4 10 61 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/88827b02647bc61954d0b04d19d5b56e.jpg b3efb378adbdb35aa67a765bfb6861df Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 501 Height 649 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The black and white frontispiece from the Life of John Kitto by John Eadie shows the mutton-chopped deaf missionary in a relaxed seated pose, looking past the viewer to the left. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Any one who has spent a considerable portion of time under peculiar, or at least undescribed, circumstances, must have been very unobservant if he has nothing to relate in which the public would be interested. It may be, indeed, that such a person lies under the same obligation to the public of describing his own condition, as a traveller is under to render his report respecting the unexplored countries which he has traversed in his pilgrimage. It is under this impression that I now write. I am unwilling to quit this world, without leaving behind me some record of a condition of which no sufferer has yet rendered an account. The condition itself is not entirely new; and that it has not been hitherto described, may be owing to the fact that a morning of life subject to such crushing calamity, has seldom, if ever, been followed by a day of such self-culture — which is the only culture possible, — and of such active exertion, as seems indispensably necessary to prevent the faculties from rusting under the absence of the diverse influences by which they are, in ordinary circumstances, brought into working condition for [end page 5] the useful labours at which all men should aim, and for the struggles necessary to self-advancement in a country and in a time like this. My case is this. It has pleased Providence that three-fourths of a life now at its meridian, should be passed in the most intense DEAFNESS to which any living creature can be subjected; and which could not be more entire had the organs conducive to the sense of hearing been altogether wanting. It is the consequences resulting from this position, that form the theme which I have now placed before me. For one who is deaf, my life has been studious; and for one who has been both deaf and studious — or indeed for any one — my life has not been uneventful. I know not, however, that I have any right to obtrude the events or studies of my life upon the public notice; and it is not my intention to refer to them further than may be necessary to bring out the points and peculiarities of the deaf condition. From the multifarious matters arising from the activities of a life which once seemed doomed to inertion, I shall select those only which arise from, which illustrate, or which are in any remarkable way connected with my deafness. It is needful to explain this, lest in sketching the natural history of my deafness, I should be supposed to offer a biography of myself. I became deaf on my father's birthday, early in the year 1817, when I had lately completed the twelfth year of my age. The commencement of this condition is too clearly connected with my circumstances in life to allow me to abstain from troubling the reader with some particulars which I should have been otherwise willing to withhold. [...] The circumstances of that day — the last of twelve years of hearing, and the first of twenty-eight years of deafness, have left a more distinct impression upon my mind than those of any previous, or almost any subsequent, day of my life. It was a day to be remembered. The last day on which any customary labour ceases, — the last day on which any customary privilege is enjoyed, — the last day on which we do the things we have done daily, are always marked days in the calendar of life; how much, therefore, must the mind not linger in the memories of a day which was the last of many blessed things, and in which one stroke of action and suffering, — one moment of time, wrought a greater change of condition, than any sudden loss of wealth or honours ever made in the state of man. Wealth may be recovered, and new honours won, or happiness may be secured without them; but there is no recovery, no adequate compensation, for such a loss as was on that day sustained. The wealth of sweet and pleasurable sounds with which the Almighty has filled the world, — of sounds modulated by affection, sympathy, and earnestness, — can be appreciated only by one who has so long been thus poor indeed in the want of them, and who for so many weary years has sat in utter silence amid the busy hum of populous cities, the music of the woods and mountains, and, more than all, of the voices sweeter than music, which are in the winter season heard around the domestic hearth. *** [In the omitted section, Kitto describes falling from a ladder while assisting his father in slating the roof of a house and then being carried, senseless, to his home where he lay unconscious for two weeks.] *** I was very slow in learning that my hearing was entirely gone. The unusual stillness of all things was grateful to me in my utter exhaustion; and if in this half-awakened state, a thought of the matter entered my mind, I ascribed it to the unusual care and success of my friends in preserving silence around me. I saw them talking indeed to one another, and thought that, out of regard to my feeble condition, they spoke in whispers, because I heard them not. The truth was revealed to me in consequence of my solicitude about the book which had so much interested me in the day of my fall. It had, it seems, been reclaimed by the good old man who had sent it to me, and who doubtless concluded, that I should have no more need of books in this life. He was wrong; for there has been nothing in this life which I have needed more. I asked for this book with much earnestness, and was answered by signs which I could not comprehend. "Why do you not speak?" I cried; "Pray let me have the book.” This seemed to create some confusion; and at length some one, more clever than the rest, hit upon the happy expedient of writing upon a slate, that the book had been reclaimed by the owner, and that I could not in my weak state be allowed to read. "But," I said in great astonishment, "Why do you write to me, why not speak? Speak, speak.” Those who stood around the bed exchanged significant looks of concern, and the writer soon displayed upon his slate the awful words— "You are Deaf." Did not this utterly crush me? By no means. In my then weakened condition nothing like this could affect me. Besides, I was a child; and to a child the full extent of such a calamity could not be at once apparent. However, I knew not the future — it was well I did not; and there was nothing to show me that I suffered under more than a temporary deafness, which in a few days might pass away. It was left for time to show me the sad realities of the condition to which I was reduced. Time passed on, and I slowly recovered strength, but my deafness continued. The doctors were perplexed by it. They probed and tested my ears in various fashions. The tympanum was uninjured, and the organ seemed in every respect perfect, excepting that it would not act. Some thought that a disorganization of the internal mechanism had been produced by the concussion; others that the auditory nerve had been paralyzed. They poured into my tortured ears various infusions, hot and cold; they bled me, they blistered me, leeched me, physicked me; and, at last, they put a watch between my teeth, and on finding that I was unable to distinguish the ticking, they gave it up as a bad case, and left me to my fate. I cannot know whether my case was properly dealt with or not. I have no reason to complain of inattention, of my own knowledge; but, some six months after, a wise doctor from London affirmed that, by a different course at the commencement, my hearing might have been restored. He caused a seton<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> to be inserted in my neck; but this had no effect upon my deafness, although it seems to have acted beneficially upon the general health. Some years after, Mr. Snow Harris,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> with a spontaneous kindness, for which I am happy to be able at this distant day to express my obligations, put my ears through a course of electrical operations. He persevered for more than a month; but no good came of it: and since then nothing further has been done or attempted. Indeed, I have not sought any relief; and have discouraged the suggestions of friends who would have had me apply to Dr. This and Dr. That. The condition in which two-thirds of my life has been passed, has become a habit to me — a part of my physical nature: I have learned to acquiesce in it, and to mould my habits of life according to the conditions which it imposes; and have hence been unwilling to give footing for hopes and expectations, which I feel in my heart can never be realized. <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> “A thread, piece of tape, or the like, drawn through a fold of skin so as to maintain an issue or opening for discharges, or drawn through a sinus or cavity to keep this from healing up” (Oxford English Dictionary). <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Sir William Snow Harris (1791-1867) was a British physician who is best known for his experiments with electricity, including the development of an effective system for lightning conduction on ship. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Lost Senses Description An account of the resource John Kitto (1804-1854) was a British missionary and writer of religious books who was deafened at the age of 12 by a fall. In his youth, Kitto, who typically worked with his father, a mason, rather than attend school, was also forced to spend time in the workhouse. Kitto, then, was largely self-educated. His religious texts and travel writing, including The Pictorial Bible (1835-8)and the Cyclopaedia of Biblical Literature (1845)were popular in his age. In addition to his religious writings, he composed an autobiographical narrative, The Lost Senses (1845), at the behest of his publisher, Charles Knight. While Kitto calls The Lost Senses “a natural history of my deafness” rather than “a biography of myself,” the first volume of the work, which is focused on deafness, narrates how Kitto came to be deaf and his experiences as a deaf man both in England and abroad. The second volume, blindness, is not autobiographical (since Kitto was not blind) and turns its attention, instead, to experiences of, and texts about, blind people, including the famous American Laura Bridgman, and various blind poets, musicians and philosophers. In this excerpt from the beginning of The Lost Senses, Kitto likens his autobiographical undertaking to the reports of travellers of “unexplored countries.” (Indeed, Kitto published accounts of his own travels in the Middle East). He then describes his fall from a ladder that led to his deafness and his experience of coming to understand his new disability. After becoming deaf, Kitto underwent extensive medical treatment; this excerpt provides a glimpse into the range of Victorian medical approaches to deafness. As Mary Wilson Carpenter notes, a Victorian “attitude toward deafness as an affliction or infirmity…was…reflected in medical practice during the nineteenth century. Some medical practitioners began to call themselves aurists…and to devise a variety of treatments and cures for the deaf, many of which were torturous and some of which actually caused or intensified deafness” (110). Kitto explains that at the time of writing The Lost Senses, he no longer sought remedies for his deafness because of his acceptance of this “part of [his] physical nature.” For Kitto, one of the most important results of his fall and subsequent deafness was how it provided him with increased time, inclination and ability to read widely; Kitto emphasizes that his reading and writing, which emerged from his experience of deafness, allowed him to move from poverty to comfort as a prominent writer of religious works. Martha Stoddard Holmes describes Kitto’s account of his deafness as a “strange melodramatic mix of misery and triumph” where Kitto at once bemoans what he understands as the limitations of his deafness while celebrating the way that his deafness enabled his scholarly and literary success (163). In this excerpt Kitto describes both his deafness and his work as a reader and writer as “habit[ual]” to him; both enabled his success as a Victorian writer and their productive interaction is no more evident in his body of work than in The Lost Senses. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Kitto, John Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Kitto, John. The Lost Senses. London: Charles Knight & Co., 1845. Pages 5-14. Complete text available<a title="Online Edition of The Lost Senses" href="http://archive.org/stream/lostsensesseries00john#page/n9/mode/2up%20" target="_blank"> online</a> at archive.org. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1845 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Esmail Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The black and white frontispiece from the Life of John Kitto by John Eadie shows the mutton-chopped deaf missionary in a relaxed seated pose, looking past the viewer to the left. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Bar-Yosef, Eitan. “The ‘Deaf Traveller,’ the ‘Blind Traveller,’ and Constructions of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing.” Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 133-54.</li> <li>Carpenter, Mary Wilson. Health, Medicine and Society in Victorian England. Santa Barbara: Praeger, 2010.</li> <li>Esmail, Jennifer. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Athens: Ohio UP, 2013.</li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004. </li> </ul> Class Deafness Invalidism John Kitto life writing https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/9a397c6bda3fbed2e864241e379d93f1.jpg 6f501857a4dabbe7fe1ad3c38ae712cf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Image courtesy Wikipedia under a Creative Commons License. Description An account of the resource Portrait of Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh, the disabled MP upon whom Richard Calmady was based. