an undated letter from Sullivan to Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins School for the Blind, in Helen Keller: A Life. In this letter, Sullivan is reluctant to have Keller use the talking glove as she saw its potential to allow anyone the ability to communicate with Keller, giving Sullivan little control over what Keller was exposed to: I cannot bring myself to the mental state, where I can feel contented to allow irresponsible and unreasoning persons to have easy access to my darling’s pure and loving little heart. I am sure that while I stay with her, she will never have occasion to feel the solitude of her life, and when I go, the glove, I doubt not, will add greatly to her enjoyment. But until then I am determined to keep my beautiful treasure pure and unspotted from the world. (quoted in Herrmann 71) In the end, although Keller herself was, initially, enthusiastic about the glove, it became inconvenient, as she grew more skilled at fingerspelling. Keller expressed her thoughts and opinions so rapidly with fingerspelling that the glove became slow and awkward for her. Indeed, the talking glove, or alphabet glove as it is now commonly called, is still used today by deafblind individuals, but, according to the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland, it “is a cumbersome communication method, but it works well when no other system is available.” As early as 1868, Bell had been involved in teaching deaf students how to speak through his father’s system called Visible Speech. However, rather than challenging Bell’s beliefs that the deaf could be integrated into American society through articulation, the alphabet glove was a part of his larger method of instruction intended to achieve this goal. Bell envisioned that the introduction to language through the alphabet glove and other tools would eventually lead to his students being able to lip-read and speak. While Keller did go on to realize Bell’s problematic oralist agenda and eventually learn to speak, Sanders was not able to master articulation<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. Sanders was, nevertheless, skilfully educated by Bell at least in part through the use of the alphabet glove. Bell’s success in instructing Sanders, who would go on to attend The National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C. in 1882 and work as a printer, added to Bell’s growing reputation as an accomplished instructor to the deaf. Additionally, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Greene Hubbard were so impressed with the alphabet glove and Bell’s success in educating George that they became major investors in Bell’s phone company. Building on the reputation that came from his use of tools such as the alphabet glove in his teaching and the proceeds from his invention of the telephone, Bell became one of the most influential figures in the oralist movement, a movement that sought to suppress sign language in favour of speaking and lip-reading and would have, and still has today, significant negative ramifications for deaf communities throughout the world. Note <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> In a forced emotional scene in the 1939 The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, George Sanders is depicted as being able to eventually say “father” while his father, Thomas, weeps with happiness. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Bell, Alexander Graham. “Upon a Method of Teaching Language to a Very Young Congenitally Deaf Child.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb. XXVII (1883): 124-139. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1883 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nadine LeGier Relation A related resource <ul><li> Clark, Harold T. Talking Gloves For The Deaf and Blind: Their Value to Men Injured in the Present War. Cleveland, Ohio, 1917. </li> </ul><ul><li> Dalgarno, George. Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor. Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1680. </li> </ul><ul><li> Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller: A Life. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. </li> </ul><ul><li> Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. New York: Modern Library, 2003. </li> </ul><ul><li> National Federation for the Blind. <a href="https://nfb.org/deaf-blind-resources">https://nfb.org/deaf-blind-resources</a> </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Talking Gloves Language A language of the resource English https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/9a397c6bda3fbed2e864241e379d93f1.jpg 6f501857a4dabbe7fe1ad3c38ae712cf 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 Image courtesy Wikipedia under a Creative Commons License. Description An account of the resource Portrait of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh, the disabled MP upon whom Richard Calmady was based. 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 1880 to 1901 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. “‘Mother, I – I want to marry.’ ‘I, too, have thought of that,’ she said. ‘You don’t consider that I am debarred from marriage?’ ‘Oh no, no!’ Katherine cried, with a little sob in her voice. He looked at her steadily, with those profoundly desolate eyes. ‘It would not be wrong? It would not be otherwise than honourable?’ he asked. If doubts arose within Katherine of the answer to that question, she crushed them down passionately. ‘No, my dearest, no,’ she declared. ‘It could not be wrong – it could not, could not be so – if she loved you, and you loved whomsoever you married.’ ‘But I’m not in love – at least not in love with any person who can become my wife. Yet that does not seem to me to matter very much. I should be faithful, no fear, to anyone who was good enough to marry me. Enough of love would come, if only out of gratitude, towards the woman who would accept me as – as I am – and forgive that – that which cannot be helped.’ Again trembling shook Katherine. So terribly much seemed to her at stake just then! Silently she implored wisdom and clear-seeing might be accorded her. She leaned a little forward, and taking his left hand held it closely in both hers. ‘Dearest, that is not all. Tell me all,’ she said, ‘or I cannot quite follow your thought.’ Richard flung his body sideways across the bed, and kissed her hands as they held his. The hot colour rushed over his face and neck, up to the roots of his close-cropped, curly hair. He spoke, lying thus upon his chest, his face half buried in the sheet. ‘I want to marry because—because I want a child—I want a son,’ he said. [...] ‘My fate is fixed, you know. There’s no earthly use in wriggling. I am condemned to live a cow’s life and die a cow’s death. The pride of life may call, but I can’t answer. The great prizes are not for me. I’m too heavily handicapped. I was looking at that young fellow, Decies, to-night and considering his chances as against my own—— Oh! I know there’s wealth in plenty. The pasture’s green enough to make many a man covet it, and the stall’s well bedded-down. I don't complain. Only mother, you know—I know. Where’s the use of denying that which we neither of us ever really forget?—And then sometimes my blood takes fire. It did to-night. And the splendour of living being denied me, I—I—am tempted to say a Black Mass. One must take it out somehow. And I know I could go to the devil as few men have ever gone, magnificently, detestably, with subtleties and refinements of iniquity. [...] There should be a picturesqueness in my descent to hell which would go far to place my name at the head of the list of those sinners who have achieved immortality——‘ ‘Richard! Richard!’ Lady Calmady cried, ‘do you want to break my heart quite?’ ‘No,’ he answered, simply. ‘I’d infinitely rather not break your heart. I have no ambition to see my name in that devil's list except as an uncommonly ironical sort of second best. But then we must make some change, some radical change. At times, lately, I’ve felt as if I was a caged wild beast—blinded, its claws cut, the bars of its cage soldered and riveted, no hope of escape, and yet the vigour, the immense longing for freedom and activity, there all the while. [...] You see these few weeks in London—I’ve enjoyed them—but still they’ve made me understand, more than ever, all I’ve missed. Life calls, mother, do you see? And though the beast is blind, and his claws are cut, and his cage bolted, yet, when life calls, he must answer—must—or run mad—or die—do you see?’ ‘And you shall answer, my beloved. Never fear, you will answer,’ Katherine replied proudly. Richard’s hand closed hard upon hers. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You were made to be a mother of heroes, not of a useless log like me.—And that’s just why I want to be good. And to be good I want a wife, that I may have that boy. I could keep straight for him, mother, though I’m afraid I can't keep straight for myself, and simply because it's right, much longer. I want him to have just all that I am denied. I want him to restore the balance, both for you and for me. I may have something of a career myself, perhaps, in politics or something. It’s possible, but that will come later, if it comes at all. And then it would be for his sake. What I want first is the boy, to give me an object and keep up my pluck, and keep me steady. I, giving him life, shall find my life in him, be paid for my wretched circumscribed existence by his goodly and complete one. He may be clever or not—I’d rather, of course, he was not quite a dunce—but I really don't very much mind, so long as he isn't an outrageous fool, if he’s only an entirely sound and healthy human animal.’ Richard stretched himself upon the bed, straightened the sheet across his chest, and clasped his hands under his head again. The desolation had gone out of his eyes. He seemed to look afar into the future, and therein see manly satisfaction and content. His voice was vibrant, rising to a kind of chant. ‘He shall run, and he shall swim, he shall fence, and he shall row,’ he said. ‘He shall learn all gallant sports, as becomes an English gentleman. And he shall ride,—not as I ride, God forbid! like a monkey strapped on a dog at a fair, but as a centaur, as a young demigod. We will set him, stark naked, on a bare-backed horse, and see that he’s clean-limbed, perfect, without spot or blemish, from head to heel.’” 