2 10 61 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/11baf66e5eeb5b6e0faf86463d841f86.jpg d405835417244736264c801aa7ef6acd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Wood engraving, 1881. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London under a Creative Commons License (Wellcome Library: ICV No 48264). Description An account of the resource Four scenes from the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney Heath, London. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. This admirable institution, the usefulness of which has just been increased by the addition of a new wing which on Saturday, the 16th inst., was formally opened by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, was originally founded in 1854 at Carshalton by the late Andrew Reed, D.D. It was removed to its present locale, Melrose Hall, Putney Heath, in 1863. Up till now there have been some 30 or 40 male inmates against nearly 150 females, and about the same proportion is observable, curiously enough, amongst the outdoor pensioners of the charity, the victims of paralysis, rheumatism, and other disabling maladies, whose number is 450 [...]. But for the fact that almost all the inmates, being more or less crippled, are compelled to move about with crutches, or in invalid chairs, Melrose Hall would present more the appearance of a comfortable hotel than of a hospital. It stands in its own grounds, the windows overlooking a lovely stretch of country, and the various rooms are furnished in such a way as to give the patients as much as possible of home comfort. Pictures, flowers, and books are there in profusion, and every effort is made to lighten the burden of life to the afflicted. There is a large Assembly Room in which Divine Service is held on Sundays, and where those patients who are able to be moved gather for daily prayer, and which is also utilised for social gatherings. The immediate wants of the inmates are attended to by a staff of forty nurses and attendants, the head nurse and six divisional nurses being hospital-trained; the Matron, who is also a skilled nurse, having the oversight of all, under the direction of the medical officer, who attends daily […]. Our engravings are copied from a little pamphlet descriptive of the Hospital, entitled “A Glimpse of a Good Work;” the first represents a patient about to enter one of the hydraulic “lifts” which connect the upper and lower floors; the second, a group of patients and visitors on the lawn; the third, a group of nurses under the verandah, and the fourth the interior of one of the wards, where lie three young girls, sisters, who have been afflicted from early youth, and who are now bedridden. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Published in 1881 in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graphic">The Graphic</a>, a widely distributed British newspaper, the following anonymously authored article, entitled “The Royal Hospital for Incurables,” and the engravings accompanying it, offer a sense of the kind of care that the disabled population in England received from privately-funded organizations throughout the long nineteenth century. Residents of The Royal Hospital for Incurables (founded by philanthropist Andrew Reed of Putney in 1854) were attended to by trained physicians when necessary, but they were also left free to roam the surrounding countryside and to enjoy the comforts of accommodating spaces of leisure like the verandah and the Assembly Room, which offered opportunities for what disability studies scholars would today term independent living. We can see from this particular series of images that while called a “hospital,” this institution was closer to what we would now call a “home” for the disabled. It operated differently from most traditional, government-funded hospitals in England, in that it accepted only terminally ill and permanently disabled patients, who were an otherwise outcast population. Most hospitals in Britain tended to focus on treatment and therefore catered to “curable” cases. According to historian Ruth Richardson, who has written on The Middlesex Hospital in London, “it was important for [a] hospital to keep up a rolling programme of ‘successful’ care. To take in the dying, who would make the [hospital’s] statistics look poor, or those who might be a serious long-term drain on the institutions resources…would skew the [hospital’s] statistics in an undesirable direction” (Richardson 70). This was particularly a trend in workhouse infirmaries, where funding and resources were especially scarce. The Royal Hospital for Incurables was progressive, then, because it created a space for an “untreatable” class of patients in England. Privately managed institutions for both the disabled and those with long-term illnesses sprung up around Great Britain and emerged as antidotes to this ethic of curable care. The Royal Hospital for Incurables is merely one example of many charities of this nature, including Reed’s sister institution, <a href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/3">The Earlswood Asylum</a> (founded in 1847), which was also known as the Asylum for Idiots. These institutions offered various levels of support; while The Royal Hospital for Incurables housed its patients permanently, other institutions arranged work opportunities for those those who could live at home, but who struggled to find accommodating jobs. The Baroness <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Burdett-Coutts,_1st_Baroness_Burdett-Coutts">Angela Burdett-Coutts</a>, a friend and benefactor of Victorian author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens</a>, established Brown’s Lane Sewing School, for example, which enlisted many disabled individuals to sew shirts for the army and navy and to work in an accepting and cooperative environment. Coutts took all unemployed people under her wing, but disabled Victorians were a population especially well-represented at her institution and at places like it. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived “The Royal Hospital for Incurables.” The Graphic. (30 July 1881): 119. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1881 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kristen Starkowski Relation A related resource <ul><li> Anonymous. Baroness Burdett-Coutts: A Sketch of Her Public Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. </li> <li> Cook, Gordon C. “Caring for ‘incurables’: The 150th Anniversary of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability, Putney.” Postgraduate Medical Journal 80 (2003): 426-430. <a href="http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/945/426.full">http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/945/426.full</a> </li> </ul><ul><li> Cook, Gordon C. The Incurables Movement: An Illustrated History of the British Home. Abingdon: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006. </li> <li> Richardson, Ruth. Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Four scenes from the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney Heath, London. Wood engraving, 1881. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://wellcomeimages.org/">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (Wellcome Library: ICV No 48264). Title A name given to the resource The Royal Hospital for Incurables Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anonymous https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4e666e957ca572d0e5c1b82159c1a7e2.jpg 0f79da7c2f9d8878cc73865aada87311 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 712 Height 868 Bit Depth 8 Channels 1 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Jane and Rochester reunite. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “It is time some one undertook to re-humanize you,” said I, parting his thick and long-uncut locks; “for I see you are being metamorphosed into a lion, or something of that sort. You have a ‘faux air’ of Nebuchadnezzar in the fields about you, that is certain, : your hair reminds me of eagles’ feathers; whether your nails are grown like birds’ claws or not, I have not yet noticed.” “On this arm, I have neither hand nor nails;” he said, drawing the mutilated limb from his breast, and shewing it to me. “It is a mere stump—a ghastly sight! Don’t you think so, Jane?” “It is a pity to see it; and a pity to see your eyes—and the scar of fire on your forehead; and the worst of it is, one is in danger of loving you too well for all this; and making too much of you.” “I thought you would be revolted, Jane, when you saw my arm, and my cicatrized visage.” “Did you? Don’t tell me so—lest I should say something disparaging to your judgment. Now, let me leave you an instant, to make a better fire and have the harth swept up. Can you tell when there is a good fire?” “Yes; with the right eye I see a glow—a ruddy haze.” “And you see the candles?” “Very dimly—each is a luminous cloud.” “Can you see me?” “No, my fairy: but I am only too thankful to hear and feel you.” “When do you take supper?” “I never take supper.” “But you shall have some to-night. I am hungry: so are you, I dare say, only you forget.” Summoning Mary, I soon had the room in more cheerful order: I prepared him, likewise, a comfortable repast. My spirits were excited, and with pleasure and ease I talked to him during supper, and for a long time after. there was no harassing restraint, no repressing of glee and vivacity with him; for with him I was at perfect ease, because I knew I suited him: all I said or did seemed either to console or revive him. Delightful consciousness! It brought to life and light my whole nature: in his presence I thoroughly lied; and he lived in mine. Blind as he was, smiles played over his face, joy dawned on his forehead: his lineaments softened and warmed. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Jane Eyre Description An account of the resource Charlotte Brontë’s 1847 sensation, Jane Eyre, ends with a dramatic climax in which the hero is blinded and maimed. This ending is often read as a symbolic castration. Richard Chase first proposed this Freudian reading of Rochester's disabilities in a 1948 essay, arguing that "Rochester’s injuries are, I should think, a symbolic castration. The faculty of vision, the analysts have shown, is often identified in the unconscious with the energy of sex."<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Peter Pickrel summed up the argument thus: “Charlotte Brontë’s spinsterish sensibilities were such that his [Rochester’s] rampant sexuality had to be tamed before he could become a suitable husband for a nice early-Victorian heroine like Jane Eyre”.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Susan Gubar and Sandra Gilbert found that the opposite was true thirty years later, and that though Brontë really did wish to castrate Rochester, the urge came from her anger at being a woman author in a patriarchal society rather than from her spinsterish inability to handle her hero's sexuality.<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Recent disability studies readings of Jane Eyre, collected in The Blindman and the Madwoman, have overturned this critical chestnut. Critics have found an erotics of care-giving in the Jane-Rochester dyad, and an emphasis on interdependence. In this scene from the penultimate chapter of the novel, Jane returns after an absence to find Rochester has been blinded and maimed in an attempt to save his estranged wife from a fire she has set to Thornfield. Rochester is surprised to find that Jane finds him as attractive as ever. Far from suggesting that Rochester’s sexuality has been tamed, the couple’s playful banter and the tactility of their rapport now that Rochester is blind and must feel Jane to see her suggest an erotic side to disability. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Chase, Richard. “The Brontës, or, Myth Domesticated.” Forms of Modern Fiction. Ed. William Van O'Connor. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press, 1948. 108-109. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Pickrel, Peter. "Jane Eyre: The Apocalypse of the Body." ELH 53.1 (1986): 165-82. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. “A Dialogue of Self and Soul: Plain Jane's Progress.” The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Brontë, Charlotte Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Brontë, Charlotte. Jane Eyre. Ed. Richard Nemesvari. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 1999 [1847]. 537-538. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1847 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource "You are altogether a human being Jane? You are certain of that?" Jane stands facing the viewer, clasping Rochester's hand, who is seated in a chair with his back to the viewer. F.H. Townsend illustration to the second edition of Jane Eyre, 1847, Chapter 37. Image in the public domain courtesy of <a href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AP422b.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a>. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bolt, David, Julia Miele Rodas, and Elizabeth Donaldson, eds. The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. </li> <li> Carpenter, Mary Wilson. <a href="http://differences.dukejournals.org/content/17/3/52.refs">“Blinding the Hero.”</a> Differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 17.3 (2006): 52–68 </li> </ul><ul><li> Chen, Chih-Ping. "Am I a Monster?": Jane Eyre Among the Shadows of Freaks.” Studies in the Novel. 34.4 (Winter 2002): 367-384. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Amputation Blindness Charlotte Brontë Literature Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c24bb49345922dc355286858f26cd699.jpg 7fb7e84ea1b0218036a1aa552809b727 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Sol Eytinge, Jr. "Mrs. Clennam and Arthur Clennam" from the Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. Description An account of the resource Mrs. Clennam, seated in a two-wheeled chair in her bedroom, listens to her adopted son, Arthur Clennam, speak. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it, from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face, between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence. 'In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains—I have begun, and I must speak of such things now, mother—some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into all my father's dealings, for more than two score years. You can set these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover the truth. Will you, mother?' He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not more immoveable in its two folds, than were her firm lips. [ . . . ] There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently—still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off the blow. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mrs. Clennam, seated in a two-wheeled chair in her bedroom, listens to her adopted son, Arthur Clennam, speak. Sol Eytinge, Jr. "Mrs. Clennam and Arthur Clennam" from the Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871. Scan by <a title="Illustration for Little Dorrit" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/eytinge/74.html">Philip V. Allingham</a>. Description An account of the resource Little Dorrit, first published in monthly installments between 1855 and 1857, is arguably Charles Dickens's most disability-focused novel. In this later and darker work, Dickens uses the trope of disability to emphasize the disease—social, economic, and otherwise—threatening to debilitate London. The language of disability pervades the text—from the educator wryly named "Mr. Cripples" to the "maimed table" and "crippled wardrobe" (53) in the Clennam household to the Clennam house itself, which appears to "[lean] on some half dozen gigantic crutches" and which ultimately collapses (46). Furthermore, there are countless references to characters with mobility impediments in various forms—from Giovanni Cavalletto's leg injury, which results from a collision with a Mail coach, to the train-like Pancks's allusion to the mobility challenges faced by men with wooden legs. These references call attention to the central figure of disability, Mrs. Clennam, who has not left her room for twelve years because of a "rheumatic affection" with "attendant debility or nervous weakness" (49) and who can only conduct business in her room because of the limited mobility afforded by her two-wheeled chair. A variety of diseases plague the cityscape—bureaucratic inefficiency, epitomized in the Circumlocution Office; a mania for credit and speculation, attested to by the fantasies of those living in Bleeding Heart Yard and whose dangers are evidenced by Mr. Merdle's life and death; the social disease of poverty, whose effects are exacerbated, rather than diminished, by England's debtors' prisons—but the one that Dickens most prominently develops through the trope of disability is the moral and religious disease embodied by Mrs. Clennam, whose vengeful ire has poisoned her familial relations and whose hard-heartedness has seemingly rendered her "stony"—as the narrator says, "she lived and died a statue" (827)—and thus immobile. Mrs. Clennam's unwillingness to forgive causes her body to become one of the many forms of prisons in the novel. To highlight her moral stagnation and rigidity, Dickens depicts her as rheumatic, with only slight mobility enabled by her wheeled chair. However, it is somewhat unclear whether Mrs. Clennam requires the use of a wheeled chair or whether it is a form of self-punishment, exacted because of her commitment to an Old Testament mode of justice. For when blackmailed by Mr. Blandois, she runs through the streets of London to secure the papers that would disclose her secret about her adopted son, Arthur Clennam. While she seems to attribute the feat to a sort of adrenaline—"This is not recovery; it is not strength; I don't know what it is" (822)—the excerpt selected here, with its reference to her "moving power" and her "swift and sudden action of her foot" (64), seems to grant Mrs. Clennam a mobility that is discordant with her bedridden state. In this excerpt we also see Mrs. Clennam raise her hand to protect herself from an imagined "blow" that might be read as her self-condemnation for her sins, which she might expiate, or at least contain, through self-imprisonment. Such a reading is troubling, to be sure, because it supposes Dickens to be using disability as a form of punishment for moral wrongs. However, it is not out of character for an author so heavily influenced by the nineteenth-century science of physiognomy to treat disability symbolically.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Despite his co-optation of disability as trope, Dickens includes in Little Dorrit a quite profound meditation on the continuum of ability.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> The narrator describes Mrs. Clennam's sickroom as the central meeting place of the "fellow travellers" who are a recurring image in the novel: "Which of the vast multitude of travellers . . . climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and re-act on one another, which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey's end, be travelling surely hither?" (195). Here we see Dickens ruminating upon the suddenness with which one might arrive in the sickroom, for as the narrator says, "[T]he travellers to all are on the great high-road; but it has wonderful divergences, and only Time shall show us whither each traveller is bound" (196). By making it the space through which many of the central characters in Little Dorrit pass, even as visitors, Dickens reminds his reader of the transitory nature of ability. Thus, in a novel that plays with reversals between independence and dependence, we might also find Dickens commenting upon the fragility of ability. For as the sexton with his fixation on the birth, marriage, and death books housed in his church says, "[W]hat makes these books interesting to most people is—not who's in ’em, but who isn't—who's coming, you know, and when. That's the interesting question" (194). In these lines, Dickens's readers—fellow travellers on the road of life—are called to acknowledge their place on the continuum of ability. Although Dickens uses disability as trope in a problematic manner, his depiction of Mrs. Clennam and her sickroom challenges the consideration of ability and disability as discrete categories, thus showing his attitudes toward disability to be more complex than might be initially presumed. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Nineteenth-century physiognomy encouraged the belief in a direct relationship between someone's facial features and his or her character. For more on this subject, see Sharrona Pearl's About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), Lennard Davis writes of this continuum of ability as follows: "Able-bodied (or temporarily able-bodied) people safely wall off the severely disabled so that they cannot be seen as part of a continuum of physical differences" (7). In other words, disability is not a fixed category; there is no "them" and "us," "able" and "disabled," as if disability were a binary term. Rather, it is a fluid identity, one that we might have at various points in life or through its entirety. According to Davis, the temporarily able-bodied, not wanting to face the fact that they, too, will be disabled one day, construct barriers—linguistic, ideological, and otherwise—to protect themselves from having to acknowledge this reality. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. London: Penguin, 2003. 63–64. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Relation A related resource <ul><li> Barrett, Edwin B. "Little Dorrit and the Disease of Modern Life." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25.2 (1970): 199–215. </li> <li> Janechek, Jennifer. "Dombey and Son." Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts. <http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/37> </li> <li> Rodas, Julia. "Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability." Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004): 51–97. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Little Dorrit Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charles Dickens Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Material Culture Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c392364e16b17477096cb4d98a9d801e.pdf b3e3db832ed2c6354884a83d63aa0076 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Illustration of The Heir of Redclyffe by Kate Greenaway. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890, page 89. Image courtesy Clare Walker Gore. Description An account of the resource This black and white illustration shows Amy and Laura flanking Guy, wearing the fashions of the late nineteenth-century (tight skirts with a bustle on the women and a bowler hat on the man) rather than those of the mid-century when the novel was published. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “ ‘You don’t know what a bore it is to lose the one bit of quicksilver in the house!’ said he, yawning. ‘I shall only drag out my existence here till you come back.’ ‘You, Charles, the maker of fun!’ said Guy, amazed. ‘It is a case of flint and steel,’ said Charles; ‘but be it owing to who it will, we have been alive since you came here. You have taken care to be remembered . We have been studying you, or laughing at you, or wondering what absurdity was to come next.’ ‘I am very sorry—that is, if you are serious. I hoped at least I appeared like other people.’ ‘I’ll tell you what you appear like. Just what I would be if I was a free man.’ ‘Never say that, Charlie.’ ‘Nay, wait a bit. I would never be so foolish. I would not let the best hunter in the country go when I had wherewithal to pay for him.’ ‘You would not have such an ill-conditioned self to keep in rule.’ ‘After all,’ continued Charles, yawning, ‘it is no great compliment to say I am sorry you are going. If you were an Ethiopian serenader, you would be a loss to me. It is something to see anything beyond this old drawing-room, and the same faces doing the same things every day. Laura poking over her drawing, and meditating upon the last entry in Philip's memorandum-book, and Amy at her flowers or some nonsense or other, and Charlotte and the elders all the same, and a lot of stupid people dropping in and a lot of stupid books to read, all just alike. I can tell what they are like without looking in!’ Charles yawned again, sighed, and moved wearily. ‘Now, there came some life and freshness with you. You talk of Redclyffe, and your brute creation there, not like a book, and still less like a commonplace man; you are innocent and unsophisticated, and take new points of view; you are something to interest oneself about; your coming in is something to look forward to; you make the singing not such mere milk-and-water, your reading the Praelectiones is an additional landmark to time; besides the mutton of to-day succeeding the beef of yesterday. Heigh-ho! I'll tell you what, Guy. Though I may carry it off with a high hand, ‘tis no joke to be a helpless log all the best years of a man's life,—nay, for my whole life,—for at the very best of the contingencies the doctors are always flattering me with, I should make but a wretched crippling affair of it. And if that is the best hope they give me, you may guess it is likely to be a pretty deal worse. Hope? I've been hoping these ten years, and much good has it done me. I say, Guy,’ he proceeded, in a tone of extreme bitterness, though with a sort of smile, ‘the only wonder is that I don't hate the very sight of you! There are times when I feel as if I could bite some men,—that Tomfool Maurice de Courcy, for instance, when I hear him rattling on, and think—’ ‘I know I have often talked thoughtlessly, I have feared afterwards I might have given you pain.’ ‘No, no, you never have; you have carried me along with you. I like nothing better than to hear of your ridings, and shootings, and boatings. It is a sort of life.’ Charles had never till now alluded seriously to his infirmity before Guy, and the changing countenance of his auditor showed him to be much affected, as he stood leaning over the end of the sofa, with his speaking eyes earnestly fixed on Charles, who went on: ‘And now you are going to Oxford. You will take your place among the men of your day. You will hear and be heard of. You will be somebody. And I! – I know I have what they call talent – I could be something. They think me an idle dog; but what’s the good of doing anything? I only know if I was not – not condemned to – to this – this life,’ (had it not been for a sort of involuntary respect to the gentle compassion of the softened hazel eyes regarding him so kindly, he would have used the violent expletive that trembled on his lip;) ‘if I was not chained down here, Master Philip should not stand alone as the paragon of the family. I’ve as much mother wit as he.’ ‘That you have,’ said Guy. ‘How fast you see the sense of a passage. You could excel very much if you only tried.’ ‘Tried? And what am I to gain by it?’ ‘I don’t know that one ought to let talents rust,’ said Guy, thoughtfully; ‘I suppose it is one’s duty not, and surely it is a pity to give up those readings.’” Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) was Charlotte M. Yonge’s first bestseller, establishing her reputation as an enjoyable as well as an improving novelist; as one critic wrote nearly twenty years later, “Anything written by the author of ‘The Heir of Redclyffe’ is sure not only to find a good number of readers, but to provide them with good pabulum.”