4 10 61 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/c24bb49345922dc355286858f26cd699.jpg 7fb7e84ea1b0218036a1aa552809b727 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Sol Eytinge, Jr. "Mrs. Clennam and Arthur Clennam" from the Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871. Scan by Philip V. Allingham. Description An account of the resource Mrs. Clennam, seated in a two-wheeled chair in her bedroom, listens to her adopted son, Arthur Clennam, speak. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Still so recoiling in her chair that her overpoised weight moved it, from time to time, a little on its wheels, and gave her the appearance of a phantom of fierce aspect gliding away from him, she interposed her left arm, bent at the elbow with the back of her hand towards her face, between herself and him, and looked at him in a fixed silence. 'In grasping at money and in driving hard bargains—I have begun, and I must speak of such things now, mother—some one may have been grievously deceived, injured, ruined. You were the moving power of all this machinery before my birth; your stronger spirit has been infused into all my father's dealings, for more than two score years. You can set these doubts at rest, I think, if you will really help me to discover the truth. Will you, mother?' He stopped in the hope that she would speak. But her grey hair was not more immoveable in its two folds, than were her firm lips. [ . . . ] There was a bell-rope hanging on the panelled wall, some two or three yards from the cabinet. By a swift and sudden action of her foot, she drove her wheeled chair rapidly back to it and pulled it violently—still holding her arm up in its shield-like posture, as if he were striking at her, and she warding off the blow. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mrs. Clennam, seated in a two-wheeled chair in her bedroom, listens to her adopted son, Arthur Clennam, speak. Sol Eytinge, Jr. "Mrs. Clennam and Arthur Clennam" from the Diamond Edition of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit. Boston: James R. Osgood, 1871. Scan by <a title="Illustration for Little Dorrit" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/eytinge/74.html">Philip V. Allingham</a>. Description An account of the resource Little Dorrit, first published in monthly installments between 1855 and 1857, is arguably Charles Dickens's most disability-focused novel. In this later and darker work, Dickens uses the trope of disability to emphasize the disease—social, economic, and otherwise—threatening to debilitate London. The language of disability pervades the text—from the educator wryly named "Mr. Cripples" to the "maimed table" and "crippled wardrobe" (53) in the Clennam household to the Clennam house itself, which appears to "[lean] on some half dozen gigantic crutches" and which ultimately collapses (46). Furthermore, there are countless references to characters with mobility impediments in various forms—from Giovanni Cavalletto's leg injury, which results from a collision with a Mail coach, to the train-like Pancks's allusion to the mobility challenges faced by men with wooden legs. These references call attention to the central figure of disability, Mrs. Clennam, who has not left her room for twelve years because of a "rheumatic affection" with "attendant debility or nervous weakness" (49) and who can only conduct business in her room because of the limited mobility afforded by her two-wheeled chair. A variety of diseases plague the cityscape—bureaucratic inefficiency, epitomized in the Circumlocution Office; a mania for credit and speculation, attested to by the fantasies of those living in Bleeding Heart Yard and whose dangers are evidenced by Mr. Merdle's life and death; the social disease of poverty, whose effects are exacerbated, rather than diminished, by England's debtors' prisons—but the one that Dickens most prominently develops through the trope of disability is the moral and religious disease embodied by Mrs. Clennam, whose vengeful ire has poisoned her familial relations and whose hard-heartedness has seemingly rendered her "stony"—as the narrator says, "she lived and died a statue" (827)—and thus immobile. Mrs. Clennam's unwillingness to forgive causes her body to become one of the many forms of prisons in the novel. To highlight her moral stagnation and rigidity, Dickens depicts her as rheumatic, with only slight mobility enabled by her wheeled chair. However, it is somewhat unclear whether Mrs. Clennam requires the use of a wheeled chair or whether it is a form of self-punishment, exacted because of her commitment to an Old Testament mode of justice. For when blackmailed by Mr. Blandois, she runs through the streets of London to secure the papers that would disclose her secret about her adopted son, Arthur Clennam. While she seems to attribute the feat to a sort of adrenaline—"This is not recovery; it is not strength; I don't know what it is" (822)—the excerpt selected here, with its reference to her "moving power" and her "swift and sudden action of her foot" (64), seems to grant Mrs. Clennam a mobility that is discordant with her bedridden state. In this excerpt we also see Mrs. Clennam raise her hand to protect herself from an imagined "blow" that might be read as her self-condemnation for her sins, which she might expiate, or at least contain, through self-imprisonment. Such a reading is troubling, to be sure, because it supposes Dickens to be using disability as a form of punishment for moral wrongs. However, it is not out of character for an author so heavily influenced by the nineteenth-century science of physiognomy to treat disability symbolically.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Despite his co-optation of disability as trope, Dickens includes in Little Dorrit a quite profound meditation on the continuum of ability.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> The narrator describes Mrs. Clennam's sickroom as the central meeting place of the "fellow travellers" who are a recurring image in the novel: "Which of the vast multitude of travellers . . . climbing the dusty hills and toiling along the weary plains, journeying by land and journeying by sea, coming and going so strangely, to meet and to act and re-act on one another, which of the host may, with no suspicion of the journey's end, be travelling surely hither?" (195). Here we see Dickens ruminating upon the suddenness with which one might arrive in the sickroom, for as the narrator says, "[T]he travellers to all are on the great high-road; but it has wonderful divergences, and only Time shall show us whither each traveller is bound" (196). By making it the space through which many of the central characters in Little Dorrit pass, even as visitors, Dickens reminds his reader of the transitory nature of ability. Thus, in a novel that plays with reversals between independence and dependence, we might also find Dickens commenting upon the fragility of ability. For as the sexton with his fixation on the birth, marriage, and death books housed in his church says, "[W]hat makes these books interesting to most people is—not who's in ’em, but who isn't—who's coming, you know, and when. That's the interesting question" (194). In these lines, Dickens's readers—fellow travellers on the road of life—are called to acknowledge their place on the continuum of ability. Although Dickens uses disability as trope in a problematic manner, his depiction of Mrs. Clennam and her sickroom challenges the consideration of ability and disability as discrete categories, thus showing his attitudes toward disability to be more complex than might be initially presumed. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Nineteenth-century physiognomy encouraged the belief in a direct relationship between someone's facial features and his or her character. For more on this subject, see Sharrona Pearl's About Faces: Physiognomy in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2010). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> In Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1995), Lennard Davis writes of this continuum of ability as follows: "Able-bodied (or temporarily able-bodied) people safely wall off the severely disabled so that they cannot be seen as part of a continuum of physical differences" (7). In other words, disability is not a fixed category; there is no "them" and "us," "able" and "disabled," as if disability were a binary term. Rather, it is a fluid identity, one that we might have at various points in life or through its entirety. According to Davis, the temporarily able-bodied, not wanting to face the fact that they, too, will be disabled one day, construct barriers—linguistic, ideological, and otherwise—to protect themselves from having to acknowledge this reality. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Little Dorrit. London: Penguin, 2003. 63–64. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1857 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Relation A related resource <ul><li> Barrett, Edwin B. "Little Dorrit and the Disease of Modern Life." Nineteenth-Century Fiction 25.2 (1970): 199–215. </li> <li> Janechek, Jennifer. "Dombey and Son." Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures & Contexts. <http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/37> </li> <li> Rodas, Julia. "Tiny Tim, Blind Bertha, and the Resistance of Miss Mowcher: Charles Dickens and the Uses of Disability." Dickens Studies Annual 34 (2004): 51–97. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Little Dorrit Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charles Dickens Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Material Culture Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/2801aa92aa2224374845c84bdb5513e9.jpg 4ba7219b7bb946b5699bb3fe72b3c624 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mary Barton. Frontispiece. C. M. Relyea, illustrator. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. New York: The Century Co., 1906. Scan by Jennifer Janechek. Description An account of the resource A black and white illustration shows a young woman wearing a shawl and dress, standing beside a chair. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “Didst thou mark how poorly Jane Wilson looked?” asked he, as they wound up their hard day’s work by a supper eaten over the fire, which glowed and glimmered through the room, and formed their only light. “No, I can’t say as I did. But she’s never rightly held up her head since the twins died; and all along she has never been a strong woman.”<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> “Never sin’ her accident. Afore that I mind her looking as fresh and likely a girl as e’er a one in Manchester.” “She cotched her side again a wheel.<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a> It were afore wheels were boxed up. It were just when she were to have been married, and many a one thought George would ha’ been off his bargain; but I knew he weren’t the chap for that trick. Pretty near the first place she went to when she were able to go about again, was th’ Oud Church, poor wench, all pale and limping she went up the aisle, George holding her up as tender as a mother, and walking as slow as e’er he could, not to hurry her, though there were plenty enow of rude lads to cast their jests at him and her.” <h3>Notes</h3> <a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> John Barton is alone with his daughter, Mary, discussing the appearance of Jane Wilson, wife of George Wilson. In a quite heartbreaking scene earlier in the novel, her twin boys pass away during their infancy from a fever, presumably typhoid. <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> According to Foster, “cotched” means “caught” (87). </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Mary Barton. Frontispiece. C. M. Relyea, illustrator. Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Barton. New York: The Century Co., 1906. Scan by Jennifer Janechek. Description An account of the resource References to disability abound in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848): Margaret experiences progressive blindness from cataracts (though at the end of the novel she is said to regain her sight); the aging Alice becomes blind, deaf, and is eventually incapacitated by a paralytic stroke; and some of the hand-loom weavers are disfigured by vitriol attacks from the striking factory workers. But perhaps the most historically situated instance of disability in the novel is that experienced by Mrs. Jane Wilson, who is introduced to us as “a delicate, fragile-looking woman, limping in her gait” (7, ch. 1). As the passage below indicates, Mrs. Wilson received some sort of orthopedic injury that gave her a permanent limp while working in a factory. John Barton tells his daughter, Mary, that “[s]he cotched [caught] her side again a wheel” (87). Her injury likely resulted from contact with a flywheel, which the OED defines as “[a] wheel with a heavy rim, attached to a revolving shaft, in order either to regulate the motion of the machinery, or to accumulate power.”<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> Mr. Barton notes that the accident occurred “afore wheels were boxed up” (87), an apparent anachronism because according to Shirley Foster, editor of the 2006 Oxford World’s Classics edition of Mary Barton, the novel is supposed to be set around 1834-40 (ix), and the mandatory “boxing up” of wheels did not occur until the passage of the Factory Act of 1844. Mrs. Wilson’s injury serves a larger function than drawing attention to factory reform, for it connects with the novel’s broader project of insisting upon the common bond of the Manchester factory workers and the mill owners—an interdependent relationship that, in her view, ultimately promoted the progress of society. In her preface, Gaskell explains that the factory worker and the mill owner are “bound to each other by common interests”—that the suffering of one must affect the other (3). In this worldview, the condition of a worker’s body discloses the successes or evils of industrialization, and a body injured in a factory incident would necessarily indict a physically harmful system of labor promoted by capitalism. Mrs. Wilson’s disability would thus present a problem to the middle-class reader: it would force the reader to confront his or her involvement in perpetuating a factory system that physically damaged human bodies. <div>Note <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> “Fly-wheel.” OED Online. Oxford UP, 2015. Web. 16 November 2015. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Gaskell, Elizabeth. Mary Barton. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2006. 86-87. Print. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1848 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jennifer Janechek Title A name given to the resource Mary Barton Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Elizabeth Gaskell Language A language of the resource English Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen. <a href="http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/08905495.2013.867659?journalCode=gncc20">“Orthopaedic Disability and the Nineteenth Century Novel.”</a> Nineteenth-Century Contexts: An Interdisciplinary Journal. 36.1 (2014): 1-17. </li> <li> Hutchins, B. L., and A. Harrison. <a href="https://archive.org/details/historyoffactory014402mbp">A History of Factory Legislation</a>. London: P. S. King & Son, 1911. Internet Archive. Web. 11 November 2015. </li> <li> Sanders, Mike. “Manufacturing Accident: Industrialism and the Worker’s Body in Early Victorian Fiction.” Victorian Literature and Culture 28.2 (2000): 313-329. </li> </ul> https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/f0fdb31dd757f85ebcf5f006e5b54570.jpg 457130ed11ce7472bb682ff34e922548 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 Conjoined twins born into slavery, Millie and Christine McKoy, pictured seated, facing the camera, wearing a Victorian dress with two bodices and a single large skirt. 