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 History of Sir Richard Calmady was something of a succès de scandale when it was published in 1901. The author, Lucas Malet, had already made her name with her bestselling novel, The Wages of Sin (1890), which dealt with the sexual double standard for men and women, but The History of Sir Richard Calmady was seen as even more shocking because of its disabled protagonist and the frank depiction of his quest for romantic and sexual fulfilment. The fact that Lucas Malet was the pen-name of Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison added an extra spice of scandal to the novel’s publication. Her father, Charles Kingsley – a giant of Victorian letters, novelist, critic, Churchman and campaigner – was strongly associated with the Muscular Christian movement, while The History of Sir Richard Calmady clearly displays the writer’s interest in Roman Catholicism (hated by Kingsley), which led to her conversion in 1901. Moreover, Kingsley’s Muscular Christian values were antithetical not only to the aestheticist style of the novel, but also to its sympathetic treatment of its subject matter, which includes atheism, sexual inversion,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> and of course disability. Malet appears particularly fascinated by the causes of disability, depicting Richard’s physical impairments as a form of paternal inheritance. At the beginning of the novel, Richard Calmady’s father is horribly injured in a horse-riding accident, and his legs have to be amputated at the knee. When his son is born posthumously without lower legs, with his feet where his knees would usually be, the implication is that the father’s injury is written onto the son’s body. In addition to this explanation, which draws on the theory of maternal impressions still influential at the time the novel is set in the 1840s,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Malet introduces the idea of a family curse, allowing the reader (but not the main characters) to learn of a legend by which the wicked action of Sir Denzil Calmady in the seventeenth century – in impregnating and abandoning a local peasant girl and then running over their child in his carriage, cutting off his legs and killing him – caused the family to be cursed, until a disabled heir should be born. Richard’s disability therefore records his family history of sexual and class oppression, while being offered in itself as an answer to these injustices. Over the course of the novel, Richard struggles to come to terms with his disability, and after an abortive attempt to marry a neighbouring aristocrat’s daughter, he undertakes a ‘Rake’s Progress’ around Europe, giving himself up to dissipation and eventually being seduced by his immoral (and married) cousin, Helen de Vallorbes. At this point, however, Richard becomes disillusioned with his life of pleasure and returns home, and after learning of the family curse, and deciding to devote himself to philanthropic works and Christian socialism, marries his other cousin, the feminist ‘New Woman’ (and proto-lesbian), Honoria St Quentin. Richard’s disability is finally shown to have brought him greater spiritual insight and a stronger sense of social responsibility than his peers; despite its innovative style and risqué subject matter, the novel ultimately advocates a form of Christian Socialism not totally unlike Charles Kingsley’s own, but underpinned by – rather than antithetical to – the experience of disability. In this extract, Richard explains to his mother why he has decided that he must marry. In fact, the novel does not give Richard the son he longs for here; he and Honoria are shown to adopt their nephew, another Richard, as their heir. <h3>Notes</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> This was a term coined by the sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing in his work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and developed by Havelock Ellis in his 1897 study Sexual Inversion. He suggested that homosexuality occurred when a man had a woman’s soul (and vice-versa) and should thus be understood not as a crime, but as a medical condition.</div> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp.64-5.</div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Malet, Lucas. The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), Ed. Talia Schaffer. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003. 202-4 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1901 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen. "Orthopaedic Disability and the Nineteenth-Century Novel." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.1 (2014): 1-17. </li> <li> Miller, Kathleen A. "'Your loving is unlike any other': Romance and the Disabled Body in the Gothic Fiction of Edith Nesbit and Lucas Malet." In Writing Women of the ‘Fin De Siècle’: Authors of Change, Ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. </li> <li> O’Connell, Rachel. "Cripsploitation: desire, the gaze, and the extraordinary body in The History of Sir Richard Calmady." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.2 (2008) </li> <li> Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Richard Calmady Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lucas Malet Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Portrait of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_MacMurrough_Kavanagh">Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh</a>, the disabled MP upon whom Richard Calmady was based. Image courtesy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_MacMurrough_Kavanagh">Wikipedia </a>under a Creative Commons License. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/11baf66e5eeb5b6e0faf86463d841f86.jpg d405835417244736264c801aa7ef6acd 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 Wood engraving, 1881. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London under a Creative Commons License (Wellcome Library: ICV No 48264). Description An account of the resource Four scenes from the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney Heath, London. 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 1880 to 1901 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. This admirable institution, the usefulness of which has just been increased by the addition of a new wing which on Saturday, the 16th inst., was formally opened by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, was originally founded in 1854 at Carshalton by the late Andrew Reed, D.D. It was removed to its present locale, Melrose Hall, Putney Heath, in 1863. Up till now there have been some 30 or 40 male inmates against nearly 150 females, and about the same proportion is observable, curiously enough, amongst the outdoor pensioners of the charity, the victims of paralysis, rheumatism, and other disabling maladies, whose number is 450 [...]. But for the fact that almost all the inmates, being more or less crippled, are compelled to move about with crutches, or in invalid chairs, Melrose Hall would present more the appearance of a comfortable hotel than of a hospital. It stands in its own grounds, the windows overlooking a lovely stretch of country, and the various rooms are furnished in such a way as to give the patients as much as possible of home comfort. Pictures, flowers, and books are there in profusion, and every effort is made to lighten the burden of life to the afflicted. There is a large Assembly Room in which Divine Service is held on Sundays, and where those patients who are able to be moved gather for daily prayer, and which is also utilised for social gatherings. The immediate wants of the inmates are attended to by a staff of forty nurses and attendants, the head nurse and six divisional nurses being hospital-trained; the Matron, who is also a skilled nurse, having the oversight of all, under the direction of the medical officer, who attends daily […]. Our engravings are copied from a little pamphlet descriptive of the Hospital, entitled “A Glimpse of a Good Work;” the first represents a patient about to enter one of the hydraulic “lifts” which connect the upper and lower floors; the second, a group of patients and visitors on the lawn; the third, a group of nurses under the verandah, and the fourth the interior of one of the wards, where lie three young girls, sisters, who have been afflicted from early youth, and who are now bedridden. 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 Published in 1881 in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graphic">The Graphic</a>, a widely distributed British newspaper, the following anonymously authored article, entitled “The Royal Hospital for Incurables,” and the engravings accompanying it, offer a sense of the kind of care that the disabled population in England received from privately-funded organizations throughout the long nineteenth century. Residents of The Royal Hospital for Incurables (founded by philanthropist Andrew Reed of Putney in 1854) were attended to by trained physicians when necessary, but they were also left free to roam the surrounding countryside and to enjoy the comforts of accommodating spaces of leisure like the verandah and the Assembly Room, which offered opportunities for what disability studies scholars would today term independent living. We can see from this particular series of images that while called a “hospital,” this institution was closer to what we would now call a “home” for the disabled. It operated differently from most traditional, government-funded hospitals in England, in that it accepted only terminally ill and permanently disabled patients, who were an otherwise outcast population. Most hospitals in Britain tended to focus on treatment and therefore catered to “curable” cases. According to historian Ruth Richardson, who has written on The Middlesex Hospital in London, “it was important for [a] hospital to keep up a rolling programme of ‘successful’ care. To take in the dying, who would make the [hospital’s] statistics look poor, or those who might be a serious long-term drain on the institutions resources…would skew the [hospital’s] statistics in an undesirable direction” (Richardson 70). This was particularly a trend in workhouse infirmaries, where funding and resources were especially scarce. The Royal Hospital for Incurables was progressive, then, because it created a space for an “untreatable” class of patients in England. Privately managed institutions for both the disabled and those with long-term illnesses sprung up around Great Britain and emerged as antidotes to this ethic of curable care. The Royal Hospital for Incurables is merely one example of many charities of this nature, including Reed’s sister institution, <a href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/3">The Earlswood Asylum</a> (founded in 1847), which was also known as the Asylum for Idiots. These institutions offered various levels of support; while The Royal Hospital for Incurables housed its patients permanently, other institutions arranged work opportunities for those those who could live at home, but who struggled to find accommodating jobs. The Baroness <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Burdett-Coutts,_1st_Baroness_Burdett-Coutts">Angela Burdett-Coutts</a>, a friend and benefactor of Victorian author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens</a>, established Brown’s Lane Sewing School, for example, which enlisted many disabled individuals to sew shirts for the army and navy and to work in an accepting and cooperative environment. Coutts took all unemployed people under her wing, but disabled Victorians were a population especially well-represented at her institution and at places like it. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived “The Royal Hospital for Incurables.” The Graphic. (30 July 1881): 119. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1881 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kristen Starkowski Relation A related resource <ul><li> Anonymous. Baroness Burdett-Coutts: A Sketch of Her Public Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. </li> <li> Cook, Gordon C. “Caring for ‘incurables’: The 150th Anniversary of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability, Putney.” Postgraduate Medical Journal 80 (2003): 426-430. <a href="http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/945/426.full">http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/945/426.full</a> </li> </ul><ul><li> Cook, Gordon C. The Incurables Movement: An Illustrated History of the British Home. Abingdon: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006. </li> <li> Richardson, Ruth. Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Four scenes from the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney Heath, London. Wood engraving, 1881. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://wellcomeimages.org/">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (Wellcome Library: ICV No 48264). Title A name given to the resource The Royal Hospital for Incurables Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anonymous https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/b8adb47826a9c84dcd49d446641781df.png 7a9c61fe960cf7039aaee49f26e01bc1 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 1880 to 1901 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. Tom was born blind, and, learning nothing from sight, manifested in his early infancy so entire a want of intellect as to induce the belief that he was idiotic as well as blind. His imbecility and helplessness secured for him the sympathy and care of the family in his infancy; when he began to walk and run about the yard, his amusing peculiarities made him a pet. His first manifestation of interest in anything was his fondness for sounds; the first indication of capacity, his power of imitating them. Musical sounds exerted a controlling influence over him; but all sounds, from the soft breathings of the flute to the harsh grating of the corn-sheller, appeared to afford him exquisite enjoyment […] The first effort to teach him was made one evening when the family was at supper, (Tom, as usual at meals times, being present,) when his owner, upon being informed that his mother, as an excuse for not teaching him something, had said he had not sense enough to learn anything, replied, “That is a mistake. A horse or a dog may be taught almost anything, provided you always use precisely the same terms to express the same idea. Show him what you mean, and have the patience to repeat it often enough. Tom has as much sense as a horse or a dog, and I will show you that he can be taught.” He thereupon arose from the table, and approaching Tom, said to him, “Tom, sit down,” Tom, of course as was expected stood still and repeated the words. He repeated the order and sat him upon the floor. He then said to him, “Tom, get up.” Tom sat still and repeated the order. He then repeated the order and lifted Tom to his feet. He then ordered Tom to sit down, which he did promptly—to get up, and he sprang to his feet […] He was perfectly delighted by cries of pain. When his mother whipped any of the older children he would laugh and caper, and rub his hands in an ecstasy of enjoyment, and soon would be found whipping himself, and repeating the words of the mother and the cries of the child. He enjoyed so highly the crying of children that he would inflict pain upon them, for the pleasure of hearing them cry; and a constant watch had to be kept on him when he was about younger children. He once choked a younger brother nearly to death, and at another time burnt an infant sister so badly as to produce fears of a fatal result. To this day any exclamation or expression indicative of pain gives him great pleasure; and though he will express sympathy for the suffered, and prescribe remedies for his relief, he cannot restrain his expressions of pleasure. Doubtless it is the strength and the intensity of expression given to sounds produced by pain, that afford the enjoyment. […] When he was three or four years of age, it was observed that he passed most of his time with his face upturned to the sun, as if gazing intently upon it, occasionally passing his hands back and forth with rapid motion before his eyes; that was soon followed by thrusting his fingers into his eyes with a force which appeared to be almost sufficient to expel the eye-balls from their sockets; from this he proceeded to digging into one of them with sticks, until the blood would run down his face. All this must have been pleasant to him, or he would not have done it; and there is no doubt that he is indebted to the stimulus thus applied to his eyes, for the measure of sight he now enjoys. […] The mere technicalities of music Tom learns without difficulty. Its substance he seems to comprehend intuitively. To teach him the notes, it was necessary only to sound them, and tell him their names. With the elements and principles of music he seems to be familiar, long before he knew any on the names by which they were indicated […] Considering that in early life he learned nothing, and later but little from sight, that he is possessed by an overmastering passion, which so pervades his whole nature as to leave little room for interest in anything else, and the gratification of which has been indulged to the largest extent, it is not surprising that, to the outside world, he should exhibit but few manifestations of intellect as applicable to any of the ordinary affairs of life, or that those who see him only under its influence should conclude that his is idiotic. 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 Thomas Greene Wiggins, better known as “Blind Tom,” was an autistic savant with an encyclopedic memory. He is known for his mind-boggling ability to replicate music and other sounds after only one hearing. Wiggins was born into slavery in Columbus, Georgia in 1848. His master, Wiley Jones, was reluctant to care for a blind infant slave and sold Wiggins to his neighbor, General Bethune. By six Wiggins had found the Bethune piano and managed to replay exactly songs performed by his white master’s family. By eight Wiggins was contracted to a traveling showman named Perry Oliver who promoted him as a “freak.” With Oliver he performed all over the United States and Europe. His extraordinary talent for imitation, music and memory earned him an invitation to play before President James Buchanan at the White House. He was the first African American musician to officially perform in the White House. Unfortunately, emancipation failed to deliver Wiggins from the shackles of slavery. His enormous fame sullied by the deep-rooted racism of the period. Audiences often confused Wiggins’s autism with “idiocy,” and reinforced the widespread belief that people of African descent were mentally inferior to whites and incapable of caring for themselves. Through “Blind Tom” we learn just how easily misinformation about autism allowed antebellum Americans to continue to conflate race with disability. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Marvelous Musical Prodigy, Blind Tom: The Negro Boy Pianist, Whose Performances at the Great St. James and Egyptian Halls, London, and Salle Hertz, Paris, Have Created Such a Profound Sensation : Anecdotes, Songs, Sketches of the Life, Testimonials of Musicians and Savans, and Opinions of the American and English Press, of "Blind Tom." Sun Book and Job Printing Establishment, 1867. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1867 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource George Gordon-Smith Relation A related resource <ul><li> Davis, Rebecca Harding. “Blind Tom,” Selected Writing From the Borderlands: Stories of the Civil War Era. Eds. Sharon M. Harris and Robin Cadwallader. Athens, GA: U of Georgia P, 2010 </li> </ul><ul><li> O’Connell, Dierdre. The Ballad of Blind Tom, Slave Pianist: America’s Last Musical Genius. New York: The Overlook Press, 2009. </li> <li> Southall, Geneva Handy. Blind Tom, Black Pianist-Composer, Continually Enslaved. London: Scarecrow Press, 2002. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Blind Tom Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Head and shoulders photograph of Blind Tom by John J. Bethune, 1880. Image courtesy <a title="Blind Tom Wikimedia Commons" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Blind_Tom_Wiggins.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a> under a Creative Commons License. Blindness Celebrity Cognition https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/8feb11aaa8db3e33f951103a2866dd4f.jpg eefbd851a6108f0e3ee99a1a5fa9956c https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/5f4b15379d7b2f4e0a15698d4c3f6d60.jpg 8a2f9681b2567e1939775052a4f19d7e https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/9c991a1aa4e81e3680aa33c96fb8fc9f.jpg fcf0c15054c402295fcba950a9f86f7d 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 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Still Image A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. 