3 10 61 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/adb7766fb62f3e216feda263b4b1128a.jpg e3af372ce930d02ae2777afeb0ae96e9 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 846 Height 1062 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 Want and Ignorance, a boy and a girl, standing in front of the Ghost of Christmas Present with Scrooge facing the triad in his nightcap. illustration by John Leech. 1843 Chapman and Hall edition of A Christmas Carol. 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. “What has ever got your precious father then?” said Mrs. Cratchit. “And your brother, Tiny Tim! And Martha warn’t as late last Christmas Day by half-an-hour?” “Here’s Martha, mother!” said a girl, appearing as she spoke. “Here’s Martha, mother!” cried the two young Cratchits. “Hurrah! There’s such a goose, Martha!” “Why, bless your heart alive, my dear, how late you are!” said Mrs. Cratchit, kissing her a dozen times, and taking off her shawl and bonnet for her with officious zeal. “We’d a deal of work to finish up last night,” replied the girl, “and had to clear away this morning, mother!” “Well! Never mind so long as you are come,” said Mrs. Cratchit. “Sit ye down before the fire, my dear, and have a warm, Lord bless ye!” “No, no! There’s father coming,” cried the two young Cratchits, who were everywhere at once. “Hide, Martha, hide!” So Martha hid herself, and in came little Bob, the father, with at least three feet of comforter exclusive of the fringe, hanging down before him; and his threadbare clothes darned up and brushed, to look seasonable; and Tiny Tim upon his shoulder. Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame! “Why, where’s our Martha?” cried Bob Cratchit, looking round. “Not coming,” said Mrs. Cratchit. “Not coming!” said Bob, with a sudden declension in his high spirits; for he had been Tim’s blood horse all the way from church, and had come home rampant. “Not coming upon Christmas Day!” Martha didn’t like to see him disappointed, if it were only in joke; so she came out prematurely from behind the closet door, and ran into his arms, while the two young Cratchits hustled Tiny Tim, and bore him off into the wash-house, that he might hear the pudding singing in the copper. “And how did little Tim behave?” asked Mrs. Cratchit, when she had rallied Bob on his credulity, and Bob had hugged his daughter to his heart’s content. “As good as gold,” said Bob, “and better. Somehow he gets thoughtful, sitting by himself so much, and thinks the strangest things you ever heard. He told me, coming home, that he hoped the people saw him in the church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas Day, who made lame beggars walk, and blind men see.” Bob’s voice was tremulous when he told them this, and trembled more when he said that Tiny Tim was growing strong and hearty. His active little crutch was heard upon the floor, and back came Tiny Tim before another word was spoken, escorted by his brother and sister to his stool before the fire; and while Bob, turning up his cuffs—as if, poor fellow, they were capable of being made more shabby—compounded some hot mixture in a jug with gin and lemons, and stirred it round and round and put it on the hob<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> to simmer; Master Peter, and the two ubiquitous young Cratchits went to fetch the goose, with which they soon returned in high procession. (89-92) <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> A metal shelf inside a hearth. </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 A Christmas Carol Description An account of the resource One of the most recognizable characters in Victorian fiction, “Tiny Tim” Cratchit reappears each Christmas in radioplays, television, stage, and film. Through these cultural reproductions, Tim has come to represent yuletide charity and the reductive idea that “the plight of the disabled can always be alleviated by philanthropy” (Fiedler 68)<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. However, as the short selection of the story below shows, the text of A Christmas Carol itself gives a more complicated depiction of disability than this. On one hand, the melodramatic tone—“Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch, and had his limbs supported by an iron frame!”— implies that Tim’s physical state inspires pity alone. Moreover, by way of synecdoche Tim’s identity is reduced to his non-normative body: his diminutive size and his crutch stand in for his name (Norden 190-91). In fact, Tim sees himself as a reminder of Christ’s healings, that is, of erasures of disability; that his father, Bob, reports this rather than Tim further obscures Tim’s autonomy. On the other hand, the passage also shows Tim as an active member of his community and family, taking full part in their religious and festive traditions. The narrator here not only depicts Tim’s body as bearing physical limitations, but also as using adapted and energetic mobility, as seen in his “active little crutch” (Rodas 67). <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Fiedler suggests that respect and empowerment do much more than charity and pity for people with disabilities. </div> </div> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. A Christmas Carol. London: Chapman and Hall, 1843. Available online at <a href="http://www.archive.org/stream/1843christmascar00dickuoft#page/n7/mode/2up">http://www.archive.org/stream/1843christmascar00dickuoft#page/n7/mode/2up</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1843 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The illustration shows Want and Ignorance, a boy and a girl, standing in front of the Ghost of Christmas Present with Scrooge facing the triad in his nightcap. illustration by John Leech. 1843 Chapman and Hall edition of A Christmas Carol. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Fiedler, Leslie A. “Pity and Fear: Images of the Disabled In Literature and the Popular Arts.” Salmagundi 57 (Summer 1982): 57-69. </li> <li> Norden, Martin F. “Tiny Tim on Screen: a Disability Studies Perspective.” Dickens On Screen. Ed. John Glavin. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. </li> <li> Rodas, Julia Miele. “Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability.” Dickens Studies Annual 34 (Summer 2004): 51-97. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Class Invalidism Literature Mobility Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4cd50619512b935cd2e56ad46ac87159.jpg 0a6119d4f0f4af87e16fcfa70628613b Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “Yes, commander, I took the business [of being a tinker]. Such as it was. It wasn’t much of a beat—round Saffron Hill, Hatton Garden, Clerkenwell, Smiffeld, and there—poor neighbourhood, where they uses up the kettles till they’re past mending. Most of the tramping tinkers used to come and lodge at our place; that was the best part of my master’s earnings. But they didn’t come to me. I warn’t like [my master]. He could sing ’em a good song. I couldn’t! He could play ’em a tune on any sort of pot you please, so as it was iron or block tin. I never could do nothing with a pot but mend it or bile it—never had a note of music in me. Besides, I was too ill-looking, and their wives complained of me.” “They were mighty particular. You would pass muster in a crowd, Phil!” says the trooper with a pleasant smile. “No, guv’ner,” returns Phil, shaking his head. “No, I shouldn’t. I was passable enough when I went with the tinker, though nothing to boast of then; but what with blowing the fire with my mouth when I was young, and spileing my complexion, and singeing my hair off, and swallering the smoke; and what with being nat’rally unfort’nate in the way of running against hot metal, and marking myself by sich means; and what with having turn-ups with the tinker as I got older, almost whenever he was too far gone in drink—which was almost always—my beauty was queer, wery queer, even at that time. As to since; what with a dozen years in a dark forge, where the men was given to larking; and what with being scorched in a accident at a gas-works; and what with being blowed out of winder, case-filling at the firework business; I am ugly enough to be made a show on!” Resigning himself to which condition with a perfectly satisfied manner, Phil begs the favour of another cup of coffee. While drinking it, he says, “It was after the case-filling blow-up when I first see you, commander. You remember?” “I remember, Phil. You were walking along in the sun.” “Crawling, guv'ner, again a wall—” “True, Phil—shouldering your way on—” “In a night-cap!” exclaims Phil, excited. “In a night-cap—” “And hobbling with a couple of sticks!” cries Phil, still more excited. “With a couple of sticks. When—” “When you stops, you know,” cries Phil, putting down his cup and saucer, and hastily removing his plate from his knees, “and says to me, ‘What, comrade! You have been in the wars!’ I didn’t say much to you, commander, then, for I was took by surprise that a person so strong and healthy and bold as you was, should stop to speak to such a limping bag of bones as I was. But you says to me, says you, delivering it out of your chest as hearty as possible, so that it was like a glass of something hot, ‘What accident have you met with? You have been badly hurt. What’s amiss, old boy? Cheer up, and tell us about it!’ Cheer up! I was cheered already! I says as much to you, you says more to me, I says more to you, you says more to me, and here I am, commander! Here I am, commander!” cries Phil, who has started from his chair and unaccountably begun to sidle away. “If a mark’s wanted, or if it will improve the business, let the customers take aim at me. They can’t spoil my beauty. I’m all right. Come on! If they want a man to box at, let ’em box at me. Let ’em knock me well about the head. I don’t mind. If they want a light-weight to be throwed for practice, Cornwall, Devonshire, or Lancashire,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> let ’em throw me. They won’t hurt me. I have been throwed, all sorts of styles, all my life!” With this unexpected speech, energetically delivered, and accompanied by action illustrative of the various exercises referred to, Phil Squod shoulders his way round three sides of the gallery, and abruptly tacking off at his commander, makes a butt at him with his head, intended to express devotion to his service. He then begins to clear away the breakfast. <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> These refer to “codes of rules for wrestling,” differing in from county to county (961). </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource While many of Charles Dickens’s novels and nonfiction works depicted people with disabilities, his novel Bleak House, published serially over 1852-1853 and in volume form in 1853, is veritably full of characters with bodies and minds deemed disabled due to deafness, illness, epilepsy, senility, invalidism, asthma, gout, paralysis, injuries, and disfigurations. Interestingly, Dickens’s treatment of disability in the novel is neither wholly realistic nor wholly caricaturized: at times the novel reduces disabilities to symbols of a broken social system—as is the case with Grandfather Smallweed’s deafness and paralysis and his wife’s senility—while at others it exposes how the social environment of the person with disability produces the meaning of disability—as is often the case with Phil Squod and Esther Summerson’s respective disfigurements. The selection below depicts one of the latter instances. In it, Phil Squod, who requires the support of the wall for getting around the room, describes the various injuries and events that gave him his many scars and mobility impairment. While the scarring and altered mobility originate in his working-class occupations, which might suggest symbolism of the exploitation of the working class, Phil’s description of his experience emphasizes the social interpretations of, and prejudices against, his disability, as well as his own delights in the abilities and appearance of his supposedly deficient body. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Bleak House. Ed. Norman Page. London: Penguin, 1971. 422-23. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Relation A related resource <ul><li> Burgan, Mary. “Contagion and Culture: A View from Victorian Studies.” American Literary History. 14.4 (2002): 837-844. Web. </li> <li> Gurney, Michael S. “Disease as Device: The Role of Smallpox in Bleak House.” Literature and Medicine. 9 (1990): 79-92. Web. </li> <li> Michie, Helena. “‘Who is This in Pain?’: Scarring, Disfigurment, and Female Identity in Bleak House and Our Mutual Friend.” Novel 22.2 (1989): 199-213. Print. </li> <li> Montwieler, Katherine. “Reading, Sympathy, and the Bodies of Bleak House.” Dickens Studies Annual. 41 (2010): 237-263 Print. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The illustration shows Grandfather Smallweed being carried in to a gallery, where he is met by Trooper George and his friend Phil Squod. “Visitors to the Shooting Gallery” by Hablot K. Browne. From Bleak House. London: Bradbury and Evans, 1853. Title A name given to the resource Bleak House Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Literature Mobility Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/fb7ce80138920dad18666487654cbcc2.jpg 5af8776fd4134ba5d848c9cf861eabe0 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 449 Height 552 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Mrs. Skewton, seated in a three wheeled chair in a crowded street, is greeted by a gentleman who tips his hat to her. Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), “Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity”, from Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1847. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. Victorian Web. <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/104.html>. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. In this manner the Major and Mr Dombey were walking arm-in-arm, much to their own satisfaction,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> when they beheld advancing towards them, a wheeled chair, in which a lady was seated, indolently steering her carriage by a kind of rudder in front, while it was propelled by some unseen power in the rear. [ . . . ] ‘Why, what the devil have we here, Sir!’ cried the Major, stopping as this little cavalcade drew near. ‘My dearest Edith!’<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> drawled the lady in the chair, ‘Major Bagstock!’ The Major no sooner heard the voice, than he relinquished Mr Dombey’s arm, darted forward, took the hand of the lady in the chair and pressed it to his lips. With no less gallantry, the Major folded both his gloves upon his heart, and bowed low to the other lady. And now, the chair having stopped, the motive power became visible in the shape of a flushed page pushing behind, who seemed to have in part out-grown and in part out-pushed his strength, for when he stood upright he was tall, and wan, and thin, and his plight appeared the more forlorn from his having injured the shape of his hat, by butting at the carriage with his head to urge it forward, as is sometimes done by elephants in Oriental countries. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Mr. Dombey and Major Bagstock have just arrived in Leamington, a British resort town famous for its medicinal springs. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Edith Granger is Mrs. Skewton’s daughter. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Dombey and Son Description An account of the resource Charles Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1846–1848) attests to his career-long interest in chair-bound characters<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>—characters who, because of illness, injury, or egotism, are confined or confine themselves to a “wheeled chair” (alternately referred to as the “Bath wheeled chair” or the “Bath chair”). In this particular novel, Dickens provides two examples of Victorian chair users: Paul Dombey, who, when ill, travels by wheeled chair so that he can sit by the sea with his sister; and Mrs. Skewton, an elderly lady who travels in a wheeled chair to perpetuate an illusion of wealth and social status. The former he renders sympathetic, while the latter he depicts as a figure of falseness—a heap of makeup and clothes that almost melts into the chair with which she joins her body. This excerpt from Dombey and Son, in which Mrs. Skewton is first introduced to the reader, illustrates Dickens’s perhaps harsh treatment of Mrs. Skewton and invites readers to consider the reasoning behind certain prejudices against chair users. In his depiction of the relationship between Mrs. Skewton and her page, Withers, Dickens engages with past and contemporary criticism directed toward people who travel by chair. In the novel, Withers is reduced to a beast of burden, “butting at the carriage with his head” like an elephant (317). To further his point, Dickens later describes Withers as another animal: “toiling after the chair, uphill, like a slow battering-ram” (321). Dickens’s furious humor levels an attack on Mrs. Skewton for her treatment of Withers as though he were an animal, an object for her personal use. To better understand Dickens’s portrayal of Mrs. Skewton, a brief history of the wheeled chair’s evolution from the sedan chair is necessary. First used in London by the Duke of Buckingham in the early seventeenth century, the sedan chair was less a “chair,” per se, and more of an enclosed box with glass doors and a detachable roof that was carried through the streets of London by two or more porters (alternately called “chairmen”), with “link-boys,” or torch bearers, employed to light the way for nighttime journeys. Patronized primarily by the wealthier classes of society, the sedan chair received much negative attention from the public, in part because the sedan chairs often collided with and injured pedestrians and in part because the public viewed the technology as demeaning to the chairmen. As evidenced by nineteenth-century periodicals, the negative discourse surrounding the sedan chair continued well past its era of usage. For instance, one anonymous writer for Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts suggests that seventeenth-century Londoners “grumbl[ed] indignantly at the pride of the man [the Duke] who employed his fellow-creatures to do the service of beasts of burden” (91–92).<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> While the chairs were most often used by those for whom walking was a burden, their support by lower-class muscle caused the public to reject them wholesale as an unnecessary luxury. In the nineteenth century, the sedan chair became increasingly obsolete as it was replaced by the wheeled chair, which was initially introduced in Bath, Leamington, and other seaside health spas as a means to transport the ill to the mineral water baths. Contrary to their wheel-less predecessors, which were owned or hired by the “able-bodied” and “disabled” alike, Bath chairs were used almost entirely by those who could not walk easily. The demographic of chair users shifted in another way: whereas the sedan chairs were primarily employed by elite society, wheeled chairs, because cheaper to hire, were more accessible to middle class patrons. Despite these changes, the wheeled chair still attracted hostilities, particularly owing to its effect on the chairmen, who often developed orthopedic impediments of their own while working. For example, in “The Bath-Chair Man’s Story,” Florence Marryat’s chairman-protagonist references his “old round back,” which results from his constant stooping (516).