1 10 61 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/062a3b4609dad0bc5f09443ee3b8e03a.jpg 540356214f4a202f335e1ef3cf4619aa 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 1174 Height 514 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 A colour lithograph shows Ben Rhydding ensconsed amidst extensive grounds with hills and trees. Frontispiece from Ben Rhydding: The Principles of Hydropathy and the Compressed-Air Bath (1858). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Ben Rhydding is finely situated on the slope of Rombald's Moor,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> at an elevation of five hundred feet above the level of the sea. Whether from the natural advantages of its position, the variety and beauty of the scenery in its neighbourhood, the extensive and elegantly laid-out private grounds with which it is surrounded, or the perfection of its internal arrangements for the health and comfort of its inmates, this establishment well deserves the reputation it has secured. Built on a sandy soil, rain never lies on its gravelly walks; and the springs which supply it with water are among the finest in England. From its situation, midway between the vast upland moors and the lovely banks of the placid Wharfe, Ben Rhydding affords not only a favourable position from which to admire the varied scenery around, but one from which, by a walk requiring little time or exertion, the valetudinarian may enjoy, when he pleases, an agreeable change of temperature. Should the sun beat too strongly on the lower levels, he can enjoy the breezes of the uplands, and when cold and storm are raging on the height, the grounds by which this establishment is surrounded will be found to command a more sheltered climate than even the banks of the silvery Wharfe. Within these grounds, and by the banks of the Wharfe, even in winter, when the weather is not inclement, the delicate and consumptive may take exercise without apprehension; for as we intend to shew by and by, it is the opinion not only of Dr. MacLeod, the eminent Physician who takes the sole direction of this establishment, but also of many medical men of high standing, who are perhaps opposed to his opinions on other points, that a dry, bracing atmosphere is more suitable than a relaxing one in consumption, and that out-door exercise, when properly regulated, may often be found even more beneficial in winter than in summer. Ilkely had long been famous for its springs, and it was this circumstance, among others, that led to its selection as an appropriate site for the Hydropathic Establishment we have undertaken to describe. Ben Rhydding was erected nearly twelve years ago, at an expense of about £30, 000. The estate consists of about two hundred acres of ground; a great part of which is laid out with a view to the advantage and pleasure of the patients, affording them the opportunity for varied exercise, and communicating also with the extensive moors which crown the hills for many miles on both sides of the valley of the Wharfe. The House consists of a central building and two wings. The centre contains, on the ground floor, the dining-room, the library, and the sitting-rooms. On the first floor are the drawing-room, six private sitting-rooms, and four bed-rooms, all commanding exquisite and varied views of the surrounding scenery. The second floor is devoted entirely to double bed-rooms. The south wing contains the ladies', and the north wing the gentleman's bed-rooms. To each landing is attached a bath-room; and the bed-rooms are each fitted with a bath and an unlimited supply of water direct from the springs. The bath-rooms contain each a plunge bath and a douche. There are also hot water, hot air, and vapour baths,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> as well as steam apparatus for local application in cases of the nerves, or other causes. Of course, too, there are all the other means and appliances, too numerous to mention, of a first-class Hydropathic establishment. The library is supplied with a great variety of the leading newspapers, reviews, and magazines of the day. Gentlemen will find in the library that quietness for reading and writing which cannot always be secured in the drawing-room. Books in the various departments of literature may be had on application to the clerk of the establishment. A billiard-room, open from 9 a.m. to 10 p.m., affords the means of recreation to those who cannot be much out of doors. But Ben Rhydding is not devoted solely to the Water Cure, but to the fullest carrying out in practice of the entire art of cure. Hardly inferior in importance to the hydropathic treatment is that by the Compressed Air-Bath. [… ] The Compressed-Air Bath, a strong chamber constructed of iron plates, firmly rivetted and air-tight, and with several small windows of strong plate glass, is on the west of the house, and so near, that the most delicate patient may walk, or be carried to it, in the severest weather, and at all seasons of the year, without any danger. We step across to it, and, with the Doctor's permission, peep in at one of the windows. We see several patients sitting, evidently quite at their ease, reading the papers, or chatting to each other. We find, however, that, though they get more than the usual supply of air, they are required to be quiet and grave when under its influence, for the direction runs:-- “Parties not to laugh or discuss in the Air-bath!” The importance of exercising the different muscles of the body, as a means of assisting in the cure of disease, or preserving health, is fully recognized at Ben Rhydding. Not only are the “free exercises” enjoined as required, (a notice of these will be given in a subsequent chapter,) but a Gymnasium, with a suitable apparatus for exercises of a more advanced description, has been erected on a large terrace levelled for the purpose. Adjoining the Gymnasium, is a large Bowling Green, whereon, as the Muse of Ben Rhydding has ere now sung; many a roaring game, with varying success, has been contested between the lovely fair and their bearded foeman. We would gladly quote for the reader's edification, some of the stirring incidents of the peaceful war, but from respect to the maiden or matronly modesty of the fair combatants, if not to that of their antagonists, we must leave them to the immortality of the “Ben Rhydding Ariel.” Let us not, in enumerating the means of recreation possessed by this fine establishment, omit to notice the American Bowling Alley, and the Racket Court. All these are under the direction of an experienced Gymnast. […] It may not be out of place to give an account, here, of the general manner of life at Ben Rhydding. Everybody who can, rise early and get a special bath and a walk. Then comes breakfast, at eight a. m. in the summer, and half-past eight in the winter, the large bell giving a quarter of an hour's notice. Immediately after breakfast, there are short scripture readings in the drawing room. Till dinner, at two p.m. the patient consults the doctor, takes his forenoon bath and the requisite exercise thereafter, and makes excursions in the neighbourhood.<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Dinner is plain, but substantial. There is no pampering the appetite by highly seasoned dishes, no pleasing the palate by generous wines; simplicity and temperance reign supreme. Roast meat and plain pudding form the staple dishes, though the bill of fare includes a variety of others. […] The drink is pure water. It is a goodly sight to glance down the Doctor's hospitable table, and see how thoroughly happy and satisfied the guests appear with their temperate fare: we do not see one who seems to miss his wine. No one, of course, thinks of very active exercise or exertion immediately after dinner. Some move off to the billiard-room; others lounge about in quiet meditation; while others betake themselves to the drawing-room. There is plenty of work for the afternoon,--the afternoon bath, and as brisk and long a walk in the grounds or on the moor, as the patient may think proper, and any of the exercises or relaxations, for which such abundant provision has been made. Then comes the evening meal, at seven o'clock. This meal should be lighter than breakfast, being composed, like it, of bread, white and brown, with fresh butter, water—pure and sparkling from the spring, milk, cocoa, and weak black tea. After tea, the patient seeks, of course, the humanizing influences of the drawing-room, and probably finds ten p.m. arrive all too soon. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Rombald's Moor is a moorland between Ilkley and Keighley in West Yorkshire, in the North of England. Ilkley Moor is part of Rombald's Moor. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> A plunge bath or pool was a still pool large enough to immerse the whole body. A “douche” was a jet or stream of water applied to some part of the body for medicinal purposes. A vapour or Russian bath sweated the bather through steam. See Malcolm Shifrin's <a href="http://www.victorianturkishbath.org/F0GLOSSARY/2WOTSINIT.htm">glossary of terms</a> at Victorian Turkish Bath for definitions and images of the types of baths offered in hydropathic treatments. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Bolton Abbey and Haworth Parsonage, along with the graves of the Brontë sisters, were among the nearby attractions. See Ben Rhydding, pages 23-25. </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/. Title A name given to the resource The Principles of Hydropathy Description An account of the resource Hydropathy, or “the water cure” was a common treatment for ailments ranging from depression to gastro-intestinal disorders in the nineteenth-century, as well as a form of recreation. It was especially popular in the mid-nineteenth century. Patients went to establishments such as <a href="http://www.victorianturkishbath.org/6DIRECTORY/AtoZEstab/Hydros/BenRydding/BenRhyddingSF.htm">Ben Rhydding</a>, established in 1844, to take the water cure, which included drinking copious quantities of (usually mineral) water, wrapping the patient in wet sheets to induce a sweat, and various forms of baths and showers. Famous Victorians including Darwin, Tennyson and the Carlyles all partook of the water cure at one point or another. Hydropathy appealed to the Victorians partly because of the control they exerted over their own treatment. As the salesmanship of the excerpt below suggests, at a hydrotherapy establishment such as Ben Rhydding, men and women were pampered clients there by choice, free to come and go, and to bring family members with them. Ben Rhydding was one of the first hydros established in the UK; it was significant in terms of the scale of its operations and its provisions for visitors. Built at a cost of £24,000 to £30,000, it became the leading establishment in the UK (Durie 40-41). The excerpt below—published anonymously by the charismatic doctor, William MacLeod (or McLeod), who superintended Ben Rhydding from 1847 to two years or so before his death in 1875—focuses on the amenities available to the patient undergoing the water cure, from baths to billiards. In 1860 the cost of a week at Ben Rhydding was 3 13s6d<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>for a patient undergoing the water cure, and 3 for a visitor, usually a family member staying with the patient (Durie 45). <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> British currency was not decimalized until 1971. It was divided up into pounds (£) shillings (s) or pence, there were twenty shillings in a pound) and pence (d). See Marje Bloy, <a href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/admin/items/edit/(http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/currency.html">“British Currency before 1971</a>” on the Victorian Web </div> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource [Macleod, William] Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived [Macleod, William]. Ben Rhydding: The Principles of Hydropathy and the Compressed-Air Bath. London: Hamilton, Adams & Co, 1858. Pages 12-22. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1858 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A colour lithograph shows Ben Rhydding ensconsed amidst extensive grounds with hills and trees. Frontispiece from Ben Rhydding: The Principles of Hydropathy and the Compressed-Air Bath (1858). T Picken, lithographers. Dav & Son Lithographers to the Queen. Courtesy <a title="Ben Rhydding Wikimedia" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Ben_Rhydding_hydropathic_establishment_-_circa_1858.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> under a Creative Commons License. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Durie, Alastair J. “The Business of Hydropathy in the North of England.” Northern History 2002(39.1): 37-58.</li> <li>Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body in Victorian Culture. Cambridge, MA: Havard UP, 1978.</li> <li>Shifrin, Malcolm. <a title="Turkish Baths" target="_blank">Victorian Turkish Baths: Their Origin, Development and Gradual Decline</a>. <<a href="http://www.victorianturkishbath.org/">http://www.victorianturkishbath.org</a>> </li> </ul> Advertisement Hydrotherapy Institutions Medicine Travel Writing https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/dbce54f5f2e3c7a6e096fbdfb7afd7fd.jpg 0d71c9eb583f97e7432b8c02d8540ae5 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 2100 Height 2843 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String copyright_notice:Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html byline:Wellcome Images object_name:V0015876 Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading e headline:V0015876 Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading emboss caption:V0015876 Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading emboss Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading embossed letters from a book. Lithograph by W. Sharp, 1844, after A. Fisher. 1844 By: Alanson Fisher and BouvÈ & Sharp.after: W. SharpPublished: 1844 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html IPTC Array a:5:{s:16:"copyright_notice";s:123:"Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";s:6:"byline";s:15:"Wellcome Images";s:11:"object_name";s:64:"V0015876 Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading e";s:8:"headline";s:69:"V0015876 Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading emboss";s:7:"caption";s:500:"V0015876 Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading emboss Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman reading embossed letters from a book. Lithograph by W. Sharp, 1844, after A. Fisher. 1844 By: Alanson Fisher and BouvÈ & Sharp.after: W. SharpPublished: 1844 Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";} Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A black and white lithograph shows Laura Bridgman guiding her friend Oliver's hand over an open book with raised print as she teaches him to read. Both children's signatures appear at the bottom of the print as further proof of their literacy. Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman (1844). Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. It is strange to watch the faces of the blind, and see how free they are from all concealment of what is passing in their thoughts; observing which, a man with eyes may blush to contemplate the mask he wears. Allowing for one shade of anxious expression which is never absent from their countenances, and the like of which we may readily detect in our own faces if we try to feel our way in the dark, every idea, as it rises within them, is expressed with the lightning’s speed, and nature’s truth. If the company at a rout, or drawing –room at court, could only for one time be as unconscious of the eyes upon them as blind men and women are, what secrets would come out, and what a worker of hypocrisy this sight, the loss of which we so much pity, would appear to be! The thought occurred to me as I sat down in another room, before a girl, blind, deaf, and dumb; destitute of smell; and nearly so, of taste: before a fair young creature with every human faculty, and hope, and power of goodness and affection, inclosed within her delicate frame, and but one outward sense—the sense of touch. There she was, before me; built up, as it were, in a marble cell, impervious to any ray of light, or particle of sound; with her poor white hand peeing through a chink in the wall, beckoning to some good man for help, that an Immortal soul might be awakened. Long before I looked upon her, the help had come. Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline, and its broad open brow; her dress, arranged by herself, was a pattern of neatness and simplicity; the work she had knitted, lay beside her; her writing-book was on the desk she leaned upon.