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 1902 to 1914 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. There are giants and giants, dwarfs and dwarfs, fat men and women, living skeletons of both sexes, hirsute monsters and baldheads by the century; there are marvels of nature, science and art, of all which the world knows; but there can only be one NONPAREIL, one UNEQUALLED, and that is the subject of our brief sketch, for only one living creature is like Millie Christine, and her name is Christine Millie. But, says the curious reader, was there ever such another heard of before? Only one is on record, attested as a fact, and leaving out of the question fabulous monsters. The first year of the eighteenth century witnessed the birth of a similar phenomenon in Hungary, the sisters Helen and Judith, born in the year 1701. These girls were united at the lower part of the body only, and were perfectly distinct beings in every way. Helen was larger, stronger, and better-looking than Judith, besides being much more active and inteiligent. These girls lived to their twenty second year, when Judith fell sick and died, Helen following her within a few minutes of her demise. And all this, you remember, happened more than a century since, so that it takes Nature a hundred years at least to produce such a marvel again. Helen and Judith died at twenty-two years of age, while Millie Christine still lives, healthy and happy, at thirty-eight, and bids fair to attain a ripe old age as easily as less wonderful beings. The following pages, confined to a simple record of the facts in her career, will therefore prove of interest and value. Miss Millie Christine, or Christine Millie, was born of slave parents, on the plantation of Mr. Alexander McCoy, near the town of Whiteville, Columbus County, North Carolina, on July 11, 1851. At her birth her mother was in her thirty-second year. She was a handsome woman, finely formed and in excellent health. Millie Christine's father, of Moorish descent, slender and sinewy, with the powerful activity characteristic of his race. Prior to the birth of Millie Christine, her mother had borne seven other children, five boys and two girls, all of ordinary size, with no peculiarities of conformation, and some of them are still alive. The wonder of the family, Millie Christine, weighed seventeen pounds when she entered the world, and, although her mother was only attended by a colored midwife, no serious consequences attended such a remarkable birth. But, when the child was once fairly in the world, how rumor flew about the township of Whiteville, and spread from thence over the whole country! "Have you seen the girl?" was the first question asked of every one by every one, and pilgrimages to visit her became all the rage in the country side. The old nurse who had superintended her introduction into this world was doubtless awestruck at the anomalous and wonderful addition she had made to her master's property, and not unnaturally prided herself on having assisted Nature to produce a phenomenon; but the master himself, and his amiable lady, without stopping to question the designs of Providence, immediately surrounded the extraordinary infant with such care and attention as enabled it to thrive and grow. The dual-headed child was taken from the cabin to the mansion, and Mr. McCoy's family commenced then a course of care and attention to her health and welfare. During the first eighteen months of her life nothing of importance occurred to Millie Christine worthy of note. She grew as other girls grow, learned to walk at twelve months old, was of a lively and agreeable disposition, and at fifteen months began to talk with both her mouths. She was cheerful and active as any girl of her age, with every appearance of robust health. Her vivacity and goodness, together, no doubt, with her peculiar formation, rendered her the almost idolized child of the mother and a general favorite of both old and young, and every attention and kindness was bestowed upon her. At this time Mr. McCoy, being a man in very moderate circumstances, a plain farmer, thinking the girl would become a burden to him, and annoyed with the frequent visits of strangers to see her, determined to dispose of her. He was not long in finding for her a purchaser, a person of the name of Brower, who offered $10,000 for her, seeing the possibilities of the child in the way of an exhibition. But inasmuch as this Brower was not possessed of the requisite cash to back his faith, and only offered to give a note of hand for the purchase money, Mr. McCoy naturally desired some responsible person to whom to look for the money in case of the non-payment of the note when due. This person was ultimately found by Brower in Joseph P. Smith, of Wadesboro, North Carolina, and Mr. McCoy finally parted with Millie Christine, in consideration of Brower's note for $10,000 endorsed by Mr. Smith. The happy Brower, in full possession of his prize, at once departed for New Orleans, in obedience to a request from the medical faculty of that city asking that she be brought there for a scientific examination. 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 Millie (left) and Christine (right) McKoy were born into slavery in Columbus County, North Carolina, in 1851. These conjoined twin sisters were sometimes called Millie-Christine McKoy. Each sister had two arms and two legs, but they were connected at the lower spine and shared one pelvis. Jabez McKay owned Millie and Christine, but the twins later adopted the last name, “McKoy.” McKay, who was concerned whether the twin sisters would be productive and frustrated when visitors flooded his farm to view their unusual anatomy, eventually sold Millie and Christine for $1,000 to a showman interested in exhibiting them. Millie and Christine ended up in the possession of Joseph Pearson Smith, who hired them out to various road shows. At this time Millie and Christine also appeared in P.T. Barnum's famed American Museum in New York City. The twins were kidnapped and taken to England by one of the men responsible for exhibiting them, but Smith eventually found the girls and, with their mother, sued to regain custody. He won this suit, and the twins returned to North Carolina. Smith's wife taught Millie and Christine how to read, write, sing, dance, and play the piano; she also taught them to deliver recitations in German and French. The sisters used these skills when they were exhibited. After the Civil War, the twins decided to remain with the Smiths. They continued to appear widely for nearly thirty years, even returning to England in 1871, where they performed for Queen Victoria. In the 1880s, the sisters joined Barnum's traveling circus, but they retired to Columbus County at the end of the decade. Throughout their career and retirement, Millie and Christine gave financial support to black schools and churches. When Millie died of tuberculosis in October 1912, doctors gave Christine morphine to help end her life quickly and painlessly. Millie and Christine are central to our own understanding of the freak show as a place where a community secures its anxieties and questions about people that are perceived as different. As women of African descent, their display as “freaks” serves as an example of the conflation of race and disability and the perceived dependency of both women and people of African descent within nineteenth-century American culture. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Biographical Sketch of Millie Christine, the Carolina Twin, Surnamed the Two-Headed Nightingale and the Eighth Wonder of the World Cincinnati: Hennegan & Co. Print, [between 1902 and 1912]. Author unknown. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource George Gordon-Smith Relation A related resource <ul><li> Martel, Joanne. Millie-Christine: Fearfully and Wonderfully Made: The Remarkable Journey of Siamese Twins from Slavery to the Courts of Europe. New York: McNaughton & Gunn, 2000. </li> <li> Frost, Linda. Conjoined Twins in Black and White: The Lives of Mille-Christine McKoy and Daisy and Violet Hilton. Madison: U of Wisconsin P, 2009. </li> <li> Garland Thomson, Rosemarie. Ed., Freakery: Cultural Spectacles of the Extraordinary Body New York: New York UP, 1996. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Michael A. Wesner. Early to mid-1890s era cabinet photo of conjoined twins Millie and Christine McCoy, likely taken while they were on tour in California. Image Courtesy <a title="Wikimedia Commons" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Millie_%26_Christine_McCoy_c1890s.jpg">Wikimedia Commons</a> under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Millie and Christine McKoy Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anonymous 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 1902-1912 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/54a070ae731190da15abc5fc8f710005.jpg a671143437b88a8c181549e2af008601 Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 711 Height 1185 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A black and white illustration shows a young Olive kneeling on the hearth and petting a cat. Notably, her spinal deformity is not visible. The caption reads: "Olive, little noticed, sat on the hearthrug, fondling the sleepy cat, or gazing with vague childish reverie into the fire." Illustration by G. Bowers, 1875. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. By her stature she might have been two years old, but her face was like that of a child of ten or twelve—so thoughtful, so grave. Her limbs were small and wasted, but exquisitely delicate. The same might be said of her features; which, though thin, and wearing a look of premature age, together with that quiet, earnest melancholy cast peculiar to deformity, were yet regular, almost pretty. Her head was well shaped, and from it feel a quantity of amber-coloured hair—pale ‘lint-white locks’, which, with the almost colourless transparency of her complexion, gave a spectral air to her whole appearance. She looked less like a child than a woman dwarfed into childhood the sort of being renowned in elfin legends, as springing up on a lonely moor, or appearing by a cradle-side; supernatural, yet fraught with a nameless beauty. She was dressed with the utmost care, in white, with blue ribands; and her lovely hair was arranged so as to hide, as much as possible the defect, which, alas! was even then only too perceptible. It was not a humpback, nor yet a twisted spine; it was an elevation of the shoulders, shortening the neck, and giving the appearance of a perpetual stoop. There was nothing disgusting or painful in it, but still it was an imperfection, causing an instinctive compassion—an involuntary ‘Poor little creature, what a pity!’ Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Olive Description An account of the resource Dinah Mulock Craik’s (1826-1887) novel Olive (1850), features a heroine who has a shoulder deformity but who goes on to establish a career as an artist and to win the love of a Scottish minister whom she rescues from religious doubt. Olive was one of many of Craik’s works to feature a protagonist with a disability—others include The Little Lame Prince (1875) and A Noble Life (1866). In his review of A Noble Life, whose protagonist, the last Earl of Cairnforth was likely partly based on Craik’s friend Frank Smedley, Henry James remarked wryly, on that “lively predilection for cripples and invalids by which she has always been distinguished” (846). This excerpt from the novel describes the first time that Olive’s father, Captain Rothesay, who has been absent in the West Indies for four years, sees his daughter. Olive’s mother, Sybilla, has kept her daughter’s deformity a secret from her husband, fearing he will be displeased. Craik refrains from describing her heroine’s “defect” in medical terms. Instead, she borrows the language of fairy tales to describe the young girl’s physical appearance, placing her heroine within an established and perhaps more sympathetic literary tradition of viewing physical difference. Other literary characters in the mid-nineteenth-century novel described using fairy tale language include Philip Wakem in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Madame Walravens in Charlotte Bronte’s Villette (1853). <h2> </h2> Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Craik, Dinah Mulock Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Craik, Dinah Mulock. Olive. 1850. Ed. Cora Kaplan. New York: Oxford UP, 1996. Page 23. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1850 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource A black and white illustration shows a young Olive kneeling on the hearth and petting a cat. Notably, her spinal deformity is not visible. The caption reads: "Olive, little noticed, sat on the hearthrug, fondling the sleepy cat, or gazing with vague childish reverie into the fire." Illustration by G. Bowers, 1875. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> <li>James, Henry. Review of A Noble Life in Literary Criticism. Volume One: Essays on Literature, American Writers, English Writers. Penguin: New York, 1984.</li> <li>Mitchell, Sally. <a title="Dinah Mulock Craik" href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html" target="_blank">Dinah Mulock Craik</a>. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1983. Available online: <<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html">http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/craik/index.html</a>></li> </ul> Dinah Mulock Craik Gender Literature Novel Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/6844a26923c493325651cc5c81092d36.jpg e32a14f3a8b9b5826c42f05c889eab5d Omeka Image File The metadata element set that was included in the `files_images` table in previous versions of Omeka. These elements are common to all image files. Width 482 Height 642 Bit Depth 8 Channels 3 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Silas Wegg stands on his peg leg, holding a candle to examine a skeletal leg that Mr. Venus, seated, holds up for inspection. “Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus in Consultation” by Sol Eytinge. Wood engraving, Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1860 to 1880 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Assuredly, this stall of Silas Wegg's was the hardest little stall of all the sterile little stalls in London. It gave you the face-ache to look at his apples, the stomach-ache to look at his oranges, the tooth-ache to look at his nuts.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Of the latter commodity he had always a grim little heap, on which lay a little wooden measure which had no discernible inside, and was considered to represent the penn'orth appointed by Magna Charta.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Whether from too much east wind or no—it was an easterly corner--the stall, the stock, and the keeper, were all as dry as the Desert. Wegg was a knotty man, and a close-grained, with a face carved out of very hard material, that had just as much play of expression as a watchman's rattle. When he laughed, certain jerks occurred in it, and the rattle sprung. Sooth to say, he was so wooden a man that he seemed to have taken his wooden leg naturally, and rather suggested to the fanciful observer, that he might be expected—if his development received no untimely check—to be completely set up with a pair of wooden legs in about six months. . . . [Mr. Boffin approaches Wegg’s stall and opens conversation with him.] “Noddy Boffin,” said that gentleman. “Noddy. That's my name. Noddy—or Nick—Boffin. What's your name?” “Silas Wegg.—I don't,” said Mr Wegg, bestirring himself to take the same precaution as before, “I don't know why Silas, and I don't know why Wegg.”<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> “Now, Wegg,” said Mr Boffin, hugging his stick closer, “I want to make a sort of offer to you. Do you remember when you first see me?” The wooden Wegg looked at him with a meditative eye, and also with a softened air as descrying possibility of profit.<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> 'Let me think. I ain't quite sure, and yet I generally take a powerful sight of notice, too. Was it on a Monday morning, when the butcher-boy had been to our house for orders, and bought a ballad of me, which, being unacquainted with the tune, I run it over to him?' “Right, Wegg, right! But he bought more than one.” . . . [Boffin admits to eavesdropping on Wegg’s ballad singing to the butcher.] “I'm coming to it! All right. I'm coming to it! I was going to say that when I listened that morning, I listened with hadmiration amounting to haw. I thought to myself, ‘Here's a man with a wooden leg—a literary man with—’” “N—not exactly so, sir,” said Mr Wegg. “Why, you know every one of these songs by name and by tune, and if you want to read or to sing any one on 'em off straight, you've only to whip on your spectacles and do it!” cried Mr Boffin. “I see you at it!” “Well, sir,” returned Mr Wegg, with a conscious inclination of the head; “we'll say literary, then.” “‘A literary man—WITH a wooden leg—and all Print is open to him!’ That's what I thought to myself, that morning,” pursued Mr Boffin, leaning forward to describe, uncramped by the clotheshorse, as large an arc as his right arm could make; “‘all Print is open to him!’ And it is, ain't it?” “Why, truly, sir,” Mr Wegg admitted, with modesty; “I believe you couldn't show me the piece of English print, that I wouldn't be equal to collaring and throwing.”<a title="" href="#_ftn5">[5]</a> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> While even Wegg’s fruit displays characteristics akin to a wooden leg, this passage could also be read in context with genuine contemporary concerns regarding the adulteration of food. See Anthony S. Wohl’s “<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/science/health/health1.html">Adulteration and Contamination of Food in Victorian England</a>” on The Victorian Web. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> Wegg’s measurements are also woodenly rigid, and are even administered by a wooden measuring device. A “penn’orth” is a penny’s worth. For more on Victorian currency, see Marje Bloy’s “<a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/economics/currency.html">British Currency before 1971</a>” on The Victorian Web. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[3]</a> While Wegg is seemingly unaware of his name’s origin, to the reader it is really quite obvious: Wegg is an elision of “wooden” and “leg”. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[4]</a> The crippled beggar was a common trope in Victorian literary and non-fiction texts. Here, Wegg sneakily alters his tone as soon as the possibility of accruing profit arises thus associating him with the often-deployed motif. As Martha Stoddard Holmes identifies, whereas “The victimized afflicted child is a figure of pure intensity and authentic pathos; the villainous begging impostor, in contrast, evokes the emotional clarity of rage, but also ambivalence of suspicion, or the conviction that pathos or ‘emotional excess’ is fakery, a coin that disabled people use to trick the nondisabled into inappropriate giving” (Fictions of Affliction 8). While Wegg does not explicitly use his afflicted state to evoke sympathy, his money-grabbing mannerisms and deceptive strategies associate him firmly with nineteenth-century cripple stereotypes. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[5]</a> As we learn later in the novel (to comical effect), Wegg really is no literary man at all. While orating to Boffin, he stumbles over sentences, mispronounces a number of words and surreptitiously avoids answering any questions. His lumbering, clumsy reading style could perhaps be described as . . . wooden! </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource Our Mutual Friend Description An account of the resource <a href="http://archive.org/stream/ourmutualfriend00883gut/old/mfrnd10.txt">Our Mutual Friend</a>, first published in serial form from 1864–1865, is a novel that literalises George Henry Lewes’s observation that Charles Dickens’s characters are wooden puppets that are brought to life by incident (“Realism and the Art of the Novel” 98): the author uses Silas Wegg, a man who is both a peg leg user and depicted as wooden in appearance, character and action, to explore the greed-provoking influence of material culture. While it is not entirely surprising that Dickens presents Wegg as villainous, since he is physically marked as different by his disability, as Adrienne E. Gavin has suggested, the inclusion of a peg leg corresponds with an apparent obsession that the author had with lower limb prosthesis. In addition to Our Mutual Friend, wooden legs also appear in <a href="http://archive.org/stream/thepickwickpaper00580gut/580.txt">The Pickwick Papers</a>(1838), <a href="http://archive.org/stream/theoldcuriositys00700gut/700.txt">The Old Curiosity Shop</a> (1840–41), <a href="http://archive.org/stream/barnabyrudgeatal00917gut/old/rudge10.txt">Barnaby Rudge</a>(1841), <a href="http://archive.org/stream/martinchuzzlewit00968gut/old/chuzz10.txt">Martin Chuzzlewit</a> (1843–44) and <a href="http://archive.org/stream/davidcopperfield00766gut/766.txt">David Copperfield</a> (1849–50). A number of prosthesis wielding characters also appear in Household Words, a weekly magazine established and edited by the author, which ran from 27 March 1850 to 28 May 1859. These include the wooden-legged Dust scavenger Peg Dotting from “Dust; Or Ugliness Redeemed” (13 July 1850), the wooden-legged man described in an article published on New Year’s Day in 1859 (“New Year’s Day”) and the respectable amputee milliner’s daughter Mary Wigley from Sarah Smith’s short story “The Lucky Leg” (19 March 1859) to mention but a few. What each of these examples demonstrates is not only that Dickens was familiar with cultural and fictional representations of lower-limb amputees but that he was in fact preoccupied with issues relating to prosthesis use. Wegg’s use of a rudimentary peg leg can be read as symptomatic of his class status early on in the novel. Peg legs were in fact the cheapest and most basic devices available to amputees. Having been in circulation for several centuries, these devices consisted, in the commonest instances, of a hollow wooden bucket or cup (into which the stump would fit) fixed to a wooden peg that would reach the ground (in the place of a foot). For slightly more money, other adaptations could also be made to better fit the amputee’s stump: a leather sheath could be attached for improved comfort or a knee joint could be incorporated so that the peg could be bent whilst sitting-down. Despite these possible modifications, however, the peg leg was considered to be a low-end product. Since these devices were most commonly used by the working class and street beggars, they therefore became synonymous with low status and small income. Wegg’s occupation at the novel’s outset, then, as the owner of a street stall that sells ballads, fruit and other miscellanies, is intimately tied to his prosthesis use: as we learn, he is unable to secure regular employment with a nearby house, probably because of the limited physical capacities that were associated with limb-loss and prosthesis use. Like many disabled characters and prosthesis users depicted in nineteenth-century literature, Wegg is associated with a number of negative traits. What is particularly interesting in this instance though, and which can be considered a trope of Dickens’s fiction more widely, is the peculiar linkage between personal object and character that is displayed by Wegg. Specifically, in this instance, the peg leg user is portrayed as wooden (just like his leg) in nearly every respect imaginable. Examples elsewhere in Dickens’s oeuvre of characters that display characteristics that reflect the material properties of a particular object with which they are intimately associated, include Miss Murdstone from David Copperfield, who carries around a “hard steel purse”; as David recalls, “I had never, at that time, seen such a metallic lady altogether as Miss Murdstone was” (Chapter 3). In a similar way to how prosthesis-wearing characters depicted elsewhere were said to reflect, in character, the material properties of their devices—for instance in the case of Miss Ruff in Anthony Trollope’s <a href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/16">The Bertrams</a>, who is as cold, hard and fixed in her mannerisms as her glass eye is in material—here Wegg’s prosthesis reflects him as much as he does it. Unlike “the Oaken Lady” of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short story “<a href="http://archive.org/stream/drheideggersexp00hawtgoog#page/n20/mode/2up">Drowne’s Wooden Image</a>” (1844)—a wooden figure head for a boat that is so mesmerisingly mimetic an effigy that “she” is thought to have come to life when “her” original comes to town—, the aesthetic effect of Wegg’s wooden artificial part is not only blatant, but all-consuming; as we will see in the following passage, in appearance he is more wooden than the oak figure skilfully carved by the craftsman Drowne in Hawthorne’s tale. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dickens, Charles Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dickens, Charles. Our Mutual Friend. 1864–65. London: Everyman, 2000. Pages 48–52. Also available <a href="http://archive.org/stream/ourmutualfriend00883gut/old/mfrnd10.txt">online</a> at archive.org. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1865 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ryan Sweet Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Silas Wegg stands on his peg leg, holding a candle to examine a skeletal leg that Mr. Venus, seated, holds up for inspection. “Mr. Wegg and Mr. Venus in Consultation” by Sol Eytinge. Wood engraving, 7.5 cm wide by 10.1 cm high. Illustration for Chapter 7 of Charles Dickens's Our Mutual Friend in the Lee & Shepard (Boston), and Charles T. Dillingham (New York) 1870 Illustrated Household Edition. Image scanned by <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org/misc/pvabio.html">Philip V. Allingham</a>. Courtesy of <a href="http://www.victorianweb.org">The Victorian Web</a>. Relation A related resource <ul><li>Gavin, Adrienne E. “<a href="http://omf.ucsc.edu/london-1865/victorian-city/wooden-legs.html">Dickens, Wegg, and Wooden Legs</a>”. Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages. Dickens Project. Santa Cruz: n.p., 1998. n. pag. Our Mutual Friend: The Scholarly Pages. Web. 18 Dec. 2012.