<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Prejudices against wheeled-chair users as lazy—choosing to ride rather than walk—and as demeaning and debilitating the lower-class chairmen continued to solidify during the nineteenth century. In characterizing Withers alternately as a battering ram and as an elephant, then, Dickens underscores the class dynamics inherited by the wheeled chair from its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century precursor. Dickens alludes to such class tensions when he portrays Mrs. Skewton as “calling to the page with all the languid dignity with which she had called in days of yore to a coachman with a wig, cauliflower nosegay, and silk stockings” (320). Her use of the wheeled chair thus exposes her to the narrator’s and the reader’s critical gaze, especially because she travels in it not out of necessity, but rather as a display of the wealth and status that she, in actuality, lacks. As the narrator indicates, after becoming accustomed in her youth to travel by barouche, Mrs. Skewton “[maintains] the wheeled chair and the butting page: there being nothing whatever, except the attitude, to prevent her from walking” (319). Attending to the various elements that contributed to the assemblage of the Victorian wheeled chair—the page, the chair user, and the chair itself—Dickens highlights the objectification of an often forgotten participant, the chairman, thereby positioning prejudices against chair users as, at least partially, class-based. Mrs. Skewton’s pretense of need and her mistreatment of Withers contribute to her removal from readerly sympathy until she becomes terminally ill and truly dependent upon the aid and support of others. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> This preoccupation of Dickens’s was first noted by M. J. Lesser in “Dickens and the Chair-Bound.” See below for full reference. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> “Sedan-Chairs.” Chambers’s Journal of Popular Literature, Science and Arts 12.580 (9 February 1895): 91–93. British Periodicals. Web. 14 June 2013. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Marryat, Florence. “The Bath-Chair Man’s Story.” Temple Bar: A London Magazine for Town and Country Readers 22 (March 1868): 507–20. British Periodicals. Web. 13 June 2013. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Dombey and Son. London: Penguin, 2002. 316–17. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1847 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mrs. Skewton, seated in a three wheeled chair in a crowded street, is greeted by a gentleman who tips his hat to her. Phiz (Hablot Knight Browne), “Major Bagstock is delighted to have that opportunity”, from Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son. London: Bradbury & Evans, 1847. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. <a title="Victorian Web" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/104.html" target="_blank">Victorian Web</a>. <http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/phiz/104.html>. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Fawcett, Trevor. “<a title="Fawcett Chair Article" href="%3A//condor.depaul.edu/cchaden/bath/chairtransport.html" target="_blank">Chair Transport in Bath: The Sedan Era</a>.” Bath History. Vol. 2. Gloucestershire, United Kingdom: Sutton Publishing, 1988: n. page. See <://condor.depaul.edu/cchaden/bath/chairtransport.html </li> <li> Lesser, M. J. “Dickens and the Chair-Bound.” Dickensian 73.381 (January 1977): 25–32. </li> <li> Sussman, Herbert and Gerhard Joseph. “Prefiguring the Posthuman: Dickens and Prosthesis.” Victorian Literature and Culture 32.2 (2004): 617–28. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Class Literature Mobility Novel Prosthesis Technology https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/ff3ff4b6d69ad75c393097ccbd3e94cb.jpg 0db76012c44426486226dec3a696c6ec 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 337 Height 549 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource This black and white photograph shows <a title="Wikipedia for Elizabeth Gilbert" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Margaretta_Maria_Gilbert" target="_blank">Elizabeth Gilbert</a> wearing a cape and shaded glasses.  From the Frontispiece of the book Elizabeth Gilbert and her Work for the Blind, Frances Martin, 1887 [available at <a href="http://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493">http://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493</a>]  Elizabeth Gilbert, the founder of the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, lost her sight in early childhood as a result of scarlet fever. 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. I was walking along a rather lonely road, humming a tune to myself – a most indefensible habit, which I only name as it accounted for my being suddenly stopped by a civil voice – “Ma’am, if you please” I turned, and now first noticed a young man who had just passed me by, stepping out quickly and decisively, with a stick in his hand and a bundle on his shoulder. “Ma’am, if you please, would you direct me to …?” naming a gentleman’s house close by, which I was proceeding to point out to him, when I perceived he had no eyes. It was a well-featured and highly intelligent countenance, with that peculiarly peaceful expression that one often sees on the faces of the blind; but of his calamity there could be no doubt: the eyes, as I said, were gone: the eyelids closed tightly over nothing.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Yet his step was firm, and his general appearance so active and bright, that a careless passenger would scarcely have detected that he was blind. Of course I went back with him to the door he named – in spite of his polite protestations that there was not the least necessity – “he could find it easily” – how, Heaven knows: also, I had the curiosity to lies in wait a few minutes, until I watched him come cheerily out, shoulder his big bundle, plant his stick on the ground and walk briskly back – whistling a lively tune, and marching as fast and fearlessly as though he saw every step of the road. “Have you done your business?” My friend started, but immediately recognised the voice. “Oh yes thank you, Ma’am. I’m all right. Very much obliged. Good Morning.” He recommenced his stopped tune, and pursued his way with such determined independence, that I felt as if more notice of him would be taking an unwarrantable liberty with his misfortune. But his cheerful face quite haunted me, and I speculated for a long time what ‘business’ he could be about, and how he dared trust himself alone, in the great wilderness of London and its environs, with no guide except his stick. At last I remembered he might be one of the ‘travellers’ belonging to an institution I had heard of (and the foundress of which, by coincidence, I was going that day to meet) – the ‘Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind.’<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> <h2>Notes</h2> <hr align="left" size="1" width="33%" /> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Sealing the eyelids over the sockets suggests this man may have lost his eyesight as a result of an ophthalmic infection which caused the eyeballs to rupture. See Mary Wilson Carpenter, Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England (Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2010): 128-148 for further information on blindness. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> The Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind continues today under the name ‘Clarity’. A video clip, made by Clarity, to celebrate the 200-year anniversary of Charles Dickens is available at <a href="http://www.claritymatters.org/blog/charles-dickens-and-clarity/">www.claritymatters.org/blog/charles-dickens-and-clarity/</a>. Here Clarity staff members discuss Dickens’ essay and the degree to which things have changed or remained the same since the nineteenth century. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Blind! Description An account of the resource When Dinah Mulock Craik, the author of John Halifax, Gentleman and The Little Lame Prince, wrote her essay, ‘Blind’, about the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, in 1861, she was engaging in an active discussion about the education of the visually impaired in the mid-nineteenth-century. Charles Dickens had written an essay in 1859 entitled ‘At Work in the Dark’ and Craik’s friend and flatmate, Francis Martin, published another in 1864 for Cornhill Magazine entitled ‘Blind Workers and Blind Helpers’. Each essay promotes the valuable work of the association, in providing education and retraining for the visually impaired, and explains how readers can help and support the association, and by extension the people who work there, through the purchase of brushes, baskets and mats etc made by the pupils and workers at the association. In the following extract, which opens Craik’s essay, we are told of a chance encounter between a sighted person (Craik) and a young visually impaired man. Craik portrays the man as being at ease and confident in his movement and remarks on his firm step and active appearance, walking as if he ‘saw every step of the road’. Whilst Craik presents a more personal encounter with the man than Dickens does in his essay, nineteenth-century attitudes to blindness are evident. Craik expresses surprise at the man’s ability to walk through the city independently, a common view as it was widely believed that the blind were incapable of living productive lives and were often treated as children in need of protection. Craik’s insistence that she accompany the man to the door, despite his protestations, reveals how the sighted struggled to understand how the blind could manage without their help. The extract also highlights the way in which the blind were seen as a curiosity or spectacle by the sighted as Craik lies in wait, virtually spying on the man, in order to observe how he found his way without assistance. In addition to this we can see how blindness was considered to be a tragedy or ‘misfortune’ as the face of the young man continued to ‘haunt’ Craik long after their meeting has ended. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dinah Craik   Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dinah Mulock Craik, The Unkind Word and Other Stories, Volume II (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1870): 1-12.  Available at: <a href="http://archive.org/stream/unkindwordothers02crai#page/n7/mode/2up">http://archive.org/stream/unkindwordothers02crai#page/n7/mode/2up</a>  Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1861 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Theresa Miller Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This black and white photograph shows <a title="Wikipedia for Elizabeth Gilbert" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elizabeth_Margaretta_Maria_Gilbert" target="_blank">Elizabeth Gilbert</a> wearing a cape and shaded glasses.  From the Frontispiece of the book Elizabeth Gilbert and her Work for the Blind, Frances Martin, 1887 [available at <a href="http://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493">http://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493</a>]  Elizabeth Gilbert, the founder of the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind, lost her sight in early childhood as a result of scarlet fever. Relation A related resource <ul> <li>Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara, California: Praeger, 2010. </li> <li>Frances Martin, Elizabeth Gilbert and her Work for the Blind, 1887. Available at: <a href="http://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493">http://archive.org/details/cu31924031232493</a></li> <li>Stoddard Holmes, Martha.  Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2009 [2004].</li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Blindness Dinah Mulock Craik Institutions Journalism life writing https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/fb32d389da8b7819ba4e831598371425.jpg 2baeb3b4db322a53d34161814c73f5cb 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. Now, after lessons, he<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> would occasionally be persuaded to quit that beloved study, and take a walk along the loch side, or across the moor, to show his pupil the country of which he, poor little fellow! was owner and lord. He did it at first out of pure kindness, to save the earl from the well-meant intrusion of neighbours, but afterward from sheer pleasure in seeing the boy so happy. To him, mounted in Malcolm’s arms and brought for the first time into contact with the outer world, everything was a novelty and delight. And his quick perception let nothing escape him. He seemed to watch lovingly all nature, from the grand lights and shadows which moved over the mountains, to the little moorland flowers which he made Malcolm stop to gather. All living things too, from the young rabbit that scudded across their path, to the lark that rose singing up into the wide blue air--he saw and noticed every thing. But he never once said, what Helen, who, as often as her house duties allowed, delighted to accompany them on these expeditions, was always expecting he would say, Why had God given these soulless creatures legs to run and wings to fly, strength, health, and activity to enjoy existence, and denied all these things to him? Denied them, not for a week, a month, a year, but for his whole lifetime – a lifetime so short at best; – “few of days, and full of trouble.” Why could He not have made it a little more happy? Thousands have asked themselves, in some form or other, the same unanswered, unanswerable question. Helen had done so already, young as she was; when her mother died, and her father seemed slowly breaking down, and the whole world appeared to her full of darkness and woe. How then must it have appeared to this poor boy? But, strange to say, that bitter doubt, which so often came into Helen's heart, never fell from Child’s lips at all. Either he was still a mere child, accepting life just as he saw it, and seeking no solution of its mysteries, or else, though so young, he was still strong enough to keep his doubts to himself, to bear his own burden, and trouble no one. Or else – and when she watched his inexpressibly sweet face, which had the look you sometimes see in blind faces, of absolutely untroubled peace, Helen was forced to believe this – God, who had taken away from him so much, had given him something still more – a spiritual insight so deep and clear that he was happy in spite of his heavy misfortune. She never looked at him but she thought involuntarily of the text, out of the only book with which unlearned Helen was very familiar—that “in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” <h3>Note</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Mr Cardross, the Earl’s minister and tutor, and Helen’s father.</div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A Noble Life (1866) is Dinah Mulock Craik’s second novel to feature a disabled protagonist. It resembles her earlier novel, Olive (1850) in representing disability as a spiritually uplifting and morally improving experience, which renders the protagonist selfless, compassionate and pious. However, whereas Olive is able to pursue a career and marry, despite being “deformed”, the protagonist of A Noble Life, the Earl of Cairnforth, has to come to terms with a life of almost total self-denial. The orphaned Earl is born with multiple disabilities, described as “the smallest, saddest specimen of infantile deformity”, his body “thin, elfish, and distorted, every joint and limb being twisted in some way or other” (1.24). The doctor suggests it would be a mercy if he simply died, but the narrative works to validate the minister’s counter-argument that “God can work out His wonderful will, if He chooses, through the meanest means – through the saddest tragedies and direst misfortunes” (1.28). Although in adulthood the Earl has weak health and restricted mobility – he is carried everywhere and can only just hold a pen – he is shown to be a capable and reforming landlord, and above all to exert a good influence upon everyone he meets. His love for the minister’s daughter, Helen Cardross, is depicted as tragically impossible – since he accepts that he can never marry – but after her unworthy husband’s early death, he adopts and co-parents her son. The passage below is typical in highlighting the Earl’s moral virtues but also his reserve, implying that there is something unspeakable in the experience of disability, which somehow cuts the Earl off from those around him, forcing them to speculate about his true feelings. Although he is only a child at this point in the novel, he is already represented as being both morally superior and enigmatic to those around him. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Craik, Dinah Mulock. A Noble Life. Vol 1. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866. Pages 125-8. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen, ed. Women’s Writing 20.3 (2013) Special Issue: Re-Reading Dinah Mulock Craik. </li> <li> Mitchell, Sally, Dinah Mulock Craik. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1983. </li> <li> Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. </li> <li> Walker Gore, Clare, "Noble Lives: Writing Masculinity and Disability in the Late Nineteenth Century." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (2014): 363-375. </li> </ul> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1866 Title A name given to the resource A Noble Life Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dinah Craik Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hurst and Blackett Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Eilean Donan Castle, reflects the Scottish setting of A Noble Life. Image courtesy <a title="Eilean Donan Castle" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilean_Donan">Wikipedia </a>under a Creative Commons License. Dinah Craik Masculinity Novel Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/f89dc46805bcd46a80bcec07996d2aaa.jpg ca24584683e51942799ee31e6fdc4e27 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 476 Height 600 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 A black and white photograph shows Thomas Edison, seated, demonstrating his phonograph in April, 1878. Courtesy of <a title="Wikimedia Commons" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edison_and_phonograph_edit1.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a>. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/5fe9857fec1908109c136cc7b28b4d66.gif f7e87bff7e536628eb75dcde0bb92fa5 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 760 Height 1171 Bit Depth 3 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 Page image of "The Phonograph and its Future". https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/1db00e6ca7acb28dcdee4712927f37d6.gif 04f9a530ccef21d8312608cfb8892575 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 760 Height 1171 Bit Depth 3 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 Second page image of "The Phonograph and its Future". 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. Books .—Books may be read by the charitably-inclined professional reader, or by such readers especially employed for that purpose, and the record of such book used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick-chamber, or even with great profit and amusement by the lady or gentleman whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed; or, again, because of the greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader. The ordinary record-sheet, repeating this book from fifty to a hundred times as it will, would command a price that would pay the original reader well for the slightly-increased difficulty in reading it aloud in the phonograph. (533) * * * * * Phonographic Books.