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “‘Mother, I – I want to marry.’ ‘I, too, have thought of that,’ she said. ‘You don’t consider that I am debarred from marriage?’ ‘Oh no, no!’ Katherine cried, with a little sob in her voice. He looked at her steadily, with those profoundly desolate eyes. ‘It would not be wrong? It would not be otherwise than honourable?’ he asked. If doubts arose within Katherine of the answer to that question, she crushed them down passionately. ‘No, my dearest, no,’ she declared. ‘It could not be wrong – it could not, could not be so – if she loved you, and you loved whomsoever you married.’ ‘But I’m not in love – at least not in love with any person who can become my wife. Yet that does not seem to me to matter very much. I should be faithful, no fear, to anyone who was good enough to marry me. Enough of love would come, if only out of gratitude, towards the woman who would accept me as – as I am – and forgive that – that which cannot be helped.’ Again trembling shook Katherine. So terribly much seemed to her at stake just then! Silently she implored wisdom and clear-seeing might be accorded her. She leaned a little forward, and taking his left hand held it closely in both hers. ‘Dearest, that is not all. Tell me all,’ she said, ‘or I cannot quite follow your thought.’ Richard flung his body sideways across the bed, and kissed her hands as they held his. The hot colour rushed over his face and neck, up to the roots of his close-cropped, curly hair. He spoke, lying thus upon his chest, his face half buried in the sheet. ‘I want to marry because—because I want a child—I want a son,’ he said. [...] ‘My fate is fixed, you know. There’s no earthly use in wriggling. I am condemned to live a cow’s life and die a cow’s death. The pride of life may call, but I can’t answer. The great prizes are not for me. I’m too heavily handicapped. I was looking at that young fellow, Decies, to-night and considering his chances as against my own—— Oh! I know there’s wealth in plenty. The pasture’s green enough to make many a man covet it, and the stall’s well bedded-down. I don't complain. Only mother, you know—I know. Where’s the use of denying that which we neither of us ever really forget?—And then sometimes my blood takes fire. It did to-night. And the splendour of living being denied me, I—I—am tempted to say a Black Mass. One must take it out somehow. And I know I could go to the devil as few men have ever gone, magnificently, detestably, with subtleties and refinements of iniquity. [...] There should be a picturesqueness in my descent to hell which would go far to place my name at the head of the list of those sinners who have achieved immortality——‘ ‘Richard! Richard!’ Lady Calmady cried, ‘do you want to break my heart quite?’ ‘No,’ he answered, simply. ‘I’d infinitely rather not break your heart. I have no ambition to see my name in that devil's list except as an uncommonly ironical sort of second best. But then we must make some change, some radical change. At times, lately, I’ve felt as if I was a caged wild beast—blinded, its claws cut, the bars of its cage soldered and riveted, no hope of escape, and yet the vigour, the immense longing for freedom and activity, there all the while. [...] You see these few weeks in London—I’ve enjoyed them—but still they’ve made me understand, more than ever, all I’ve missed. Life calls, mother, do you see? And though the beast is blind, and his claws are cut, and his cage bolted, yet, when life calls, he must answer—must—or run mad—or die—do you see?’ ‘And you shall answer, my beloved. Never fear, you will answer,’ Katherine replied proudly. Richard’s hand closed hard upon hers. ‘Thank you,’ he said. ‘You were made to be a mother of heroes, not of a useless log like me.—And that’s just why I want to be good. And to be good I want a wife, that I may have that boy. I could keep straight for him, mother, though I’m afraid I can't keep straight for myself, and simply because it's right, much longer. I want him to have just all that I am denied. I want him to restore the balance, both for you and for me. I may have something of a career myself, perhaps, in politics or something. It’s possible, but that will come later, if it comes at all. And then it would be for his sake. What I want first is the boy, to give me an object and keep up my pluck, and keep me steady. I, giving him life, shall find my life in him, be paid for my wretched circumscribed existence by his goodly and complete one. He may be clever or not—I’d rather, of course, he was not quite a dunce—but I really don't very much mind, so long as he isn't an outrageous fool, if he’s only an entirely sound and healthy human animal.’ Richard stretched himself upon the bed, straightened the sheet across his chest, and clasped his hands under his head again. The desolation had gone out of his eyes. He seemed to look afar into the future, and therein see manly satisfaction and content. His voice was vibrant, rising to a kind of chant. ‘He shall run, and he shall swim, he shall fence, and he shall row,’ he said. ‘He shall learn all gallant sports, as becomes an English gentleman. And he shall ride,—not as I ride, God forbid! like a monkey strapped on a dog at a fair, but as a centaur, as a young demigod. We will set him, stark naked, on a bare-backed horse, and see that he’s clean-limbed, perfect, without spot or blemish, from head to heel.’” Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The History of Sir Richard Calmady was something of a succès de scandale when it was published in 1901. The author, Lucas Malet, had already made her name with her bestselling novel, The Wages of Sin (1890), which dealt with the sexual double standard for men and women, but The History of Sir Richard Calmady was seen as even more shocking because of its disabled protagonist and the frank depiction of his quest for romantic and sexual fulfilment. The fact that Lucas Malet was the pen-name of Mary St. Leger Kingsley Harrison added an extra spice of scandal to the novel’s publication. Her father, Charles Kingsley – a giant of Victorian letters, novelist, critic, Churchman and campaigner – was strongly associated with the Muscular Christian movement, while The History of Sir Richard Calmady clearly displays the writer’s interest in Roman Catholicism (hated by Kingsley), which led to her conversion in 1901. Moreover, Kingsley’s Muscular Christian values were antithetical not only to the aestheticist style of the novel, but also to its sympathetic treatment of its subject matter, which includes atheism, sexual inversion,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> and of course disability. Malet appears particularly fascinated by the causes of disability, depicting Richard’s physical impairments as a form of paternal inheritance. At the beginning of the novel, Richard Calmady’s father is horribly injured in a horse-riding accident, and his legs have to be amputated at the knee. When his son is born posthumously without lower legs, with his feet where his knees would usually be, the implication is that the father’s injury is written onto the son’s body. In addition to this explanation, which draws on the theory of maternal impressions still influential at the time the novel is set in the 1840s,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Malet introduces the idea of a family curse, allowing the reader (but not the main characters) to learn of a legend by which the wicked action of Sir Denzil Calmady in the seventeenth century – in impregnating and abandoning a local peasant girl and then running over their child in his carriage, cutting off his legs and killing him – caused the family to be cursed, until a disabled heir should be born. Richard’s disability therefore records his family history of sexual and class oppression, while being offered in itself as an answer to these injustices. Over the course of the novel, Richard struggles to come to terms with his disability, and after an abortive attempt to marry a neighbouring aristocrat’s daughter, he undertakes a ‘Rake’s Progress’ around Europe, giving himself up to dissipation and eventually being seduced by his immoral (and married) cousin, Helen de Vallorbes. At this point, however, Richard becomes disillusioned with his life of pleasure and returns home, and after learning of the family curse, and deciding to devote himself to philanthropic works and Christian socialism, marries his other cousin, the feminist ‘New Woman’ (and proto-lesbian), Honoria St Quentin. Richard’s disability is finally shown to have brought him greater spiritual insight and a stronger sense of social responsibility than his peers; despite its innovative style and risqué subject matter, the novel ultimately advocates a form of Christian Socialism not totally unlike Charles Kingsley’s own, but underpinned by – rather than antithetical to – the experience of disability. In this extract, Richard explains to his mother why he has decided that he must marry. In fact, the novel does not give Richard the son he longs for here; he and Honoria are shown to adopt their nephew, another Richard, as their heir. <h3>Notes</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> This was a term coined by the sexologist Richard Krafft-Ebing in his work Psychopathia Sexualis (1886), and developed by Havelock Ellis in his 1897 study Sexual Inversion. He suggested that homosexuality occurred when a man had a woman’s soul (and vice-versa) and should thus be understood not as a crime, but as a medical condition.</div> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp.64-5.</div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Malet, Lucas. The History of Sir Richard Calmady (1901), Ed. Talia Schaffer. Birmingham: University of Birmingham Press, 2003. 202-4 Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1901 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen. "Orthopaedic Disability and the Nineteenth-Century Novel." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.1 (2014): 1-17. </li> <li> Miller, Kathleen A. "'Your loving is unlike any other': Romance and the Disabled Body in the Gothic Fiction of Edith Nesbit and Lucas Malet." In Writing Women of the ‘Fin De Siècle’: Authors of Change, Ed. Adrienne E. Gavin and Carolyn W. de la L. Oulton. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. </li> <li> O’Connell, Rachel. "Cripsploitation: desire, the gaze, and the extraordinary body in The History of Sir Richard Calmady." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 4.2 (2008) </li> <li> Schaffer, Talia. The Forgotten Female Aesthetes: Literary Culture in Late-Victorian England. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 2000. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Richard Calmady Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Lucas Malet Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Portrait of <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_MacMurrough_Kavanagh">Arthur Macmurrough Kavanagh</a>, the disabled MP upon whom Richard Calmady was based. Image courtesy <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_MacMurrough_Kavanagh">Wikipedia </a>under a Creative Commons License. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/6f14d892a271cf49a4498e0790d429f2.jpg 4fbc405aef3d7f763ff701ce59e99b31 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 395 Height 546 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 IPTC String copyright_notice:Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html byline:Wellcome Images object_name:V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. headline:V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. caption:V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html IPTC Array a:5:{s:16:"copyright_notice";s:123:"Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";s:6:"byline";s:15:"Wellcome Images";s:11:"object_name";s:43:"V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving.";s:8:"headline";s:43:"V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving.";s:7:"caption";s:319:"V0003878 Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Harriet Martineau. Wood engraving. Published: - Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons by-nc 2.0 UK, see http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/indexplus/page/Prices.html";} Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A wood engraving shows Harriet Martineau gazing toward the left, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. [from “Dedication”]: I do not believe it is possible for persons in health and action to trace, as we can, the agencies for good that are going on in life and the world. Or, if they can, it seems as if the perception were accompanied by a breathless fear,--a dread of being, if not crushed, whirled away somewhere, hurried along to new regions for which they are unprepared, and to which, however good, they would prefer the familiar. You and I, and our fellow-sufferers, see differently, whether or not we see further. We know and feel, to the very centre of our souls, that there is no hurry, no crushing, no devastation attending Divine processes. While we see the whole system of human life rising and rising into a higher region and a purer light, we perceive that every atom is as much cared for as the whole. While we use our new insight to show how things are done,--and gravely smile to see that it is by every man’s overrating the issues of his immediate pursuit, in order that he may devote all his energies to it, (without which nothing would ever be done,) we smile with another feeling presently, on perceiving how an industry and care from above are compensating to every man his mistake by giving him collateral benefits when he misses the direct good he sought,--by giving him and his helpers a wealth of ideas, as often as their schemes turn out, in their professed objects, profitless. When we see men straining every nerve to reach the tempting apples which are to prove dust and ashes in their jaws, [xiv] we see also, by virtue of our position, the flying messenger who is descending with the ambrosia which is to feed their immortal part. We can tell that while revolutions are grandly operating, by which life and the world will in time change their aspect,--while a progress