<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Its hero, Guy Morville, is not only a morally serious and deeply Christian young man, but also the heir to a gothic castle, a fierce temper, and an ancient feud with the other branch of the Morville family, represented by his irritatingly priggish cousin Philip. The two are brought together when Guy comes to stay with his Edmonstone cousins (with whom Philip also lives), and although Guy makes every effort at conciliation, Philip’s unacknowledged jealousy causes a rift between them. Despite Philip’s efforts to thwart their romance, Guy marries the younger Edmonstone sister, Amy – his dealings with her family highlighting Philip’s unworthy action in becoming secretly engaged to the older Edmonstone sister, Laura – but on their honeymoon in Europe, sacrifices his life by nursing Philip through a near-fatal fever. The family feud is finally settled upon Guy’s death, as Philip retrospectively recognises his true worth, and the Christian allegory of Guy’s life and death is brought out in the novel’s famously tear-jerking conclusion. Although this summary of the novel’s main action suggests that disability does not play much part in the narrative, in fact, Amy and Laura’s disabled brother, Charles, is very much at the forefront of the novel. Although he is confined to his couch as a result of his tubercular hip, he offers an amusing and insightful commentary on all the action of the novel, acting as Guy and Amy’s confidant, seeing through Philip’s pretensions to moral superiority, and modelling for the reader, through his own reaction to Guy, what we might have to gain from reading the novel. Yonge was to become famous for her saintly invalids – typified by Margaret May in The Daisy Chain – but Charles is anything but a saintly character. In contrast to Guy, he is frequently selfish, spiteful, sarcastic and impatient, but he is also capable of great loyalty, kindness and stoicism. As a sympathetic and believable character, Charles is perhaps the Edmonstone with whom the reader is most likely to identify, and Yonge offers a sensitive and realistic portrayal of his struggle to come to terms with physical impairment. Although, as in the passage below, Charles is shown to resent his physical suffering and immobility, he is shown to be a valuable member of the Edmonstone family, better able to advise his mother and sister than his impetuous and easily-led father, and he is finally shown as Amy’s closest companion in her widowhood, promising to help her bring up her daughter. Moreover, his own relationship with Guy is dealt upon at such length that it comes to seem almost as important as the marriage plot from which he is excluded. <h3>Note</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> ‘Review of The Caged Lion’, John Bull, 1870, 413–14.</div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Heir of Redclyffe. (1853) London: Macmillan, 1888. Pages 70-71. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen, ‘ “The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple”: Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge’s “The Heir of Redclyffe”’, Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 117-131. </li> <li> Budge, Gavin. "Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe." Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 193-223. </li> <li> Wells-Cole, Catherine, "Angry Young Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge." In Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture. Ed. Andrew Bradstock. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. </li> <li> Walker Gore, Clare. "'Setting Novels at Defiance': Novel Reading and Novelistic Form in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 10.1 (2014) </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource The Heir of Redclyffe Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource "Guy was pacing the terrace with Laura and Amabel." Illustration of The Heir of Redclyffe by Kate Greenaway. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890, page 89. Image courtesy Clare Walker Gore. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charlotte Yonge Charlotte Yonge Invalidism Masculinity Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/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. 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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/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/1c33dec5afde0bfded4d301aa14f9da6.jpg 9c21d51da135b927e72745214f67e70b 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 453 Height 536 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 John McL. Ralston’s illustration shows Dolor testing out his flying cloak inside the tower, with his hands to his ears. 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. He hesitated, not wishing to be impolite. “Don’t you think it’s—just a little old and shabby for a prince?” The old woman laughed—long and loud, though very sweetly. “Prince, indeed! Why, if all the princes in the world craved for it, they couldn’t get it, unless I gave it them. Old and shabby! It’s the most valuable thing imaginable! Very few ever have it; but I thought I would give it to you, because—because you are different from other people.” “Am I?” said the Prince, and looked first with curiosity, then with a sort of anxiety, into his godmother’s face, which was sad and grave, with slow tears beginning to steal down. She touched his poor little legs. “These are not like those of other little boys.” “Indeed!—my nurse never told me that.” “Very likely not. But it is time you were told; and I tell you, because I love you.” “Tell me what, dear godmother?” “That you will never be able to walk or run or jump or play—that your life will be quite different from most people’s lives: but it may be a very happy life for all that. Do not be afraid.” “I am not afraid,” said the boy; but he turned very pale, and his lips began to quiver, though he did not actually cry—he was too old for that, and, perhaps, too proud. Though not wholly comprehending, he began dimly to guess what his godmother meant. He had never seen any real live boys, but he had seen pictures of them; running and jumping; which he had admired and tried hard to imitate, but always failed. Now he began to understand why he failed, and that he always should fail— that, in fact, he was not like other little boys; and it was of no use his wishing to do as they did, and play as they played, even if he had had them to play with. His was a separate life, in which he must find out new work and new pleasures for himself. The sense of the inevitable, as grown‐up people call it—that we cannot have things as we want them to be, but as they are, and that we must learn to bear them and make the best of them—this lesson, which everybody has to learn soon or late—came, alas! sadly soon, to the poor boy. He fought against it for a while, and then, quite overcome, turned and sobbed bitterly in his godmother’s arms. She comforted him—I do not know how, except that love always comforts; and then she whispered to him, in her sweet, strong, cheerful voice— “Never mind!” “No, I don’t think I do mind—that is, I won’t mind,” replied he, catching the courage of her tone and speaking like a man, though he was still such a mere boy. 