—A book of 40,000 words upon a single metal plate ten inches square thus becomes a strong probability. The advantages of such books over those printed are too readily seen to need mention. Such books would be listened to where now none are read. They would preserve more than the mental emanations of the brain of the author; and, as a bequest to future generations, they would be unequaled. For the preservation of languages they would be invaluable. (534) * * * * * Every one of these uses the perfected phonograph is now ready to carry out. I may add that, through the facility with which it stores up and reproduces music of all sorts, or whistling and recitations, it can be employed to furnish constant amusement to invalids, or to social assemblies, at receptions, dinners, etc. Any one sitting in his room alone may order an assorted supply of wax cylinders inscribed with songs, poems, piano or violin music, short stories, anecdotes, or dialect pieces, and, by putting them on his phonograph, he can listen to them as originally sung or recited by authors, vocalists and actors, or elocutionists. The variety of entertainment he thus commands, at trifling expense and without moving from his chair, is practically unlimited. Music by a band, in fact whole operas, can be stored up on the cylinders, and the voice of Patti singing in England can thus be heard again on this side of the ocean, or preserved for future generations. On four cylinders eight inches long, with a diameter of five, I can put the whole of “Nicholas Nickleby” in phonogram form. (646) 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 Talking Books Description An account of the resource Thomas Edison’s phonograph was the first machine to reproduce the human voice. In December 1877, Edison’s associates assembled a device on which Edison recorded the words of the nursery rhyme “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” The prototype consisted of a sheet of tinfoil wrapped around a grooved cylinder and rotated with a hand crank. Speech created indentations in the tinfoil (and, later, wax cylinders) that could be played back afterward. Phonograph demonstrations entertained audiences throughout the country by playing recitations, songs, music, and random noises such as whistling or whooping. Edison proposed using the phonograph to read aloud to people with disabilities in a promotional essay written for the North American Review. The essay identifies numerous uses for the phonograph including playing music, dictating letters, teaching elocution, animating dolls, recording courtroom testimony, preserving the last words of dying relatives, conserving the speeches of famous orators, and enabling clocks to announce the hours of the day. It also proposes using the phonograph as a reading machine: “Books may be read by the charitably-inclined professional reader, or by such readers especially employed for that purpose, and the record of such book used in the asylums of the blind, hospitals, the sick-chamber, or even with great profit and amusement by the lady or gentleman whose eyes and hands may be otherwise employed; or, again, because of the greater enjoyment to be had from a book when read by an elocutionist than when read by the average reader” (533). Edison envisioned books being read aloud to people with disabilities who were unable to read for themselves as well as people without disabilities who preferred listening to books recited by a professional narrator. He later described such recordings as “phonographic books, which would speak to blind people without effort on their part” (646). Edison’s prediction of a talking book was ahead of its time in the 1870s and 1880s. His idea was to record books of approximately 40,000 words on a single plate measuring ten inches square. Edison later proposed recording Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby on four wax cylinders. Yet tinfoil and wax cylinders could only play a few minutes of speech at a time. Recording an entire Dickens novel required hundreds of wax cylinders. It would be impossible to record an entire novel until advances in the field of sound recording made by the film and radio industries in the twentieth century. The American Foundation for the Blind and Library of Congress recorded the first books for people with vision impairments in 1934. These recordings, known as “talking books,” consisted of a book read aloud onto a set of long-playing phonograph records. The Library of Congress hailed the talking book program as the realization of Edison’s ambition to read aloud to people who were blind. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived <ul><li>Edison, Thomas A. “The Phonograph and its Future.” North American Review 126 (May 1878): 527-36.</li> <li>Edison, Thomas A. “The Perfected Phonograph.” North American Review 379 (June 1888): 641-50.</li> </ul> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1878, 1888 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Matthew Rubery Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A black and white photograph shows Thomas Edison, seated, demonstrating his phonograph in April, 1878. Courtesy of <a title="Wikimedia Commons" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Edison_and_phonograph_edit1.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a>. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Camlot, Jason. “Early Talking Books: Spoken Recordings and Recitation Anthologies, 1880-1920.” Book History 6 (2003): 147-73.</li> <li>Gitelman, Lisa. Always Already New: Media, History, and the Data of Culture. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2006. 25-44. </li> <li>Israel, Paul. Edison: A Life of Invention. New York: John Wiley, 1998. </li> <li>Koestler, Frances A. The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in the United States. New York: David McKay Company, 1976.</li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Edison, Thomas Audio Culture Blindness Technology Thomas Edison https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/2801aa92aa2224374845c84bdb5513e9.jpg 4ba7219b7bb946b5699bb3fe72b3c624 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mary Barton. Frontispiece. C. M. Relyea, illustrator. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. New York: The Century Co., 1906. Scan by Jennifer Janechek. Description An account of the resource A black and white illustration shows a young woman wearing a shawl and dress, standing beside a chair. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “Didst thou mark how poorly Jane Wilson looked?” asked he, as they wound up their hard day’s work by a supper eaten over the fire, which glowed and glimmered through the room, and formed their only light. “No, I can’t say as I did. But she’s never rightly held up her head since the twins died; and all along she has never been a strong woman.”<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> “Never sin’ her accident. Afore that I mind her looking as fresh and likely a girl as e’er a one in Manchester.” “She cotched her side again a wheel.<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a> It were afore wheels were boxed up. It were just when she were to have been married, and many a one thought George would ha’ been off his bargain; but I knew he weren’t the chap for that trick. Pretty near the first place she went to when she were able to go about again, was th’ Oud Church, poor wench, all pale and limping she went up the aisle, George holding her up as tender as a mother, and walking as slow as e’er he could, not to hurry her, though there were plenty enow of rude lads to cast their jests at him and her.” <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> John Barton is alone with his daughter, Mary, discussing the appearance of Jane Wilson, wife of George Wilson. In a quite heartbreaking scene earlier in the novel, her twin boys pass away during their infancy from a fever, presumably typhoid. <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> According to Foster, “cotched” means “caught” (87). </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mary Barton. Frontispiece. C. M. Relyea, illustrator. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. New York: The Century Co., 1906. Scan by Jennifer Janechek. Description An account of the resource References to disability abound in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848): Margaret experiences progressive blindness from cataracts (though at the end of the novel she is said to regain her sight); the aging Alice becomes blind, deaf, and is eventually incapacitated by a paralytic stroke; and some of the hand-loom weavers are disfigured by vitriol attacks from the striking factory workers. But perhaps the most historically situated instance of disability in the novel is that experienced by Mrs. Jane Wilson, who is introduced to us as “a delicate, fragile-looking woman, limping in her gait” (7, ch. 1). As the passage below indicates, Mrs. Wilson received some sort of orthopedic injury that gave her a permanent limp while working in a factory. John Barton tells his daughter, Mary, that “[s]he cotched [caught] her side again a wheel” (87). Her injury likely resulted from contact with a flywheel, which the OED defines as “[a] wheel with a heavy rim, attached to a revolving shaft, in order either to regulate the motion of the machinery, or to accumulate power.”