—From the mournful ruin of such bereavement, there had slowly risen up this gentle, tender, guileless, grateful hearted being. Like other inmates of that house, she had a green ribbon bound round her eyelids. A doll she had dressed lay near upon the ground. I took it up, and saw that she had made a green fillet such as she wore herself, and fastened it about its mimic eyes. She was seated in a little enclosure, made by school-desks and forms, writing her daily journal. But soon finishing this pursuit, she engaged in an animated conversation with a teacher who sat beside her. This was a favourite mistress with the poor pupil. If she could see the face of her fair instructress, she would not love her less, I am sure. I have extracted a few disjointed fragments of her history, from an account, written by that one man who has made her what she is. It is a very beautiful and touching narrative; and I wish I could present it entire. Her name is Laura Bridgman. ‘She was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, on the twenty-first of December, 1829. She is described as having been a very sprightly and pretty infant, with bright blue eyes. She was, however, so puny and feeble until she was a year and a half old, that her parents hardly hoped to rear her. She was subject to severe fits, which seemed to rack her frame almost beyond her power of endurance; and life was held by the feeblest tenure: but when a year and a half old, she seemed to rally; the dangerous symptoms subsided; and a twenty months old, she was perfectly well. ‘Then her mental powers, hitherto stinted in their growth, rapidly developed themselves; and during the four months of health which she enjoyed, she appears (making due allowance for a fond mother’s account) to have displayed a considerable degree of intelligence. ‘But suddenly she sickened again; her disease raged with great violence during five weeks, when her eyes and ears were inflamed, suppurated, and their contents were discharged.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> But though sight and hearing were gone for ever, the poor child’s sufferings were not ended. The fever raged during seven weeks; for five months she was kept in bed in a darkened room; it was a year before she could walk unsupported, and two years before she could sit up all day. It was now observed that her sense of smell was almost entirely destroyed; and, consequently, that her taste was much blunted. ‘It was not until four years of age that the poor child’s bodily health seemed restored, and she was able to enter upon her apprenticeship of life and the world. ‘But what a situation was hers! The darkness and the silence of the tomb were around her: no mother’s smile called forth her answering smile, no father’s voice taught her to imitate his sounds:--they, brothers and sisters, were but forms of matter which resisted her touch, but which differed not from the furniture of the house, save in warmth, and in the power of locomotion; and not even in these respects from the dog and the cat. ‘But the immortal spirit which had been implanted within her could not die, nor be maimed nor mutilated; and though most of its avenues of communication with the world were cut off, it began to manifest itself through the others. As soon as she could walk, she began to explore the room, and then the house; she became familiar with the form, density, weight, and heat, of every article she could lay her hands upon. She followed her mother, and felt her hands and arms, as she was occupied about the house; and her disposition to imitate, led her to repeat everything herself. She even learned to sew a little, and to knit.’ The reader will scarcely need to be told, however, that the opportunities of communicating with her, were very, very limited; and that the moral effects of her wretched state soon began to appear. Those who cannot be enlightened by reason, can only be controlled by force; and this, coupled with her great privations, must soon have reduced her to a worse condition than that of the beasts that perish, but for timely and unhoped-for aid. ‘At this time, I was so fortunate as to hear of the child, and immediately hastened to Hanover to see her. I found her with a well-formed figure; a strongly marked, nervous-sanguine temperament; a large and beautifully shaped head;<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> and the whole system in healthy action. The parents were easily induced to consent to her coming to Boston, and on the 4th of October, 1837, they brought her to the Institution. ‘For a while, she was much bewildered; and after waiting about two weeks, until she became acquainted with her new locality, and somewhat familiar with the inmates, the attempt was made to give her knowledge of arbitrary signs, by which she could interchange thoughts with others. ‘There was one of two ways to be adopted: either go on to build up a language of signs on the basis of the natural language which she had already commenced herself, or to teach her the purely arbitrary language in common use: that is, to give her a sign for every individual thing, or to give her a knowledge of letters by combination of which she might express her idea of the existence, and the mode and condition of existence, of any thing. The former would have been easy, but very ineffectual; the latter seemed very difficult, but, if accomplished, very effectual. I determined therefore to try the latter. ‘The first experiments were made by taking articles in common use, such as knives, forks, spoons, keys &c. and pasting upon the labels with their names printed in raised letters. These she felt very carefully, and soon, of course, distinguished that the crooked lines s p o o n, differed as much from the crooked lines k e y ‘Then small detached labels, with the same words printed upon them, were put into her hands; and she soon observed that they were similar to the ones pasted upon the articles. She showed her perception of this similarity by laying the label k e y upon the key, and the label s p o o n upon the spoon. She was encouraged here by the natural sign of approbation, patting on the head. ‘The same process was then repeated with all the articles which she could handle; and she very easily learned to place the proper labels upon them. It was evident, however, that the only intellectual exercise was that of imitation and memory. […] ‘Hitherto, the process had been mechanical, and the success about as great as teaching a very knowing dog a variety of tricks. The poor child had sat in mute amazement, and patiently imitated every thing her teacher did; but now the truth began to flash upon her: her intellect began to work: she perceived that here was a way by which she could herself make a up a sign of any thing that was in her own mind, and show it to another mind; and at once her countenance lighted up with a human expression: it was no longer a dog, or parrot: it was an immortal spirit eagerly seizing upon a new link of union with other spirits! I could almost fix upon the moment when this truth dawned upon her mind, and spread its light to her countenance; I saw that the great obstacle was overcome; and that henceforward nothing but patient and persevering, but plain and straightforward, efforts were to be used. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Bridgman suffered from scarlet fever. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> In remarking on Bridgman’s “large and beautifully-shaped head” and her “nervous-sanguine temperament”, Howe is drawing on the nineteenth-century science of phrenology which held that the shape of one’s head was a guide to character. See John Van Whye, <a href="http://www.historyofphrenology.org.uk/">The History of Phrenology on the Web </a>for more information. </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/. Title A name given to the resource American Notes Description An account of the resource In January of 1842, Charles Dickens paid a visit to the Perkins Institute for the Blind, just outside of Boston, MA, as part of his American tour. There he met Laura Bridgman, whom the director of the institute, Samuel Gridley Howe, touted as the first deaf and blind person to be educated. (That person was arguably Julia Brace, who had been educated at the Hartford Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb using sign language.) On his return home, Dickens published an account of his encounter with Bridgman in American Notes for General Circulation, comprised partly of his own reflections on Bridgman, and partly of Howe’s widely reprinted 1838 Annual Report for the Perkins Institute of the Blind, which Dickens literally cut and paste directly into his manuscript. The excerpt below focuses on the story of how Bridgman learned to read and write: for Howe, the moment that Bridgman becomes literate is the moment when she becomes human. Howe’s insistence on teaching Bridgman how to spell in English rather than building on the version of home sign that she is already using to communicate through formal instruction in sign language is based on a stereotype that sign language was pictorial, and could only refer to literal objects rather than expressing abstract ideas. Seeing Bridgman write English, then, is proof of her intelligence and ability to process abstract ideas. For Dickens, watching Bridgman write in her diary is akin to seeing her prove that she is a fully conscious human being. At the center of Bridgman’s story, then, is the question of the role of literacy in determining who is fully human and who is not. This question takes on larger significance in the context of Dickens’s American Notes, in which Dickens also visits slaves and factory workers, whose right to literacy was contested. (See Bourrier, “Reading Laura Bridgman”.) <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. American Notes for General Circulation. Ed. Patricia Ingham. New York: Penguin, 2000. Pages 39-44. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1842 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A black and white lithograph shows Laura Bridgman guiding her friend Oliver's hand over an open book with raised print as she teaches him to read. Both children's signatures appear at the bottom of the print as further proof of their literacy. Portrait of Oliver Caswell and Laura Bridgman (1844). Lithograph by W. Sharp, 1844, after A. Fisher. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Wellcome Library Image" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1174265" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 16376</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li>Bourrier, Karen. “Reading Laura Bridgman: Literacy and Disability in Dickens’s American Notes.” Dickens Studies Annual 40 (Summer 2009): 37-60.</li> <li>Gitter, Elisabeth. The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001.</li> <li>Freeberg, Ernest. The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.</li> <li><a title="Perkins Institute" href="http://www.perkinsmuseum.org/." target="_blank">Perkins History Museum</a>. <a href="http://www.perkinsmuseum.org/">http://www.perkinsmuseum.org/</a>. </li> </ul> Blindness Celebrity Charles Dickens Deafness Education Institutions life writing https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/bc970afea3bff06562ca28f5ab36ef9b.jpg a6e4e165f595ee0dfe9a152990a6615c 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 798 Height 534 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String copyright_notice:Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html byline:Wellcome Images object_name:N0028879 Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey headline:N0028879 Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey caption:N0028879 Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey Credit: Niall McCrae. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey This grand structure was designed by W B Moffatt. Originally a charitable institution, its last fifty years were served under the NHS as a hospital for the mentally handicapped. This photogrph was taken in 1997, just prior to its closure. Photograph 1997 Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html IPTC Array a:5:{s:16:"copyright_notice";s:126:"Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";s:6:"byline";s:15:"Wellcome Images";s:11:"object_name";s:50:"N0028879 Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey";s:8:"headline";s:50:"N0028879 Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey";s:7:"caption";s:579:"N0028879 Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey Credit: Niall McCrae. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey This grand structure was designed by W B Moffatt. Originally a charitable institution, its last fifty years were served under the NHS as a hospital for the mentally handicapped. This photogrph was taken in 1997, just prior to its closure. Photograph 1997 Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc-nd 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";} Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A contemporary photograph shows the Earlswood Asylum, an impressive red brick building, from the road. A tree and an expanse of green lawn make up the foreground. Photograph of Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey (1997) by Niall McCrae. 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 1860 to 1880 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 dream of the monks and hospitallers<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> of old has been realized—alms-giving has become an art, indeed, it may be said, a fine art. Among all the institutions of the country there are none so well organised, so liberally conducted, or so carefully and thoughtfully adapted to their purpose, as those which are designed to relieve the sufferings and mitigate the misfortunes of humanity. Here in England there is scarcely a disease either of the mind or body, scarcely even a deformity, for whose alleviation some hospital has not been provided by the inexhaustible charity of the people. And our hospitals [start 565] and asylums vie in architectural magnificence with the mansions of the rich and great. When the intelligent foreigner is making his way towards London by the South Eastern Railway, and sees on every side magnificent buildings rising majestically from woods and gardens rich in stately timber, and glowing with rare plans and flowers, he is apt to inquire the names of the great English milords who own those splendid seats. This Italian place on the left, with the British flag floating proudly from its summit. Surely this must be the residence of a royal prince? No, monseiur, it is the residence of some two or three hundred poor creatures who are suffering from incurable disease [...] Descending from the noble terrace by a flight of stone steps, I come upon the whole of the inmates of the Asylum, disporting themselves upon the lawn. They number in all three hundred and sixty-five, two hundred and sixty being males, and one hundred and five females. They are of all ages, ranging from a grey-haired old lady of sixty, to a child of five years; and of all ranks, from the sons of prosperous merchants, it may be noblemen, down to the children of poor clerks and petty tradespeople. The Asylum at Earlsowood is not absolutely a charity. All who can afford it, pay something for their maintenance, and in some instances pay handsomely. Those who cannot afford to pay are elected by the votes of the subscribers, and are maintained gratuitously. The receipts of the Asylum are thus, to a certain extent, a common fund for the support of all the inmates; although those who maintain themselves receive special advantages according to the amount of their payments. But none of the inmates, however poor they may be, are deprived of any of the essentials of comfort. A patient who pays a hundred or a hundred and fifty pounds a year may have a separate apartment and an attendant entirely to himself; but as regards the necessaries and comforts essential to health and enjoyment of life, the rich and the poor are on the same footing. I fully expected that the sight of so many idiotic creatures in a body would be exceedingly painful.