is advancing which it is now scarcely conceivable that we should ever have dreamed of putting our hands,--there is not one of our passing thoughts that is not ordained,--not a sigh of weariness unheeded—not an effort of patience that is not met half-way by divine pity,--not a generous emotion of triumph in the world’s improvement that is not hallowed by the divine sympathy ever living and breathing round about us. This is our peculiar privilege, of seeing and feeling something of the simultaneous vastness and minuteness of providential administration, is one in which we most enjoy sympathy;--at least, I do:--and in this, therefore, do I find your undoubted fellowship most precious. [From “Life to the Invalid”] Nothing is more impossible to represent in words, even to one’s self in meditative moments, than what it is to lie on the verge of life and watch, with nothing to do but think, and learn from what we behold. Let any one recall what it is to feel suddenly, by personal experience, the full depth of meaning of some saying, always believed in, often repeated with sincerity, but never till now known. Everyone has felt this, in regard to some one proverb, or divine scriptural clause, or word of some right royal philosopher or poet. Let any one then try to conceive of an extension of this realization through all that has ever been wisely said of man and human life, and he will be endeavouring to imagine our experience. Engrossing, thrilling, overpowering as the experience is, we have each to bear it alone; for each of us is surrounded by the active and the busy, who have a different gift and a different office;--and if not, it is one of those experiences which are incommunicable. If we endeavour to utter our thoughts on the folly of the pursuit of wealth, on the emptiness of ambition, on the surface nature of distinctions of rank, &c. we are only saying what our hearers have had by heart all their lives from books […] [From the “Power of Ideas in the Sickroom”] If I were asked whether there is any one idea more potential than any other over every sort of suffering, in a mode of life like ours, most hearers of the question would make haste to answer for me that there is such a variety of potential ideas, suited to such wide differences of mood of mind and body, that it must be impossible to measure the strength of any one. Nevertheless, I should reply that there is one, to me more powerful at present than I can now conceive any single idea to have been in any former state of mind. It is this; that it matters infinitely less what we do than what we are. I can conceive the amazement of many at this announcement,--of many even who admit its truth, and feelingly admit it, as I myself did when it was first brought home to me from the printed page of one friend by the heart-breathing voice of another. I care not who wonders, and who only half understands, while there are some few to whom this thought may be what it is to me. No one will be so short-sighted as to apply it as an excuse for indolence in the active and healthy,--so clear is it that such cannot be what they ought to be, unless they do all they can. But perhaps it is only the practiced in human sorrows who can see far enough into the boundless truth of this thought to appreciate its worth to us. Suffice it here that it has the power I ascribe to it, and that we whom it has consoled long to administer it when we see old age restless in its infirmity, activity disappointed of its scope or instruments, or the most useful agents of society, the most indispensable members of families paralysed by disease. We long to whisper it in the dungeons of Spielberg,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> where it opens a career within the narrowest recess of those thick walls. We long to send a missive to every couch of the sick, to every arm-chair of the aged and the blind, reminding them that the great work of life is ours still,--through all modes of life but that of the madhouse,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a>--the formation of a heavenly soul within us. If we cannot pursue a trade or a science, or keep house, or help the state, or write books, or earn our own bread or that of others, we can do the work to which all this is only subsidiary,--we can cherish a sweet and holy temper,--we can vindicate the supremacy of mind over body,--we can, in defiance of our liabilities, minister pleasure and hope to the gayest who come prepared to receive pain from the spectacle of our pain; we can, here as well as in heaven’s courts hereafter, reveal the angel growing into its immortal aspect, which is the highest achievement we could propose to ourselves, or that grace from above could propose to us, if we had a free choice of all possible conditions of human life. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Dungeons of Spielberg: <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silvio_Pellico">Silvio Pellico</a> (1789-1854), an Italian author, was arrested by Austrian officials under the charge of belonging to the carbonari (meaning a secret revolutionary society in early nineteenth-century Italy) and put in a prison at Spielberg. There he wrote Le mie prigioni (“My Prisons”) about his determination to live a Christian life in prison. His work was widely translated and inspired sympathy for the unification of Italy. In alluding to him, Martineau suggests that a life of confinement, be it from imprisonment or illness, can lead to the development of a Christian temperament. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Martineau’s exclusion of those in the madhouse from her message suggests that she sees the insane as a limit case of who could be consoled by the ability to keep a “sweet and holy temper” in the absence of the ability to do anything else. </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Life in the Sickroom Description An account of the resource Harriet Martineau (1802-1876) was a writer and intellectual of the Victorian period. She was best known for her work on political economy, but she was also deaf from childhood and an invalid for six years. She wrote about both of these experiences in her “Letter to the Deaf” (1834) Life in the Sickroom (1844) and her autobiography (1877). Life in the Sickroom is one of many first-hand accounts of the experience of being ill written by an invalid. Martineau was ill for six years, but she found taking on the identity of an invalid a reprieve from the stresses of daily life. What is interesting about her account, then, is that rather than depicting the difficulties of being ill, she portrays life in the sickroom as a time of rest and reflection, a welcome repose that can lead to time for thought and greater insight. Nor was she unusual in this respect. Miriam Bailin points out that many Victorians valued illness for the rest and repose it could offer from the stresses of daily life, and that it is perhaps not surprising that the cult of the invalid developed in the wake of the Industrial revolution alongside the “coexistent imperatives of self-discipline, will-power and industriousness” (12). Martineau dedicates her work to fellow-invalids whom she imagines will be sympathetic to her experiences in the sickroom, and to her claim that suffering can afford invalids greater insight, especially about the transience of this world. This type of dedication is typical of Victorian writing about invalidism. As Maria Frawley points out, many Victorian invalids who wrote first-person narratives about their experiences portrayed themselves as lonely sufferers seeking from their “own bed of affliction to console others, envisioned as similarly confined to their sickrooms and in need of solace” (11). In the following two excerpts, from the chapters on “Life to the Invalid” and the “Power of Ideas in the Sick-Room,” Martineau reflects on invalid’s heightened ability to grasp truisms that may seem farther off to the healthy: that wealth and status are unimportant, and that it matters less what we do than what we are. <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Martineau, Harriet Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Martineau, Harriet. Life in the Sickroom. Essays by an Invalid. Second Edition. London: Edward Moxon, 1845. Pages xii-xiii, 65-66, 160-162. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1844 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A wood engraving shows Harriet Martineau gazing toward the left, with a shawl wrapped around her shoulders. R. Burgess, Portraits of doctors & scientists in the Wellcome Institute, London 1973. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Institute" href="http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue Record" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1169696" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 1929.1</a>). Relation A related resource <ul><li>Bailin, Miriam. The Sickroom in Victorian Fiction: The Art of being Ill. New York: Cambridge UP, 1994.</li> <li>Frawley, Maria. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2004. </li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Harriet Marineau Invalidism life writing Literature Mobility https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4749e0f1dfc862e860e68c87599fb354.gif c7f224b413683c4820235c63edfc6f07 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 400 Height 650 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The illustration shows the seller of nutmeg graters on his knees on the street. He wears a sign reading "I was born a cripple" and has nutmeg graters strung on his body. 'The Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters' from a Daguerreotype by Beard. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. I now give an example of one of the classes driven to the streets by utter inability to labour. I have already spoken of the sterling independence of some of these men possessing the strongest claims to our sympathy and charity, and yet preferring to sell rather than beg. As I said before, many ingrained beggars certainly use the street trade as a cloak for alms-seeking, but as certainly many more, with every title to our assistance, use it as a means of redemption from beggary. That the nutmeg-grater seller is a noble example of the latter class, I have not the least doubt. I have made all due inquiries to satisfy myself as to his worthiness, and I feel convinced that when the reader looks at the portrait here given, and observes how utterly helpless the poor fellow is, and then reads the following plain unvarnished tale, he will marvel like me, not only at the fortitude which could sustain him under all his heavy afflictions, but at the resignation (not to say philosophy) with which he bears them every one. His struggles to earn his own living (notwithstanding his physical incapacity even to put the victuals to his mouth after he has earned them), are instances of a nobility of pride that are I believe without a parallel. The poor creature’s legs and arms are completely withered; indeed he is scarcely more than head and trunk. His thigh I hardly thicker than a child’s wrist. His hands are bent inward from contraction of the sinews, the fingers being curled up and almost as thin as the claws of a bird’s foot. He is unable even to stand, and cannot move from place to place but on his knees, which are shod with leather caps, like the heels of a clog, strapped round the joint; the soles of his boots are on the upper leathers, that being the part always turned towards the ground while he is crawling along. His countenance is rather handsome than otherwise; the intelligence indicated by his ample forehead is fully borne out by the testimony as to his sagcity in his business, and the mild expression of his eye by the statements as to his feeling for all others in affliction. “I sell nutmeg-graters<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> and funnels,' said the cripple to me; “I sell them at 1d. and 1½ d. a piece.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> I get mine of the man in whose house I live. He is a tinman, and makes for the street trade and shops and all. I pay 7d. a dozen for them, and I get 12d. or 18d. a dozen, if I can when I sell them, but mostly I get a penny a piece—it’s quite a chance if I have a customer at 1½ d. Some days I sell only three—some days not one—though I’m out from ten o’clock till six. The most I ever took was 2s. 6d. in a day. Some weeks I hardly clear my expenses—and they’re between 7s. and 8s. a week; for not being able to dress and ondress myself, I’m obligated to pay some one to do it for me—I think I don’t clear more than 7s. a week take one week with another. When I don’t make that much, I go without—sometimes friends who are kind to me give me a trifle, or else I should starve. […] When I do very well I have three meals a day, but it’s oftener only two—breakfast and supper—unless of Sunday. On a wet day when I can’t get out, I often go without food. I may have a bit of bread and butter give me, but that’s all—then I lie a-bed. I feel miserable enough when I see the rain come down of a week day, I can tell you. Ah, it is very miserable indeed lying in bed all day, and in a lonely room, without perhaps a person to come near one—helpless as I am—and hear the rain beat against the windows, and all that without nothing to put in your lips. I’ve done that over and over again where I lived before; but where I live now I’m more comfortable like. My breakfast is mostly bread and butter and tea; and my supper, bread and butter and tea with a bit of fish, or a small bit of meat. What my landlord and landlady has I share with them. I never break my fast from the time I go out in the morning till I come home—unless it is a halfpenny orange I buy in the street; I do that when I feel faint. I have only been selling in the streets since this last winter. I was in the workhouse with a fever all the summer. I was destitute afterwards, and obliged to begin selling in the streets. The Guardians<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> gave me 5s. to get stock. I had always dealt in tin ware, so I knew where to go to buy my things. It’s very hard work indeed is street-selling for such as me. I can’t walk no distance. I suffer a great deal of pains in my back and