<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> Mr. Barton notes that the accident occurred “afore wheels were boxed up” (87), an apparent anachronism because according to Shirley Foster, editor of the 2006 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mary Barton, the novel is supposed to be set around 1834-40 (ix), and the mandatory “boxing up” of wheels did not occur until the passage of the Factory Act of 1844. Mrs. Wilson’s injury serves a larger function than drawing attention to factory reform, for it connects with the novel’s broader project of insisting upon the common bond of the Manchester factory workers and the mill owners—an interdependent relationship that, in her view, ultimately promoted the progress of society. In her preface, Gaskell explains that the factory worker and the mill owner are “bound to each other by common interests”—that the suffering of one must affect the other (3). In this worldview, the condition of a worker’s body discloses the successes or evils of industrialization, and a body injured in a factory incident would necessarily indict a physically harmful system of labor promoted by capitalism. Mrs. Wilson’s disability would thus present a problem to the middle-class reader: it would force the reader to confront his or her involvement in perpetuating a factory system that physically damaged human bodies. <div>Note <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> “Fly-wheel.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2015. Web. 16 November 2015. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 86-87. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1848 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Title A name given to the resource Mary Barton Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elizabeth Gaskell Language A language of the resource English Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen. <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905495.2013.867659?journalCode=gncc20">“Orthopaedic Disability and the Nineteenth Century Novel.”</a> Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 36.1 (2014): 1-17. </li> <li> Hutchins, B. L., and A. Harrison. <a href="https://archive.org/details/historyoffactory014402mbp">A History of Factory Legislation</a>. London: P. S. King & Son, 1911. Internet Archive. Web. 11 November 2015. </li> <li> Sanders, Mike. “Manufacturing Accident: Industrialism and the Worker’s Body in Early Victorian Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.2 (2000): 313-329. </li> </ul> https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/0716ee2ac2a3af085eeab54188f8c9be.jpg 8e1e92cdc18d954bd8ffda527651241e Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “It is important to society to know whether Mesmerism is true. The revival of its pretensions from age to age makes the negative of this question appear so improbable, and the affirmative involves anticipations so vast, that no testimony of a conscientious witness can be unworthy of attention. I am now capable of affording testimony; and all personal considerations must give way before the social duty of imparting the facts of which I am in possession.” “Those who know Mesmerism to be true from their own experience are now a large number; many more, I believe, than is at all supposed by those who have not attended to the subject. Another considerable class consists of those who believe upon testimony: who find it impossible not to yield credit to the long array of cases in many books, and to the attestation of friends whose judgment and veracity they are in the habit of respecting. After these there remain a good many who amuse themselves with observing some of the effects of Mesmerism, calling them strange and unaccountable, and then going away and thinking no more about them; and lastly, the great majority who know nothing of the matter, and are so little aware of its seriousness as to call it “a bore,” or to laugh at it as nonsense or a cheat.” “A besetting sickness, almost disabling me from taking food for two years, brought me very low; and, together with other evils, it confined me to a condition of almost entire stillness, — to a life passed between my bed and my sofa [. . .] From that time, I lay still; and by means of this undisturbed quiet, and such an increase of opiates as kept down my most urgent discomforts, I passed the last two years with less suffering than the three preceding. There was, however, no favourable change in the disease. Everything was done for me that the best medical skill and science could suggest, and the most indefatigable humanity and family affection devise: but nothing could avail beyond mere alleviation. My dependence on opiates was desperate.” “A few days after the arrival of my kind Mesmerist, I had my foot on the grass for the first time for four years and a half [. . .] I never before was in the open air, after an illness of merely a week or two, without feeling more or less overpowered; but now, under the open sky, after four years and a half spent between bed and a sofa, I felt no faintness, exhaustion, or nervousness of any kind” “[f]rom the early summer of 1839, I was, till this autumn, a prisoner from illness. My recovery now, by means of mesmeric treatment alone, has given me the most thorough knowledge possible that Mesmerism is true” “After my medical friend’s avowal<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> of his hopelessness, however, I felt myself not only at liberty, but in duty bound, to try, if possible, the only remaining resource for alleviation. I felt then, and I feel now, that through all mortification of old prejudices, and all springing up of new, nobody in the world would undertake to say I was wrong in seeking even recovery by any harmless means, when other hope was given up by all: and it was not recovery that was in my thoughts, but only solace. It never presented itself to me as possible that disease so long and deeply fixed could be removed; and I was perfectly sincere in saying, that the utmost I looked for was release from my miserable dependence on opiates. Deep as are my obligations to my faithful and skilful medical friend, for a long course of humane effort on his part, no one kindness of his has touched me so sensibly as the grace with which he met my desire to try a means of which he had no knowledge or opinion, and himself brought over the Mesmerist under whom the first trial of my susceptibility was made.” “I put in a claim for my experiment being considered rational. It surely was so, not only on account of my previous knowledge of facts, and of my hopelessness from any other resource, but on grounds which other sufferers may share with me;— on the ground that though the science of medicine may be exhausted in any particular case, it does not follow that curative means are exhausted” <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Martineau is referring to Thomas Greenhow, her physician and brother-in-law. Greenhow, according to Martineau’s personal letters, had, in the course of treating her for uterine tumours he considered incurable by traditional methods, proposed that she attempt a course of mesmerism. She writes that he introduced her to the famous mesmerist, Spenser Hall (1812-1885). However, Greenhow refuted Martineau’s claims in his <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=7VkXAQAAMAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#v=onepage&q&f=false">“Medical Report on the Case of Miss H—M—.”</a> </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Mesmerism<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> was the term used by Victorians for the procedure during which the practitioner, or mesmerist, would fix his or her (usually his) gaze on a subject or make passes over their body in order to treat and even cure disabilities and illnesses such as consumption, tuberculosis, rheumatism, and gout. Although many traditional physicians considered mesmerism to be quack medicine practiced by charlatans on weak and gullible patients, some lay-practitioners, radical physicians, and patients saw power in the therapy. Author and social theorist, Harriet Martineau, who had written extensively on her own deafness and invalidism, was one such proponent of the curative properties of mesmerism. She claimed that a course in mesmerism had cured her of the uterine tumours that had disabled her to the point that she had become confined to a sickroom and had produced a significant improvement in her deafness. In 1844, Martineau published a series of letters entitled <a href="http://books.google.ca/books?id=te8DAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0#http://books.google.ca/books?id=te8DAAAAQAAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=gbs_ge_summary_r&cad=0%23v=onepage&q&f=false">“Letters on Mesmerism”</a> in the Athenæum with the intention of educating her readers and fellow “sufferers” on the healing power of mesmerism. She hoped that her letters would confirm the scientific validity of mesmerism and that this would strengthen the movement of patients taking control over their own medical cases and assuming some of the power and authority of the medical profession. Ultimately, her candid description of her mesmerism and recovery prompted increased debate on the procedure and resulted in copious letters to her from disabled and ill persons asking for further information on her mesmerism and requests from traditional physicians seeking additional details of her recovery. However, Martineau’s publication also resulted in a barrage of disparaging responses to the Athenæum that questioned her ability to evaluate mesmerism’s effect on her health, that stated that she did not meet the intellectual conditions required to determine the efficacy of the therapy, and that implied that any beneficial results of procedures such as mesmerism reported by patients could only be called, as we would say today, a placebo effect. Martineau’s “Letters on Mesmerism” as well as the public responses to her publication are striking illustrations both of the debate between patients and physicians for authority over the disabled or ill body during the Victorian period and of Martineau’s role in this debate. <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> This procedure was based on the work of eighteenth-century physician, Franz Anton Mesmer (1734–1815), who called his theory “animal magnetism ” and who believed that individuals who possessed natural healing powers could harness the strength of the mind and control a fluid permeating the entire universe to cure any illness considered incurable by traditional medicine. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Martineau, Harriet. “Letters on Mesmerism.” London: Athenæum. (23 November 1844): 1070-1072. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1844 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nadine LeGier Relation A related resource <ul><li>Kaplan, Fred. Dickens and Mesmerism: The Hidden Springs of Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975.</li> <li> Ryall, Anka. “Medical Body and Lived Experience: The Case of Harriet Martineau.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature. 34.4 (2000): 35-53. </li> <li> Tatar, Maria. Spellbound: Studies on Mesmerism and Literature. Princeton, NJ:Princeton University Press, 1978. </li> <li> Winter, Alison. Mesmerized: Powers of Mind in Victorian Britain. Chicago: U Of Chicago P, 2000. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Letters on Mesmerism Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Harriet Martineau Format The file format, physical medium, or dimensions of the resource Text Language A language of the resource English Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource “Treatment of consumption and tuberculosis by mesmerism” from The Illustrated Practical Mesmerist by William Davey, c1854. Courtesy of Wellcome Images under a Creative Commons License (L0000487). Harriet Martineau Invalidism Mesmerism https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/5888cf22f9ad5b6e97955f9601128002.gif 91858a8d390aea4ac64eed699f295ab4 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 2914 Height 2914 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 engraving shows Quasimodo's head emerging from Cathedral architecture, resembling a gargoyle. “Quasimodo” by Gustave Brion, engraved by Perrichon and Yon in 1836. From Notre-Dame de Paris. Oeuvres complètes illustrées. Paris: Éditions A. Michel, 1930. 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 1798 to 1837 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. Clopin Trouillefou, who had been a candidate [for Pope of Fools] — and God knows what intensity of ugliness his features could attain — confessed himself conquered. We shall do the same: we shall not attempt to give the reader any idea of that tetrahedron nose, of that horse-shoe mouth, of that little left eye, stubbled up with an eye-brow of carotty bristles, while the right was completely overwhelmed and buried by an enormous wen<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>; of those irregular teeth, jagged here and there like the battlements of a fortress; of that horny lip, over which one of those teeth protruded, like the tusk of an elephant; of that forked chin; and above all, of the expression, that mixture of spite, wonder, and melancholy, spread over these exquisite features. Imagine such an object, if you can. The acclamation was unanimous: the crowd rushed to the chapel. The lucky Pope of Fools was brought out in triumph, and it was not till then that surprise and admiration were at their height: what had been mistaken for a grimace was his natural visage; indeed, it might be said that his whole person was but one grimace. His prodigious head was covered with red bristles; between his shoulders rose an enormous hump, which was counterbalanced by a protuberance in front; his thighs and legs were so strangely put together, that they touched at no one point but the knees, and, seen in front, resembled two sickles jointed at the handles; his feet were immense, his hands monstrous; but, with all this deformity, there was a formidable air of strength, agility, and courage, constituting a singular exception to the eternal rule, which ordains that force, as well as beauty, shall result from harmony. He looked like a giant who had been broken in pieces and ill soldered together. When this sort of Cyclop appeared on the threshold of the chapel, motionless, squat, almost as broad as high, “the square of his base,” as a great man expresses it, the populace instantly recognized him by his coat, half red and half purple, sprinkled with silver bells, and, more especially, by the perfection of his ugliness, and cried out with one voice: “It is Quasimodo, the bell-ringer! it is Quasimodo, the hunchback of Notre-Dame! Quasimodo, the one-eyed! Quasimodo the bandy-legged! Hurrah! hurrah!” The poor devil, it seems, had plenty of surnames to choose among. (43-44) *** He held the damsel, palpitating all over, hanging from his horny hands like a white drapery; but he carried her with as much care as if he was fearful of bruising or disturbing her. He felt, you would have thought, that a thing so delicate, so exquisite, so precious, was not made for such hands as his. At times he looked as though he dared not touch her even with his breath. Then, all at once, he would clasp her closely in his arms, against his angular bosom, as his treasure, as his all, as the mother of that girl would herself have done. His cyclop eye bent down upon her, shed over her a flood of tenderness, of pity, of grief, and was suddenly raised flashing lightning. At this sight the women laughed and cried; the crowd stamped with enthusiasm, for at that moment Quasimodo was really beautiful. Yes, he was beautiful — he, that orphan, that foundling, that outcast; he felt himself august and strong; he looked in the face that society from which he was banished, and from which he had made so signal a conquest; that human justice from which he had snatched its victim; those judges, those executioners, all that force of the King’s, which he, the meanest of the mean, had foiled with the force of God! (311) <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> A growth or tumour. </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Hunchback of Notre-Dame Description An account of the resource One of the most well known nineteenth-century fictional representations of disability is that of Quasimodo, the deaf and disabled bell-ringer in Victor Hugo’s 1831 historical novel, Notre-Dame de Paris. The novel quickly became immensely popular, particularly in England, with multiple editions of at least three England translations being published within ten years of its first publication. The story was as equally popular in stage and operatic adaptations in England; in fact, Edward Fitzball had adapted and produced in London two different stage versions of it —Esmeralda; or, The Deformed of Notre Dame (1834) and Quasimodo; or, The Gipsey Girl of Notre Dame (1836) — before Hugo’s own theatrical adaptation, La Esmeralda (1836), hit theatres in Paris (Szwydky 471). The novel’s immense popularity demonstrates the nineteenth-century fascination with non-normative bodies that we typically associate with Victorian freak shows. However, the novel offers a complex portrayal of disability that neither simply reduces Quasimodo’s disability to a metaphor for social problems nor wholly recognizes the social source of his impediments. Ambivalently, at times the narrator solidly blames Quasimodo’s misery on his non-normative body, making such statements as “It is certain that the spirit pines in a misshapen form” (141), but at other times attributes the fault to the social environment of medieval France instead. In the two selections from Notre-Dame below, the social environment shapes the meaning of Quasimodo’s disability in two very different ways. The first selection, in which Quasimodo is elected “Pope of Fools” for making the ugliest face at the Epiphany celebrations,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> shows how the social environment of the Carnival reads the grotesque in Quasimodo’s body. The second, however, in which Quasimodo has just rescued the heroine Esmeralda from execution by the King’s men, shows how the altered social environment interprets his body as sublime. <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Epiphany, a Christian feast day celebrated on January 6, marks the visit of the Wise Men to the infant Jesus. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Hugo, Victor. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. 1831. Trans. Frederic Shoberl. Standard Novels No. 32. London: Richard Bentley, 1833. Available online at <a href="http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7104667M/The_hunchback_of_Notre-Dame">http://openlibrary.org/books/OL7104667M/The_hunchback_of_Notre-Dame</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1831 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The engraving shows Quasimodo's head emerging from Cathedral architecture, resembling a gargoyle. “Quasimodo” by Gustave Brion, engraved by Perrichon and Yon in 1836. From Notre-Dame de Paris. Oeuvres complètes illustrées. Paris: Éditions A. Michel, 1930. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Duncan, Ian. “We Were Never Human: Monstrous Forms of Nineteenth-Century Fiction.” Victorian Transformations. Ed. Bianca Trednnick. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate Publishing Ltd., 2011. 7-27. Print.</li> <li>Joshua, Essaka. “The Drifting Language Of Architectural Accessibility In Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame De Paris.” Disability Studies Quarterly 31.3 (2011): http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1677/1594. 14 May 2012. Web.</li> <li>Szwydky, Lissette Lopez. “Victor Hugo's Notre‐Dame de Paris on the Nineteenth‐Century London Stage.” European Romantic Review 21.4 (2010): 469-487. Online.</li> </ul> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Hugo, Victor Cognition Literature Novel Orthopaedic Disability Victor Hugo https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4a9f064106917802c6e0bd7beb312f7d.jpg 8a663bb92893d0b1a640cd261e95895f Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. [T]he effectual head of the whole cretinous school [of fiction with characters with disability] is the renowned novel in which the hunchbacked lover watches the execution of his mistress from the tower of Notre-Dame;<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> and its strength passes gradually away into the anatomical preparations, for the general market, of novels like Poor Miss Finch,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> in which the heroine is blind, the hero epileptic, and the obnoxious brother is found dead with his hands dropped off, in the Arctic regions.