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 Little Lame Prince Description An account of the resource Dinah Mulock Craik’s Victorian fairytale The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak (1874) tells the story of Prince Dolor, whose legs are disabled after a nurse drops him at his christening. Following the death of his father, the king of Nomansland, the infant Prince Dolor is secretly banished to a distant tower by his wicked uncle. Dolor grows up in the tower, unaware of his position as the true king of Nomansland and, as the excerpt below suggests, equally unaware of his identity as a person with disability until his fairy godmother, Stuff-and-nonsense, provides him with a magical travelling cloak that allows him to leave the castle. The adventures Dolor has on the cloak teach him lessons that make him a better ruler when he is eventually reinstated as Nomansland’s king. In the excerpt below, Stuff-and-nonsense gives Dolor his magical travelling cloak, explaining that she does so because he cannot walk. Craik wrote prolifically about the <a title="Craik Olive" href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/5">lives of people with disabilities</a>, and explored in her fiction the consequences of being deemed physically different in a world that privileges “normalcy.” Significantly, Craik’s portrayal of disability reveals that the Victorian perception of disability was complex and, at times, self-contradictory. The following excerpt paints disability as immutably and pitiably “different,” producing for the fairytale’s audience a sentimental lesson on accepting one’s circumstances; however, at the same time, the scene demonstrates that the primary problems of disability are social, not physical. What makes Dolor weep is his social isolation, not his physical difference. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Craik, Dinah Mulock Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dinah Mulock Craik, The Little Lame Prince and His Travelling Cloak: A Parable for Young and Old. Illus. John McL. Ralston. London: Daldy, Ibitser & Co., 1875. Pages 59-61. Available <a title="Little Lame Prince" href="http://webapp1.dlib.indiana.edu/vwwp/view?docId=VAB7135" target="_blank">online</a> at the Indiana Women Writer's Project. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1874 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource John McL. Ralston’s illustration shows Dolor testing out his flying cloak inside the tower, with his hands to his ears. The Little Lame Prince (London: Daldy, Isbister & Co., 1875), Microform, Archival Survival, Inc. (1990): film 7314.1 Relation A related resource <ul><li>Dowker, Ann. “The Treatment of Disability in 19th and Early 20th Century Children's Literature,” Disability Studies Quarterly 24.1 (2004). Available <a title="Little Lame Prince Article" href="http://www.dsq-sds.org" target="_blank">online</a>.</li> <li>Hingston, Kylee-Anne. "Prostheses and Narrative Perspective in Dinah Mulock Craik's The Little Lame Prince." Women's Writing. Forthcoming in 2013.</li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, The Corporealities Series (Ann Arbour: U of Michigan P, 2004) 48. </li> <li>Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Available <a title="Sally Mitchell Dinah Craik" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html" target="_blank">online</a> on the Victorian Web.</li> </ul> Childhood Children's Literature Dinah Mulock Craik Fairy Tale Literature Prosthesis https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/3682d8c699e444ae4b5f5e8261af025a.gif d5a1aa8b3e55908850d3253e007aba83 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 312 Height 429 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 Phineas on crutches in the foreground with Jael, looking towards John Halifax, who is walking toward him carrying a hobo's bindle à la Dick Whittington. The caption reads: “I smiled, for I, at least, had no difficulty in recognizing John Halifax.” 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 lifted myself, and began looking for my crutches. John found them and put them into my hand, with a grave, pitiful look. “You don’t need those sort of things,” I said, making pretense to laugh, for I had not grown used to them and felt often ashamed. “I hope you will not need them always.” “Perhaps not—Doctor Jessup isn’t sure. But it doesn’t matter much; most likely I shan’t live long.” For this was, God forgive me, always the last and greatest comfort I had. John looked at me—surprised, troubled, compassionate—but he did not say a word. I hobbled past him; he following through the long passage to the garden door. There I paused—tired out. John Halifax took gentle hold of my shoulder. “I think, if you did not mind, I’m sure I could carry you. I carried a meal sack once, weighing eight stone.” I burst out laughing, which may be was what he wanted, and forthwith consented to assume the place of the meal sack. He took me on his back—what a strong fellow he was!—and fairly trotted with me down the garden walk. We were both very merry, and though I was his senior, I seemed with him, out of my great weakness and infirmity, to feel almost like a child. 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 John Halifax, Gentleman Description An account of the resource Dinah Mulock Craik’s (1826-1887) novel John Halifax, Gentleman (1856) follows John Halifax’s journey from an impoverished orphan boy to self-made tradesman hero. As their friendship unfolds, Phineas Fletcher, the novel’s disabled first-person narrator, relates John’s narrative of heroic strength, and the invalid’s physical immobility and pre-bachelor dandy femininity forms a stark contrast to the masculine strength of John Halifax. Scenes depicting Phineas’s admiration of John’s able body and John’s tenderness as he carries his feeble friend in strong arms emit a homoerotic charge that was apparent even to Craik’s contemporary readers. Victorian critic R.H. Hutton remarked, “it is hard to suppress the fear that Phineas Fletcher will fall hopelessly in love with John Halifax, so hard is it to remember that Phineas is of the male sex” (258). Modern critics continue to remark on Phineas’s femininity its possible impact in making the novel popular with an audience of middle-class women readers. For instance, Kiran Mascarenhas interprets Phineas as a stand-in for the female novel reader, observing that his “repression and circumscription makes him a character that they identify with, and along with whom they could look—with some longing—at John, the epitome of ideal masculinity” (257). Craik wrote extensively about the lives of disabled men and women in Victorian society, with many of her novels, such as Olive (1850), A Noble Life (1866), and The Little Lame Prince (1875) offering complex and often contradictory representations of the experiences of disabled protagonists. Phineas is no exception, and scholars continue to debate about whether Phineas provides a positive glimpse into the pleasures of bachelor invalid domesticity or serves as a helpless, negative foil to John’s middle class determination. In either case, the relationship between Phineas and John underscores the importance of caring for one another; John’s tenderness with Phineas proves as important to his development as gentleman as his devotion to labor. In the following excerpt, John has just met Phineas for the first time after Phineas’s father, Abel Fletcher, trusts Phineas to the strong young man’s care. John’s body willingness to carry not only a heavy meal sack, but also its human equivalent—a weary Phineas— underscores his value as both a hearty, masculine laborer and a gentle caretaker. 