knees. Sometimes I go in a barrow, when I’m traveling any great way. When I go only a short way a crawl along on my knees and toes. The most I’ve ever crawled is two miles. When I get home afterwards, I’m in great pain. My knees swell dreadfully, and they’re all covered with blisters, and my toes ache awful. I’ve corns all on top of them. “Often after I’ve been walking, my limbs and back ache so badly that I can get no sleep. Across my lines it feels as if I’d got some great weight, and my knees are in a heat, and throb, and feel as if a knife was running into them. When I go up-stairs I have to crawl upon the backs of my hands and my knees. I can’t lift nothing to my mouth. The sinews of my hands is all contracted. I am obliged to have things held to my lipe for me to drink, like a child. I can use a knife and fork by leaning my arm on the table and then stooping my head to it. I can’t wash nor ondress myself. Sometimes I think of my helplessness a great deal. The thoughts of it used to throw me into fits at one time—very bad. It’s the Almighty’s will that I am so, and I must abide by it. People says, as they passes me in the streets, ‘Poor fellow, it’s a shocking thing;’ but very seldom they does any more than pity me; some lays out half a-penny or a penny with me, but most of ‘em goes on about their business. Persons looks at me a good bit when I go into a strange place. I do feel it very much, that I haven’ the power to get my living or to do a thing for myself, but I never begged for nothing. I’d sooner starve than I ‘d do that. I never thought that people whom God had given the power to help theirselves ought to help me. I have thought that I’m as I am—obliged to on my hands and knees, from no fault of my own. Often I’ve done that, and I’ve over and over again laid in bed and wondered why the Almighty should send me into this world in such a state; often I’ve done that on a wet day, with nothing to eat, and no friend to come a-nigh me. When I’ve gone along the streets, too, and been in pain, I’ve thought, as I’ve seen the people pass straight up, with all the use of their limbs, and some of them the biggest blackguards, cussing and swearing, I’ve thought, Why should I be deprived of the use of mine? and I’ve felt angry like, and perhaps at that moment I couldn’t ring my mind to believe the Almighty was so good and merciful as I’d heard say; but then in a minute or two afterwards I’ve prayed to Him to make me better and happier in the next world. I’ve always been led to think He’s afflicted me as He has for some wise purpose or another that I can’t see. I think as mine is so hard a life in this world, I shall be better off in the next. Often when I couldn’t afford to pay a boy, I’ve not had m boots off for four or five nights and days, nor my clothes neither. Give me the world I couldn’t take them off myself, and then my feet has swollen to that degree that I’ve been nearly mad with pain, and I’ve been shivering and faint, but still I was obliged to go out with my things; if I hadn’t I should have starved. Such as I am can’t afford to be ill—it’s only rich folks as can lay up, not we; for us to take to our beds is to go without food altogether […] Mother was a cook in a nobleman’s family when I were born. They say as I was a love-child. I was not brought up by mother, but by one of her fellow-servants. Mother’s intellects was so weak, that she couldn’t have me with her. She used to fret a good deal about me, so her fellow-servant took me when she got married. After I were born, mother married a farmer in middling circumstances. They tell me as my mother was frightened afore I was born. I never knew my father. He went over to Buonos Ayres, and kept a hotel there—I’ve heard mother say as much. No mother couldn’t love a child more than mine did me, but her feelings was such she couldn’t bear to see me. I never went to mother’s to live, but was brought up by the fellow servant as I’ve told you of. Mother allowed her 30l a-year. I was with her till two years back. She was always very kind to me—treated me like one of her own. Mother used to come and see me about once a-year—sometimes not so often; she was very kind to me then. Oh, yes; I used to like to see her very much. Whatever I wished for she’d let me have; if I wrote to her, she always sent me what I wanted. I was very comfortable then. Mother died four years ago; when I lost her I fell into a fit—I was told of it all of a sudden. She and the party as I was brought up with was the only friends as I had in the world—the only persons as cared anything about a creature like me. […] I have still some relations living, and they are well to do, but, being a cripple, they despise me. My aunt, my mother’s sister, is married to a builder, in Petersham, near Richmond—having some houses of their own besides a good business. I have got a boy to wheel me down on a barrow to them, and asked assistance of them, but they will have nothing to do with me. They won’t look at me for my affliction. Six months ago they gave me half-a-crown. I had no lodgings nor victuals then; and that I shouldn’t have had from them had I not said I was starving and must go to the parish. This winter I went to them, and they shut the door in my face. […] I can, indeed, solemnly say, that there is nothing else against me, and that I strive hard and crawl about till my limbs ache enough to drive me mad, to get an honest livelihood. With a couple of pounds I could, I think, manage to shift very well for myself. I’d get a stock, and go into the country with a barrow, and buy old metal, and exchange tin ware for old clothes, and, with that, I’m almost sure I could get a decent living. I’m accounted a very good dealer.” <h3>Notes</h3> <div><div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Grated nutmeg featured not only sweet dishes where one might expect it such as Christmas plum pudding, bread and butter pudding or punch, but, according to <a href="http://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/b/beeton/isabella/household/">Mrs. Beeton’s recipes</a>, grated nutmeg was essential to savoury dishes such as fowl or chicken pie, eel pie, and potted ham </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> British currency was not decimalized until 1971. It was divided up into pounds (£) shillings (s or l, there were twenty shillings in a pound) and pennies (d). See Marje Bloy, “<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/currency.html">British Currency before 1971</a>” The Victorian Web. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> After the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, before which relief or alms were given out at the discretion of the parish, paupers were forced to seek relief in workhouses, which meant that they had to live in an institution and work in order to gain relief. See Peter Higganbotham, <a href="http://www.workhouses.org.uk/">The Workhouse</a>, <http://www.workhouses.org.uk/> </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Crippled Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters Description An account of the resource Journalist Henry Mayhew (1812-1887) began publishing his vast collection of interviews and observations on London street life in the mid-century, in the newspaper the Morning Chronicle in 1849. When the newspaper collapsed in 1850, Mayhew continued his interviews, often with the help of collaborators, and bound numbers of the work in-progress were issued from 1851-1852. In 1861-62 he collected all his work in three volumes, with a fourth volume mainly written by others added later, under the title London Labour and the London Poor (<a title="Review of London Labour" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/history/work/abanerjee1.html" target="_blank">A. Banjaree</a>). Many of the London street people that Mayhew interviewed were ill or disabled; his interviews offer a rare account of how lower class people with disabilities were seen, and how they saw themselves. In the excerpt below of his interview with the “crippled street-seller of nutmeg-graters,” Mayhew attempts to establish the nutmeg-grater seller as one of the “honest poor” rather than a begging imposter. He prefaces his account of the crippled street-seller with a disquisition on the difference between those who use street-selling as a excuse for begging, and those who are honestly trying to make a living through selling their wares, and ends it by reprinting letters from those who know him swearing to his honesty and sobriety. Most of the text is a report of the street-seller’s own account of his life, in his own words. Martha Stoddard Holmes argues that there is a tension between Mayhew’s melodramatic framing of the cripple’s story and the nutmeg-grater’s own account of himself, which is straightforward to the point of being anti-melodramatic (138). The nutmeg-grater cannot walk, and speaks of the practicalities of paying a boy to wheel him around in a barrow, and to dress and undress him. He once owned a shop but lost it through customers who did not pay for their wares, and has been in the workhouse, but avers that he would rather die on the streets than die a pauper. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Mayhew, Henry Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor; A Cyclopaedia of the Condition and Earnings of those that will work, those that cannot work, and those that will not work Vol. 1. The London Street-Folk. London: Office, 16, Upper Wellington Street, Strand, 1851. Pages 329-332. Available online at <a title="London Labour and the London Poor" href="http://archive.org/details/londonlabourand00mayhgoog" target="_blank">archive.org</a> through Google Books. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1851 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The illustration shows the seller of nutmeg graters on his knees on the street. He wears a sign reading "I was born a cripple" and has nutmeg graters strung on his body. 'The Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters' from a Daguerreotype by Beard. Image courtesy <a title="Mayhew on Victorian London" href="http://www.victorianlondon.org/mayhew/mayhew-street-characters.htm" target="_blank">Victorian London</a> under a Creative Commons License. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Banerjee,<a title="Banjaree Review" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/history/work/abanerjee1.html" target="_blank"> A. Review of Robert Douglas-Fairhurst's Selected Edition of Henry Mayhew's London Labour and the London Poor.</a> </li> <li>Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> <li>Mayhew, Henry. London Labour and the London Poor. Ed. Robert Douglas-Fairhurst. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. [Contains a shorter extract of "The Crippled Street-Seller of Nutmeg Graters."]</li> </ul> Class Henry Mayhew Journalism life writing Masculinity Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/575f6f2bdd8657306182d472178086e6.jpg b8d973c68cb81d3baaaf9d48cc6265bf Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “I first saw the light on the 5th of August, 1860, I was born in Lee Street, Wharf Street, Leicester. The deformity which I am now exhibiting was caused by my mother being frightened by an Elephant; my mother was going along the street when a procession of Animals were passing by, there was a terrible crush of people to see them, and unfortunately she was pushed under the Elephant's feet, which frightened her very much; this occurring during a time of pregnancy was the cause of my deformity. The measurement around my head is 36 inches, there is a large substance of flesh at the back as large as a breakfast cup, the other part in a manner of speaking is like hills and valleys, all lumped together, while the face is such a sight that no one could describe it. The right hand is almost the size and shape of an Elephant's foreleg, measuring 12 inches round the wrist and 5 inches round one of the fingers; the other hand and arm is no larger than that of a girl ten years of age, although it is well proportioned. My feet and legs are covered with thick lumpy skin, also my body, like that of an Elephant, and almost the same colour, in fact, no one would believe until they saw it, that such a thing could exist. It was not perceived much at birth, but began to develop itself when at the age of 5 years. I went to school like other children until I was about 11 or 12 years of age, when the greatest misfortune of my life occurred, namely - the death of my mother, peace to her, she was a good mother to me; after she died my father broke up his home and went to lodgings; unfortunately for me he married his landlady; henceforth I never had one moment's comfort, she having children of her own, and I not being so handsome as they, together with my deformity, she was the means of making my life a perfect misery; lame and deformed as I was, I ran, or rather walked away from home two or three times, but suppose father had some spark of parental feeling left, so he induced me to return home again. The best friend I had in those days was my father's brother, Mr. Merrick, hair Dresser, Church Gate, Leicester. When about 13 years old, nothing would satisfy my step-mother until she got me out to work; I obtained employment at Messrs. Freeman's Cigar Manufacturers, and worked there about two years, but my right hand got too heavy for making cigars, so I had to leave them. I was sent about the town to see if I could procure work, but being lame and deformed no one would employ me; when I went home for my meals, my step-mother used to say I had not been to seek for work. I was taunted and sneered at so that I would not go home for my meals, and used to stay in the streets with an hungry belly rather than return for anything to eat, what few half-meals I did have, I was taunted with the remark – ‘That's more than you have earned.’ Being unable to get employment my father got me a pedlar's license to hawk the town, but being deformed, people would not come to the door to buy my wares. In consequence of my ill luck my life was again made a misery to me, so that I again ran away and went hawking on my own account, but my deformity had grown to such an extent, so that I could not move about the town without having a crowd of people gather around me. I then went into the infirmary at Leicester, where I remained for two or three years, when I had to undergo an operation on my face, having three or four ounces of flesh cut away; so thought I, I'll get my living by being exhibited about the country. Knowing Mr. Sam Torr, Gladstone Vaults, Wharf Street, Leicester, went in for Novelties, I wrote to him, he came to see me, and soon arranged matters, recommending me to Mr. Ellis, Bee-hive Inn, Nottingham, from whom I received the greatest kindness and attention. In making my first appearance before the public, who have treated me well -- in fact I may say I am as comfortable now as I was uncomfortable before. I must now bid my kind readers adieu.” Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The story of Joseph Carey Merrick began in 1862, when he was born to Mary Jane and Joseph Merrick of Leicester, but the story of the Elephant Man did not start until several years later. It was when he was a toddler that tumours first appeared on Merrick's body. They continued to grow and multiply throughout his short life, the result of what is now generally understood to be <a title="Proteus Syndrome" href="http://ghr.nlm.nih.gov/condition/proteus-syndrome" target="_blank">Proteus Syndrome</a>. Without modern surgical treatment, the condition eventually became so severe that it made a normal life impossible. As the autobiographical pamphlet above states, Merrick found a means of supporting himself by joining travelling 'freak shows', displaying his deformity to the public under the stage name of The Elephant Man. While touring, Merrick composed – albeit possibly with the help of an external writer – the above statement as part of a pamphlet to be distributed to crowds at each exhibition. He later attained fame of a different sort through his relationship with Dr. Frederick Treves, whose reports to the Pathological Society of London made him a medical curiosity. Similarly, F.C. Carr Gomm, chairman of the London Hospital, sent letters to The Times requesting charitable donations to cover the cost of Merrick’s residence there in the final years of his life, and these appeals saw the former sideshow performer faced with an entirely new audience of upper-class benefactors comprised of some celebrities and even royalty. As a result of the spectacular career pressed upon him, scholarly discussions about Merrick’s life and experiences tend to take place within frameworks focused on freakery or nineteenth century medicine rather than a wider perspective of disability history. It’s perhaps significant that most critical approaches centre on the many second-hand accounts of his life. Treves’ reports and his own autobiographical The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences, Carr Gomm’s letters, even accounts in the diaries of those who visited Merrick while at the London Hospital: these typically combine with official documents to form the basis on which contemporary scholars analyse Merrick. Primarily, these second-hand accounts present confused attempts to define Merrick as ‘other’, whether other-as-object or other-as-martyr. In most accounts he becomes both, and yet he is neither. Merrick is other, and yet he is also human; more accurately, he is the realization of the other within humanity, and the reflection of the limitations of binaries and boundaries which define humanity in opposition to the other. But while the contemporary accounts that refer to Merrick struggle with this reflection, the one account which at first glance seems most to struggle, Merrick’s own autobiography, in fact offers a more complete acceptance of his redefined humanity. Despite debate over the authorship of the statement in this pamphlet, I refer to it as an autobiography because I find no evidence to convince me otherwise; Merrick was literate, and there is no concrete evidence that the pamphlet was composed by anyone else, although he may have had help with the physical act of writing. That said, confusion as to the author is understandable given the strange narrative voice that characterises the autobiography. In their critical exploration of Merrick’s narrative construction, Peter Graham and Fritz Oehlschlaeger note that the persistent detachment of the statement “might plausibly be ascribed either to an external writer... or to Merrick's own distinguishing between his essence and the misshapen 'thing' that was his body” (13). However, to explore Merrick’s written experience as a means of understanding his own perspective on his “essence” and his “body”, it helps to consider the way in which the autobiographical pamphlet can be considered a piece of disability writing, and to examine this voice in relation to those which speak about Merrick. Mark Mossman explores the function of disability writing in relation to the disabled persons’ construction or definition of selfhood; he describes how disability writing “attempts to reclaim ownership of the body and the way the body is understood” by spinning the body’s inherent instability into “the articulation of a volitional mode of selfhood” (7). For Mossman, “writing disability becomes an empowering act of control, a deconstructive critical strategy that attempts to break down oppressive and imprisoning cultural construction… the performance and general representation of disability is re-centered, re-focused on the disabled subject itself” (7-8). At first glance, it would appear that Merrick’s autobiography does not constitute “an empowering act of control” or a “deconstructive critical strategy,” given that Merrick seems to describe himself within the confines of stereotypes imposed on him by Treves and others. Merrick emphasises his own otherness by referring to his right hand as “almost the size and shape of an Elephant's [sic] foreleg,” and to himself as an impossible “thing”, informing readers that “no one would believe until they saw it, that such a thing could exist.” The way that Merrick both distances and owns his body throughout his autobiography also seems not to fit under the heading of disability writing, which Mossman asserts attempts to reclaim ownership of the body. Merrick’s narrative alternates between the use “the” and “my” when referring to his body: “my head is 36 inches”, “the face is such a sight that no one could describe it”, “the right hand”, “my feet and legs”, “my body”, “my deformity.” While these fluctuations and the images of otherness that Merrick employs could be seen as an inability to reclaim his body or as evidence of an external writer, they can also be interpreted another way. Merrick describes his body as both part of his subjectivity, claiming his embodied experience as a fundamental part of his humanity, and at the same time realizing his body as an object. His language throughout this passage reflects a subjectivity like that outlined by Ruth Robbins, in which “we are not only subjective selves... but also objective selves - selves with a material presence in the world, selves with bodies that may in fact be subject to actions and forces that we cannot control, which are in fact the objects of the actions and desires... of others” (8-9). From this perspective, then, Merrick is not hesitating or unable to reclaim his body; he is in fact claiming ownership of his body as intertwined with his subjectivity and as distanced object. In short, he is claiming ownership of his body in a way that those whose bodies conform to the strictures of “normal” humanity cannot do, at least, not comfortably. Understanding Merrick’s autobiography as a method of reclaiming his body and his embodied subjectivity brings it more in line with disability narratives. However, rather than simply “deflect[ing]and displac[ing] the powerful gaze of the ‘norm’” (Mossman 8), Merrick’s autobiography calls the very nature of the ‘norm’ into question. The accounts written about him by others attempt to divide him into the bodily other and the human spirit, but Merrick’s autobiography denies this separation, and brings his body and his spirit together into one lived experience. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Merrick, Joseph Carey. “The Autobiography of Joseph Carey Merrick.” In Michael Howell and Peter Ford, The True History of the Elephant Man, 3rd Edition. 173-174. London: Penguin Books Ltd., 1980, 1992. (Available online at <a href="http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/autobioMerrick.pdf">http://www4.ncsu.edu/~leila/documents/autobioMerrick.pdf</a>) Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource c. 1884 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ally Crockford Relation A related resource <ul><li> Evans, Jonathan. Treves and the Elephant Man. Compiled by Jonathan Evans. Loughton, Essex: Metloc Printers, 2003. </li> <li> Montagu, Ashley. The Elephant Man: A Study in Human Dignity. London: Allison & Busby Ltd, 1972. </li> <li> Mossman, Mark. “Acts of Becoming: Autobiography, Frankenstein, and the Postmodern Body.” Postmodern Culture 11, no. 3 (May 2001). </li> <li> Robbins, Ruth. Subjectivity. Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave MacMillan, 2005. </li> <li> Treves, Sir Frederick. The Elephant Man and Other Reminiscences. London: Cassell & Company Ltd, 1923. (Available at: <a href="http://archive.org/details/elephantmanother00trevuoft">http://archive.org/details/elephantmanother00trevuoft</a>) </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Carte de visite photograph of Joseph Carey Merrick. Image Courtesy <a title="Merrick" href="http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File%3AJoseph_Merrick_carte_de_visite_photo%2C_c._1889.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons</a> under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Joseph Carey Merrick, ‘The Elephant Man’ Autobiographical pamphlet Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Merrick, Joseph Carey Language A language of the resource English Celebrity freakery life writing Medicine https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/b3aa732d8ec9ce789862a1e948ee4838.jpg b2374c8406bda4e065580da083121674 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 711 Height 1035 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Millais's oil painting shows a blind musician and her sister resting on the roadside after a storm. Green hills and pasture make up the middleground, a double rainbow and a town can be seen in the distance. Millais, John Everett. The Blind Girl. 1856. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Still Image A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Tag Items with this tag should be included in the timeline cognition Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Blind Girl Description An account of the resource <div> <a title="Millais Bio" href="http://www.bmagic.org.uk/people/John+Everett+Millais" target="_blank">John Everett Millais</a>’s (1829-1896) The Blind Girl (1856) shows a blind musician with a concertina in her lap, and a little girl, presumed to be her sister, resting on the roadside after a rainstorm. They are on their way toward Winchelsea, whose church appears on the hill-top in the background (Flint 75). With its idyllic rural landscape, this <a title="Pre-Raphaelite at Birmingham" href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/" target="_blank">pre-Raphalite</a> painting presents a more romanticized version of the life of a blind beggar than its contemporary, Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor. Millais’s painting draws on a long Christian tradition of reading blind people as both blessed and afflicted by their lack of sight: while the blind may face practical difficulties in navigating a world set up for the sighted, as well as missing out on visual pleasures, as people less enmeshed in the material world, they may closer to the spiritual world and to God. This tension between the material and the spiritual is reflected in the painting itself, which is an object of visual pleasure but also a reminder to the viewer, with its autumnal setting, of the decay of this world and the importance of the next world. The little girl acts as both an interpreter of the scene for the blind girl and a stand-in for the viewer, who appreciates the double rainbow that the blind girl cannot see. Meanwhile, the blind girl’s upturned face and partially closed eyes suggest that she is contemplating higher things while resting and enjoying the sunshine. The forget-me-nots in the lower left-hand corner act as a reminder to the viewer not to forget, and perhaps hint at the cruelty of the blind girl’s lost ability to see them in bloom (Flint 75). The viewer is thus encouraged to both pity the blind girl and appreciate her spirituality. Kate Flint argues that the painting “may be seen as a contribution to a developing discourse which set the visibility and the epistemological certainties of the material, industrial world, blindly self-regarding in its own pride in its achievements, against the higher worth of divine illumination” (82). </div> <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Millais, John Everett Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Millais's oil painting shows a blind musician and her sister resting on the roadside after a storm. Green hills and pasture make up the middleground, a double rainbow and a town can be seen in the distance. Millais, John Everett. The Blind Girl. 1856. <a title="Birmingham Museum, The Blind Girl" href="http://www.bmagic.org.uk/objects/1892P3" target="_blank">Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery</a>. Web. August 2012. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1856 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource The Blind Girl (1856) by John Everett Millais. Image in the public domain courtesy of <a title="wikimedia the Blind Girl" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millais-Blind_Girl.jpg" target="_blank">Wikimedia Commons.</a> Relation A related resource <ul><li>Flint, Kate. The Victorians and the Visual Imagination. New York: Cambridge UP, 2000.