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> It certainly was painful; but far less so than I could possibly have imagined. Contrary to my anticipation they were all clean , and neat and tidy in their dress. Moreover, the majority of them exhibited an activity of body and a cheerfulness of expression which I had never before witnessed in persons so manifestly deficient in mental power. The manifestations are very similar in all cases,--a deformed head or jaw, a wide loose mouth showing the gums, large irregular teeth, a fixed stare, and an imbecile smile that comes and goes in a mechanical manner. These peculiarities told plainly that the persons I saw before me were idiotic; but their manner and bearing conveyed no idea of their being useless and helpless. The kindly system of the institution had done its work. Many of these poor creatures, when they were first brought to Earlswood, were in a condition inferior almost to the brutes. They were confirmed in filthy habits; they were at times perfectly torpid and completely insensible. All the gates of their understanding were as firmly locked as if they had been sealed by the hand of death. They had ears and could not hear; eyes and could not see; tongues and could not speak. And now, here on this lawn, were these self-same creatures, all more or less awakened to life and understanding, running and leaping, laughing and chatting, asking and answering questions, and contending with each other in a high spirit of emulation in all kinds of games, while the workshops, the garden, and the farm offered a hundred specimens of their work in almost every department of art and industry. [...] On the reception of a pupil, the first step is to inquire from friends the history of the case, and to discover the peculiar predilection and repugnancies of the individual. Certain objective facts, as weight, height, shape, condition of the organs of sense, and powers of prehension and locomotion, are carefully registered. Then follow personal observation with comparison of habits and propensities with the accounts received from friends. These are the data for treatment, and instructions in accordance with them are given to the attendant or nurse. The first efforts are directed to the eradication of bad habits, such as tearing the clothes and wallowing in the dirt. After this, if there exist sufficient power, the pupil has proposed to him, occupations: such as unravelling coca fibre for matting, slitting rods for baskets, and the result of is labour, whatever it may be, is always received with praise instead of blame. When the pupil is indolent, morose, or stubborn, the example of good fellow-pupils is tried, and the imitation of their conduct is encouraged. If he prove incapable from low physical power, the physician's skill is exercised on diet, attention to the condition of the skin, and due medical treatment. The physical state is held to be of the greatest importance, and the appliance of gymnastic exercise is regulated by it. These exercises are first to the upper extremities, and then to the lower and the trunk, and the lessons are enlivened by music. From the examination of many hundred cases, Dr. Down has found that a malformation of the mouth and the palate is a physical characteristic of nearly all idiots. It is not surprising, therefore, that many of them are mute, semi-mute, or indistinct in utterance. But even the worst of such cases are successfully treated at Earlswood. The method pursued is curious. For example, if the sounds to be caught were those of the letter T, the teacher would first hold up a top, which the pupils are made to name collectively; then a letter, and lastly a pot. In the same manner for D, he would show pictures of a dog, a ladder, and some object coloured red. Hence, when a learner can name every object in the collection, he is able to utter the required words correctly. The result has been that many who could scarcely articulate a sound, can now speak intelligibly and with tolerable correctness. Pictures play an important part on conveying ideas to the pupils, and many of them have learned all they know from pictures. Some of them, who are incapable of reading and writing, have become expert draughtsmen, as may be seen from various specimens of their artistic works which adorn the walls of the Asylum. Another ingenious mode of conveying instruction, is by engaging the pupils in playing at shop-keeping. A counter is set out with various articles in daily use, at which a boy presides as shopkeeper, while the others come forward in turn and act as buyers. “It is most curious,” says Mr. Sidney,<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> “to see what a puzzle it often is to find the correct weight; when it is found, the class is well questioned upon it, and, indeed, on every other weight the shopman touches, before it is put onto the scale. Then there is further perplexity in getting the correct quantity of the required substance, as, for instance, sugar, into the scale... [Omitted further description of the difficulties of weighing the goods.] All this causes a regular excitement till the due proportions are achieved; and then comes the moment of pay, which is one of great excitement, the whole class trying to check every step in the reckoning. Combinations of pence and halfpence are trying things to get over; and sometimes the purchaser who cannot calculate them uses cunning, and tries to pay with a silver coins, and asks for change, thus throwing his perplexities on the shopman.” The Asylum is at once a hospital, a school, and a workshop within; without, a gymnasium, a garden, and a farm. In the workshops the inmates practise tailoring, shoemaking, carpentering, mat-making, and the like. The clothes of the inmates and the attendants are nearly all made by imbeciles, who have learned their trades in the Asylum. They all take a great interest in their work, and are very proud of the results. Some of the lads act as cooks. On a visit to the kitchen, Mr. Sidney found twelve of the pupils, not one of whom, a year previously, could have been trusted near an oven or a fire, neatly dressed in white, helping the regular officials of the kitchen with the greatest order and zeal. One poor fellow acted as a scullery-boy, and to show how completely his heart was in his humble occupation, on being asked which he liked best, Earlswood or the establishment where he had previously been, he answered, “O Earlswood great deal;” and on being further question “Why?” added, “Because we have a bigger sink.” It should be observed, that the pupils are not forced to engage in occupations which they do not like. Each one is allowed to choose the employment for which he has a fancy. Some of them occupy themselves in drawing, and in making models and toys, simply for their own amusement. One of these, a youth of sixteen, has completed a most beautiful model of a frigate fully equipped and rigged with every rope, sail, and spar. The model of of considerable size, and is executed with marvellous neatness and skill. I was informed that the constructor had never seen a ship, and took his first notion from a picture on a pocket-handkerchief, being afterwards assisted by drawings in the Illustrated London News. In the progress of his work, he made a great discovery, namely, that boiling wood rendered it capable of being easily bent. He had never heard of this process, so that the discovery was really his own. With the permission of Dr. Down, this pupil took me to his room to show me the model His articulation was so imperfect, and his vocabulary so limited, that I could scarcely understand a word he said. He was, I was assured, a true idiot, who could scarcely read or write; yet he could draw admirably, and had made this wonderful ship. Though he could measure well, as his work testified, he had no idea of figures, or of money. I asked him how much the ship had cost him. He said, “Three thousand pounds.” The girl's side of the Asylum comprises, besides the dining-hall and dormitories, a sewing school, and a play-room. In the school the girls are taught to read by the aid of large letters chalked on black boards; they are also employed in useful work; in the afternoon they are allowed to make fancy articles which may be seen exhibited in the reception-room. In another apartment there is a baby class taught entirely by pictures. In these rooms are stands of flowers and ferns prettily arranged, rendering the place cheerful and attractive. Some of the girls have learned to read and write very well. The farm, situated at the end of the garden, gives regular employment to twelve of the inmates, and in hay and harvest time brings others from the workshops, who profit greatly by the change. Strolling into the yard, I met one of he idiot farmers dressed in a smock-frock and a wideawake hat.<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> He certainly did not look more idiotic than some farm servants, not supposed to be deficient in mental capacity, whom I had seen outside the Asylum gates. He took me to the cow-house and showed me the cows. There were twenty of them, all in god condition and well provided with straw, and over each stall their attendant had placed a label bearing the cow's name in highly ornamental text. The lad who accompanied me was a good farmer; but a perfect idiot. He could not count the pigs in a sty, though there were barely a dozen of them; but he was a most useful member of the establishment for all that. He spoke very imperfectly. I asked him if he were happy there. He said, “Yes, very happy, but no money.” I asked him what he would do with money if he had any. He said, “Buy sweetstuff.”<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> A friend came to see him, and he gave the friend particular instructions to send him a seed cake. The farm supplies the establishment with the whole of milk and butter consumed by the inmates of the Asylum. Amusement enters largely into the system pursued by Dr. Down. Besides the daily sports on the lawn and in the gymansium, a theatrical performance is given at Christmas, and a fête at Midsummer. The charade performances have proved highly successfull in stimulating into lasting vigour several whom it had been previously impossible to rouse from idiotic depression and apathy. The leading parts are sustained by inmates, assisted by the attendants; the scenery is painted by a youth who, though an excellent artist, is incapable of describing his work intelligibly, or of referring to it except in a jumble of incoherent words. All the woodwork is done by boys in the carpenter's shop. In all these amusements the pupils have the hearty assistance of Dr. Down and Mrs. Down, who are regarded by all in the establishment with the strongest affection. I saw many unmistakable evidences of the regard in which the doctor is held, during my visit. Whereever he appeared on the grounds, the boys and girls ran to him, to talk to him, to ask him questions, and to fondle him. The men and women attendants, too, seemed to be all favourites with the poor imbeciles. I observed no indication that any of them inspired fear. I saw one man humour a tiresome boy with the utmost patience for fully half an hour, and in the end he succeeded in diverting him from the absurd desire he wished to gratify. I do not know upon what principle the attendants are chosen, but I noticed that they were al “good looking,” which suggests the theory that good looks and a kind disposition generally go together. The inmates all like the place. Some of them who have gone home for a few weeks have expressed a desire to return to Earlswood and their friend Dr. Down, before the expiration of their leave. One boy actually packed up and walked to the Asylum, saying he could not stay away from “home” any longer. Seeing how they were surrounded by every comfort, and indulged in every way, I could not feel surprised at this; but considering the labour and patience required of those who are employed to watch and tend them, I certainly was not prepared for the statement of one of the female attendants—that she was very happy at Earlswood, that she had been there three years, and that she should not like to go to another place. It was one the fête-day that I visited Earlswood—a day long and anxiously looked forward to by all the inmates. The amusements on the lawn continued from one o'clock until dusk, consisting of cricket, croquet, Aunt Sally, racing and jumping matches, a performance of Punch and Judy, glees by the singing class, negro melodies by the Earlswood Troupe, and the ascent of a fire balloon.<a title="" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Under the influence of the emulation excited by the racing and jumping for prizes, ranging from a shilling to a penny, the idiotic expression vanished from the faces of the patients in a magical way. In several instances I found it difficult to say whether they were idiots or not. One lad achieved some astonishing feats in bar-jumping, trying again and again until he had accomplished his purpose. I was informed that this boy, when he first entered the Asylum, was incapable of any physical effort whatever. His energies, both mental and physical, had been roused chiefly by gymnastic exercises. In all the sports, I noticed that Dr. Down and the attendants joined on equal terms with the patients, and thus set them all perfectly at their ease. The only refractory subject was a fat boy, whose accomplishments consisted in standing on his head, and in the execution of a dance in frog fashion, which he was ready to perform any number of times on the slightest encouragement. The fat boy's idiosyncrasy was to be always out of humour and always grumbling. He was last in all the races, but would insist upon a prize; in the pole-climbing he had to be hoisted up on the shoulders of an attendant. When the attendant dropped him, he came forward to the doctor in a triumphant manner, and held out his hand for a prize. In all cases he had one. They were all extremely fond of money, but the amount was of no consequence. They were just as well pleased with a penny as with a shilling. The results of the system pursued at Earlswood are very great, very astonishing. Are they desirable? Is it incumbent upon those who have the charge of idiots, to do their utmost to rouse their dormant faculties and restore the broken and defaced image to the likeness of Him who made it? If these questions are to be answered in the affirmative, to do anything less than is done at earlswood would be to fail in a great and sacred duty. Dr. Down's system is purely one of kindness, and it was not long before I perceived that his uniform and scrupulous kindness, his minute attention to every case, his liberal employment of every means calculated to divert the mind and promote the health of the body, were the true cause of the great expense of which some persons have complained. There is no doubt that the inmates of Earlswood might be kept and maintained for considerably less money; but this could only be done by reducing the number of attendants, and the success attained, by dispensing with many sanitary precautions, by adopting mechanical restraints, and by otherwise limiting the comforts and enjoyments of the inmates. For example, I found in the grounds some twenty or thirty attendants going about among the patients, watching them without appearing to watch them, laughing and chatting, joining in their sports, and taking infinite pains to divert their minds from the particular notions which possess them. In the good old times, this was done by a third of the number of attendants; but then they saved the labour and the money of the patrons by chaining the patients to their bedsteads, by strapping them to boards, and by beating them until they were insensible. A blow is a cheap and effective quieter, there is no doubt. Dirt, filth, and unwholesome food, are also cheap, but they are nasty too, and, I trust, wholly distasteful to the humane and Christian feeling of the times in which we live. Relatively the expenses at Earlswood may be larger than absolutely necessary, but I was quite convinced from what I saw, that the system pursued by Dr. Down could not be carried out without great liberality. The number of attendants; the various workshops, with all their fittings and appliances; the schools, the play-rooms, the works of art and ornament, the organised entertainments, the cheerful gardens; are all necessary and essential to the subtle process by which these poor idiots are coaxed, and petted, and insensibly led into developing their latent faculties, and assuming, as near as possible, the attributes of useful and intelligent human beings. One item of expense may be reasonably objected to—that of the mere ornamental parts of such an edifice. It surely can never be necessary to burden a charitable institution with an enormous rent in the form of interest of capital, or an incubus in the much more depressing form of a heavy building debt. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Hospitaller: According to the OED: “A member of a religious order, brotherhood, or sisterhood, formed for charitable purposes, esp. for the care of the sick and infirm in hospitals. Many such have existed from the 13th c. or earlier.” </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> The term “idiot” as David Wright points out, was “packed with social, legal, and medical meanings,” and understanding the history of its use is part of understanding how it became a derisive term (Earlswood 10). For a history of the term “idiot” see David Wright, Mental Disability in Victorian England, pages 9-10, and Patrick McDonagh, Idiocy: A Cultural History, 12-15. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Reverend Edwin Sidney, a clergyman and benefactor of the Earlswood Asylum, who watched the progress of the institution firsthand and published several accounts, including: A Visit to Earlswood Asylum (London, 1859). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> A “smock-frock” is a loose outer-garment worn by rural labourers, often made of hard-wearing wool or linen. A wideawake (or “wide-awake”) hat was a men's hat with a broad brim and a low crown, made of black or brown felt, reminiscent of those worn by Quakers. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[5]</a> Men with cognitive disabilities were stereotypically thought to be unable to manage money and also to concentrate instead on gustatory pleasures, especially sweets. George Eliot's short story, “Brother Jacob,” also turns to this theme. See McDonagh, Idiocy, pages 165-168 for a reading on this topic. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[6]</a> <a href="http://www.tradgames.org.uk/games/Aunt-Sally.htm"> Aunt Sally</a> is a throwing game where contestants try to knock over “Aunt Sally,” often a pipe. It is traditionally played in pubs or on fairgrounds. Punch and Judy is a traditional puppet show featuring Mr. Punch and his wife Judy; while there is no definitive storyline, they are often shown bickering and hitting each other with bats. A fire balloon is a nineteenth century folk toy made of tissue paper, string, and a cup with tallow and a wick; the heat from the candle would propel the balloon for thirty minutes to an hour. Unfortunately when it landed it was likely to cause a fire. </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/. Title A name given to the resource Happy Idiots Description An account of the resource This article, which appeared in Charles Dickens's publication All The Year Round in 1864, describes a journalist's visit to the Earlswood Asylum, the first institution for the care of the cognitively disabled in England. It was founded by J Langdon Down (now best known as the doctor who identified Down syndrome) in 1847. The term “idiot” (or sometimes “imbecile”) was commonly used to designate a person who was seen has having a permanent cognitive disability from birth or an early age. An attempt to distinguish “idiocy” legally and medically from “lunacy” was made in the Lunacy Act of 1845, which stated that an “idiot” was legally a person “whose mind from his birth by a perpetual infirmity is so deficient as to be incapable of directing him in any matter which requires thought or judgement” while a “lunatic” was legally “sometimes of good and sound memory” and sometimes not, while any other person “of morbid condition of intellect” who did not fit either of these categories was “a person of unsound mind” (quoted in Wright Earlswood Asylum 16). The need for a third category suggests that attempts to label cognitive difference were more difficult in practice than in theory, and that idiocy was not a stable or transparent category for the Victorians. In describing the conditions of the Earlswood Asylum, the journalist deploys language common to reports on other educational institutions and asylums for the physically and cognitively disabled, comparing the initial condition of the patients to one “inferior almost to the brutes” and suggesting that institutional care humanizes them. The Earlswood Asylum was not a place where patients expected to be institutionalized for life. David Wright suggests that “institutionalization, even during the so-called Victorian heyday of the asylum, was only one part of a lifelong strategy of families to care for and control their disabled family members” (Earlswood Asylum 8). Contrary to our contemporary view of cognitive disability, especially a condition like Down Syndrome, as more or less a fixed state, at the Earlswood Asylum it is taken as a mutable condition. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Andrew Halliday Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived “Happy Idiots.” All the Year Round. (23 July 1864): 564-569. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 23 July 1864 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A contemporary photograph shows the Earlswood Asylum, an impressive red brick building, from the road. A tree and an expanse of green lawn make up the foreground. Photograph of Royal Earlswood Hospital, Redhill, Surrey (1997) by Niall McCrae. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library, London </a>under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://wellcomeimages.org/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library No: N0028879</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li>Drew, John and Tony Williams. <a title="Dickens Journal Online" href="http://www.djo.org.uk/" target="_blank">Dickens Journal Online</a>. University of Buckingham. <http://www.djo.org.uk/> [Contains digitized versions of the full run of Household Words and All the Year Round.]</li> <li><a title="Museum of Learning Disability" href="http://langdondownmuseum.org.uk/" target="_blank">Langdon Down Museum of Learning Disability</a>. <<a href="http://langdondownmuseum.org.uk/">http://langdondownmuseum.org.uk/</a>></li> <li>McDonagh, Patrick. Idiocy: A Cultural History. Liverpool: Liverpool UP, 2008.</li> <li>Wright, David. Downs: The History of a Disability. New York: Oxford UP, 2011.</li> <li>---. Mental Disability in Victorian England: The Earlswood Asylum, 1847-1901. New York: Oxford UP, 2001.</li> </ul> All the Year Round Charles Dickens Cognition Institutions life writing https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/6f14d892a271cf49a4498e0790d429f2.jpg 4fbc405aef3d7f763ff701ce59e99b31 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 395 Height 546 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String copyright_notice:Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html byline:Wellcome Images object_name:V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. headline:V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. caption:V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html IPTC Array a:5:{s:16:"copyright_notice";s:123:"Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";s:6:"byline";s:15:"Wellcome Images";s:11:"object_name";s:43:"V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving.";s:8:"headline";s:43:"V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving.";s:7:"caption";s:319:"V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";} Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A wood engraving shows Harriet Martineau gazing toward the left, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. [from “Dedication”]: I do not believe it is possible for persons in health and action to trace, as we can, the agencies for good that are going on in life and the world. Or, if they can, it seems as if the perception were accompanied by a breathless fear,--a dread of being, if not crushed, whirled away somewhere, hurried along to new regions for which they are unprepared, and to which, however good, they would prefer the familiar. You and I, and our fellow-sufferers, see differently, whether or not we see further. We know and feel, to the very centre of our souls, that there is no hurry, no crushing, no devastation attending Divine processes. While we see the whole system of human life rising and rising into a higher region and a purer light, we perceive that every atom is as much cared for as the whole. While we use our new insight to show how things are done,--and gravely smile to see that it is by every man’s overrating the issues of his immediate pursuit, in order that he may devote all his energies to it, (without which nothing would ever be done,) we smile with another feeling presently, on perceiving how an industry and care from above are compensating to every man his mistake by giving him collateral benefits when he misses the direct good he sought,--by giving him and his helpers a wealth of ideas, as often as their schemes turn out, in their professed objects, profitless. When we see men straining every nerve to reach the tempting apples which are to prove dust and ashes in their jaws, [xiv] we see also, by virtue of our position, the flying messenger who is descending with the ambrosia which is to feed their immortal part. We can tell that while revolutions are grandly operating, by which life and the world will in time change their aspect,--while a progress is advancing which it is now scarcely conceivable that we should ever have dreamed of putting our hands,--there is not one of our passing thoughts that is not ordained,--not a sigh of weariness unheeded—not an effort of patience that is not met half-way by divine pity,--not a generous emotion of triumph in the world’s improvement that is not hallowed by the divine sympathy ever living and breathing round about us. This is our peculiar privilege, of seeing and feeling something of the simultaneous vastness and minuteness of providential administration, is one in which we most enjoy sympathy;--at least, I do:--and in this, therefore, do I find your undoubted fellowship most precious. [From “Life to the Invalid”] Nothing is more impossible to represent in words, even to one’s self in meditative moments, than what it is to lie on the verge of life and watch, with nothing to do but think, and learn from what we behold. Let any one recall what it is to feel suddenly, by personal experience, the full depth of meaning of some saying, always believed in, often repeated with sincerity, but never till now known. Everyone has felt this, in regard to some one proverb, or divine scriptural clause, or word of some right royal philosopher or poet. Let any one then try to conceive of an extension of this realization through all that has ever been wisely said of man and human life, and he will be endeavouring to imagine our experience. Engrossing, thrilling, overpowering as the experience is, we have each to bear it alone; for each of us is surrounded by the active and the busy, who have a different gift and a different office;--and if not, it is one of those experiences which are incommunicable. If we endeavour to utter our thoughts on the folly of the pursuit of wealth, on the emptiness of ambition, on the surface nature of distinctions of rank, &c. we are only saying what our hearers have had by heart all their lives from books […] [From the “Power of Ideas in the Sickroom”] If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of mood of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to have been in any former state of mind. It is this; that it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are. I can conceive the amazement of many at this announcement,--of many even who admit its truth, and feelingly admit it, as I myself did when it was first brought home to me from the printed page of one friend by the heart-breathing voice of another. I care not who wonders, and who only half understands, while there are some few to whom this thought may be what it is to me. No one will be so short-sighted as to apply it as an excuse for indolence in the active and healthy,--so clear is it that such cannot be what they ought to be, unless they do all they can. But perhaps it is only the practiced in human sorrows who can see far enough into the boundless truth of this thought to appreciate its worth to us. Suffice it here that it has the power I ascribe to it, and that we whom it has consoled long to administer it when we see old age restless in its infirmity, activity disappointed of its scope or instruments, or the most useful agents of society, the most indispensable members of families paralysed by disease. We long to whisper it in the dungeons of Spielberg,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> where it opens a career within the narrowest recess of those thick walls. We long to send a missive to every couch of the sick, to every arm-chair of the aged and the blind, reminding them that the great work of life is ours still,--through all modes of life but that of the madhouse,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>--the formation of a heavenly soul within us. If we cannot pursue a trade or a science, or keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only subsidiary,--we can cherish a sweet and holy temper,--we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body,--we can, in defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Dungeons of Spielberg: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Pellico">Silvio Pellico</a> (1789-1854), an Italian author, was arrested by Austrian officials under the charge of belonging to the carbonari (meaning a secret revolutionary society in early nineteenth-century Italy) and put in a prison at Spielberg. There he wrote Le mie prigioni (“My Prisons”) about his determination to live a Christian life in prison. His work was widely translated and inspired sympathy for the unification of Italy. In alluding to him, Martineau suggests that a life of confinement, be it from imprisonment or illness, can lead to the development of a Christian temperament. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Martineau’s exclusion of those in the madhouse from her message suggests that she sees the insane as a limit case of who could be consoled by the ability to keep a “sweet and holy temper” in the absence of the ability to do anything else. </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/. Title A name given to the resource Life in the Sickroom Description An account of the resource Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a writer and intellectual of the Victorian period. She was best known for her work on political economy, but she was also deaf from childhood and an invalid for six years. She wrote about both of these experiences in her “Letter to the Deaf” (1834) Life in the Sickroom (1844) and her autobiography (1877). Life in the Sickroom is one of many first-hand accounts of the experience of being ill written by an invalid. Martineau was ill for six years, but she found taking on the identity of an invalid a reprieve from the stresses of daily life. What is interesting about her account, then, is that rather than depicting the difficulties of being ill, she portrays life in the sickroom as a time of rest and reflection, a welcome repose that can lead to time for thought and greater insight. Nor was she unusual in this respect. Miriam Bailin points out that many Victorians valued illness for the rest and repose it could offer from the stresses of daily life, and that it is perhaps not surprising that the cult of the invalid developed in the wake of the Industrial revolution alongside the “coexistent imperatives of self-discipline, will-power and industriousness” (12). Martineau dedicates her work to fellow-invalids whom she imagines will be sympathetic to her experiences in the sickroom, and to her claim that suffering can afford invalids greater insight, especially about the transience of this world. This type of dedication is typical of Victorian writing about invalidism. As Maria Frawley points out, many Victorian invalids who wrote first-person narratives about their experiences portrayed themselves as lonely sufferers seeking from their “own bed of affliction to console others, envisioned as similarly confined to their sickrooms and in need of solace” (11). In the following two excerpts, from the chapters on “Life to the Invalid” and the “Power of Ideas in the Sick-Room,” Martineau reflects on invalid’s heightened ability to grasp truisms that may seem farther off to the healthy: that wealth and status are unimportant, and that it matters less what we do than what we are. <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Martineau, Harriet Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Martineau, Harriet. Life in the Sickroom. Essays by an Invalid. Second Edition. London: Edward Moxon, 1845. Pages xii-xiii, 65-66, 160-162. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1844 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A wood engraving shows Harriet Martineau gazing toward the left, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. R. Burgess, Portraits of doctors & scientists in the Wellcome Institute, London 1973. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Institute" href="http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue Record" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1169696" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 1929.1</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li>Bailin, Miriam. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of being Ill. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.</li> <li>Frawley, Maria. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Harriet Marineau Invalidism life writing Literature Mobility https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/54a070ae731190da15abc5fc8f710005.jpg a671143437b88a8c181549e2af008601 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 711 Height 1185 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 A black and white illustration shows a young Olive kneeling on the hearth and petting a cat. Notably, her spinal deformity is not visible. The caption reads: "Olive, little noticed, sat on the hearthrug, fondling the sleepy cat, or gazing with vague childish reverie into the fire." Illustration by G. Bowers, 1875. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. By her stature she might have been two years old, but her face was like that of a child of ten or twelve—so thoughtful, so grave. Her limbs were small and wasted, but exquisitely delicate. The same might be said of her features; which, though thin, and wearing a look of premature age, together with that quiet, earnest melancholy cast peculiar to deformity, were yet regular, almost pretty. Her head was well shaped, and from it feel a quantity of amber-coloured hair—pale ‘lint-white locks’, which, with the almost colourless transparency of her complexion, gave a spectral air to her whole appearance. She looked less like a child than a woman dwarfed into childhood the sort of being renowned in elfin legends, as springing up on a lonely moor, or appearing by a cradle-side; supernatural, yet fraught with a nameless beauty. She was dressed with the utmost care, in white, with blue ribands; and her lovely hair was arranged so as to hide, as much as possible the defect, which, alas! was even then only too perceptible. It was not a humpback, nor yet a twisted spine; it was an elevation of the shoulders, shortening the neck, and giving the appearance of a perpetual stoop. There was nothing disgusting or painful in it, but still it was an imperfection, causing an instinctive compassion—an involuntary ‘Poor little creature, what a pity!’ 