* … * The reader who cares to seek it may easily find medical evidence of the physical effects of certain states of brain disease in producing especially images of truncated and Hermes-like deformity<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a>, complicated with grossness. … In its grotesque and distorting power, it produced all the figures of the Lay Goblin,<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> Pacolet,<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> Flibbertigibbet,<a title="" href="#_ftn6">[6]</a> Cockledemoy,<a title="" href="#_ftn7">[7]</a> Geoffrey Hudson,<a title="" href="#_ftn8">[8]</a> Fenella,<a title="" href="#_ftn9">[9]</a> and Nectabanus<a title="" href="#_ftn10">[10]</a>; in Dickens it in like manner gives Quilp,<a title="" href="#_ftn11">[11]</a> Krook,<a title="" href="#_ftn12">[12]</a> Smike,<a title="" href="#_ftn13">[13]</a> Smallweed,<a title="" href="#_ftn14">[14]</a> Miss Mowcher,<a title="" href="#_ftn15">[15]</a> and the dwarfs and wax-work of Nell's caravan<a title="" href="#_ftn16">[16]</a>; and runs entirely wild in Barnaby Rudge<a title="" href="#_ftn17">[17]</a>, where, with a corps de drame composed of one idiot, two madmen, a gentleman fool who is also a villain, a shop-boy fool who is also a blackguard, a hangman, a shrivelled virago, and a doll in ribands—carrying this company through riot and fire, till he hangs the hangman, one of the madmen, his mother, and the idiot, runs the gentleman fool through in a bloody duel, and burns and crushes the shop-boy fool into shapelessness, he cannot yet be content without shooting the spare lover's leg off, and marrying him to the doll in a wooden one; the shapeless shop-boy being finally also married in two wooden ones. It is this mutilation, observe, which is the very sign manual of the plague; joined, in the artistic forms of it, with a love of thorniness… . The two frescoes in the colossal handbills which have lately decorated the streets of London (the baboon with the mirror,<a title="" href="#_ftn18">[18]</a> and the Maskelyne and Cooke decapitation<a title="" href="#_ftn19">[19]</a>) are the final English forms of Raphael's arabesque <a title="" href="#_ftn20">[20]</a>under this influence... . [I]t is always to be remembered that the evil and good are alike conditions of literal vision: and therefore also, inseparably connected with the state of the health. I believe the first elements of all Scott’s errors were in the milk of his consumptive nurse, which all but killed him as an infant … and was without doubt the cause of the teething fever that ended in his lameness. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (1831). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872). Ruskin misinterprets the death of the “obnoxious brother”: his hands did not “drop off” his body in the Arctic regions, but rather they dropped—while remaining attached to his arms—to his lap as he died. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Hermes, the Ancient Greek messenger god and guide to the underworld, has no direct relation to deformity (unless in his offspring, Pan, the Panes, and the Satyri, who all had the legs and feet of goats). Ruskin refers here to Hermes’s role as a god of boundaries and to the boundary-marking "herm" statues, whose bodies were shapeless pillars with a carved head on top and an erect phallus halfway down. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> A page or errand boy from Sir Walter Scott’s The Lay of the Last Minstrel. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[5]</a> A “dwarf” from Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[6]</a> An “imp” from Sir Walter Scott’s Kenilworth. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[7]</a> A “goblin” and “fool” from Sir Walter Scott’s The Doom of Dervorgoil. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[8]</a> A knighted “dwarf” from Sir Walter Scott’s Perevil of the Peak. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[9]</a> A character, from Sir Walter Scott’s Perevil of the Peak, who pretends to be deaf and mute to spy on her employer. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[10]</a> A “dwarf” from Sir Walter Scott’s Tales of the Crusador. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[11]</a> A little person and villain from Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[12]</a> The illiterate, drunk rag and bottle merchant who spontaneously combusts in Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[13]</a> Nicholas Nickleby’s “simple-minded” best friend, who dies of consumption in Charles Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby (1839). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[14]</a> An elderly loan shark who is also hearing impaired and paralyzed from Charles Dickens’s Bleak House (1853). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[15]</a> The "dwarf" beautician from Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[16]</a> From Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[17]</a> Charles Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge (1841). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[18]</a> Possibly an advertisement for Brook’s Monkey Soap, which commonly featured a monkey dressed as a man and carrying a mirror or a reflective pan. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[19]</a> An <a title="Advertisement from British Library" href="http://www.bl.uk/catalogues/evanion/FullImage.aspx?EvanID=024-000004633&ImageId=52145">advertisement</a> for magicians John Neville Maskelyne and George Alfred Cooke in which a man holds a decapitated head over the still-living beheaded body. <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[20]</a> Grotesque architectural decorations by Raffaello Sanzio da Urbino (1483-1520). </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource As theories of degeneracy<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> gained currency in the latter part of the nineteenth century, literary critics increasingly used rhetoric of pathology (that is, of health and sickness) to discuss authors and their works.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> As Arata explains, critics interpreted literature deemed “degenerate” (for unsavoury topic matter, for example) as “symptom and sign of its author’s pathology” with the potential to operate as “an instrument of contagion” to its readers (“Strange Cases” 173). As apparent in the works of not just art and literary critics, but also that of psychiatrists, political theorists, scientists, and sociologists, Victorian thought interwove literature and morality with the body, often implying that the disabled or ill body manifested moral disorder. The passage below from the first instalment of “Fiction, Fair and Foul,” John Ruskin’s series of literary criticism published in The Nineteenth-Century, strikingly illustrates this rhetoric. In this piece, Ruskin complains about the Victorian fascination with the “analysis of physical corruption,” which he argues has become “the most valued material of modern fiction, and the most eagerly discussed texts of modern philosophy” (943). Ruskin believed that Victorian fiction was preoccupied with depicting scenes of death and characters with illness and disability, and that this preoccupation was caused by increased urbanization and industrialization. In the section below, the bulk of which is a footnote to a section referring to this fiction as a “cretinous school,” Ruskin argues that disabled characters are the product of the authors’s brain disease. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> The theory that certain groups of people, or even society in general, were biologically, psychologically, and socially degenerating or regressing into a less civilized state. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Barbara Spackman shows how this trend continued well into the twentieth century, as well, and traces the “genealogy” of the rhetoric of sickness in her book Decadent Genealogies. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Ruskin, John. “Fiction, Fair and Foul.” The Nineteenth Century: A Monthly Review 7 (June 1880): 941-962. Literary Theory Full-Text Database. Cambridge: Chadwyck-Healey, 1999. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1880-1881 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Relation A related resource <ul><li> Arata, Stephen D. Fictions of Loss in the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. </li> <li> ---. “Strange Cases, Common Fates: Degeneration and the Pleasures of Professional Reading.” Centuries’ Ends, Narrative Means. Ed. Robert Newman. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 1996. 171-190 Print. </li> <li> Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. The Corporealities Series. Ann Arbour: U of Michigan P, 2004. Print. </li> <li> Spackman, Barbara. Decadent Genealogies: The Rhetoric of Sickness from Baudelaire to D’Annunzio. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP, 1989. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This image depicts a winged Ruskin flying over London, under the guiding star of “High Art,” sprinkling roses beribboned with the titles of his art criticism. Image Courtesy T<a title="Public Domain Review" href="http://publicdomainreview.org/2012/08/17/cartoon-portraits-of-leading-19th-century-figures-1873/">he Public Domain Review</a> under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Fiction, Fair and Foul Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource John Ruskin Language A language of the resource English Degeneration Literature Orthopaedic Disability Ruskin