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 In 1890, a 36” x 24” painting depicting Queen Victoria communicating with a deaf woman in front of a cozy hearth, was exhibited at the Edinburgh Exhibition. Titled “Royal Condescension,” this was the second of a series painted by the amateur painter William Agnew (1846-1941); each shows the Queen in various stages of conversation with a woman, but with minor differences: the 1883 version has a dog on the hearth and was shown at the Chicago World’s Fair; the 1889 version has a baby and won an award at the Edinburgh Exhibition; and the 1900 focuses only on the Queen and the woman. <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/library-rnid/2011/12/20/deaf-artist-william-agnew/">Agnew painted</a> only two other works, “True Nobility” (1897) and “Post Office, Whippingham, I.O.W.” There is little evidence that any of these paintings survive. Born deaf and mute, Agnew received his education at an institution for the deaf in Glasgow, where he learned sign-language and fingerspelling. After leaving school, he was employed in various occupations, including as a bookbinder, printer, and writer. As a writer, he penned several articles advocating sign language in deaf schools, and condemning the implementation of oralism (educating the deaf through articulation and speech) in British schools. It was during this period that fierce debates were ranging amongst educators over the best pedagogical means for instructing deaf-mutes and on the value of sign-language for “normalizing” the deaf. In 1880, educators gathered at the International Congress on Education of the Deaf voted to ban sign language in the classroom and replace it with oral education. Although little is known about Agnew, he certainly saw oralism as a threat to his own identity and culture. He was recruited to fundraise for the building of a new Institute for Deaf and Dumb Adults in Glasgow and West Scotland that would rely on instruction through sign language. Upon exhibiting his 1889 “Royal Condescension” painting to Queen Victoria, Agnew received a generous contribution from the Queen (£50). Funds from an 1891 grand bazaar raised enough to purchase a site for the new building and Agnew was made Director of the Institution. Agnew’s “Royal Condescension” paintings are a testament to his campaigns on the importance of sign language. Queen Victoria was familiar with fingerspelling, having learned as her daughter-in-law Princess Alexandra’s hearing worsened over the years until she became deaf. According to Jennifer Esmail, Agnew’s paintings “not only depicts a unique conversation between a monarch known for her fingerspelling fluency, and one of her poor and ill subjects but also allows us a rare glimpse into the visual language of deaf Victorians” (1). The Queen spook the language of the deaf, refusing, as some accounts noted, to bring a translator. This was tremendously supportive to the manualist campaigns against oral education, for if the monarch spoke the language, why should it be an issue in the classroom? Even the woman in the painting, Mrs. Elizabeth Tuffield (neé Bective Groves, 1840-1874), gives us some insight into the lives of the Victorian deaf. The daughter of a schoolmaster on the Isle of Wright, Tuffield attended the <a href="http://jaivirdi.com/2010/06/14/the-london-asylum-for-the-deaf-and-dumb/">London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb on Old Kent Road</a> (est.1792), one of the first schools in England for the deaf. She eventually married a bootmaker, Samuel (b.1840) in 1870, but she left him; sources indicate Samuel was abusive. The historical significance of Agnew’s “Royal Condescension” paintings is also revealed in how they were reproduced and distributed. Tracts and pamphlets were popular tools in the nineteenth century to propagate powerful visual images, especially to draw attention to a cause. They raised awareness for political or social issues, asked for contributions to fundraising campaigns, and/or merely disseminated information. As many educational asylums for the deaf in the nineteenth-century relied on donations and subscriptions, small pamphlets were often printed for fundraising, even consisting illustrations of sign language—as both information and novelty. <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/library-rnid/2013/08/02/sign-alphabet-exhibition-royalty-and-the-deaf/">Harry Ash</a> (1863-1934) was a deaf draughtsman and designer of wallpaper who, like Tuffield, received his education from the London Asylum. In the late 1890s, he published some pamphlets on sign language, some of which were advertised in the publications of the British Deaf and Dumb Association and the British Deaf Times. In one pamphlet Ash copied Agnew’s “Royal Condescension” painting on the cover, and included the fingerspelling alphabet in the contents. Ash’s pamphlets were partly a response to his experiences at the London Asylum, where in the middle of his education, the <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/library-rnid/2013/08/02/sign-alphabet-exhibition-royalty-and-the-deaf/">system of instruction changed</a> from sign language to the oral method, hindering his progress in learning English. Sign language was necessary and something that every Briton should learn. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Wellcome Library, UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1800-1900 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi Relation A related resource <ul><li>Beaver, Patrick. A Tower of Strength: Two Hundred Years of the Royal School for Deaf Children Margate. Sussex, England: The Book Guild, Ltd., 1992.</li> <li>Edwards, R.A.R. Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture. New York & London: New York University Press, 2012.</li> <li>Esmail, Jennifer. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2013.</li> <li>Jackson, Peter W. Britain’s Deaf Heritage. Edinburgh: The Pentand Press, Ltd., 1990.</li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource (1) Postcard reprint of William Agnew’s 1889 “Royal Condescension” painting. Courtesy of UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries. (2) Postcard reprint of William Agnew’s 1900 “Royal Condescension” painting. Courtesy of UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries. (3) “Royal Condescension” process print by Harry Ash after William Agnew, c.1890-1900. Courtesy of Wellcome Images under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Royal Condescension Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource William Agnew Deafness Painting Visual Culture https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/7816e3d4d7e51ad59b7626eece1c807d.jpg 54b9166ffbc42ea19f8cbeac79f415b1 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 1880 to 1901 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. (Reprinted from a London newspaper, October 7, 1887) The “Ugly Clubs,” of which particulars are to be met in “Hone’s Every-Day Book,” and like compilations, have a somewhat apocryphal air; but at last documentary evidence of the constitution and history of one of these facetious societies of the last century has been brought to light.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> It is an old thin volume in manuscript discovered by a Liverpool bookseller. It contains the rules, accounts, and minutes of proceedings of “The Most Honourable Society of Ugly Faces,” who appear to have been in active existence in that city at least from January 1743 to January 1754, and who were possibly the model for other like facetious societies in later days. The primary condition of membership was that the candidate should have “something odd, remarkable, droll, or out of the way in his phiz; as in the length, breadth, or narrowness thereof, or in his complexion, the cast of his eyes or make of his mouth, lips, chin, &c.”<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Of all this (it is added) the Majority of the Society are to judge, the President to have a casting vote. Extensive lists of names of actual members are duly entered, together with records of meetings, from which it appears that sober subjects were not excluded from their table, since on one occasion the President makes a speech “On the Declaration of War against France.” In this book there also appear minute descriptions of members. James Ashton, D.D., Chaplain to the Society, is stated to have “a fine carv’d face, Eyelashes like two Beesoms, Nose like a shuffle Nos’d Shark, a triangular Mouth, blubber Lips, Meagre Cheecks, and Eyes of a Sea-Green,” and to be “an excellently well qualified member.” Mr. John Woods, of Liverpool, architect, elected July 22, 1751, is sketched in the following flattering terms: “A stone Colour’d complexion, a dimple in his Attick Story, the pilasters of his face fluted, tortoise ey’d, a prominent nose, wild grin, and face altogether resembling a badger, and finer, tho’ smaller, than Sr Chryst. Wren or Inego Jones’s.”<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> As there is an entry in the accounts of a payment “for five pictures of ugly faces” there may be some more convincing record still extant of the claims of these persons to figure at the gatherings at the old “Exchange Coffee House,” which place of entertainment, it seems, was their headquarters. But it has been shrewdly observed that it is not certain whether these were portraits of exceptionally ill-favoured persons, purchased for the general delight and comfort of the club. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> “Hone’s Every-Day Book” was a British periodical published by William Hone in Britain in the 1820s and subtitled “A guide to the year: describing the popular amusements, sports, ceremonies, manners, customs, and events, incident to the three hundred and sixty-five days, in past and present times.” </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> “Phiz” refers to “physiognomy,” or judging a person by their outward appearance. This practice originated in antiquity and regained popularity in the eighteenth century through theorists like Johann Caspar Lavater (who published his Essays on Physiognomy in the 1770s), often with discriminatory ends. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> John Woods was the architect of Liverpool’s Town Hall, and Sir Christopher Wren and Inigo Jones were renowned British architects of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. </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 Ugly Clubs reflect changing notions of deformity through the long nineteenth century, before and beyond. Ugly Clubs arose from fictional forebears in early eighteenth-century satirical periodicals in Britain, including Ned Ward’s The Secret History of Clubs and Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s Spectator papers.