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 Olive Description An account of the resource Dinah Mulock Craik’s (1826-1887) novel Olive (1850), features a heroine who has a shoulder deformity but who goes on to establish a career as an artist and to win the love of a Scottish minister whom she rescues from religious doubt. Olive was one of many of Craik’s works to feature a protagonist with a disability—others include The Little Lame Prince (1875) and A Noble Life (1866). In his review of A Noble Life, whose protagonist, the last Earl of Cairnforth was likely partly based on Craik’s friend Frank Smedley, Henry James remarked wryly, on that “lively predilection for cripples and invalids by which she has always been distinguished” (846). This excerpt from the novel describes the first time that Olive’s father, Captain Rothesay, who has been absent in the West Indies for four years, sees his daughter. Olive’s mother, Sybilla, has kept her daughter’s deformity a secret from her husband, fearing he will be displeased. Craik refrains from describing her heroine’s “defect” in medical terms. Instead, she borrows the language of fairy tales to describe the young girl’s physical appearance, placing her heroine within an established and perhaps more sympathetic literary tradition of viewing physical difference. Other literary characters in the mid-nineteenth-century novel described using fairy tale language include Philip Wakem in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Madame Walravens in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853). <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Craik, Dinah Mulock Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Craik, Dinah Mulock. Olive. 1850. Ed. Cora Kaplan. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Page 23. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A black and white illustration shows a young Olive kneeling on the hearth and petting a cat. Notably, her spinal deformity is not visible. The caption reads: "Olive, little noticed, sat on the hearthrug, fondling the sleepy cat, or gazing with vague childish reverie into the fire." Illustration by G. Bowers, 1875. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> <li>James, Henry. Review of A Noble Life in Literary Criticism. Volume One: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Penguin: New York, 1984.</li> <li>Mitchell, Sally. <a title="Dinah Mulock Craik" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html" target="_blank">Dinah Mulock Craik</a>. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Available online: <<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html">http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html</a>></li> </ul> Dinah Mulock Craik Gender Literature Novel Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/b3aa732d8ec9ce789862a1e948ee4838.jpg b2374c8406bda4e065580da083121674 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 711 Height 1035 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 Millais's oil painting shows a blind musician and her sister resting on the roadside after a storm. Green hills and pasture make up the middleground, a double rainbow and a town can be seen in the distance. Millais, John Everett. The Blind Girl. 1856. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource 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. Tag Items with this tag should be included in the timeline cognition 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 Blind Girl Description An account of the resource <div> <a title="Millais Bio" href="http://www.bmagic.org.uk/people/John+Everett+Millais" target="_blank">John Everett Millais</a>’s (1829-1896) The Blind Girl (1856) shows a blind musician with a concertina in her lap, and a little girl, presumed to be her sister, resting on the roadside after a rainstorm. They are on their way toward Winchelsea, whose church appears on the hill-top in the background (Flint 75). With its idyllic rural landscape, this <a title="Pre-Raphaelite at Birmingham" href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/" target="_blank">pre-Raphalite</a> painting presents a more romanticized version of the life of a blind beggar than its contemporary, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Millais’s painting draws on a long Christian tradition of reading blind people as both blessed and afflicted by their lack of sight: while the blind may face practical difficulties in navigating a world set up for the sighted, as well as missing out on visual pleasures, as people less enmeshed in the material world, they may closer to the spiritual world and to God. This tension between the material and the spiritual is reflected in the painting itself, which is an object of visual pleasure but also a reminder to the viewer, with its autumnal setting, of the decay of this world and the importance of the next world. The little girl acts as both an interpreter of the scene for the blind girl and a stand-in for the viewer, who appreciates the double rainbow that the blind girl cannot see. Meanwhile, the blind girl’s upturned face and partially closed eyes suggest that she is contemplating higher things while resting and enjoying the sunshine. The forget-me-nots in the lower left-hand corner act as a reminder to the viewer not to forget, and perhaps hint at the cruelty of the blind girl’s lost ability to see them in bloom (Flint 75). The viewer is thus encouraged to both pity the blind girl and appreciate her spirituality. Kate Flint argues that the painting “may be seen as a contribution to a developing discourse which set the visibility and the epistemological certainties of the material, industrial world, blindly self-regarding in its own pride in its achievements, against the higher worth of divine illumination” (82). </div> <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Millais, John Everett Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Millais's oil painting shows a blind musician and her sister resting on the roadside after a storm. Green hills and pasture make up the middleground, a double rainbow and a town can be seen in the distance. Millais, John Everett. The Blind Girl. 1856. <a title="Birmingham Museum, The Blind Girl" href="http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1892P3" target="_blank">Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery</a>. Web. August 2012. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The Blind Girl (1856) by John Everett Millais. Image in the public domain courtesy of <a title="wikimedia the Blind Girl" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millais-Blind_Girl.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons.</a> Relation A related resource <ul><li>Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.</li> <li>Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. <a title="Pre-Raphaelites" href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/" target="_blank">Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource</a>. <<a href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/">http://www.preraphaelites.org/</a>> </li> </ul> Blindness Class John Everett Millais Painting Visual Culture https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4749e0f1dfc862e860e68c87599fb354.gif c7f224b413683c4820235c63edfc6f07 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 400 Height 650 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 The illustration shows the seller of nutmeg graters on his knees on the street. He wears a sign reading "I was born a cripple" and has nutmeg graters strung on his body. 'The Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters' from a Daguerreotype by Beard. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. I now give an example of one of the classes driven to the streets by utter inability to labour. I have already spoken of the sterling independence of some of these men possessing the strongest claims to our sympathy and charity, and yet preferring to sell rather than beg. As I said before, many ingrained beggars certainly use the street trade as a cloak for alms-seeking, but as certainly many more, with every title to our assistance, use it as a means of redemption from beggary. That the nutmeg-grater seller is a noble example of the latter class, I have not the least doubt. I have made all due inquiries to satisfy myself as to his worthiness, and I feel convinced that when the reader looks at the portrait here given, and observes how utterly helpless the poor fellow is, and then reads the following plain unvarnished tale, he will marvel like me, not only at the fortitude which could sustain him under all his heavy afflictions, but at the resignation (not to say philosophy) with which he bears them every one. His struggles to earn his own living (notwithstanding his physical incapacity even to put the victuals to his mouth after he has earned them), are instances of a nobility of pride that are I believe without a parallel. The poor creature’s legs and arms are completely withered; indeed he is scarcely more than head and trunk. His thigh I hardly thicker than a child’s wrist. His hands are bent inward from contraction of the sinews, the fingers being curled up and almost as thin as the claws of a bird’s foot. He is unable even to stand, and cannot move from place to place but on his knees, which are shod with leather caps, like the heels of a clog, strapped round the joint; the soles of his boots are on the upper leathers, that being the part always turned towards the ground while he is crawling along. His countenance is rather handsome than otherwise; the intelligence indicated by his ample forehead is fully borne out by the testimony as to his sagcity in his business, and the mild expression of his eye by the statements as to his feeling for all others in affliction. “I sell nutmeg-graters<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> and funnels,' said the cripple to me; “I sell them at 1d. and 1½ d. a piece.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> I get mine of the man in whose house I live. He is a tinman, and makes for the street trade and shops and all. I pay 7d. a dozen for them, and I get 12d. or 18d. a dozen, if I can when I sell them, but mostly I get a penny a piece—it’s quite a chance if I have a customer at 1½ d. Some days I sell only three—some days not one—though I’m out from ten o’clock till six. The most I ever took was 2s. 6d. in a day. Some weeks I hardly clear my expenses—and they’re between 7s. and 8s. a week; for not being able to dress and ondress myself, I’m obligated to pay some one to do it for me—I think I don’t clear more than 7s. a week take one week with another. When I don’t make that much, I go without—sometimes friends who are kind to me give me a trifle, or else I should starve. […] When I do very well I have three meals a day, but it’s oftener only two—breakfast and supper—unless of Sunday. On a wet day when I can’t get out, I often go without food. I may have a bit of bread and butter give me, but that’s all—then I lie a-bed. I feel miserable enough when I see the rain come down of a week day, I can tell you. Ah, it is very miserable indeed lying in bed all day, and in a lonely room, without perhaps a person to come near one—helpless as I am—and hear the rain beat against the windows, and all that without nothing to put in your lips. I’ve done that over and over again where I lived before; but where I live now I’m more comfortable like. My breakfast is mostly bread and butter and tea; and my supper, bread and butter and tea with a bit of fish, or a small bit of meat. What my landlord and landlady has I share with them. I never break my fast from the time I go out in the morning till I come home—unless it is a halfpenny orange I buy in the street; I do that when I feel faint. I have only been selling in the streets since this last winter. I was in the workhouse with a fever all the summer. I was destitute afterwards, and obliged to begin selling in the streets. The Guardians<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> gave me 5s. to get stock. I had always dealt in tin ware, so I knew where to go to buy my things. It’s very hard work indeed is street-selling for such as me. I can’t walk no distance. I suffer a great deal of pains in my back and knees. Sometimes I go in a barrow, when I’m traveling any great way. When I go only a short way a crawl along on my knees and toes. The most I’ve ever crawled is two miles. When I get home afterwards, I’m in great pain. My knees swell dreadfully, and they’re all covered with blisters, and my toes ache awful. I’ve corns all on top of them. “Often after I’ve been walking, my limbs and back ache so badly that I can get no sleep. Across my lines it feels as if I’d got some great weight, and my knees are in a heat, and throb, and feel as if a knife was running into them. When I go up-stairs I have to crawl upon the backs of my hands and my knees. I can’t lift nothing to my mouth. The sinews of my hands is all contracted. I am obliged to have things held to my lipe for me to drink, like a child. I can use a knife and fork by leaning my arm on the table and then stooping my head to it. I can’t wash nor ondress myself. Sometimes I think of my helplessness a great deal. The thoughts of it used to throw me into fits at one time—very bad. It’s the Almighty’s will that I am so, and I must abide by it. People says, as they passes me in the streets, ‘Poor fellow, it’s a shocking thing;’ but very seldom they does any more than pity me; some lays out half a-penny or a penny with me, but most of ‘em goes on about their business. Persons looks at me a good bit when I go into a strange place. I do feel it very much, that I haven’ the power to get my living or to do a thing for myself, but I never begged for nothing. I’d sooner starve than I ‘d do that. I never thought that people whom God had given the power to help theirselves ought to help me. I have thought that I’m as I am—obliged to on my hands and knees, from no fault of my own. Often I’ve done that, and I’ve over and over again laid in bed and wondered why the Almighty should send me into this world in such a state; often I’ve done that on a wet day, with nothing to eat, and no friend to come a-nigh me. When I’ve gone along the streets, too, and been in pain, I’ve thought, as I’ve seen the people pass straight up, with all the use of their limbs, and some of them the biggest blackguards, cussing and swearing, I’ve thought, Why should I be deprived of the use of mine? and I’ve felt angry like, and perhaps at that moment I couldn’t ring my mind to believe the Almighty was so good and merciful as I’d heard say; but then in a minute or two afterwards I’ve prayed to Him to make me better and happier in the next world. I’ve always been led to think He’s afflicted me as He has for some wise purpose or another that I can’t see. I think as mine is so hard a life in this world, I shall be better off in the next. Often when I couldn’t afford to pay a boy, I’ve not had m boots off for four or five nights and days, nor my clothes neither. Give me the world I couldn’t take them off myself, and then my feet has swollen to that degree that I’ve been nearly mad with pain, and I’ve been shivering and faint, but still I was obliged to go out with my things; if I hadn’t I should have starved. Such as I am can’t afford to be ill—it’s only rich folks as can lay up, not we; for us to take to our beds is to go without food altogether […] Mother was a cook in a nobleman’s family when I were born. They say as I was a love-child. I was not brought up by mother, but by one of her fellow-servants. Mother’s intellects was so weak, that she couldn’t have me with her. She used to fret a good deal about me, so her fellow-servant took me when she got married. After I were born, mother married a farmer in middling circumstances. They tell me as my mother was frightened afore I was born. I never knew my father. He went over to Buonos Ayres, and kept a hotel there—I’ve heard mother say as much. No mother couldn’t love a child more than mine did me, but her feelings was such she couldn’t bear to see me. I never went to mother’s to live, but was brought up by the fellow servant as I’ve told you of. Mother allowed her 30l a-year. I was with her till two years back. She was always very kind to me—treated me like one of her own. Mother used to come and see me about once a-year—sometimes not so often; she was very kind to me then. Oh, yes; I used to like to see her very much. Whatever I wished for she’d let me have; if I wrote to her, she always sent me what I wanted. I was very comfortable then. Mother died four years ago; when I lost her I fell into a fit—I was told of it all of a sudden. She and the party as I was brought up with was the only friends as I had in the world—the only persons as cared anything about a creature like me. […] I have still some relations living, and they are well to do, but, being a cripple, they despise me. My aunt, my mother’s sister, is married to a builder, in Petersham, near Richmond—having some houses of their own besides a good business. I have got a boy to wheel me down on a barrow to them, and asked assistance of them, but they will have nothing to do with me. They won’t look at me for my affliction. Six months ago they gave me half-a-crown. I had no lodgings nor victuals then; and that I shouldn’t have had from them had I not said I was starving and must go to the parish. This winter I went to them, and they shut the door in my face. […] I can, indeed, solemnly say, that there is nothing else against me, and that I strive hard and crawl about till my limbs ache enough to drive me mad, to get an honest livelihood. With a couple of pounds I could, I think, manage to shift very well for myself. I’d get a stock, and go into the country with a barrow, and buy old metal, and exchange tin ware for old clothes, and, with that, I’m almost sure I could get a decent living. I’m accounted a very good dealer.” <h3>Notes</h3> <div><div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Grated nutmeg featured not only sweet dishes where one might expect it such as Christmas plum pudding, bread and butter pudding or punch, but, according to <a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/beeton/isabella/household/">Mrs. Beeton’s recipes</a>, grated nutmeg was essential to savoury dishes such as fowl or chicken pie, eel pie, and potted ham </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> British currency was not decimalized until 1971. It was divided up into pounds (£) shillings (s or l, there were twenty shillings in a pound) and pennies (d). See Marje Bloy, “<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/currency.html">British Currency before 1971</a>” The Victorian Web. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, before which relief or alms were given out at the discretion of the parish, paupers were forced to seek relief in workhouses, which meant that they had to live in an institution and work in order to gain relief. See Peter Higganbotham, <a href="http://www.workhouses.org.uk/">The Workhouse</a>, <http://www.workhouses.org.uk/> </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/. Title A name given to the resource The Crippled Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters Description An account of the resource Journalist Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) began publishing his vast collection of interviews and observations on London street life in the mid-century, in the newspaper the Morning Chronicle in 1849. When the newspaper collapsed in 1850, Mayhew continued his interviews, often with the help of collaborators, and bound numbers of the work in-progress were issued from 1851-1852. In 1861-62 he collected all his work in three volumes, with a fourth volume mainly written by others added later, under the title London Labour and the London Poor (<a title="Review of London Labour" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/history/work/abanerjee1.html" target="_blank">A. Banjaree</a>). Many of the London street people that Mayhew interviewed were ill or disabled; his interviews offer a rare account of how lower class people with disabilities were seen, and how they saw themselves. In the excerpt below of his interview with the “crippled street-seller of nutmeg-graters,” Mayhew attempts to establish the nutmeg-grater seller as one of the “honest poor” rather than a begging imposter. He prefaces his account of the crippled street-seller with a disquisition on the difference between those who use street-selling as a excuse for begging, and those who are honestly trying to make a living through selling their wares, and ends it by reprinting letters from those who know him swearing to his honesty and sobriety. Most of the text is a report of the street-seller’s own account of his life, in his own words. Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that there is a tension between Mayhew’s melodramatic framing of the cripple’s story and the nutmeg-grater’s own account of himself, which is straightforward to the point of being anti-melodramatic (138). The nutmeg-grater cannot walk, and speaks of the practicalities of paying a boy to wheel him around in a barrow, and to dress and undress him. He once owned a shop but lost it through customers who did not pay for their wares, and has been in the workhouse, but avers that he would rather die on the streets than die a pauper. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mayhew, Henry Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work Vol. 1. The London Street-Folk. London: Office, 16, Upper Wellington Street, Strand, 1851. Pages 329-332. Available online at <a title="London Labour and the London Poor" href="http://archive.org/details/londonlabourand00mayhgoog" target="_blank">archive.org</a> through Google Books. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1851 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The illustration shows the seller of nutmeg graters on his knees on the street. He wears a sign reading "I was born a cripple" and has nutmeg graters strung on his body. 'The Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters' from a Daguerreotype by Beard. Image courtesy <a title="Mayhew on Victorian London" href="http://www.victorianlondon.org/mayhew/mayhew-street-characters.htm" target="_blank">Victorian London</a> under a Creative Commons License. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Banerjee,<a title="Banjaree Review" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/history/work/abanerjee1.html" target="_blank"> A. Review of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Selected Edition of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.</a> </li> <li>Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> <li>Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [Contains a shorter extract of "The Crippled Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters."]</li> </ul> Class Henry Mayhew Journalism life writing Masculinity Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/0a38b3f9f7a845aad0b69a78a812161f.jpg 79f855406542a40866e6a31b693508c7 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 523 Height 800 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String caption:by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt, oil on panel, 1850 caption_writer:National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg.org.uk headline:NPG 967; Wilkie Collins by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt special_instructions:Unauthorised reproduction prohibited. For authorisation contact rightsandimages@npg.org.uk www.npg.org.uk byline:National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg.org.uk byline_title:Rights and Images Department credit:National Portrait Gallery London source:National Portrait Gallery London object_name:NPG 967; Wilkie Collins date_created:02.05.2012 city:London, St Martin's Place, WC2 0HE country:United Kingdom keyword:Portraits with Archive documents; Eyeglasses and spectacles�� copyright_notice:© National Portrait Gallery, London IPTC Array a:14:{s:7:"caption";s:55:"by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt, oil on panel, 1850";s:14:"caption_writer";s:49:"National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg.org.uk";s:8:"headline";s:59:"NPG 967; Wilkie Collins by Sir John Everett Millais, 1st Bt";s:20:"special_instructions";s:105:"Unauthorised reproduction prohibited. For authorisation contact rightsandimages@npg.org.uk www.npg.org.uk";s:6:"byline";s:49:"National Portrait Gallery London - www.npg.org.uk";s:12:"byline_title";s:28:"Rights and Images Department";s:6:"credit";s:32:"National Portrait Gallery London";s:6:"source";s:32:"National Portrait Gallery London";s:11:"object_name";s:23:"NPG 967; Wilkie Collins";s:12:"date_created";s:10:"02.05.2012";s:4:"city";s:34:"London, St Martin's Place, WC2 0HE";s:7:"country";s:14:"United Kingdom";s:7:"keyword";s:118:"Portraits with Archive documents; Eyeglasses and spectacles��";s:16:"copyright_notice";s:36:"© National Portrait Gallery, 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/. Description An account of the resource Millais's oil painting shows Wilkie Collins seated wearing a brown velvet jacket, and looking downwards pensively with his hands clapsed in front of his chest. Wilkie Collins (1850) by John Everett Millais. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. As the course of her education proceeded, many striking peculiarities became developed in Madonna's disposition, which seemed to be all more or less produced by the necessary influence of her affliction on the formation of her character. The social isolation to which that affliction condemned her, the solitude of thought and feeling into which it forced her, tended from an early period to make her mind remarkably self-reliant, for so young a girl. Her first impression of strangers seemed invariably to decide her opinion of them at once and for ever. She liked or disliked people heartily; estimating them apparently from considerations entirely irrespective of age, or sex, or personal appearance. Sometimes, the very person who was thought certain to attract her, proved to be absolutely repulsive to her--sometimes, people, who, in Mr. Blyth's opinion, were sure to be unwelcome visitors to Madonna, turned out, incomprehensibly, to be people whom she took a violent liking to directly. She always betrayed her pleasure or uneasiness in the society of others with the most diverting candor--showing the extremest anxiety to conciliate and attract those whom she liked; running away and hiding herself like a child, from those whom she disliked. There were some unhappy people, in this latter class, whom no persuasion could ever induce her to see a second time. She could never give any satisfactory account of how she proceeded in forming her opinions of others. The only visible means of arriving at them, which her deafness and dumbness permitted her to use, consisted simply in examination of a stranger's manner, expression, and play of features at a first interview. This process, however, seemed [end page 119] always amply sufficient for her; and in more than one instance events proved that her judgment had not been misled by it. Her affliction had tended, indeed, to sharpen her faculties of observation and her powers of analysis to such a remarkable degree, that she often guessed the general tenor of a conversation quite correctly, merely by watching the minute varieties of expression and gesture in the persons speaking--fixing her attention always with especial intentness on the changeful and rapid motions of their lips. Exiled alike from the worlds of sound and speech, the poor girl's enjoyment of all that she could still gain of happiness, by means of the seeing sense that was left her, was hardly conceivable to her speaking and hearing fellow-creatures. All beautiful sights, and particularly the exquisite combinations that Nature presents, filled her with an artless rapture, which it affected the most unimpressible people to witness. Trees were beyond all other objects the greatest luxuries that her eyes could enjoy. She would sit for hours, on fresh summer evenings, watching the mere waving of the leaves; her face flushed, her whole nervous organization trembling with the sensations of deep and perfect happiness which that simple sight imparted to her. All the riches and honors which this world can afford, would not have added to her existence a tithe of that pleasure which Valentine easily conferred on her, by teaching her to draw; he might almost be said to have given her a new sense in exchange for the senses that she had lost. She used to dance about the room with the reckless ecstasy of a child, in her ungovernable delight at the prospect of a sketching expedition with Mr. Blyth in the Hampstead fields. 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 Hide and Seek Description An account of the resource Wilkie Collins (1824-1889) was a prolific British writer who was famous for his contributions to the genre of<a title="Sensation Fiction" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/genre/sensation.html" target="_blank"> “sensation fiction”</a> including the popular novels The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868). Hide and Seek (1854), from which this passage is excerpted, one of his early novels, was centered on the mysterious parentage of its deaf character Madonna Blyth. Madonna, who was found as an orphaned infant by circus performers, was raised in the circus where, during a performance, she fell from a horse and was deafened. Eventually, an artist, Valentine Blyth, and his “invalid” wife Lavvie, adopt Madonna and raise her as their daughter. The mystery of the novel is eventually solved by Mat Grice, a character who enters the Blyth’s lives when he is looking for answers about the seduction and death of his sister Mary. While the plot of Hide and Seek centers on detection, intrigue and other sensational elements, Collins inserted a note to chapter seven explaining that he wished to “represent[] the character of a ‘Deaf Mute’ as literally as possible according to nature” (431). When Collins describes Madonna’s communicative and sensory experiences in detail, then, he typically relies on his source material, John Kitto’s <a title="Kitto The Lost Senses" href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/9" target="_blank">The Lost Senses (1845)</a>, an autobiographical work by a deaf writer. In this passage, Collins suggests that Madonna has extraordinary visual abilities as a kind of “compensation” for her deafness and this notion that there must be a sensory compensation for a sensory impairment had enormous currency in Victorian writing about both deafness and blindness. When Collins describes Madonna’s skill at, and pleasure in, looking, he borrows from Kitto’s assessment of his own acuity; while Kitto disputes the idea that his sight must be better than the sight of people who can hear in compensation for his deafness, he nevertheless contends that his deafness led to his “passionate love” of “the beautiful in nature and art” (Kitto 51) and a “habit of seeking the character and passing sentiments of persons in their countenance” (Kitto 61). As Flint argues, in attending to the compensations of a sensory impairment in his novels featuring disabled character, “Collins is offering… a commentary on the role played by the senses in perception in general—something which was very much a live issue for many commentators in the mid nineteenth-century in the rapidly consolidating field of psychophysiology” (Flint 157). However, when Collins describes Madonna’s deafness as having “sharpen[ed] her faculties of observation and her powers of analysis to…a remarkable degree,” he is not only representing deafness in a way that he believes is realistic, nor simply commenting on her lip-reading abilities, but also is developing an important feature of characterization in a mystery novel. The fact that Madonna’s visual prowess enables her superior judgment is invaluable in a novel where looks can be deceiving and mysteries require solving. While, as Martha Stoddard Holmes has noted, Madonna’s sensitivity to visual pleasure may be read as a “dangerous” quality in a woman (Holmes 80), Madonna is also celebrated in the novel as a model of perceptiveness. Collins, who includes disabled characters in many of his works, explains that he has a “moral purpose” in introducing Madonna Blyth, who is deaf, and Lavvie Blyth, who is an “invalid”: I know of nothing which more firmly supports our faith in the better parts of human nature, than to see – as we all may—with what patience and cheerfulness the heavier bodily afflictions of humanity are borne, for the most part, by those afflicted and also to note what elements of kindness and gentleness the spectacle of these afflictions constantly developes [sic] in the persons of the little circle by which the sufferer is surrounded. Here is the ever bright side, the ever noble and consoling aspect of all human calamity…(Introduction to Hide and Seek 431) Despite Collins employment of the rhetoric of “affliction” and “calamity,” his depictions of disability, as Kate Flint notes, tend to “collapse the boundaries between the able-bodied and the impaired” (Flint 154), suggesting perhaps a more positive portrayal of disability in his novels. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Collins, Wilkie Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Collins, Wilkie. Hide and Seek. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009. Pages 119-20. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1854 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Esmail Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Millais's oil painting shows Wilkie Collins seated wearing a brown velvet jacket, and looking downwards pensively with his hands clapsed in front of his chest. Wilkie Collins (1850) by John Everett Millais. Courtesy <a title="National Portrait Gallery" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/" target="_blank">National Portrait Gallery</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="National Portrait Gallery" href="http://www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw01409/Wilkie-Collins?LinkID=mp00975&search=sas&sText=wilkie+collins&role=sit&rNo=0" target="_blank">NPG 967</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li>Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010. </li> <li>Esmail, Jennifer. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 2013. </li> <li>Flint, Kate. “Disability and Difference.” The Cambridge Companion to Wilkie Collins. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. </li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> </ul> Deafness Literature Novel Wilkie Collins https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/88827b02647bc61954d0b04d19d5b56e.jpg b3efb378adbdb35aa67a765bfb6861df 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 501 Height 649 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 The black and white frontispiece from the Life of John Kitto by John Eadie shows the mutton-chopped deaf missionary in a relaxed seated pose, looking past the viewer to the left. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Any one who has spent a considerable portion of time under peculiar, or at least undescribed, circumstances, must have been very unobservant if he has nothing to relate in which the public would be interested. It may be, indeed, that such a person lies under the same obligation to the public of describing his own condition, as a traveller is under to render his report respecting the unexplored countries which he has traversed in his pilgrimage. It is under this impression that I now write. I am unwilling to quit this world, without leaving behind me some record of a condition of which no sufferer has yet rendered an account. The condition itself is not entirely new; and that it has not been hitherto described, may be owing to the fact that a morning of life subject to such crushing calamity, has seldom, if ever, been followed by a day of such self-culture — which is the only culture possible, — and of such active exertion, as seems indispensably necessary to prevent the faculties from rusting under the absence of the diverse influences by which they are, in ordinary circumstances, brought into working condition for [end page 5] the useful labours at which all men should aim, and for the struggles necessary to self-advancement in a country and in a time like this. My case is this. It has pleased Providence that three-fourths of a life now at its meridian, should be passed in the most intense DEAFNESS to which any living creature can be subjected; and which could not be more entire had the organs conducive to the sense of hearing been altogether wanting. It is the consequences resulting from this position, that form the theme which I have now placed before me. For one who is deaf, my life has been studious; and for one who has been both deaf and studious — or indeed for any one — my life has not been uneventful. I know not, however, that I have any right to obtrude the events or studies of my life upon the public notice; and it is not my intention to refer to them further than may be necessary to bring out the points and peculiarities of the deaf condition. From the multifarious matters arising from the activities of a life which once seemed doomed to inertion, I shall select those only which arise from, which illustrate, or which are in any remarkable way connected with my deafness. It is needful to explain this, lest in sketching the natural history of my deafness, I should be supposed to offer a biography of myself. I became deaf on my father's birthday, early in the year 1817, when I had lately completed the twelfth year of my age. The commencement of this condition is too clearly connected with my circumstances in life to allow me to abstain from troubling the reader with some particulars which I should have been otherwise willing to withhold. [...] The circumstances of that day — the last of twelve years of hearing, and the first of twenty-eight years of deafness, have left a more distinct impression upon my mind than those of any previous, or almost any subsequent, day of my life. It was a day to be remembered. The last day on which any customary labour ceases, — the last day on which any customary privilege is enjoyed, — the last day on which we do the things we have done daily, are always marked days in the calendar of life; how much, therefore, must the mind not linger in the memories of a day which was the last of many blessed things, and in which one stroke of action and suffering, — one moment of time, wrought a greater change of condition, than any sudden loss of wealth or honours ever made in the state of man. Wealth may be recovered, and new honours won, or happiness may be secured without them; but there is no recovery, no adequate compensation, for such a loss as was on that day sustained. The wealth of sweet and pleasurable sounds with which the Almighty has filled the world, — of sounds modulated by affection, sympathy, and earnestness, — can be appreciated only by one who has so long been thus poor indeed in the want of them, and who for so many weary years has sat in utter silence amid the busy hum of populous cities, the music of the woods and mountains, and, more than all, of the voices sweeter than music, which are in the winter season heard around the domestic hearth. *** [In the omitted section, Kitto describes falling from a ladder while assisting his father in slating the roof of a house and then being carried, senseless, to his home where he lay unconscious for two weeks.] *** I was very slow in learning that my hearing was entirely gone. The unusual stillness of all things was grateful to me in my utter exhaustion; and if in this half-awakened state, a thought of the matter entered my mind, I ascribed it to the unusual care and success of my friends in preserving silence around me. I saw them talking indeed to one another, and thought that, out of regard to my feeble condition, they spoke in whispers, because I heard them not. The truth was revealed to me in consequence of my solicitude about the book which had so much interested me in the day of my fall. It had, it seems, been reclaimed by the good old man who had sent it to me, and who doubtless concluded, that I should have no more need of books in this life. He was wrong; for there has been nothing in this life which I have needed more. I asked for this book with much earnestness, and was answered by signs which I could not comprehend. "Why do you not speak?" I cried; "Pray let me have the book.” This seemed to create some confusion; and at length some one, more clever than the rest, hit upon the happy expedient of writing upon a slate, that the book had been reclaimed by the owner, and that I could not in my weak state be allowed to read. "But," I said in great astonishment, "Why do you write to me, why not speak? Speak, speak.” Those who stood around the bed exchanged significant looks of concern, and the writer soon displayed upon his slate the awful words— "You are Deaf." Did not this utterly crush me? By no means. In my then weakened condition nothing like this could affect me. Besides, I was a child; and to a child the full extent of such a calamity could not be at once apparent. However, I knew not the future — it was well I did not; and there was nothing to show me that I suffered under more than a temporary deafness, which in a few days might pass away. It was left for time to show me the sad realities of the condition to which I was reduced. Time passed on, and I slowly recovered strength, but my deafness continued. The doctors were perplexed by it. They probed and tested my ears in various fashions. The tympanum was uninjured, and the organ seemed in every respect perfect, excepting that it would not act. Some thought that a disorganization of the internal mechanism had been produced by the concussion; others that the auditory nerve had been paralyzed. They poured into my tortured ears various infusions, hot and cold; they bled me, they blistered me, leeched me, physicked me; and, at last, they put a watch between my teeth, and on finding that I was unable to distinguish the ticking, they gave it up as a bad case, and left me to my fate. I cannot know whether my case was properly dealt with or not. I have no reason to complain of inattention, of my own knowledge; but, some six months after, a wise doctor from London affirmed that, by a different course at the commencement, my hearing might have been restored. He caused a seton<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> to be inserted in my neck; but this had no effect upon my deafness, although it seems to have acted beneficially upon the general health. Some years after, Mr. Snow Harris,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> with a spontaneous kindness, for which I am happy to be able at this distant day to express my obligations, put my ears through a course of electrical operations. He persevered for more than a month; but no good came of it: and since then nothing further has been done or attempted. Indeed, I have not sought any relief; and have discouraged the suggestions of friends who would have had me apply to Dr. This and Dr. That. The condition in which two-thirds of my life has been passed, has become a habit to me — a part of my physical nature: I have learned to acquiesce in it, and to mould my habits of life according to the conditions which it imposes; and have hence been unwilling to give footing for hopes and expectations, which I feel in my heart can never be realized. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> “A thread, piece of tape, or the like, drawn through a fold of skin so as to maintain an issue or opening for discharges, or drawn through a sinus or cavity to keep this from healing up” (Oxford English Dictionary). <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Sir William Snow Harris (1791-1867) was a British physician who is best known for his experiments with electricity, including the development of an effective system for lightning conduction on ship. 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 Lost Senses Description An account of the resource John Kitto (1804-1854) was a British missionary and writer of religious books who was deafened at the age of 12 by a fall. In his youth, Kitto, who typically worked with his father, a mason, rather than attend school, was also forced to spend time in the workhouse. Kitto, then, was largely self-educated. His religious texts and travel writing, including The Pictorial Bible (1835-8)and the Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (1845)were popular in his age. In addition to his religious writings, he composed an autobiographical narrative, The Lost Senses (1845), at the behest of his publisher, Charles Knight. While Kitto calls The Lost Senses “a natural history of my deafness” rather than “a biography of myself,” the first volume of the work, which is focused on deafness, narrates how Kitto came to be deaf and his experiences as a deaf man both in England and abroad. The second volume, blindness, is not autobiographical (since Kitto was not blind) and turns its attention, instead, to experiences of, and texts about, blind people, including the famous American Laura Bridgman, and various blind poets, musicians and philosophers. In this excerpt from the beginning of The Lost Senses, Kitto likens his autobiographical undertaking to the reports of travellers of “unexplored countries.” (Indeed, Kitto published accounts of his own travels in the Middle East). He then describes his fall from a ladder that led to his deafness and his experience of coming to understand his new disability. After becoming deaf, Kitto underwent extensive medical treatment; this excerpt provides a glimpse into the range of Victorian medical approaches to deafness. As Mary Wilson Carpenter notes, a Victorian “attitude toward deafness as an affliction or infirmity…was…reflected in medical practice during the nineteenth century. Some medical practitioners began to call themselves aurists…and to devise a variety of treatments and cures for the deaf, many of which were torturous and some of which actually caused or intensified deafness” (110). Kitto explains that at the time of writing The Lost Senses, he no longer sought remedies for his deafness because of his acceptance of this “part of [his] physical nature.” For Kitto, one of the most important results of his fall and subsequent deafness was how it provided him with increased time, inclination and ability to read widely; Kitto emphasizes that his reading and writing, which emerged from his experience of deafness, allowed him to move from poverty to comfort as a prominent writer of religious works. Martha Stoddard Holmes describes Kitto’s account of his deafness as a “strange melodramatic mix of misery and triumph” where Kitto at once bemoans what he understands as the limitations of his deafness while celebrating the way that his deafness enabled his scholarly and literary success (163). In this excerpt Kitto describes both his deafness and his work as a reader and writer as “habit[ual]” to him; both enabled his success as a Victorian writer and their productive interaction is no more evident in his body of work than in The Lost Senses. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kitto, John Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Kitto, John. The Lost Senses. London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845. Pages 5-14. Complete text available<a title="Online Edition of The Lost Senses" href="http://archive.org/stream/lostsensesseries00john#page/n9/mode/2up%20" target="_blank"> online</a> at archive.org. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1845 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Esmail Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The black and white frontispiece from the Life of John Kitto by John Eadie shows the mutton-chopped deaf missionary in a relaxed seated pose, looking past the viewer to the left. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Bar-Yosef, Eitan. “The ‘Deaf Traveller,’ the ‘Blind Traveller,’ and Constructions of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing.” Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 133-54.</li> <li>Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.</li> <li>Esmail, Jennifer. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 2013.</li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. </li> </ul> Class Deafness Invalidism John Kitto life writing https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/851adf33366a97e044b9fba10341e9c8.jpg 130ae5f28852cb9b0c9d70c70b5edd8e 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 781 Height 538 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String copyright_notice:Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html byline:Wellcome Images object_name:V0013623 School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to headline:V0013623 School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, caption:V0013623 School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, Avenue Road, London: seen from the road. Coloured lithograph by E. T. Dolby, n.d., after H. E. Kendall, 1838. after: Edwin Thomas Dolby and Henry Edward KendallPublished: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html IPTC Array a:5:{s:16:"copyright_notice";s:123:"Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";s:6:"byline";s:15:"Wellcome Images";s:11:"object_name";s:64:"V0013623 School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to ";s:8:"headline";s:69:"V0013623 School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read,";s:7:"caption";s:531:"V0013623 School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, Avenue Road, London: seen from the road. Coloured lithograph by E. T. Dolby, n.d., after H. E. Kendall, 1838. after: Edwin Thomas Dolby and Henry Edward KendallPublished: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";} Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A coloured lithograph shows the School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read from the road, as passerbys hurry past. The school is a stately brick building surrounded by foliage. Coloured lithograph by E. T. Dolby, n.d., after H. E. Kendall, 1838. 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 1860 to 1880 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. Poor Guy! He is burning as he has burnt any time since that fifth of November on which he attempted to “blow Scotchmen back to Scotland.” He is blazing in the midst of tar-barrels and brushwood. The great bonfire pouring out masses of flame and sparks—careful officer of the Fire Brigade keeping watch meanwhile—lights up an odd scene.