</li> <li>Birmingham Museums and Art Gallery. <a title="Pre-Raphaelites" href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/" target="_blank">Pre-Raphaelite Online Resource</a>. <<a href="http://www.preraphaelites.org/">http://www.preraphaelites.org/</a>> </li> </ul> Blindness Class John Everett Millais Painting Visual Culture https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/681c4799c738f2a09e88e9334bc7738c.jpg 9e3c71dfb90abb524079ee9eb15a8d32 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 795 Height 400 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:V0048744 An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muy headline:V0048744 An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridg caption:V0048744 An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridg Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. 1887 By: Eadweard Muybridge and University of Pennsylvania.Published: 1887 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:"V0048744 An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muy";s:8:"headline";s:69:"V0048744 An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridg";s:7:"caption";s:439:"V0048744 An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridg Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk An amputee on crutches. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. 1887 By: Eadweard Muybridge and University of Pennsylvania.Published: 1887 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 In a series of photographs presented in a table with three columns and twelve rows, a naked man who is missing one foot walks on crutches. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/0b12d75567f6e0ba28e58a1a8d2ede97.jpg ec9ad0500e9c4448cadf23fc46e2f63d 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 788 Height 286 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:V0048745 A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending fro headline:V0048745 A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a c caption:V0048745 A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a c Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a chair and moving. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. 1887 By: Eadweard Muybridge and University of Pennsylvania.Published: 1887 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:"V0048745 A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending fro";s:8:"headline";s:69:"V0048745 A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a c";s:7:"caption";s:492:"V0048745 A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a c Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a chair and moving. Photogravure after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. 1887 By: Eadweard Muybridge and University of Pennsylvania.Published: 1887 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 In a series of black and white photographs presented in a table with three rows and four columns, a disabled child crawls on and off a chair. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/256b4df7d4b118277568f467a48e5455.jpg d101bfd0e729b8a45e2f2956efa01e40 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. 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Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Deformed child walking on arms and legs. 1887 By: University of Pennsylvania. and Eadweard MuybridgeAnimal locomotion Eadweard James Muybridge Published: 1887 Printed: 1887) 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:54:"L0015804 Muybridge "Animal locomotion"; deformed child";s:8:"headline";s:54:"L0015804 Muybridge "Animal locomotion"; deformed child";s:7:"caption";s:454:"L0015804 Muybridge "Animal locomotion"; deformed child Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk Deformed child walking on arms and legs. 1887 By: University of Pennsylvania. and Eadweard MuybridgeAnimal locomotion Eadweard James Muybridge Published: 1887 Printed: 1887) 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 In a series of photographs with three rows and four columns, a disabled child crawls. His ribs are visible and he crawls on his feet rather than on his knees. In some of the photographs he smiles. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/f59c80a96337e730fa87f0ada60f8c82.jpg 41033c53a1844abb8a296378b2240955 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 635 Height 375 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:L0050336 A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking headline:L0050336 A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with caption:L0050336 A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with a nurse. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. One of 781 collotypes which form Eadweard Muybridge\'s magnum opus, Animal locomotion, 1887. This work originated in an attempt to settle the argument which arose in 1871 between Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and Robert Bonner, owner of the New York Ledger, as to whether a trotting horse ever had all four feet off the ground at once. Both men were prepared to enter the controversy fully and to contribute ideas and practical means to prove his side of the argument. Muybridge\'s solution was to photograph each stage in the trot of a horse called Occident owned by Stanford. Some of Muybridge\'s photographs did appear to show Occident with all four of his feet lifted at the same time clear of the ground. The research and photography for Animal Locomotion was carried out for the University of Pennsylvania in 1884-1885, using and improving the techniques developed in the 1870s. Of the 781 plates, 95 were devoted to the horse and 124 to other animals. The other 562 are devoted to men, women, and children, nude, semi-nude, and draped, walking, running, dancing, getting up and lying down, wrestling, boxing, leaping, etc. For further information see G. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybrige, London 1975, and R.B. Haas, Muybridge: man in motion, Berkeley 1976 Plate to: E. Muybridge, Animal locomotion, Philadelphia 1887, plate 541 1887 By: University of Pennsylvania. and Eadweard MuybridgePublished: 1887 Printed: 1887) 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:"L0050336 A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking ";s:8:"headline";s:68:"L0050336 A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with";s:7:"caption";s:1860:"L0050336 A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images images@wellcome.ac.uk http://images.wellcome.ac.uk A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with a nurse. Collotype after Eadweard Muybridge, 1887. One of 781 collotypes which form Eadweard Muybridge\'s magnum opus, Animal locomotion, 1887. This work originated in an attempt to settle the argument which arose in 1871 between Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, and Robert Bonner, owner of the New York Ledger, as to whether a trotting horse ever had all four feet off the ground at once. Both men were prepared to enter the controversy fully and to contribute ideas and practical means to prove his side of the argument. Muybridge\'s solution was to photograph each stage in the trot of a horse called Occident owned by Stanford. Some of Muybridge\'s photographs did appear to show Occident with all four of his feet lifted at the same time clear of the ground. The research and photography for Animal Locomotion was carried out for the University of Pennsylvania in 1884-1885, using and improving the techniques developed in the 1870s. Of the 781 plates, 95 were devoted to the horse and 124 to other animals. The other 562 are devoted to men, women, and children, nude, semi-nude, and draped, walking, running, dancing, getting up and lying down, wrestling, boxing, leaping, etc. For further information see G. Hendricks, Eadweard Muybrige, London 1975, and R.B. Haas, Muybridge: man in motion, Berkeley 1976 Plate to: E. Muybridge, Animal locomotion, Philadelphia 1887, plate 541 1887 By: University of Pennsylvania. and Eadweard MuybridgePublished: 1887 Printed: 1887) 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 In a series of black and white photographs, a naked woman with an orthopaedic disability walks with the aid of a clothed attendant. The photographs are presented in a table with three rows and twelve columns. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Still Image A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Original Format If the image is of an object, state the type of object, such as painting, sculpture, paper, photo, and additional data Photograph 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 Animal Locomotion Description An account of the resource In 1887, <a title="Wikipedia Muybridge Entry" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eadweard_Muybridge" target="_blank">Eadweard Muybridge</a> (1830-1904), the American photographer, published Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movement, an eleven-volume collection of photographs of instantaneous or consecutive movement. It features photographs of ‘abnormal movement,’ including: An amputee on crutches, <a title="Wellcome Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185959" target="_blank">plate 537</a>; A double amputee climbing on to a chair, descending from a chair and moving, <a title="Wellcome Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185960" target="_blank">plate 538</a>; Deformed child walking on arms and legs,<a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1658436" target="_blank"> plate 539</a>; A girl with multiple cerebral-spinal sclerosis walking with a nurse, <a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185962" target="_blank">plate 541</a>. Figures were photographed without clothes, allowing for the unobstructed scrutiny of their bodies, and in front of grids, which invited viewers to treat the pictures as scientific studies. In Animal Locomotion, Muybridge arranged his photographs according to a hierarchy, with male and female nudes presented in the first volumes, followed by draped males and females, then children. Volume 8, which was devoted to the abnormal movements of males, females and children, appeared ahead of photographs of animals, domestic and wild. By arranging the photographs in this way, Muybridge positioned those with disabilities lower than those with ‘healthy’ bodies and just above animals. He also included photographs of athletes, which juxtaposed his photographs of the disabled, in turn reflecting late nineteenth-century conceptions of health and beauty, which proved especially relevant for artists and scientists of the day. Muybridge is considered to be an important figure in the history of photography and cinema. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Muybridge, Eadweard Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1887 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Keren Hammerschlag Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Four series of photographs, each with between twelve and forty five frames, show people with disabilities, naked, in various stages of locomotion.  There is a man on crutches walking, a man with no legs getting on and off a chair, a disabled child crawling, and a woman with an orthopaedic disability walking with the aid of a clothed attendant.  Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements.  Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://images.wellcome.ac.uk/" target="_blank">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (<a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185959" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 28116</a>i; <a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185960" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 28117i</a>; <a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185961" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 28118i</a>; and <a title="Wellcome Library Catalogue" href="http://catalogue.wellcomelibrary.org/record=b1185962" target="_blank">Wellcome Library no. 28119i</a>). Relation A related resource <ul> <li>Eadweard Muybridge, Animal Locomotion: An Electro-Photographic Investigation of Consecutive Phases of Animal Movements. 1872-1885. 11 vols., 781 plates. Philadelphia: University of Pennslyvania, 1887.</li> <li>Philip Brookman, with contributions by Martha Braun, Andy Grundberg, Corey Keller, Rebecca Solnit, Eadweard Muybridge, exhibition catalogue, London: Tate Publishing, 2010.</li> <li>Eadweard Muybridge:  Defining Modernities. Kingston University and Kingston Museum, UK.  <a title="Eadweard Muybridge Site" href="http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/" target="_blank">http://www.eadweardmuybridge.co.uk/</a></li> </ul> Childhood Eadweard Muybridge Invalidism Mobility Photography Visual Culture https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/cd07918c6f0f82a422b73c24f001ba6e.jpeg 99d2438f56b35820b9b03f6c8d86386e Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 280 Height 430 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource This black and white photograph shows a young woman holding Rhodes’ Audiphone to her mouth, c.1926. Courtesy of The Central Institute for the Deaf-Max A. Goldstein Historic Devices for Hearing Collection. Becker Medical Library, Washington University School of Medicine. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. The mute will feel the influence of the sound on his hand in the instructor's throat, imitate it in his own throat, will hear the speaker's voice on the Audiphone and will be aided in imitating the speaker by seeing his lips, and will also hear his own voice on the Audiphone, and readily learn to speak. It is remarkable how rapidly they learn to distinguish words by sound. In a very short time, they have learned to repeat whole sentences spoken to them while blindfolded. It is believed that every mute child may hear and learn to speak by using the Audiphone. It must be borne in mind, however, that a mute who has never heard has no conception of the meaning of the simplest words. Even though he be very intelligent and highly educated, read and write fluently, and interpret language readily by the motion of the speaker's lips, still he will not understand the most elementary sound until he is taught. He is familiar with visible, but knows nothing of articulate, language. At first, if you ask him to intimate whether or not he hears by means of the Audiphone, he may indicate that he feels a peculiar sensation that is new to him. It will not be long, however, until he realizes that what seemed to him feeling we call sound. Parents and teachers of mutes are, therefore, recommended to begin with the rudiments of language, as in teaching a child of two years. Mutes enjoy music from the first. A piano or organ should be used daily in their early training, at first resting the handle of the Audiphone on the instrument. Start and stop the music at intervals, until they realize the difference. Then they may withdraw from the piano and gradually accustom themselves to the new sensation. Faithful and patient practice, repeating over and over again the vowels and other simple sounds day after day, must be the ground-work of the mute's articulate education. To expect him to understand the first sounds that reach his brain is like asking the child in the A B C class to read Bacon or Shakspeare [sic]. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource The Audiphone Description An account of the resource On September 1879, Richard Silas Rhodes (1842-1902), president of a publishing company in Chicago, received a patent for his “Audiphone for the Deaf” his various improvements to the device. (<a>U.S. Patent No. 319,828</a>). Rhodes had conductive hearing loss<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> for twenty years following a bout of illness and was frustrated with his continuous failed encounters with ear trumpets. He observed he could hear the ticking of his watch when he held it in his mouth, and this inspired his construction of the Audiphone, which exploited the fact sound waves can be transmitted through the teeth or cranial bones. Hearing through bone conduction by using a material to transmit external sound through the jaw or teeth is an ancient notion, with references to its use dating back to the Ancient Greeks. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, some scholars observed sounds could be heard at a distance upon placing a rod on the ground and holding the other end to the teeth. Physicians, educators, and even deaf individuals experimented with a variety of materials, such as wood, to figure out which objects best could transmit sound from a vibrating source (Mills 143; Goldstein 345). The Audiphone was made of a flexible sheet of polished black vulcanite (hardened rubber), with a handle, and was constructed in the shape of a fan. It was 24cm wide 27.7cm long, and 1mm thick. Another model was later constructed consisting of two leaves, designed so the user could also hear his or her voice. The standard model sold for $10 and the double-model sold for $15, an expensive sum at the time. For an extra charge, Rhodes would add ornamental features to disguise the instrument and make it inconspicuous as a hearing aid device. It was designed to be held loosely in the hand, with the upper edge placed under the upper teeth with slight pressure; the lower teeth should not be allowed to come into contact with the instrument (Goldstein 347). The device was effective only in conductive hearing loss. Users could improve their hearing up to 30 decibels, equivalent to a soft conversation heard a few feet away in a quiet room (for comparison, 20dB is the rustling of leaves, or whispering; 0dB is the hearing threshold). In January 1881, Rhodes received a patent for a modified version of his design, an Audiphone that folded as a fan of 10mm. The model was awarded a medal at the 1893 World’s Columbia Exposition in Chicago. In an <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout38-t13-body-d1.html">advertising pamphlet</a>, The Audiphone: A New Invention that enables the deaf to hear (1879), Rhodes remarks the Audiphone was “GOOD NEWS FOR THE DEAF,” for it enables them to hear ordinary conversation readily and was beneficial for church, lectures, concerts, plays, and so forth. Moreover, the design of the device as a fan meant the user could easily conceal their deafness if they wished, by pretending they were simply using a fan. Numerous testimonials from the United States and Europe commented on the Audiphone’s <a href="http://nzetc.victoria.ac.nz/tm/scholarly/tei-Stout38-t13-body-d3.html">acoustic capabilities</a>. The Englishman James Samuelson, for instance, purchased one in his visit to the United States in 1880, and tried it himself both in private and in public. He testifies: “It seems to me that aurists [medical specialists of the ear] and teachers of the deaf will be very much benefited by the invention: the former, through being able to use it as an instrument for diagnosis…the latter, where the child is deaf from some injury or imperfection of the mechanical portions of the auditory apparatus” (Samuelson 12). Indeed, the Audiphone was used in schools for the deaf, particularly in France, though opinions on its benefits varied. Some teachers were astounded at its ability to assist deaf children to speak, while others noted it was completely unnecessary as a pedagogical aid. Mary McCowen, for instance, who taught a class of semi-deaf children at the Nebraska School for the Deaf (est. 1869), and at the “Voice and Hearing School for the Deaf” in Chicago, remarked: “Though I began the year’s work as a most enthusiastic advocate of the audiphones, and used it conscientiously for several months, I cannot without a protest allow it to be said that the teacher of that class ascribes the success to the audiphones. I make a specialty in my work here of training the hearing, but I have thus far failed to find a single child that was really and truly helped by the audiphones” (American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb 87). Some schools in England even reported that at least twenty percent of the pupils had sufficient hearing when assisted with the audiphone, enabling them to participate more diligently in their speech-training and learning. Rhodes’ Audiphone remained a popular bone-conduction hearing instrument until the early years of the twentieth century, long after Rhodes’ unfortunate death—he was killed while walking along the Wisconsin Central Railroad tracks in Illinois (Berger 318). Various other patents and designs of the Audiphone popped up over the ears, each boasting a more efficient conduction system, a cheaper price tag, or a more revolutionary design. Some of these were quickly dismissed as nothing more than another <a href="http://select.nytimes.com/gst/abstract.html?res=F20716FE34551B7A93C6A81788D85F448884F9">“quack cure” for deafness</a>. <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Conductive hearing loss is when it is difficult for sound waves to conduct through the tympanum (the ear drum) or the middle ear, where the ossicles (three tiny bones in the ear) reside. </div> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Rhodes, Richard S. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Rhodes, Richard S. The Audiphone: A New Invention that Enables the Deaf to Hear. Chicago: Rhodes & McClure, 1879. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1881 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This black and white photograph shows a young woman holding Rhodes’ Audiphone to her mouth, c.1926. Courtesy of The Central Institute for the Deaf-Max A. Goldstein Historic Devices for Hearing Collection. <a href="http://beckerimages.wustl.edu/">Becker Medical Library</a>, Washington University School of Medicine. Relation A related resource <ul><li> Berger, Kenneth W. The Hearing Aid, it’s Operation and Development. Michigan, USA: National Hearing Aid Society, 1970. </li> <li> Berger, Kenneth W. “Early Bone Conduction Hearing Aid Devices.” Archives of Otolaryngology 102 (May 1976): 315-318. </li> <li> Murdy, Albert and Tjellstorm, Anders. “Historical Background of Bone Conduction Hearing Devices and Bone Conduction Hearing Aids.” Archives of Otorhinolaryngology 71 (2011): 1-9. </li> <li> Mills, Mara. “When Mobile Communication Technologies Were New.” Endeavour 33.4 (2009): 140-146. </li> <li> Goldstein, Max A. Problems of the Deaf. St. Louis: The Laryngoscope Press, 1933. </li> <li> Samuelson, James. “Rhodes’s Audiphone.” British Medical Journal 3.1 (1880): 12. </li> </ul> Advertisement Deafness Medicine Mobility Prosthesis Technology https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c2caabd0798887c4fad9a75192b5239b.jpg a63618238cfed20de5dcf1d79630fd34 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “All at once, I saw two figures: one a little man who was stumping along eastward at a good walk, and the other a girl of maybe eight or ten who was running as hard as she was able down a cross street. Well, sir, the two ran into one another naturally enough at the corner; and then came the horrible part of the thing; for the man trampled calmly over the child’s body and left her screaming on the ground. It sounds nothing to hear, but it was hellish to see. It wasn’t like a man; it was like some damned Juggernaut.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> I gave a view-halloa,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> took to my heels, collared my gentleman, and brought him back to where there was already quite a group about the screaming child. He was perfectly cool and made no resistance, but gave me one look, so ugly that it brought out the sweat on me like running. The people who had turned out were the girl’s own family; and pretty soon, the doctor, for whom she had been sent, put in his appearance. Well, the child was not much the worse, more frightened, according to the Sawbones;<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> and there you might have supposed would be an end to it. But there was one curious circumstance. I had taken a loathing to my gentleman at first sight. So had the child’s family, which was only natural. But the doctor’s case was what struck me. He was the usual cut and dry apothecary, of no particular age and colour, with a strong Edinburgh accent and about as emotional as a bagpipe. Well, sir, he was like the rest of us; every time he looked at my prisoner, I saw that Sawbones turn sick and white with desire to kill him. I knew what was in his mind, just as he knew what was in mine; and killing being out of the question, we did the next best. We told the man we could and would make such a scandal out of this as should make his name stink from one end of London to the other. If he had any friends or any credit, we undertook that he should lose them. And all the time, as we were pitching it in red hot, we were keeping the women off him as best we could for they were as wild as harpies. I never saw a circle of such hateful faces; and there was the man in the middle, with a kind of black, sneering coolness—frightened too, I could see that—but carrying it off, sir, really like Satan. ‘If you choose to make capital out of this accident,’ said he, ‘I am naturally helpless. No gentleman but wishes to avoid a scene,’ says he. ‘Name your figure.’ Well, we screwed him up to a hundred pounds for the child’s family; he would have clearly liked to stick out;<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> but there was something about the lot of us that meant mischief, and at last he struck. … “But for all that,” continued the lawyer, “there’s one point I want to ask: I want to ask the name of that man who walked over the child.” “Well,” said Mr. Enfield, “I can’t see what harm it would do. It was a man of the name of Hyde.” “Hm,” said Mr. Utterson. “What sort of a man is he to see?” “He is not easy to describe. There is something wrong with his appearance; something displeasing, something downright detestable. I never saw a man I so disliked, and yet I scarce know why. He must be deformed somewhere; he gives a strong feeling of deformity, although I couldn’t specify the point. He’s an extraordinary looking man, and yet I really can name nothing out of the way. No, sir; I can make no hand of it; I can’t describe him. And it’s not want of memory; for I declare I can see him this moment.” <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> “Originally a term from Hindu, in Victorian England used to denote a force that crushes people to death” (33). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> “A hunter’s cry when a fox has been sighted” (33). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> “Slang for a doctor, especially a surgeon” (33). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> To continue to negotiate for a better price. </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Robert Lois Stevenson’s “shilling-shocker” novella, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), has so thoroughly become a part of our cultural consciousness that, though not all people have read the tale, most are familiar with its title characters. One often hears the phrase “Jekyll and Hyde” applied to common temperamental behaviour and, more crudely, to types of psychiatric illness. In fact, Anne Stiles suggests that at the time of its publication, Stevenson’s depiction of one man split into two distinct persons would have born similarities to the Victorian medical concept of the “double-brained,” that is, of a dual personality caused by “a disproportionately large right brain overpowering the rational activities of the left brain” (38). While the disparate dual personalities of the title characters and the pseudo-medical transformation between them prompt medical interest, Hyde, who is thought to be a separate person from Jekyll until the last quarter of the story, and his body more directly reflect fin-de-siècle notions of disability. In Hyde, we can see both the criminalization of disability and the medicalization of crime disseminated in popular scientific theories of the time: in particular, early criminology, degeneration theory, and theories of atavism, all of which tended to argue that criminals’ bodies bore evidence of de-evolving to a primitive form of human. The novella’s narrators often describe Hyde in atavistic terms, as “troglodytic” (42), “ape-like” (42, 92), or “like a monkey” (65). In the passage below, which gives us the text’s first depiction of Hyde, a Mr Enfield describes Hyde violently injuring a child. Stevenson’s portrayal of Hyde aligns the criminal body with physicality, Hyde’s diminutive size and apparent deformity, but ambiguously does not pin down that deformity, instead making it only a suggestion, a “strong feeling” located in the observer rather than a tangible fact of Hyde’s being. The passage also notably details the violent repulsion people have to the sight of Hyde. While the various narrators of the novella presume Hyde’s inherent evil is the source of this disgust, their responses to his body align with Lennard Davis’s description of disability as “a specular moment” in which a normative-bodied observer responds to the sight of a disabled person with “horror, fear, pity, compassion, and avoidance” (12). Davis argues that these emotional responses are “a socially conditioned, politically generated response” (13); in the case of Hyde’s viewers, these responses would have been informed by popular degeneration theory. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Stevenson, Robert Louis. The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde. Ed. Martin A. Danahay. 2nd Edition. Peterborough: Broadview Press Ltd., 2005. 33-36. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1886 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kylee-Anne Hingston Relation A related resource <ul><li> Arata, Stephen D. “The Sedulous Ape: Atavism, Professionalism, and Stevenson's Jekyll and Hyde.” Criticism 37.2 (1995): 233-259. 17 Jul. 2013. Print </li> <li> Davis, Lennard. Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body. New York: Verso, 1995. Print. </li> <li> Hurley, Kelly. The Gothic Body: Sexuality, Materialism, and Degeneration at the Fin de Siècle. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996. Print. </li> <li> Schalk, Sami. “What Makes Mr. Hyde So Scary?: Disability as a Result of Evil and Cause of Fear.” Disability Studies Quarterly. 28.4 (2008): <www.dsq-sds.org> Web. </li> <li> Smith, Andrew. Victorian Demons: Masculinity and the Gothic at the Fin-De-Siècle. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2004. </li> <li> Stiles, Anne. Popular Fiction and Brain Science in the Late Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2012. Print. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This double-exposed photograph by Henry Van der Weyde depicts Richard Mansfield in the dual role of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in an early and infamous stage adaptation of Stevenson’s novella. Image in the public domain courtesy of Wikimedia Commons. Title A name given to the resource The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Robert Louis Stevenson Language A language of the resource English https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/374aedbb98b3796bed18aaa47edb59c1.png b9893c43ff89b64cb4654938a07bdca2 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 etching shows the North view of the York Retreat, a grand manor surrounded by trees. 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. The female patients in the Retreat, are employed, as much as possible, in sewing, knitting, or domestic affairs; and several of the convalescents assist the attendants. Of all the modes by which the patients may be induced to restrain themselves, regular employment is perhaps the most efficacious; and those kinds of employment are doubtless to be preferred, both on a moral and physical account, which are accompanied by considerable bodily action; that are most agreeable to the patient, and which are most opposite to the illusions of his disease. In an early part of this chapter, it is stated, that the patients are considered capable of rational and honourable inducement; and though we allowed fear a considerable place in the production of that restraint, which the patient generally exerts on his entrance into a new situation; yet the desire of esteem is considered, at the Retreat, as operating, in general, still more powerfully. This principle in the human mind, which doubtless influences, in a great degree, though often secretly, our general manners; and which with peculiar force on our introduction into a new circle of acquaintance, is found to have great influence, even over the conduct of the insane. Though it has obviously not been sufficiently powerful, to enable them entirely to resist the strong irregular tendencies of their disease; yet when properly cultivated, it leads many to struggle to conceal and overcome their deviations, within such bounds, as do not make them obnoxious to the family. This struggle is highly beneficial to the patient, by strengthening his mind, and conducing to a salutary habit of self-restraint; an object which experience points out as of the greatest importance, in the cure of insanity, by moral means. That fear is not the only motive, which operates in producing self-restraint in the minds of maniacs, is evident from its being often exercised in the presence of strangers, who are merely passing through the house; and which, I presume, can only be accounted for, from that desire of esteem, which has been stated to be a powerful motive to conduct. It is probably from encouraging the action of this principle, that so much advantage has been found in this Institution, from treating the patient as much in the manner of a rational being, as the state of his mind will possibly allow. The superintendent is particularly attentive to this point, in his conversation with the patients. He introduces such topics as he knows will most interest them to display their knowledge to the greatest advantage. If the patient is an agriculturist, he asks him questions relative to his art; and frequently consults him upon any occasion in which his knowledge may be useful. I have heard one of the worst patients in the house, who, previously to his indisposition, had been a considerable grazier, give very sensible directions for the treatment of a diseased cow. These considerations are undoubtedly very material, as they regard the comfort of insane persons; but they are of far greater importance, as they relate to the cure of the disorder. The patient feeling himself of some consequence, is induced to support it by the exertion of his reason, and by restraining those dispositions, which, if indulged, would lessen the respectful treatment he receives; or lower his character in the eyes of his companions and attendants […] To consider them at the same time both as brothers, and as mere automata; to applaud all they do right; and pity, without censuring, whatever they do wrong, requires such a habit philosophical reflection, and Christian charity, as is certainly difficult to attain […] In considering our first division of this subject, viz. the modes by which self-restraint may be induced, we have anticipated many of the means by which the comfort of this unhappy class of our fellow beings is promoted; indeed we might, without impropriety, have included all these means under our former division; since whatever tends to promote the happiness of the patient, is found to increase his desire to restrain himself, by exciting the wish not to forfeit his enjoyments; and lessening the irritation of mind, which too frequently accompanies mental derangement. The comfort of the patients is therefore considered of the highest importance, in a curative point of view. The study of the superintendents to promote it with all the assiduity of parental, but judicious attention, has been, in numerous instances, rewarded by an almost filial attachment. In their conversation with the patients, they adapt themselves to their particular weaknesses; but, at the same time, endeavour to draw them insensibly from the sorrow, or the error, which marks the disease. The female superintendent, who possesses an uncommon share of benevolent activity, and who has the chief management of the female patients, as well as of the domestic department, occasionally gives a general invitation to the patients, to a tea-party. All who attend, dress in their best clothes, and vie with each other in politeness and propriety. The best fare in provided, and the visitors are treated with the attention of strangers. The evening generally passes in the greatest harmony and enjoyment. It rarely happens that any unpleasant circumstance occurs; the patients control, in a wonderful degree, their different propensities; and the scene is at once curious, and affectingly gratifying. Some of the patients occasionally pay visits to friends in the city; and female visiters [sic.] are appointed every month, by the Committee, to pay visits to those of their own sex; to converse with them, and so propose to the superintendents, or the Committee, any improvements which may occur to them. The visiters sometimes take tea with the patients, who are much gratified with the attention of their friends, and most behave with propriety. It will be necessary here to mention, that the visits of former intimate friends, have frequently been attended with disadvantage to the patients; except when convalescence had so far advanced, as so afford a prospect of a speedy return to the bosom of society. It is, however, very certain, that as soon as reason begins to return, the conversation of judicious, indifferent persons, greatly increases the comfort; and is considered almost essential to the recovery of many patients. On this account, the convalescents of every class, are frequently introduced into the society of the rational parts of the family. They are also permitted to sit up till the usual time for the family to retire to rest, and are allowed as much liberty as their state of mind will admit. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource In 1791 a female patient, belonging to the Society of Friends, was admitted to the York Asylum. Since her family did not live nearby, they requested that their friends who lived in the city visit her. These visits were refused, and a few weeks later the patient later died in mysterious circumstances. The Quaker community were appalled and decided to found a charitable asylum which opened in 1796 under the direction of William Tuke, based on the more human principle of moral management, without the use of physical restraints. The publication in 1813 of a description of the retreat by Samuel Tuke, the grandson of the institution’s founder, quickly drew the public’s attention the plight of the insane, exposing the routine and systematic maltreatment of those incarcerated at madhouses such as the York Asylum and London’s notorious Bethlem Hospital. The description was of vital importance, leading to the establishment of a select committee in Parliament to regulate asylums in 1815. The resulting legislation, the Lunacy Acts of 1845, outlawed practices such as allowing paying members of the public to view patients, established the Lunacy Commission to inspect asylums, and required the establishment of a public asylum in every county. Tuke’s description also marked a turning point in the history of the treatment of the insane, increasing support for the moral management on which the new nineteenth-century medical discipline of psychology was largely based. The following extract emphasises the familial homeliness of the Retreat’s environment, in contrast to the prison-like conditions of previous institutions, and the use of middle-class domestic rituals, such as tea parties, to promote conformation to societal norms of gendered behaviour. Patients’ return to reason and sanity was determined to a considerable extent by their adherence to conventions like good manners, with those who did not match expectations being treated ‘like ill-disciplined children.’<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Despite the policy of non-restraint,<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Tuke acknowledges the deliberate establishment of fear of punishment in patients’ minds. This may be seen as one of the main roots of Michel Foucault’s contention that ‘the absence of constraint in the nineteenth-century asylum is not unreason liberated, but madness long since mastered.’<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> According to this influential critique of the asylum system, patients, like prisoners, no longer needed such high levels of restraint or supervision since this had been replaced by a more sinister method of control: the internalisation of restraint which amounted to the self-policing of individuals’ behaviour. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. London: HarperCollins, 1997. Page 497. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> In practice, attendants at the asylums sometimes resorted to the use of strong clothing and straitjackets to restrict patients’ movement and prevent them from ripping their clothing. In the rare cases of violent mania, patients were kept in a darkened room in solitary confinement until they became calmer. In the meantime, they could move around the room or lie in bed as they chose. Similarly rare were instances of force feeding when there was a high risk of starvation, and of strapping patients to their beds if they seemed likely to attempt suicide during the night. Tuke repeatedly stresses that such episodes were regrettable but sadly necessary in the most extreme cases. The use of chains, however, was strictly prohibited. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. Page 239. </div> </div> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1812 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Helen Goodman Relation A related resource <ul><li> Digby, Anne. Madness, Morality and Medicine: A Study of the York Retreat. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. </li> <li> Foucault, Michel. Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Translated from the French by Richard Howard. London and New York: Routledge, 2009. </li> <li> Porter, Roy. The Greatest Benefit to Mankind: A Medical History of Humanity from Antiquity to the Present. London: HarperCollins, 1997. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Frontispiece from A Description of the Retreat, an Institution Near York, for Insane Persons of the Society of Friends (1813). Courtesy of Wellcome Images under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource The York Retreat Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Samuel Tuke Language A language of the resource English Coverage The spatial or temporal topic of the resource, the spatial applicability of the resource, or the jurisdiction under which the resource is relevant 1813 Institutions Mental Illness