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> The factual club in Liverpool, England (1743-54) reflected a number of social, political, and moral debates as it communally satirized deformity and, by extension, disability. In an era when Samuel Johnson interchangeably defined “deformity” and “ugliness” in his ground-breaking A Dictionary of the English Language, and contemporary with the artist William Hogarth’s The Analysis of Beauty, the Ugly Face Club paralleled debates about physiognomy, artistic caricature, and minority dissent toward the club’s focus on ugliness—which “doubles the Ridicule,” according to William Hay, a member of Parliament who was hunchbacked and who wrote Deformity: An Essay (1754), in which he vowed never to be a member of an Ugly Club.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Like other Clubs that permeated eighteenth-century British social culture, the Ugly Face Club was a voluntary fraternal organization whose activities revolved around meeting in a coffee house, drinking ale, and singing songs. Liverpool’s “Most Honourable and Facetious Society of Ugly Faces” consisted of bachelors who banded together to satirize their “odd,” “remarkable,” and “out of the way” facial deformities, not construed as disabling. One membership rule stated that even if a candidate is “humpback’d and leg’d and posses’d of all the perfections besides of the great and immortall worthy Aesop,” he could not be admitted to the Club if he lacked the requisite facial deformities, ranging from “Blubber lips, little goggyling or squinting Eyes” to “a large Carbuncle Potatoe Nose.”<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Members were drawn mainly from Liverpool’s merchant class, also including doctors, ship captains, tradesmen, and the architect of the city’s Town Hall. Throughout the nineteenth century, Ugly Clubs continued to spread, with variations immigrating to America and populating colleges (including the Universities of Virginia and North Carolina), also published in periodical literatures. Perhaps more than their English forebears, Ugly Clubs at American colleges were social fraternities. Framed by the Civil War (1861-65), these satiric portraits appeared against more sobering and realistic contrasts of deformed bodies. UVA’s rituals quieted during the war, when many Americans suffered disabling, rather than amusing, deformities. The heroism or horror of war likely fit uneasily with self-ridicule and fraternal pranks, and the overriding realism and rise of naturalism likely dampened the Club’s antics. In the 1860s, European writers like George Augustus Sala and Victor Hugo mentioned Ugly Clubs, but beyond that, Ugly Clubs seemed to retreat.<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> In the United States, so-called “Ugly Laws” (circa 1880s-1970s) attempted to prohibit individuals with physical deformities from visiting public spaces, perpetuating historic conflations of disability with ugliness.<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> A different lineage of Ugly Clubs arose in Piobicco, Italy, which to this day celebrates a Festival of the Ugly.<a title="" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Throughout their history, Ugly Clubs were complexly entwined with a culture that demeaned deformity, but their communal affiliation refrained deformity that was otherwise isolating and disparaging. Via their witty self-ridicule and ridiculous rules (not to mention the projected self-respect that went with abiding by them), Ugly Clubs participated in a broader historical interrogation of humanity and disability that persists to this day. The published volume of archival papers of Liverpool’s Ye Ugly Face Clubb (1912) provides evidence of this transatlantic trend across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, including the following excerpt dated 1887. This surviving volume is particularly interesting because it notes how Ugly Clubs made a practice “of destroying all documentary evidence of their natural gifts; for even in this MS. many pages are missing, whether by accident or design is open to conjecture.”<a title="" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a> <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Ned Ward’s account or invention of the “Club of Ugly-Faces” (1709) likely inspired Joseph Addison’s and Richard Steele’s fictional Club of the same name in The Spectator papers (1711-12, 1714), including societies at Oxford and Cambridge Universities. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Samuel Johnson published his first edition of <a href="https://archive.org/details/dictionaryofengl01johnuoft" target="_blank">A Dictionary of the English Language</a> in 1755. In <a href="https://archive.org/details/analysisbeauty00hogagoog">The Analysis of Beauty </a>(1753), William Hogarth identified beauty in curved or serpentine lines, which critics disparaged as his “Anti-line of Beauty” and “Line of Deformity.” See also William Hay, Deformity: An Essay, ed. Kathleen James-Cavan (Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2004). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Edward Howell’s edition of Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743-1753 (Liverpool, 1912), pp. 26-7. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> George Augustus Sala was an English journalist, and Victor Hugo was a French writer whose novels include The Hunchback of Notre-Dame and The Man Who Laughs. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[5]</a> See Susan M. Schweik, The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public (New York: New York University Press, 2009). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[6]</a> Rebecca Pike, “<a title="BBC" href="http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/3107852.stm">Italy’s ugly club defies convention</a>,” BBC News, 14 Sept. 2003. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[7]</a> Howell, Ye Ugly Face Clubb, p. 9. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Edward Howell, ed., <a href="http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.a0000230185;view=1up;seq=19%20">Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743-1753 </a>(Liverpool, 1912), pp. 17-19. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Gretchen E. Henderson Relation A related resource <ul><li> Clark, Peter. British Clubs and Societies: 1580-1800: The Origins of An Associational World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. </li> <li> Hay, William. Deformity: An Essay. Ed. Kathleen James-Cavan. Victoria, BC: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2004. </li> <li> Henderson, Gretchen E. “<a href="http://books.google.com/books?id=cAtgAgAAQBAJ&pg=PT35&dq=ugly+face+club&hl=en&sa=X&ei=yjgGU92KIcaIogS-4YGQCg&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=ugly%20face%20club&f=false">The Ugly Face Club: A Case Study in the Tangled Politics and Aesthetics of Deformity.</a>” Ugliness: The Non-Beautiful in Art and Theory. Eds. Andrei Pop and Mechtild Widrich. London: I.B. Tauris, 2014. pp. 17-33. </li> <li> Schweik, Susan M. The Ugly Laws: Disability in Public. New York: New York University Press, 2009. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource From an advertisement for an Ugly Face Club anniversary celebration (1806) reprinted with the frontispiece in Edward Howell’s edition of Ye Ugly Face Clubb, Leverpoole, 1743-1753 (Liverpool, 1912). Image courtesy of Gretchen E. Henderson. Title A name given to the resource Ugly Clubs Aesthetics Class Deformity Literature Visual Culture https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c2caabd0798887c4fad9a75192b5239b.jpg a63618238cfed20de5dcf1d79630fd34 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 1880 to 1901 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. “All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> I gave a view-halloa,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones;<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we could for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black, sneering coolness—frightened too, I could see that—but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. ‘If you choose to make capital out of this accident,’ said he, ‘I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he. ‘Name your figure.’ Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family; he would have clearly liked to stick out;<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> but there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. … “But for all that,” continued the lawyer, “there’s one point I want to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child.” “Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do. It was a man of the name of Hyde.” “Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What sort of a man is he to see?” “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.” <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> “Originally a term from Hindu, in Victorian England used to denote a force that crushes people to death” (33). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> “A hunter’s cry when a fox has been sighted” (33). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> “Slang for a doctor, especially a surgeon” (33). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> To continue to negotiate for a better price. </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 Robert Lois Stevenson’s “shilling-shocker” novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), has so thoroughly become a part of our cultural consciousness that, though not all people have read the tale, most are familiar with its title characters. One often hears the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” applied to common temperamental behaviour and, more crudely, to types of psychiatric illness. In fact, Anne Stiles suggests that at the time of its publication, Stevenson’s depiction of one man split into two distinct persons would have born similarities to the Victorian medical concept of the “double-brained,” that is, of a dual personality caused by “a disproportionately large right brain overpowering the rational activities of the left brain” (38). While the disparate dual personalities of the title characters and the pseudo-medical transformation between them prompt medical interest, Hyde, who is thought to be a separate person from Jekyll until the last quarter of the story, and his body more directly reflect fin-de-siècle notions of disability. In Hyde, we can see both the criminalization of disability and the medicalization of crime disseminated in popular scientific theories of the time: in particular, early criminology, degeneration theory, and theories of atavism, all of which tended to argue that criminals’ bodies bore evidence of de-evolving to a primitive form of human. The novella’s narrators often describe Hyde in atavistic terms, as “troglodytic” (42), “ape-like” (42, 92), or “like a monkey” (65). In the passage below, which gives us the text’s first depiction of Hyde, a Mr Enfield describes Hyde violently injuring a child. Stevenson’s portrayal of Hyde aligns the criminal body with physicality, Hyde’s diminutive size and apparent deformity, but ambiguously does not pin down that deformity, instead making it only a suggestion, a “strong feeling” located in the observer rather than a tangible fact of Hyde’s being. The passage also notably details the violent repulsion people have to the sight of Hyde. While the various narrators of the novella presume Hyde’s inherent evil is the source of this disgust, their responses to his body align with Lennard Davis’s description of disability as “a specular moment” in which a normative-bodied observer responds to the sight of a disabled person with “horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance” (12). Davis argues that these emotional responses are “a socially conditioned, politically generated response” (13); in the case of Hyde’s viewers, these responses would have been informed by popular degeneration theory. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ed. Martin A. Danahay. 2nd Edition. Peterborough: Broadview Press Ltd., 2005. 33-36. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1886 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Relation A related resource <ul><li> Arata, Stephen D. “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde.” Criticism 37.2 (1995): 233-259. 17 Jul. 2013. Print </li> <li> Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995. Print. </li> <li> Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. </li> <li> Schalk, Sami. “What Makes Mr. Hyde So Scary?: Disability as a Result of Evil and Cause of Fear.” Disability Studies Quarterly. 28.4 (2008): <www.dsq-sds.org> Web. </li> <li> Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-De-Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. </li> <li> Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This double-exposed photograph by Henry Van der Weyde depicts Richard Mansfield in the dual role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an early and infamous stage adaptation of Stevenson’s novella. Image in the public domain courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Title A name given to the resource The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Robert Louis Stevenson Language A language of the resource English https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/2adda1e630f00e48db84953cb856a238.png f6b719fad1f7649b7e9cf12a35b53257 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 1880 to 1901 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. Was ever Hell conceived By mortal brain, by brain Divine devised, Darker, more fraught with torment, than the world For such as I? A creature maimed and marr’d From very birth. A blot, a blur, a note All out of tune in this world’s instrument. A base thing, yet not knowing to fulfil Base functions. A high thing, yet all unmeet For work that’s high. A dweller on the earth, Yet not content to dig with other men Because of certain sudden sights and sounds (Bars of broke music; furtive, fleeting glimpse Of angel faces ’thwart the grating seen) Perceived in Heaven. Yet when I approach To catch the sound’s completeness, to absorb The faces’ full perfection, Heaven’s gate, Which then had stood ajar, sudden falls to, And I, a‐shiver in the dark and cold, Scarce hear afar the mocking tones of men: “He would not dig, forsooth; but he must strive For higher fruits than what our tillage yields; Behold what comes, my brothers, of vain pride!” [ . . . ] <h3>EPILOGUE.</h3> We knocked and knocked; at last, burst in the door, And found him as you know—the outstretched arms Propping the hidden face. The sun had set, And all the place was dim with lurking shade. There was no written word to say farewell, Or make more clear the deed. [ . . . ] Meantime there is much talk about my friend. The women say, of course, he died for love; The men, for lack of gold, or cavilling Of carping critics. I, Tom Leigh, his friend I have no word at all to say of this. Nay, I had deem’d him more philosopher; For did he think by this one paltry deed To cut the knot of circumstance, and snap The chain which binds all being? 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 second poem in Amy Levy’s second published collection attests to her longstanding interest in mental illness. As a fin-de-siècle poet, essayist, and novelist, Levy (1861-1889) was one of the most prominent female voices for the significance of mental difference. Levy’s poetry consciously engages with a long line of mostly-male nineteenth-century authors, including Algernon Charles Swinburne, Robert Browning, and James Thomson. In doing so, she highlights earlier, less direct, engagement with mental illness that often goes unexplored. “A Minor Poet,” first published in 1884, revolves around two perspectives. Readers meet the first speaker as he begins his third suicide attempt.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> The first two attempts may have been unsuccessful, but he has high hopes for “luck in threes” (3). The second speaker, a friend by the name of “Tom Leigh,” appears early in the text, but readers only hear his perspective in the epilogue, when he discovers the first speaker’s remains. The excerpted passages below highlight Levy’s interest in interpretations of the non-normative mind. “A Minor Poet” considers why someone would commit suicide, how it might feel to perceive the world from within such a mind, and if it is possible to form a generalizable answer for either question. Tom Leigh underscores how much “talk” has taken place as observers try to interpret the suicide (115). Women, apparently, tend to blame personal pain, while men cite professional grievances. Even Tom begins the poem by trying to use philosophy to reason the nameless speaker out of his melancholy. In contrast, the main speaker of the poem resists the observers’ desire to pin a motivation on his suicidal intent. Instead, he focuses on sensation and how it feels to be, first, out of sync with the world and, then, to leave it entirely. The speaker teaches his readers about what it means to see, hear, touch, and desire as “[a] blot, a blur, a note/ [a]ll out of tune in this world’s instrument” (54-5). In doing so, he not only offers a window into a single mind, but also destabilizes the assumption that there must be a logical reason behind the speaker’s actions. By the end of the epilogue, it seems that Tom has come to a similar conclusion. After a list of potential reasons for his friend’s suicide, he refuses to offer his own interpretation and, instead, ends his text with a question. <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> One year before this collection, Levy published an essay entitled “James Thomson: A Minor Poet.” As such, the first speaker has been read as representing both Thomson and Levy herself. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Levy, Amy. A Minor Poet and Other Verse. 1884. London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1891. Full text available at archive.org. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1884 Relation A related resource <ul><li> Hetherington, Naomi and Nadia Valman. “Introduction.” Ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. Amy Levy: Critical Essays. Athens: Ohio UP, 2010. 1-24. Print. </li> <li> Laird, Holly. “The Death of the Author By Suicide: Fin-de-Siecle Poets and the Construction of Identity.” Ed. Joseph Bristow. The Fin-de-Siecle Poem: English Literary Culture and the 1890s. Athens:Ohio UP, 2005. 69-100. Print. </li> <li> New, Melvyn. “Introduction.” The Complete Novels and Selected Writings of Amy Levy, 1861-1889. Ed. Melvyn New. Gainsville: University Press of Florida,1993. 1-52. Print. </li> <li> Randolph, Lyssa. “Verse or Vitality? Biological Economies and the New Woman Poet.” Ed. Naomi Hetherington and Nadia Valman. Amy Levy: Critical Essays. Athens: Ohio UP, 2010. 198-220. Print. </li> <li> Weisman, Karen. “Playing with Figures: Amy Levy and the Forms of Cancellation.” Criticism 43.1 (2001) 59-79. Print. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The black and white photograph shows the author looking directly into the camera. It was first published in Women’s World 3 (1890): 51, with the legend “From a Photograph by Montabone, Florence.” Image Courtesy Wikimedia Commons under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource A Minor Poet Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Amy Levy Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Rachel Herzl-Betz Mental Illness Poetry https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/575f6f2bdd8657306182d472178086e6.jpg b8d973c68cb81d3baaaf9d48cc6265bf 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 1880 to 1901 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. “I first saw the light on the 5th of August, 1860, I was born in Lee Street, Wharf Street, Leicester. The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant's feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity. The measurement around my head is 36 inches, there is a large substance of flesh at the back as large as a breakfast cup, the other part in a manner of speaking is like hills and valleys, all lumped together, while the face is such a sight that no one could describe it. The right hand is almost the size and shape of an Elephant's foreleg, measuring 12 inches round the wrist and 5 inches round one of the fingers; the other hand and arm is no larger than that of a girl ten years of age, although it is well proportioned. My feet and legs are covered with thick lumpy skin, also my body, like that of an Elephant, and almost the same colour, in fact, no one would believe until they saw it, that such a thing could exist. It was not perceived much at birth, but began to develop itself when at the age of 5 years. I went to school like other children until I was about 11 or 12 years of age, when the greatest misfortune of my life occurred, namely - the death of my mother, peace to her, she was a good mother to me; after she died my father broke up his home and went to lodgings; unfortunately for me he married his landlady; henceforth I never had one moment's comfort, she having children of her own, and I not being so handsome as they, together with my deformity, she was the means of making my life a perfect misery; lame and deformed as I was, I ran, or rather walked away from home two or three times, but suppose father had some spark of parental feeling left, so he induced me to return home again. The best friend I had in those days was my father's brother, Mr. Merrick, hair Dresser, Church Gate, Leicester. When about 13 years old, nothing would satisfy my step-mother until she got me out to work; I obtained employment at Messrs. Freeman's Cigar Manufacturers, and worked there about two years, but my right hand got too heavy for making cigars, so I had to leave them. I was sent about the town to see if I could procure work, but being lame and deformed no one would employ me; when I went home for my meals, my step-mother used to say I had not been to seek for work. I was taunted and sneered at so that I would not go home for my meals, and used to stay in the streets with an hungry belly rather than return for anything to eat, what few half-meals I did have, I was taunted with the remark – ‘That's more than you have earned.’ Being unable to get employment my father got me a pedlar's license to hawk the town, but being deformed, people would not come to the door to buy my wares. In consequence of my ill luck my life was again made a misery to me, so that I again ran away and went hawking on my own account, but my deformity had grown to such an extent, so that I could not move about the town without having a crowd of people gather around me. I then went into the infirmary at Leicester, where I remained for two or three years, when I had to undergo an operation on my face, having three or four ounces of flesh cut away; so thought I, I'll get my living by being exhibited about the country. Knowing Mr. Sam Torr, Gladstone Vaults, Wharf Street, Leicester, went in for Novelties, I wrote to him, he came to see me, and soon arranged matters, recommending me to Mr. Ellis, Bee-hive Inn, Nottingham, from whom I received the greatest kindness and attention. In making my first appearance before the public, who have treated me well -- in fact I may say I am as comfortable now as I was uncomfortable before. I must now bid my kind readers adieu.” 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 story of Joseph Carey Merrick began in 1862, when he was born to Mary Jane and Joseph Merrick of Leicester, but the story of the Elephant Man did not start until several years later. It was when he was a toddler that tumours first appeared on Merrick's body. They continued to grow and multiply throughout his short life, the result of what is now generally understood to be <a title="Proteus Syndrome" href="http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/proteus-syndrome" target="_blank">Proteus Syndrome</a>. Without modern surgical treatment, the condition eventually became so severe that it made a normal life impossible. As the autobiographical pamphlet above states, Merrick found a means of supporting himself by joining travelling 'freak shows', displaying his deformity to the public under the stage name of The Elephant Man. While touring, Merrick composed – albeit possibly with the help of an external writer – the above statement as part of a pamphlet to be distributed to crowds at each exhibition. He later attained fame of a different sort through his relationship with Dr. Frederick Treves, whose reports to the Pathological Society of London made him a medical curiosity. Similarly, F.C. Carr Gomm, chairman of the London Hospital, sent letters to The Times requesting charitable donations to cover the cost of Merrick’s residence there in the final years of his life, and these appeals saw the former sideshow performer faced with an entirely new audience of upper-class benefactors comprised of some celebrities and even royalty. As a result of the spectacular career pressed upon him, scholarly discussions about Merrick’s life and experiences tend to take place within frameworks focused on freakery or nineteenth century medicine rather than a wider perspective of disability history. It’s perhaps significant that most critical approaches centre on the many second-hand accounts of his life. Treves’ reports and his own autobiographical The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, Carr Gomm’s letters, even accounts in the diaries of those who visited Merrick while at the London Hospital: these typically combine with official documents to form the basis on which contemporary scholars analyse Merrick. Primarily, these second-hand accounts present confused attempts to define Merrick as ‘other’, whether other-as-object or other-as-martyr. In most accounts he becomes both, and yet he is neither. Merrick is other, and yet he is also human; more accurately, he is the realization of the other within humanity, and the reflection of the limitations of binaries and boundaries which define humanity in opposition to the other. But while the contemporary accounts that refer to Merrick struggle with this reflection, the one account which at first glance seems most to struggle, Merrick’s own autobiography, in fact offers a more complete acceptance of his redefined humanity. Despite debate over the authorship of the statement in this pamphlet, I refer to it as an autobiography because I find no evidence to convince me otherwise; Merrick was literate, and there is no concrete evidence that the pamphlet was composed by anyone else, although he may have had help with the physical act of writing. That said, confusion as to the author is understandable given the strange narrative voice that characterises the autobiography. In their critical exploration of Merrick’s narrative construction, Peter Graham and Fritz Oehlschlaeger note that the persistent detachment of the statement “might plausibly be ascribed either to an external writer... or to Merrick's own distinguishing between his essence and the misshapen 'thing' that was his body” (13). However, to explore Merrick’s written experience as a means of understanding his own perspective on his “essence” and his “body”, it helps to consider the way in which the autobiographical pamphlet can be considered a piece of disability writing, and to examine this voice in relation to those which speak about Merrick. Mark Mossman explores the function of disability writing in relation to the disabled persons’ construction or definition of selfhood; he describes how disability writing “attempts to reclaim ownership of the body and the way the body is understood” by spinning the body’s inherent instability into “the articulation of a volitional mode of selfhood” (7). For Mossman, “writing disability becomes an empowering act of control, a deconstructive critical strategy that attempts to break down oppressive and imprisoning cultural construction… the performance and general representation of disability is re-centered, re-focused on the disabled subject itself” (7-8). At first glance, it would appear that Merrick’s autobiography does not constitute “an empowering act of control” or a “deconstructive critical strategy,” given that Merrick seems to describe himself within the confines of stereotypes imposed on him by Treves and others. Merrick emphasises his own otherness by referring to his right hand as “almost the size and shape of an Elephant's [sic] foreleg,” and to himself as an impossible “thing”, informing readers that “no one would believe until they saw it, that such a thing could exist.” The way that Merrick both distances and owns his body throughout his autobiography also seems not to fit under the heading of disability writing, which Mossman asserts attempts to reclaim ownership of the body. Merrick’s narrative alternates between the use “the” and “my” when referring to his body: “my head is 36 inches”, “the face is such a sight that no one could describe it”, “the right hand”, “my feet and legs”, “my body”, “my deformity.” While these fluctuations and the images of otherness that Merrick employs could be seen as an inability to reclaim his body or as evidence of an external writer, they can also be interpreted another way. Merrick describes his body as both part of his subjectivity, claiming his embodied experience as a fundamental part of his humanity, and at the same time realizing his body as an object. His language throughout this passage reflects a subjectivity like that outlined by Ruth Robbins, in which “we are not only subjective selves... but also objective selves - selves with a material presence in the world, selves with bodies that may in fact be subject to actions and forces that we cannot control, which are in fact the objects of the actions and desires... of others” (8-9). From this perspective, then, Merrick is not hesitating or unable to reclaim his body; he is in fact claiming ownership of his body as intertwined with his subjectivity and as distanced object. In short, he is claiming ownership of his body in a way that those whose bodies conform to the strictures of “normal” humanity cannot do, at least, not comfortably. Understanding Merrick’s autobiography as a method of reclaiming his body and his embodied subjectivity brings it more in line with disability narratives. However, rather than simply “deflect[ing]and displac[ing] the powerful gaze of the ‘norm’” (Mossman 8), Merrick’s autobiography calls the very nature of the ‘norm’ into question. The accounts written about him by others attempt to divide him into the bodily other and the human spirit, but Merrick’s autobiography denies this separation, and brings his body and his spirit together into one lived experience. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Merrick, Joseph Carey. “The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick.” In Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man, 3rd Edition. 173-174. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1980, 1992. (Available online at <a href="http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/autobioMerrick.pdf">http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/autobioMerrick.pdf</a>) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1884 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ally Crockford Relation A related resource <ul><li> Evans, Jonathan. Treves and the Elephant Man. Compiled by Jonathan Evans. Loughton, Essex: Metloc Printers, 2003. </li> <li> Montagu, Ashley. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. London: Allison & Busby Ltd, 1972. </li> <li> Mossman, Mark. “Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body.” Postmodern Culture 11, no. 3 (May 2001). </li> <li> Robbins, Ruth. Subjectivity. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. </li> <li> Treves, Sir Frederick. The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences. London: Cassell & Company Ltd, 1923. (Available at: <a href="http://archive.org/details/elephantmanother00trevuoft">http://archive.org/details/elephantmanother00trevuoft</a>) </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Carte de visite photograph of Joseph Carey Merrick. Image Courtesy <a title="Merrick" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AJoseph_Merrick_carte_de_visite_photo%2C_c._1889.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Joseph Carey Merrick, ‘The Elephant Man’ Autobiographical pamphlet Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Merrick, Joseph Carey Language A language of the resource English Celebrity freakery life writing Medicine https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/cd07918c6f0f82a422b73c24f001ba6e.jpeg 99d2438f56b35820b9b03f6c8d86386e 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 280 Height 430 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 This black and white photograph shows a young woman holding Rhodes’ Audiphone to her mouth, c.1926. Courtesy of The Central Institute for the Deaf-Max A. Goldstein Historic Devices for Hearing Collection. Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine. 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 1880 to 1901 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 mute will feel the influence of the sound on his hand in the instructor's throat, imitate it in his own throat, will hear the speaker's voice on the Audiphone and will be aided in imitating the speaker by seeing his lips, and will also hear his own voice on the Audiphone, and readily learn to speak. It is remarkable how rapidly they learn to distinguish words by sound. In a very short time, they have learned to repeat whole sentences spoken to them while blindfolded. It is believed that every mute child may hear and learn to speak by using the Audiphone. It must be borne in mind, however, that a mute who has never heard has no conception of the meaning of the simplest words. Even though he be very intelligent and highly educated, read and write fluently, and interpret language readily by the motion of the speaker's lips, still he will not understand the most elementary sound until he is taught. He is familiar with visible, but knows nothing of articulate, language. At first, if you ask him to intimate whether or not he hears by means of the Audiphone, he may indicate that he feels a peculiar sensation that is new to him. It will not be long, however, until he realizes that what seemed to him feeling we call sound. Parents and teachers of mutes are, therefore, recommended to begin with the rudiments of language, as in teaching a child of two years. Mutes enjoy music from the first. A piano or organ should be used daily in their early training, at first resting the handle of the Audiphone on the instrument. Start and stop the music at intervals, until they realize the difference. Then they may withdraw from the piano and gradually accustom themselves to the new sensation. Faithful and patient practice, repeating over and over again the vowels and other simple sounds day after day, must be the ground-work of the mute's articulate education. To expect him to understand the first sounds that reach his brain is like asking the child in the A B C class to read Bacon or Shakspeare [sic]. 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 Audiphone Description An account of the resource On September 1879, Richard Silas Rhodes (1842-1902), president of a publishing company in Chicago, received a patent for his “Audiphone for the Deaf” his various improvements to the device. (<a>U.S. Patent No. 319,828</a>). Rhodes had conductive hearing loss<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> for twenty years following a bout of illness and was frustrated with his continuous failed encounters with ear trumpets. He observed he could hear the ticking of his watch when he held it in his mouth, and this inspired his construction of the Audiphone, which exploited the fact sound waves can be transmitted through the teeth or cranial bones. Hearing through bone conduction by using a material to transmit external sound through the jaw or teeth is an ancient notion, with references to its use dating back to the Ancient Greeks. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some scholars observed sounds could be heard at a distance upon placing a rod on the ground and holding the other end to the teeth. Physicians, educators, and even deaf individuals experimented with a variety of materials, such as wood, to figure out which objects best could transmit sound from a vibrating source (Mills 143; Goldstein 345). The Audiphone was made of a flexible sheet of polished black vulcanite (hardened rubber), with a handle, and was constructed in the shape of a fan. It was 24cm wide 27.7cm long, and 1mm thick. Another model was later constructed consisting of two leaves, designed so the user could also hear his or her voice. The standard model sold for $10 and the double-model sold for $15, an expensive sum at the time. For an extra charge, Rhodes would add ornamental features to disguise the instrument and make it inconspicuous as a hearing aid device. It was designed to be held loosely in the hand, with the upper edge placed under the upper teeth with slight pressure; the lower teeth should not be allowed to come into contact with the instrument (Goldstein 347). The device was effective only in conductive hearing loss. Users could improve their hearing up to 30 decibels, equivalent to a soft conversation heard a few feet away in a quiet room (for comparison, 20dB is the rustling of leaves, or whispering; 0dB is the hearing threshold). In January 1881, Rhodes received a patent for a modified version of his design, an Audiphone that folded as a fan of 10mm. The model was awarded a medal at the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago. In an <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout38-t13-body-d1.html">advertising pamphlet</a>, The Audiphone: A New Invention that enables the deaf to hear (1879), Rhodes remarks the Audiphone was “GOOD NEWS FOR THE DEAF,” for it enables them to hear ordinary conversation readily and was beneficial for church, lectures, concerts, plays, and so forth. Moreover, the design of the device as a fan meant the user could easily conceal their deafness if they wished, by pretending they were simply using a fan. Numerous testimonials from the United States and Europe commented on the Audiphone’s <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout38-t13-body-d3.html">acoustic capabilities</a>. The Englishman James Samuelson, for instance, purchased one in his visit to the United States in 1880, and tried it himself both in private and in public. He testifies: “It seems to me that aurists [medical specialists of the ear] and teachers of the deaf will be very much benefited by the invention: the former, through being able to use it as an instrument for diagnosis…the latter, where the child is deaf from some injury or imperfection of the mechanical portions of the auditory apparatus” (Samuelson 12). Indeed, the Audiphone was used in schools for the deaf, particularly in France, though opinions on its benefits varied. Some teachers were astounded at its ability to assist deaf children to speak, while others noted it was completely unnecessary as a pedagogical aid. Mary McCowen, for instance, who taught a class of semi-deaf children at the Nebraska School for the Deaf (est. 1869), and at the “Voice and Hearing School for the Deaf” in Chicago, remarked: “Though I began the year’s work as a most enthusiastic advocate of the audiphones, and used it conscientiously for several months, I cannot without a protest allow it to be said that the teacher of that class ascribes the success to the audiphones. I make a specialty in my work here of training the hearing, but I have thus far failed to find a single child that was really and truly helped by the audiphones” (American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 87). Some schools in England even reported that at least twenty percent of the pupils had sufficient hearing when assisted with the audiphone, enabling them to participate more diligently in their speech-training and learning. Rhodes’ Audiphone remained a popular bone-conduction hearing instrument until the early years of the twentieth century, long after Rhodes’ unfortunate death—he was killed while walking along the Wisconsin Central Railroad tracks in Illinois (Berger 318). Various other patents and designs of the Audiphone popped up over the ears, each boasting a more efficient conduction system, a cheaper price tag, or a more revolutionary design. Some of these were quickly dismissed as nothing more than another <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20716FE34551B7A93C6A81788D85F448884F9">“quack cure” for deafness</a>. <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Conductive hearing loss is when it is difficult for sound waves to conduct through the tympanum (the ear drum) or the middle ear, where the ossicles (three tiny bones in the ear) reside. </div> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhodes, Richard S. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Rhodes, Richard S. The Audiphone: A New Invention that Enables the Deaf to Hear. Chicago: Rhodes & McClure, 1879. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1881 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This black and white photograph shows a young woman holding Rhodes’ Audiphone to her mouth, c.1926. Courtesy of The Central Institute for the Deaf-Max A. Goldstein Historic Devices for Hearing Collection. <a href="http://beckerimages.wustl.edu/">Becker Medical Library</a>, Washington University School of Medicine. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Berger, Kenneth W. The Hearing Aid, it’s Operation and Development. Michigan, USA: National Hearing Aid Society, 1970. </li> <li> Berger, Kenneth W. “Early Bone Conduction Hearing Aid Devices.” Archives of Otolaryngology 102 (May 1976): 315-318. </li> <li> Murdy, Albert and Tjellstorm, Anders. “Historical Background of Bone Conduction Hearing Devices and Bone Conduction Hearing Aids.” Archives of Otorhinolaryngology 71 (2011): 1-9. </li> <li> Mills, Mara. “When Mobile Communication Technologies Were New.” Endeavour 33.4 (2009): 140-146. </li> <li> Goldstein, Max A. Problems of the Deaf. St. Louis: The Laryngoscope Press, 1933. </li> <li> Samuelson, James. “Rhodes’s Audiphone.” British Medical Journal 3.1 (1880): 12. </li> </ul> Advertisement Deafness Medicine Mobility Prosthesis Technology