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> We are in a great square on a November night, dim walls enclosing it. Rockets are shooting far into the wintry sky, Roman candles are jetting out starts of many-coloured flame. Catherine-wheels whizz round on tree trunks; squibs are spurting our their short but sparkling life; crackers banging and barking on the ground, noisy, demonstrative, and soon extinct, like fussy politicians; and, besides all theses, there is plenty of high pyrotechnic art from Mr. Brock’s<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> famous laboratory—set-pieces, Chinese trees, fiery fountains and the like. Plenty of noise, plenty of fire, and plenty of light. Round the bonfire dance merry figures –rushing hurriedly now and then to the window whence the fireworks are liberally dealt out—exulting in the noise, the crackle, the fun generally; glorying in Guy Fawkes and his sublime cremation. They are “knowing,” these shadowy forms of boys and half-grown men. They keep the fire at a respectful distance, save when one, bolder than the rest, gives a tar-barrel a kick to bring out the sparks in golden showers. They never light their fireworks at the wrong end, as has happened to philosophers before now, but manage them deftly and skillfully. They are enjoying themselves immensely; and, as they last glorious wheel dies out, the last cracker and the last maroon explode, they open their throats with a hearty cheer—a three times three- in honour of, it may be supposed, the Protestant succession. They have thoroughly enjoyed the festival of St. Guy; and, when the embers on the fire sink low, go indoors to bed, satisfied, but not satiated, with the fun of the evening. The odd part of this fête is that the celebrants are blind—many of them wholly unconscious of the light of the day, people to whom life is one long Arctic night, unillumined by lamp or heavenly or earthly make. There are others who, although their blindness is unhappily complete enough to prevent them from distinguishing objects, yet they are dimly conscious of sunrise and sunset. The latter enjoy the fireworks keenly, perhaps more keenly than those who see perfectly; but it is difficult to understand the fun of fireworks to the utterly blind. That they produce no effect on some people, is proved by the demeanour of the industrious man, who has retreated out of the noise and bustle into a quiet corner in the dark, and is working away at basket-making as if his life depended upon getting that pretty basket, with the white and red stripes, done this very night. The glare of the bonfire, when the flames shoot up on this side, just reveals the pattern of the work on which he is busied; but he is otherwise so completely in the dark, that ordinary people can barely make out his figure in the corner. He is absorbed in his task. Great wheels spin round unheeded by the basket-maker; maroons thunder out their warning in vain. One perpetually moves his busy fingers among the osier-meshes, woven with strips red or white, selected with unerring accuracy but this one solitary man who cares not for Guy Fawkes or his fête. Alas, poor fellow! He cannot “remember the Fifth of November,”<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> for he has never heard of that or anything else. He is not only blind, but absolutely stone deaf; yet is he a capital basket-maker; and an honest and good-honoured fellow, if you only know how to talk to him by taking one of his hands, and touching it rapidly in various parts, as Miss Quarman is now doing. He is not absolutely dumb, but articulates a few words—a very limited vocabulary—and then goes back to work with a will, ignoring the high jinks going on around him utterly and completely. But the boys who are only blind are as “jolly” as those proverbial youths whose birth or occupation is associated with “sand.”<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> Miss Quarman and Mr. Sander have as much as they can do to distribute Roman candles, squibs, and crackers to the numerous applicants, who appear singularly well acquainted with the properties of various kinds of fireworks. It is difficult to realize that these boys are blind. When hurrying towards the window they never miss it, and, what is stranger still, never blunder over one another; and they have the keenest appreciation of the difference between a squib and a cracker. The Roman candle and the Jack-in-the-box are the prime favorites, next comes the cracker, and lastly squibs and golden rain. The triumphs of pyrotechny—set-pieces, wheels, and coloured rockets—are comparatively unheeded, a single maroon being worth a boxful of them. The boys—and, in a quiet way, the girls—of the institution in the Avenue-road, under the care of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read,<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> have had a glorious holiday on this Fifth of November. There has been much fun over the dressing of the guy, and carrying him round. It was curious to see those little ones, who has not assisted in the “make up,” approach, one by one, to “look at,” as they call it—in ordinary literal English to “feel”—the guy. These young blind folk, when they touch anything, always “look at” it, and, if they have met and touched persons, say, “I saw him to-day,” in the most offhand and matter-of-course way. On the subject of blindness they are extraordinarily sensitive, and express their dislike to any questioning concerning their infirmity. Blind is, in fact, among the blind, an expression of contempt. As a rule they find their way about with remarkable skill; but should some poor awkward fellow blunder by accident over a chair or up against one of his schoolfellows, the reproof generally takes the form: “You must be blind.” Perhaps the strangest and most interesting time to see any institution for the blind is at dusk. While others are blundering and floundering about, the blind people move hither and thither noiselessly and accurately. An odd effect is felt on entering the printing-office of the school in Avenue-road, late on a winter afternoon. The house is dark, the passage is dark, the office is darker still, but there are the printers, setting up type and pulling proofs with all possible celerity and exactitude. The master printer courteously proposes to light a candle for the sake of visitors, who perhaps “cannot see very well.” […] Some odd stories are told of the basket-makers, who evince a marked preference for very sharp knives, to trim and split their osiers withal, and have a marked objection to being stared at by Philistines—that is, people who can see. At one time they were greatly annoyed, as they were in the act of soaking their osier-twigs in a tank, specially provided for that purpose, to find that there was a stranger among them, an enterprising loafer, who had climbed over the tall fence in order to have a closer view. He repented of his audacity, for the blind youths pounced on him, and ducked him in the tank till he was half-drowned. Many more curious tales are told of the blind, one of which they refuse to believe themselves—viz., the story of the girl whose fingers, having been so hardened by manual labour that she could not learn to write on the Lucasian system, learnt to read with her lips.<a title="" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Others they assert to be absolutely correct and trustworthy, especially a wonderful instance of sagacity in a fellow-pupil who, since she left the school—having mastered every accomplishment taught there—has married a blind husband, is an excellent housekeeper, cooks her husband’s dinner, makes and actually “cuts out,” and fits her children’s clothes, washes, starches, and irons her husband’s shirts, and plays piano like an angel. I am a person of facile faith, hating the trouble of doubting things, and therefore believe implicitly in the existence of this accomplished lady; but I feel obliged to mention, after the excellent example set by Herodotus, and followed by Sir John Maundevile, “Verilie I have not see hir.”<a title="" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a> <h2>Notes</h2> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> For more information on Victorian Britain’s sometimes violent celebration of Guy Fawkes day and on attempts to suppress these celebrations, see J.A. Sharpe’s Remember, Remember: A Cultural History of Guy Fawkes Day (London: Harvard UP, 2005). <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Founded in the early 18th-century, Brock’s Fireworks, later known as C.T. Brock & Co.’s Crystal Palace Fireworks, was a fireworks manufactory located in the south of London. It was known both for the accidental explosion of its Whitechapel factory in 1825 and for holding successful fireworks displays for the public, known as Brock’s Benefits. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> The phrase is common in popular songs about Guy Fawkes, many of which include the refrain “Remember, remember, the fifth of November, / Gunpowder, Treason and Plot.” <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> Sand boys transported and sold sand used for flooring and for other domestic purposes. The reference to jolly sand boys is in part a reference to Charles Dickens’ 1840 novel Old Curiosity Shop which features an inn called “The Jolly Sandboys.” <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[5]</a> The Society for Teaching the Blind to Read was founded in 1838 and was located at 1 Avenue Road, Regent’s Park, London. A Guide to the Institutions and Charities for the Blind in the United Kingdom, published in 1884, explains that the Society’s goal was “to provide instruction for the Blind in ordinary branches of Education, with music, in a resident school; also to teach them trades” (31). At the time the Guide was published, the Society had 26 females and 30 male student boarders. In “The Blind of London,” an essay published in The Times in 1860, Edmund Johnson noted that the primary object of the Society was “to teach the blind to read, with an especial view to their eventually reading the Holy Scriptures” (16). He goes on to explain that no student, no matter how eager he or she might be to “acquire knowledge of an art of a more material advantage” is permitted to “learn any of the additional branches of instruction until he or she can read tolerably well in one of the Gospels, an acquirement generally made within three months of his or her admission.” (16). The Guide to the Institutions and Charities for the Blind in the United Kingdom notes that female students were taught to knit, while male students learnt how to print books in the Lucas embossed script. Boys also learnt chair caning and basket making. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[6]</a> The “Lucasian” system referred to here is one of many raised-print script systems developed and used in the course of the nineteenth-century to print text to be finger read by blind readers. It takes its name from its inventor, Thomas Lucas. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[7]</a> The author uses references to <a title="Wikipedia Entry on Herodotus" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus" target="_blank">Herodotus</a>, the famously cautious ancient Greek historian, and to <a title="John Mandeville Wikipedia Entry" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Mandeville" target="_blank">John Maundeville</a>, the 14th-century world traveler, who is believed to be as mythical as the ‘facts’ about foreign places attributed to him, to express skepticism about the housekeeping and parenting abilities of a visually disabled woman. 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 Blind Guy Fawkes Description An account of the resource “Blind Guy Fawkes” is noteworthy for how it both participates in and diverges from a representational pattern. The introduction into Britain of raised-print books in the first decades of the nineteenth century and the proliferation of finger reading skills that followed resulted in both the founding of new schools and charities dedicated to the education of blind people and extensive press coverage of the accomplishments of this newly literate group. This article, which was published anonymously in Charles Dickens’ weekly family magazine All The Year Round, describes an evening visit to the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read, a boarding school for young people with visual disabilities founded in 1839. While its author describes both the academic and vocational training provided by the Society, he or she chooses to open with and focus on the students’ rowdy celebration of Guy Fawkes’ day. Portraying a group of blind students as playful, pleasure-seeking, and energetic, the article’s author eschews the highlighting of difference, common in articles of this kind, in favor of an emphasis on experiences, aptitudes and interests that this group of blind children hold in common with sighted children. While many articles on the education of people with visual disabilities published in the period portray blind students as industrious, serious, devout and suffering, this article offers a more nuanced portrait, in large part by withholding information about the disabilities of the children being described. Information about the location of this celebration and the children’s visual disabilities is withheld for several paragraphs. It is only after describing the rowdy behavior of the children and their agility and pleasure that the author identifies them as having visual disabilities. While the article opens with an expression of pity, “Poor Guy!,” the pity expressed is for the effigy of Guy Fawkes and not for the children, who mark the anniversary of Guy Fawkes’ treason in the same spirit and in the same way as sighted children: by preparing a Guy for burning and by setting off fireworks. The result is a progressive, straightforward and positive portrait of blind children and of the everydayness of their lives. This is not to suggest that this article avoids all of the pitfalls common to the Victorian press’ handling of the experience of visual disability. The author describes visually disabled people as “people to whom life is one long Arctic night, unillumined by lamp of heavenly or earthly make,” a poetic lament of a kind common to reporting on disability. Similarly, the author’s discussion of blind people’s use of the word “see” to describe experiences of perception has a regrettable ethnographic feel. While the reporter is eager to share an anecdote that demonstrates the capabilities of a group of blind boys (a story about how they detect and punish an unwelcome sighted boy who spies on them by dunking him in a trough), he or she doubts a story that the students share about the existence of a highly successful blind housewife. While the author focuses on the experiences of students with visual disabilities, the article also caters to public fascination with the experiences of people with multiple sensory disabilities, fascination well documented by the century’s extensive press coverage of the education and lives of Laura Bridgman and Helen Keller. In this article, the author portrays a blind and deaf basket maker as a skilled and diligent workman but dwells on his isolation from fellow students and on his exclusion from the night’s celebrations. This representation of a blind and deaf person links the article to a section from American Notes (1842) in which Charles Dickens described his visit to the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, both celebrating the accomplishments of the rapidly developing field of blind education and lamenting the presumed suffering and isolation of Laura Bridgman, the school’s star pupil. While both “Blind Guy Fawkes” and Dickens’ American Notes expressed and catered to public interest in the education of people with disabilities, they differ in their portrayal of blind children. “Blind Guy Fawkes,” with its lively descriptions of bold and boisterous children, is a reminder to modern readers that press reports on educational institutions for people with disabilities are far from homogenous in their approach to their shared subject matter. They document different facets of the lives of people with disabilities and, in doing so, they communicate different ideas about disability. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anonymous Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived “Blind Guy Fawkes.” All the Year Round (November 25, 1876): 255-258. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 25 November 1876 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Vanessa Warne Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A coloured lithograph shows the School of the London Society for Teaching the Blind to Read from the road, as passerbys hurry past. The school is a stately brick building surrounded by foliage. Coloured lithograph by E. T. Dolby, n.d., after H. E. Kendall, 1838. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1196471" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 38645i</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li>Bourrier, Karen. “Reading Laura Bridgman: Literacy and Disability in Dickens’s American Notes.” Dickens Studies Annual 40 (Summer 2009): 37-60.</li> <li>Drew, John and Tony Williams. <a title="Dickens Journal Online" href="http://www.djo.org.uk/" target="_blank">Dickens Journal Online</a>. University of Buckingham. <http://www.djo.org.uk/> [Contains digitized versions of Household Words and All the Year Round.]</li> <li>Gitter, Elisabeth. The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl. New York: Farrar, 2001.</li> <li>Johnson, Edmund C. The Blind of London. London: John Mitchell, 1860.</li> <li>Oliphant, John. Early Education of the Blind in Britain, ca. 1790-1900: Institutional Experience in England and Scotland. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen, 2007.</li> <li>Turner, Mansfield and William Harris. A Guide to the Institutions and Charities for the Blind in the United Kingdom. London: Simpkin and Marshall, 1884.</li> <li>Warne, Vanessa. “‘So that the sense of touch may supply the want of sight’: Blind Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain.” Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley eds. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011. 43-64.</li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English All the Year Round Blindness Charles Dickens Institutions Journalism life writing