</li> <li>Holmes, Martha Stoddard. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2004.</li> <li>Lewes, George Henry. “Realism and the Art of the Novel”. Literary Criticism of George Henry Lewes. ed. Alice R. Kaminsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1964. 94–105.</li> <li>Morgentaler, Goldie. “Dickens and the Scattered Identity of Silas Wegg.” Dickens Quarterly 22.2 (2005): 92–101.</li> </ul> Language A language of the resource English Charles Dickens Class Literature Mobility Novel Prosthesis Technology https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/1f20088a628575f2d8757c3b83058381.jpg 4ed206e60c25dfd73337a02fbdde0ef2 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 Klemm, L. R. Relief Practice Map: Roman Empire (New York: William Beverley Harison, 59 Fifth Avenue, 1894), 29 x 32 cm. Scale 1:20,000,000. Image Courtesy The Library of Virginia. Description An account of the resource This waterproof relief map depicts the Roman Empire (284-476 CE), including insets of Greece and Lower Italy. The map typography is in raised capital letters. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1860 to 1880 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Maps printed in relief from plates are necessarily much cheaper than those made by hand. In general the boundaries in printed maps are indicated by raised lines, and the towns marked by dots, no distinction being usually made between land and water. In those, however, printed by Dr. Howe, of Boston, U.S., the water is raised above the land, which injurious practice has been imitated by Mr. Moon ,<a title="" href="#_edn1">[i]</a> of Brighton, in some of his productions. The idea of water being raised above land is so unnatural, that the mind never thoroughly becomes accustomed to it, and this produces constant irritation and uncertainty in consulting maps so arranged. The maps invented by Haüy,<a title="" href="#_edn2">[ii]</a> and still used in France, are made by hand. They are expensive and very inefficient. Herr Zeune,<a title="" href="#_edn3">[iii]</a> the director of “The Institution for the Blind” at Berlin, invented some years ago maps of very perfect construction; the various elevations on the surface of the earth being given on a regularly graduated scale: thus, if land one thousand feet above the level of the sea is represented on the map by a substance the tenth of an inch thick, land which is ten thousand feet above the level of the sea is indicated by a substance of the thickness of an inch. The utility of this invention in the case of institutions, and for the use of pupils of the wealthy classes is undoubted, but the costliness of maps constructed on such a principle places the advantages of the system beyond the reach of the blind generally. The mode adopted by Herr Zeune is so admirable that it has been employed in common schools, and it forms perhaps the only instance in which an invention, originally intended for the blind, has proved of signal advantage to the sighted. <h3>Notes</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ednref1">[i]</a> Completely blind by the age of twenty-one, William Moon (1818-1894) was an educator of the blind and developed Moon type, a raised typography for tactile reading.</div> <div><a title="" href="#_ednref2">[ii]</a> Valentin Haüy (1745-1822) was founder of the first institute for the blind and developed an embossed printing system for the blind. <a title="" href="#_ednref3">[iii]</a> Johann August Zeune (1778-1853) founded the Berlin Foundation for the Blind.</div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Klemm, L. R. Relief Practice Map: Roman Empire (New York: William Beverley Harison, 59 Fifth Avenue, 1894), 29 x 32 cm. Scale 1:20,000,000. Image Courtesy The Library of Virginia. Patented on June 28, 1888 and copyrighted by William Beverly Harison in 1894, this waterproof relief map, as indicated in the upper left, depicts the Roman Empire (284-476 CE), including insets of Greece and Lower Italy. The map typography is in raised capital letters. Description An account of the resource Printed tactile, or relief, maps began to be published during the early nineteenth century and were used to teach the sighted and the blind geography. Initially used in Europe, they were introduced into the United States by American educators who traveled to Europe to observe educational practices.<a title="" href="#_edn1">[1]</a> Influenced by his observations of the education of the blind in Europe, Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876) of the Perkins School for the Blind made printed tactile maps, such as his <a href="http://www.davidrumsey.com/blog/2012/5/21/atlas-for-the-blind-1837">1837 atlas</a> of the United States that included the typography Boston Line Type, designed for the blind.<a title="" href="#_edn2">[2]</a> Likewise, Martin Kunz (1847-1923), the director of the Blind Institute at Illzack in Germany, also created <a href="http://www.aph.org/museum/virtual_exhibit/exhibit3/e30033a.htm">printed tactile maps</a> for the blind. However, his maps incorporated German Braille. A contemporary of Kunz, L. R. (Louis Richard) Klemm (1845-1925), superintendent of schools in Cleveland and Hamilton, Ohio, later worked for the United States Bureau of Education, specializing in foreign education, in Washington, DC in 1889.<a title="" href="#_edn3">[3]</a> He produced printed tactile maps in addition to other educational materials to engage sighted students kinesthetically, an educational strategy about which he learned in Europe and one that was successful for teaching the blind. His Relief Practice Map: Roman Empire (1894) that utilized raised typography in capital letters was created for the sighted but was also used by the blind. An announcement for his maps does not target a specific user other than students in general but provides details on the production and use of his maps: “In this series of blank maps the relief has been produced, on specially prepared paper, by pressure. It is intended that they should be filled in by the student with the names of places, rivers, lakes, mountains, etc. They are very portable, and seem well suited for use in schools.”<a title="" href="#_edn4">[4]</a> Klemm further details the construction of these maps in his “<a href="https://books.google.com/books?id=OQYCAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA131&lpg=PA131&dq=klemm+american+teacher+how+to+make+durable+relief+maps&source=bl&ots=xabyq0Xjwz&sig=g9SpEpUokhi8PjW_egRGDisy5ak&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0CB4Q6AEwAGoVChMIlNnRj6jHxgIVyzw-Ch2kXgAQ#v=onepage&q=klemm%20american%20teacher%20how%20to%20make%20durable%20relief%20maps&f=false">How To Make Durable Relief Maps</a>,” and his European Schools; or, What I Saw in the Schools of Germany, France, Austria, and Switzerland (1890) offers insight into the genesis of his printed tactile maps. Moreover, his <a href="https://docs.google.com/viewer?url=patentimages.storage.googleapis.com/pdfs/US320564.pdf">patent</a> (no. 320,564 dated June 23, 1885) for his “Relief Map, Chart, &c.” includes the same figure that he displays in his aforementioned <a href="https://archive.org/stream/eurschoolsorwhat00klemiala#page/54/mode/2up">European Schools</a>. W. Hanks Levy’s Blindness and the Blind (1872) below reviews printed tactile maps in the US and Europe. He addresses accessibility issues regarding readability and expense of tactile maps for the blind. His critique illuminates the potential use of Klemm’s maps by the blind. <h3>Notes</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ednref1">[1]</a> Various types of maps have been used to teach the blind geography since the eighteenth century and likely earlier. Students made relief maps and “raised maps” constructed with cushions, pins, wire, glass, and string. The first maps the blind used “were on embroidered cloth or canvas, the needle-work representing the land and the plain cloth the water” with other embroidered details. Relief maps were constructed on paper or cardboard. See Joseph Stadelman, “<a href="http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/05306a.htm">Education of the Blind</a>,” in The Catholic Encyclopedia, Vol. 5 (New York: Robert Appleton Company, 1909), accessed July 7, 2015. See also Sébastien Guillié, An Essay on the Instruction and Amusements of the Blind (London: Printed for Richard Phillips, 1819, reprint, London: Sampson Low, Marston and Company, 1894), 101-106. Wooden “dissected,” or puzzle, maps were also used to teach the sighted and the blind geography. See “Maps for the Blind: How They Are Manufactured and How Used,” The New York Times (New York, NY), Aug. 10, 1890. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref2">[2]</a> See Kimberly French, Perkins School for the Blind (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2004), 9-10, 13. Braille was not introduced into the United States until 1860 and was not adopted in the US until 1918. Because of the lack of standardization of typography for the blind and the various existent writing systems, the struggle that led to the universal acceptance of Braille became known as the “War of the Dots.” See French, 65-70. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref3">[3]</a> “Educational Expert, Dr. L. R. Klemm, Dies,” The Evening Star (Washington, DC), Nov. 20, 1925. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ednref4">[4]</a> “New Maps,” The Geographical Journal 5, no. 1 (1895): 93-96, 96. </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived W. Hanks Levy, <a href="http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/005764641">Blindness and the Blind: or, A Treatise on the Science of Typhlology</a> (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872), 139-140. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1872 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Leah Thomas Relation A related resource <ul><li> Cooper, Holly L. “A<a href="https://www.tsbvi.edu/seehear/spring06/history.htm"> Brief History of Tactile Writing Systems for Readers with Blindness and Visual Impairments</a>.” Texas School for the Blind and Visually Impaired. </li> <li> Eriksson, Yvonne. Tactile Pictures: Pictorial Representations for the Blind, 1784-1940. Göteborg: Acta Universitatis Gothoburgensis, 1998. </li> <li> Norgate, Martin. “Cutting Borders: Dissected Maps and the Origins of the Jigsaw Puzzle.“ The Cartographic Journal. 44.4 (2007): 342-350. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Printed Tactile Maps Language A language of the resource English Blindness Maps Martin Kunz Material Culture Samuel Gridley Howe 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/8feb11aaa8db3e33f951103a2866dd4f.jpg eefbd851a6108f0e3ee99a1a5fa9956c https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/5f4b15379d7b2f4e0a15698d4c3f6d60.jpg 8a2f9681b2567e1939775052a4f19d7e https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/9c991a1aa4e81e3680aa33c96fb8fc9f.jpg fcf0c15054c402295fcba950a9f86f7d Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Still Image A static visual representation. Examples of still images are: paintings, drawings, graphic designs, plans and maps. Recommended best practice is to assign the type "text" to images of textual materials. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource In 1890, a 36” x 24” painting depicting Queen Victoria communicating with a deaf woman in front of a cozy hearth, was exhibited at the Edinburgh Exhibition. Titled “Royal Condescension,” this was the second of a series painted by the amateur painter William Agnew (1846-1941); each shows the Queen in various stages of conversation with a woman, but with minor differences: the 1883 version has a dog on the hearth and was shown at the Chicago World’s Fair; the 1889 version has a baby and won an award at the Edinburgh Exhibition; and the 1900 focuses only on the Queen and the woman. <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/library-rnid/2011/12/20/deaf-artist-william-agnew/">Agnew painted</a> only two other works, “True Nobility” (1897) and “Post Office, Whippingham, I.O.W.” There is little evidence that any of these paintings survive. Born deaf and mute, Agnew received his education at an institution for the deaf in Glasgow, where he learned sign-language and fingerspelling. After leaving school, he was employed in various occupations, including as a bookbinder, printer, and writer. As a writer, he penned several articles advocating sign language in deaf schools, and condemning the implementation of oralism (educating the deaf through articulation and speech) in British schools. It was during this period that fierce debates were ranging amongst educators over the best pedagogical means for instructing deaf-mutes and on the value of sign-language for “normalizing” the deaf. In 1880, educators gathered at the International Congress on Education of the Deaf voted to ban sign language in the classroom and replace it with oral education. Although little is known about Agnew, he certainly saw oralism as a threat to his own identity and culture. He was recruited to fundraise for the building of a new Institute for Deaf and Dumb Adults in Glasgow and West Scotland that would rely on instruction through sign language. Upon exhibiting his 1889 “Royal Condescension” painting to Queen Victoria, Agnew received a generous contribution from the Queen (£50). Funds from an 1891 grand bazaar raised enough to purchase a site for the new building and Agnew was made Director of the Institution. Agnew’s “Royal Condescension” paintings are a testament to his campaigns on the importance of sign language. Queen Victoria was familiar with fingerspelling, having learned as her daughter-in-law Princess Alexandra’s hearing worsened over the years until she became deaf. According to Jennifer Esmail, Agnew’s paintings “not only depicts a unique conversation between a monarch known for her fingerspelling fluency, and one of her poor and ill subjects but also allows us a rare glimpse into the visual language of deaf Victorians” (1). The Queen spook the language of the deaf, refusing, as some accounts noted, to bring a translator. This was tremendously supportive to the manualist campaigns against oral education, for if the monarch spoke the language, why should it be an issue in the classroom? Even the woman in the painting, Mrs. Elizabeth Tuffield (neé Bective Groves, 1840-1874), gives us some insight into the lives of the Victorian deaf. The daughter of a schoolmaster on the Isle of Wright, Tuffield attended the <a href="http://jaivirdi.com/2010/06/14/the-london-asylum-for-the-deaf-and-dumb/">London Asylum for the Deaf and Dumb on Old Kent Road</a> (est.1792), one of the first schools in England for the deaf. She eventually married a bootmaker, Samuel (b.1840) in 1870, but she left him; sources indicate Samuel was abusive. The historical significance of Agnew’s “Royal Condescension” paintings is also revealed in how they were reproduced and distributed. Tracts and pamphlets were popular tools in the nineteenth century to propagate powerful visual images, especially to draw attention to a cause. They raised awareness for political or social issues, asked for contributions to fundraising campaigns, and/or merely disseminated information. As many educational asylums for the deaf in the nineteenth-century relied on donations and subscriptions, small pamphlets were often printed for fundraising, even consisting illustrations of sign language—as both information and novelty. <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/library-rnid/2013/08/02/sign-alphabet-exhibition-royalty-and-the-deaf/">Harry Ash</a> (1863-1934) was a deaf draughtsman and designer of wallpaper who, like Tuffield, received his education from the London Asylum. In the late 1890s, he published some pamphlets on sign language, some of which were advertised in the publications of the British Deaf and Dumb Association and the British Deaf Times. In one pamphlet Ash copied Agnew’s “Royal Condescension” painting on the cover, and included the fingerspelling alphabet in the contents. Ash’s pamphlets were partly a response to his experiences at the London Asylum, where in the middle of his education, the <a href="http://blogs.ucl.ac.uk/library-rnid/2013/08/02/sign-alphabet-exhibition-royalty-and-the-deaf/">system of instruction changed</a> from sign language to the oral method, hindering his progress in learning English. Sign language was necessary and something that every Briton should learn. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Wellcome Library, UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1800-1900 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi Relation A related resource <ul><li>Beaver, Patrick. A Tower of Strength: Two Hundred Years of the Royal School for Deaf Children Margate. Sussex, England: The Book Guild, Ltd., 1992.</li> <li>Edwards, R.A.R. Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and the Growth of Deaf Culture. New York & London: New York University Press, 2012.</li> <li>Esmail, Jennifer. Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture. Ohio: Ohio University Press, 2013.