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. John Halifax, Gentleman. 1856. Ed. Lynn M. Alexander. Peterborough, ON: Broadview Press, 2005. Page 43. 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 Melina Moore Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The illustration shows Phineas on crutches in the foreground with Jael, looking towards John Halifax, who is walking toward him carrying a hobo's bindle à la Dick Whittington. The caption reads: “I smiled, for I, at least, had no difficulty in recognizing John Halifax.” John Halifax, Gentlemen (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, Publishers, 1897). Relation A related resource <ul><li>R.H. Hutton, “Novels by the Authoress of ‘John Halifax.’” North British Review 29 (1858)</li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, The Corporealities Series (Ann Arbour: U of Michigan P, 2004). </li> <li>Mascarenhas, Kiran. “John Halifax: A Counter Story,” Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Woman Writers (Amherst, NY: Cambria Press, 2009) 255-269.</li> <li>Mitchell, Sally. Dinah Mulock Craik. 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> <li>Sussman, Herbert. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge University Press, [1995] 2008.</li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Class Dinah Mulock Craik Gender Literature Mobility Novel 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/6844a26923c493325651cc5c81092d36.jpg e32a14f3a8b9b5826c42f05c889eab5d 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 482 Height 642 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 Silas Wegg stands on his peg leg, holding a candle to examine a skeletal leg that Mr. Venus, seated, holds up for inspection. “Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus in Consultation” by Sol Eytinge. Wood engraving, 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. Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg's was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-ache to look at his nuts.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Whether from too much east wind or no—it was an easterly corner--the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks occurred in it, and the rattle sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected—if his development received no untimely check—to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months. . . . [Mr. Boffin approaches Wegg’s stall and opens conversation with him.] “Noddy Boffin,” said that gentleman. “Noddy. That's my name. Noddy—or Nick—Boffin. What's your name?” “Silas Wegg.—I don't,” said Mr Wegg, bestirring himself to take the same precaution as before, “I don't know why Silas, and I don't know why Wegg.”<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> “Now, Wegg,” said Mr Boffin, hugging his stick closer, “I want to make a sort of offer to you. Do you remember when you first see me?” The wooden Wegg looked at him with a meditative eye, and also with a softened air as descrying possibility of profit.<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> 'Let me think. I ain't quite sure, and yet I generally take a powerful sight of notice, too. Was it on a Monday morning, when the butcher-boy had been to our house for orders, and bought a ballad of me, which, being unacquainted with the tune, I run it over to him?' “Right, Wegg, right! But he bought more than one.” . . . [Boffin admits to eavesdropping on Wegg’s ballad singing to the butcher.] “I'm coming to it! All right. I'm coming to it! I was going to say that when I listened that morning, I listened with hadmiration amounting to haw. I thought to myself, ‘Here's a man with a wooden leg—a literary man with—’” “N—not exactly so, sir,” said Mr Wegg. “Why, you know every one of these songs by name and by tune, and if you want to read or to sing any one on 'em off straight, you've only to whip on your spectacles and do it!” cried Mr Boffin. “I see you at it!” “Well, sir,” returned Mr Wegg, with a conscious inclination of the head; “we'll say literary, then.” “‘A literary man—WITH a wooden leg—and all Print is open to him!’ That's what I thought to myself, that morning,” pursued Mr Boffin, leaning forward to describe, uncramped by the clotheshorse, as large an arc as his right arm could make; “‘all Print is open to him!’ And it is, ain't it?” “Why, truly, sir,” Mr Wegg admitted, with modesty; “I believe you couldn't show me the piece of English print, that I wouldn't be equal to collaring and throwing.”<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> While even Wegg’s fruit displays characteristics akin to a wooden leg, this passage could also be read in context with genuine contemporary concerns regarding the adulteration of food. See Anthony S. Wohl’s “<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/science/health/health1.html">Adulteration and Contamination of Food in Victorian England</a>” on The Victorian Web. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Wegg’s measurements are also woodenly rigid, and are even administered by a wooden measuring device. A “penn’orth” is a penny’s worth. For more on Victorian currency, see Marje Bloy’s “<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/currency.html">British Currency before 1971</a>” on The Victorian Web. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> While Wegg is seemingly unaware of his name’s origin, to the reader it is really quite obvious: Wegg is an elision of “wooden” and “leg”. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> The crippled beggar was a common trope in Victorian literary and non-fiction texts. Here, Wegg sneakily alters his tone as soon as the possibility of accruing profit arises thus associating him with the often-deployed motif. As Martha Stoddard Holmes identifies, whereas “The victimized afflicted child is a figure of pure intensity and authentic pathos; the villainous begging impostor, in contrast, evokes the emotional clarity of rage, but also ambivalence of suspicion, or the conviction that pathos or ‘emotional excess’ is fakery, a coin that disabled people use to trick the nondisabled into inappropriate giving” (Fictions of Affliction 8). While Wegg does not explicitly use his afflicted state to evoke sympathy, his money-grabbing mannerisms and deceptive strategies associate him firmly with nineteenth-century cripple stereotypes. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[5]</a> As we learn later in the novel (to comical effect), Wegg really is no literary man at all. While orating to Boffin, he stumbles over sentences, mispronounces a number of words and surreptitiously avoids answering any questions. His lumbering, clumsy reading style could perhaps be described as . . . wooden! </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 Our Mutual Friend Description An account of the resource <a href="http://archive.org/stream/ourmutualfriend00883gut/old/mfrnd10.txt">Our Mutual Friend</a>, first published in serial form from 1864–1865, is a novel that literalises George Henry Lewes’s observation that Charles Dickens’s characters are wooden puppets that are brought to life by incident (“Realism and the Art of the Novel” 98): the author uses Silas Wegg, a man who is both a peg leg user and depicted as wooden in appearance, character and action, to explore the greed-provoking influence of material culture. While it is not entirely surprising that Dickens presents Wegg as villainous, since he is physically marked as different by his disability, as Adrienne E. Gavin has suggested, the inclusion of a peg leg corresponds with an apparent obsession that the author had with lower limb prosthesis. In addition to Our Mutual Friend, wooden legs also appear in <a href="http://archive.org/stream/thepickwickpaper00580gut/580.txt">The Pickwick Papers</a>(1838), <a href="http://archive.org/stream/theoldcuriositys00700gut/700.txt">The Old Curiosity Shop</a> (1840–41), <a href="http://archive.org/stream/barnabyrudgeatal00917gut/old/rudge10.txt">Barnaby Rudge</a>(1841), <a href="http://archive.org/stream/martinchuzzlewit00968gut/old/chuzz10.txt">Martin Chuzzlewit</a> (1843–44) and <a href="http://archive.org/stream/davidcopperfield00766gut/766.txt">David Copperfield</a> (1849–50). A number of prosthesis wielding characters also appear in Household Words, a weekly magazine established and edited by the author, which ran from 27 March 1850 to 28 May 1859. These include the wooden-legged Dust scavenger Peg Dotting from “Dust; Or Ugliness Redeemed” (13 July 1850), the wooden-legged man described in an article published on New Year’s Day in 1859 (“New Year’s Day”) and the respectable amputee milliner’s daughter Mary Wigley from Sarah Smith’s short story “The Lucky Leg” (19 March 1859) to mention but a few. What each of these examples demonstrates is not only that Dickens was familiar with cultural and fictional representations of lower-limb amputees but that he was in fact preoccupied with issues relating to prosthesis use. Wegg’s use of a rudimentary peg leg can be read as symptomatic of his class status early on in the novel. Peg legs were in fact the cheapest and most basic devices available to amputees. Having been in circulation for several centuries, these devices consisted, in the commonest instances, of a hollow wooden bucket or cup (into which the stump would fit) fixed to a wooden peg that would reach the ground (in the place of a foot). For slightly more money, other adaptations could also be made to better fit the amputee’s stump: a leather sheath could be attached for improved comfort or a knee joint could be incorporated so that the peg could be bent whilst sitting-down. Despite these possible modifications, however, the peg leg was considered to be a low-end product. Since these devices were most commonly used by the working class and street beggars, they therefore became synonymous with low status and small income. Wegg’s occupation at the novel’s outset, then, as the owner of a street stall that sells ballads, fruit and other miscellanies, is intimately tied to his prosthesis use: as we learn, he is unable to secure regular employment with a nearby house, probably because of the limited physical capacities that were associated with limb-loss and prosthesis use. Like many disabled characters and prosthesis users depicted in nineteenth-century literature, Wegg is associated with a number of negative traits. What is particularly interesting in this instance though, and which can be considered a trope of Dickens’s fiction more widely, is the peculiar linkage between personal object and character that is displayed by Wegg. Specifically, in this instance, the peg leg user is portrayed as wooden (just like his leg) in nearly every respect imaginable. Examples elsewhere in Dickens’s oeuvre of characters that display characteristics that reflect the material properties of a particular object with which they are intimately associated, include Miss Murdstone from David Copperfield, who carries around a “hard steel purse”; as David recalls, “I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was” (Chapter 3). In a similar way to how prosthesis-wearing characters depicted elsewhere were said to reflect, in character, the material properties of their devices—for instance in the case of Miss Ruff in Anthony Trollope’s <a href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/16">The Bertrams</a>, who is as cold, hard and fixed in her mannerisms as her glass eye is in material—here Wegg’s prosthesis reflects him as much as he does it. Unlike “the Oaken Lady” of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “<a href="http://archive.org/stream/drheideggersexp00hawtgoog#page/n20/mode/2up">Drowne’s Wooden Image</a>” (1844)—a wooden figure head for a boat that is so mesmerisingly mimetic an effigy that “she” is thought to have come to life when “her” original comes to town—, the aesthetic effect of Wegg’s wooden artificial part is not only blatant, but all-consuming; as we will see in the following passage, in appearance he is more wooden than the oak figure skilfully carved by the craftsman Drowne in Hawthorne’s tale. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. 1864–65. London: Everyman, 2000. Pages 48–52. Also available <a href="http://archive.org/stream/ourmutualfriend00883gut/old/mfrnd10.txt">online</a> at archive.org. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1865 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ryan Sweet Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Silas Wegg stands on his peg leg, holding a candle to examine a skeletal leg that Mr. Venus, seated, holds up for inspection. “Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus in Consultation” by Sol Eytinge. Wood engraving, 7.5 cm wide by 10.1 cm high. Illustration for Chapter 7 of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Lee & Shepard (Boston), and Charles T. Dillingham (New York) 1870 Illustrated Household Edition. Image scanned by <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/misc/pvabio.html">Philip V. Allingham</a>. Courtesy of <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org">The Victorian Web</a>. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Gavin, Adrienne E. “<a href="http://omf.ucsc.edu/london-1865/victorian-city/wooden-legs.html">Dickens, Wegg, and Wooden Legs</a>”. Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages. Dickens Project. Santa Cruz: n.p., 1998. n. pag. Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages. Web. 18 Dec. 2012.</li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> <li>Lewes, George Henry. “Realism and the Art of the Novel”. Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes. ed. Alice R. Kaminsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. 94–105.</li> <li>Morgentaler, Goldie. “Dickens and the Scattered Identity of Silas Wegg.” Dickens Quarterly 22.2 (2005): 92–101.</li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Class Literature Mobility Novel Prosthesis Technology