</li> <li>Jackson, Peter W. Britain’s Deaf Heritage. Edinburgh: The Pentand Press, Ltd., 1990.</li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource (1) Postcard reprint of William Agnew’s 1889 “Royal Condescension” painting. Courtesy of UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries. (2) Postcard reprint of William Agnew’s 1900 “Royal Condescension” painting. Courtesy of UCL Ear Institute & Action on Hearing Loss Libraries. (3) “Royal Condescension” process print by Harry Ash after William Agnew, c.1890-1900. Courtesy of Wellcome Images under a Creative Commons License. Title A name given to the resource Royal Condescension Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource William Agnew Deafness Painting Visual Culture https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/4c227392db77ae2698895747dbd45067.jpg b5f10d2c10d6a6090aa1e80972279e00 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 1024 Height 750 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 coloured photo shows the harbour in San Remo; three boats sail on the blue Riviera, with villas and hills in the distance. Photomechanical print, photochrom, colour. ca. 1890 to 1900. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1860 to 1880 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. San Remo combines, in a modified degree, the invigorating qualities of Nice with the warmth of Mentone, but without its closeness; and is thus peculiarly adapted for diseases of the chest,<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> especially if the digestive organs are impaired. It lies due south, in the middle of a large bay, at the east end of which the Capo Verde, and at the west the Capo Nero, run far out to sea, and form a sufficient shelter against the winds from both quarters. Gently sloping hills, covered with orange, lemon, and olive trees, rise from these capes, one above another, in the form of an amphitheatre, extending far back till they join a chain of lofty mountains, the highest of which, Monte Bignone, rising 4300 feet, lies exactly behind the town, and these mountains again are protected by the Maritime Alps. Begnone and its fellows form one continuous range, there is not a single gap through which the wind can rush; of all the numerous valleys radiating from the town not one leads to a pass, they simply run up between the lower hills till they lose themselves, vanishing in the sides of the mountains. The lowest elevation at which the range can be crossed is 2000 feet. Unless people have seen the place they will hardly understand this description, but the truth of it is perceived at once from any of the lower hills, or, better still, by taking a boat about a mile out to sea. Of course it is a matter of the greatest importance to invalids to step at once out of the house into the lemon and olive groves without risk of exposure to wind and dust; and this advantage San Remo possesses more than any place I know, as the olive groves reach down almost to the water’s edge, and the delight of wandering amongst them none but those who have tried can know. Their immense extent also keeps the air cool in the warmer parts of the season by preventing radiation, such as takes place from the bare rocks at Mentone, making it too hot for English residents after the middle of April. […] Hitherto I have never stayed at San Remo later than the end of April, but so much has always been said to me by the natives about the salubrity of their climate in May, and they have so often assured me that it was one of their pleasantest months, that this year I was induced to try it, and we therefore remained there instead of going as usual to Germany. The weather during the whole of April had been most charming, as nearly approaching to perfection as I can imagine. Bright, beautiful, calm, cool mornings, a delightful sea breeze springing up about ten and continuing till almost half-past five, when it again calmed down, and there was a delightful twilight, cool and refreshing, of nearly two hours. The nights were also quite cool. We remained until the twenty-fifth of May, and the same description will apply to the weather during the whole of that month; it was charming, hot, but never so much so as to cause us inconvenience, while the amount of verdure prevented that intolerable glare which is so trying to the eyes in less wooded localities. […] The weather is often hotter in England in April and May than we found it at San Remo.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> As I shall mention elsewhere, the hotel keepers are going to build houses for the convenience of bathers, hoping to make San Remo the great summer bathing place of the Riviera. It will, I am convinced, be ere long the great winter sanatorium for diseases of the chest. Amongst other recommendations, physicians all agree that it is particularly good in cases of haemorrhage, the air is so soothing. <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[1]</a> In the nineteenth century “diseases of the chest” often referred to tuberculosis, but could also refer to emphysema or bronchitis (which are now known as chronic obstructive pulmonary disease). </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref">[2]</a> The average temperature of the month of May, up to the 26th, was, maximum 79°, minimum 57°, Farenheit. [author’s footnote] </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 San Remo as a Winter Residence Description An account of the resource Invalidism may seem to limit mobility, confining one to the four walls of the sickroom. But, for those who were well enough and wealthy enough, the Victorians actually made an industry of travelling for the sake of one’s health. Thus, far from being immobile, an invalid could actually undertake quite a strenuous travel itinerary. Within England, one could visit a hydropathy establishment, such as <a title="Ben Rhydding" href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/1">Ben Rhydding</a>, in Yorkshire, or a seaside resort town. San Remo was one of many popular Mediterranean locations for invalids hoping to avoid an English winter altogether. The author of the excerpt below, a self-declared invalid, writes a practical guide for Englishmen and women wishing to winter abroad, in sunny San Remo. Aspinall compares San Remo favourably to Madeira (“depressing and debilitating” 2), Egypt (“hot and dusty, and the food little calculated to suit a delicate digestion” 2) Naples, Rome and Sorrento, and Nice as a favoured spot for convalescents. He gives practical advice on the hotels (with names like Hôtel Victoria and Hôtel d’Angleterre, it is easy to see that hotels were catering to the English abroad), and specific directions for scenic walks and donkey rides in this Victorian version of Lonely Planet for invalids. In Henry James's The Portrait of a Lady (1880), San Remo is one of the tubercular Ralph Touchett's haunts, where he wiles away "a dull, bright winter beneath a slow-moving white umbrella" (242). Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource [Aspinall, W.B.] Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived W. B. Aspinall. San Remo as a Winter Residence. London: John Churchill and Sons, 1865. Pages 10-13. Available online at <a title="San Remo as a Winter Residence" href="http://archive.org/details/sanremoasawinte00aspigoog" target="_blank">archive.org</a>. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1865 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Karen Bourrier Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource This coloured photo shows the harbour in San Remo; three boats sail on the blue Riviera, with villas and hills in the distance. Photomechanical print, photochrom, colour. ca. 1890 to 1900. Courtesy <a title="San Remo Library of Congress" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699351/" target="_blank">Library of Congress</a>, in the public domain (<a title="Library of Congress" href="http://www.loc.gov/pictures/item/2001699351/resource/" target="_blank">LC-DIG-ppmsc-05986</a>). 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): 133-154.</li> <li>Frawley, Maria. Invalidism and Identity in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.</li> <li>Haley, Bruce. The Healthy Body and Victorian Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1978.</li> <li>James, Henry. The Portrait of a Lady (1881). Ed Nicola Bradbury. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998.</li> </ul> Class Invalidism Medicine Mobility Travel Writing