6 10 61 https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/cf6d36b49ce1f5522650cb4c6715cbe0.jpg 1afd2a6b694b1b748d528160eda8be59 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 Pratt, Matthew. The American School, 1765, oil on canvas, 36 x 50 ¼”. Image Courtesy Metropolitan Museum of Art. This painting depicts a group of students painting in Benjamin West’s London studio. Description An account of the resource The artist, Matthew Pratt, is seated at the easel, while West, at left wearing green, gives instructions to another young, unidentified artist. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1798 to 1837 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. While Trumbull and Stuart were together as pupils of Mr. West, Stuart being the senior student, and more advanced in the art, Trumbull frequently submitted his works to him for the benefit of his remarks. Stuart told Mr. Sully, from whom we derive the anecdote, that on one occasion he was excessively puzzled by the drawing, “and after turning it this way and that, I observed, ‘Why, Trumbull, this looks as if it was drawn by a man with but one eye.’ Trumbull appeared much hurt, and said, ‘I take it very unkindly, sir, that you should make the remark.’ I couldn't tell what he meant, and asked him. ‘I presume, sir,’ he answered, ‘that you know I have lost the sight of one eye, and any allusion to it, in this manner, is illiberal.’ Now I never suspected it, and only the oddness of the drawing suggested the thing.” We have heard from Stuart’s companions in Boston, the same story, in nearly the same words, and when he told it to them, he went into a long dissertation on optics to prove, that a man, with but the sight of one eye, could not possibly draw truly. This notion Sully thought perfectly idle, and only one of Stuart’s whims, who could lecture most eloquently on any subject, from the anatomy of a man, to the economy of his shoe-tie.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> <div> <h3>Note</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 1:182. </div> </div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Despite his resistance to the formal study of painting, William Dunlap’s time in Europe would prove critical to the history of American art because it was at West’s studio in London that Dunlap became acquainted with the foremost artists of the time. Dunlap is today best remembered as “the American Vasari,” after Giorgio Vasari (1511-1574), the 16th-century Italian biographer of Renaissance painters, as Dunlap would go on to write the first history of American art and artists, History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States, published in 1834. The following excerpt, drawn from the Rise and Progress, recounts an exchange between two other American painters working under West in London, Gilbert Stuart (1755-1828) and John Trumbull (1756-1843), as related later by a third American, Thomas Sully (1783-1872). Dunlap’s decision to include this anecdote is likely informed by his own visual impairment, which is identical to that suffered by John Trumbull, described below.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Although Dunlap does not draw attention to this similarity here, elsewhere in the Rise and Progress and in his 1832 history of American theatre<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> Dunlap details the accident that rendered him blind in the right eye (see linked entry on Dunlap’s self-portraits). Curiously, however, in neither of these accounts does Dunlap suggest that his monocular vision limited his ability to draw in perspective. Instead, Dunlap notes multiple times in his published works that he found his sense of color wanting, possibly as a result of the accident, or, as he hypothesizes, “a natural defect.”<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Nonetheless, Dunlap appears to use this anecdote, and particularly Sully’s criticism of Stuart’s theory, as a defense of painters, like Dunlap himself, who suffered from visual impairments. <div> <h3>Notes</h3> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Stuart’s criticism of Trumbull’s drawing evidently held little weight; Trumbull was commissioned to paint four large American historical scenes for the Capitol Rotunda in 1817. See: http://www.aoc.gov/capitol-hill/artists/john-trumbull </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> William Dunlap, History of the American Theatre, vol. 2 (London: Richard Bentley, 1833), 49, http://books.google.com/books/about/History_of_the_American_Theatre.html?id=yDEOAAAAIAAJ. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> Dunlap, History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States, 1:259. Also describes his difficulty with color on p. 250. It should be noted that the first widely acknowledged account of color blindness was not published until 1798 by the English physicist John Dalton. Dunlap was likely unaware of the possible genetic explanation for his condition, which may have been a partial color blindness. See: A E Emery, “John Dalton (1766-1844).,” Journal of Medical Genetics 25, no. 6 (June 1988): 422–26. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Dunlap, William. History of the Rise and Progress of the Arts of Design in the United States. Vol. 1. 2 vols. New York: George P. Scott and Company, Printers, 1834. Available at: https://archive.org/details/historyofrisepro01dunl. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1834 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kim Beil Relation A related resource <ul><li> Dunlap, William. A History of the American Theatre. New York : J. & J. Harper, 1832. http://archive.org/details/historyofamerica00dunl. </li> <li> Lyons, Maura. William Dunlap and the Construction of an American Art History. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Pratt, Matthew. The American School, 1765, oil on canvas, 36 x 50 ¼”. Image Courtesy <a title="Met Museum Link" href="http://www.metmuseum.org/collection/the-collection-online/search/11797">Metropolitan Museum of Art</a>. This painting depicts a group of students painting in Benjamin West’s London studio. The artist, Matthew Pratt, is seated at the easel, while West, at left wearing green, gives instructions to another young, unidentified artist. Title A name given to the resource History of the Rise and Progress of the Art of Design in the United States Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource William Dunlap Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available George P. Scott and Company Art History Blindness Visual Culture William Dunlap https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/11baf66e5eeb5b6e0faf86463d841f86.jpg d405835417244736264c801aa7ef6acd Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Wood engraving, 1881. Courtesy of the Wellcome Library, London under a Creative Commons License (Wellcome Library: ICV No 48264). Description An account of the resource Four scenes from the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney Heath, London. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. This admirable institution, the usefulness of which has just been increased by the addition of a new wing which on Saturday, the 16th inst., was formally opened by H.R.H. the Duke of Connaught, was originally founded in 1854 at Carshalton by the late Andrew Reed, D.D. It was removed to its present locale, Melrose Hall, Putney Heath, in 1863. Up till now there have been some 30 or 40 male inmates against nearly 150 females, and about the same proportion is observable, curiously enough, amongst the outdoor pensioners of the charity, the victims of paralysis, rheumatism, and other disabling maladies, whose number is 450 [...]. But for the fact that almost all the inmates, being more or less crippled, are compelled to move about with crutches, or in invalid chairs, Melrose Hall would present more the appearance of a comfortable hotel than of a hospital. It stands in its own grounds, the windows overlooking a lovely stretch of country, and the various rooms are furnished in such a way as to give the patients as much as possible of home comfort. Pictures, flowers, and books are there in profusion, and every effort is made to lighten the burden of life to the afflicted. There is a large Assembly Room in which Divine Service is held on Sundays, and where those patients who are able to be moved gather for daily prayer, and which is also utilised for social gatherings. The immediate wants of the inmates are attended to by a staff of forty nurses and attendants, the head nurse and six divisional nurses being hospital-trained; the Matron, who is also a skilled nurse, having the oversight of all, under the direction of the medical officer, who attends daily […]. Our engravings are copied from a little pamphlet descriptive of the Hospital, entitled “A Glimpse of a Good Work;” the first represents a patient about to enter one of the hydraulic “lifts” which connect the upper and lower floors; the second, a group of patients and visitors on the lawn; the third, a group of nurses under the verandah, and the fourth the interior of one of the wards, where lie three young girls, sisters, who have been afflicted from early youth, and who are now bedridden. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource Published in 1881 in <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Graphic">The Graphic</a>, a widely distributed British newspaper, the following anonymously authored article, entitled “The Royal Hospital for Incurables,” and the engravings accompanying it, offer a sense of the kind of care that the disabled population in England received from privately-funded organizations throughout the long nineteenth century. Residents of The Royal Hospital for Incurables (founded by philanthropist Andrew Reed of Putney in 1854) were attended to by trained physicians when necessary, but they were also left free to roam the surrounding countryside and to enjoy the comforts of accommodating spaces of leisure like the verandah and the Assembly Room, which offered opportunities for what disability studies scholars would today term independent living. We can see from this particular series of images that while called a “hospital,” this institution was closer to what we would now call a “home” for the disabled. It operated differently from most traditional, government-funded hospitals in England, in that it accepted only terminally ill and permanently disabled patients, who were an otherwise outcast population. Most hospitals in Britain tended to focus on treatment and therefore catered to “curable” cases. According to historian Ruth Richardson, who has written on The Middlesex Hospital in London, “it was important for [a] hospital to keep up a rolling programme of ‘successful’ care. To take in the dying, who would make the [hospital’s] statistics look poor, or those who might be a serious long-term drain on the institutions resources…would skew the [hospital’s] statistics in an undesirable direction” (Richardson 70). This was particularly a trend in workhouse infirmaries, where funding and resources were especially scarce. The Royal Hospital for Incurables was progressive, then, because it created a space for an “untreatable” class of patients in England. Privately managed institutions for both the disabled and those with long-term illnesses sprung up around Great Britain and emerged as antidotes to this ethic of curable care. The Royal Hospital for Incurables is merely one example of many charities of this nature, including Reed’s sister institution, <a href="http://www.nineteenthcenturydisability.org/items/show/3">The Earlswood Asylum</a> (founded in 1847), which was also known as the Asylum for Idiots. These institutions offered various levels of support; while The Royal Hospital for Incurables housed its patients permanently, other institutions arranged work opportunities for those those who could live at home, but who struggled to find accommodating jobs. The Baroness <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angela_Burdett-Coutts,_1st_Baroness_Burdett-Coutts">Angela Burdett-Coutts</a>, a friend and benefactor of Victorian author <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Dickens">Charles Dickens</a>, established Brown’s Lane Sewing School, for example, which enlisted many disabled individuals to sew shirts for the army and navy and to work in an accepting and cooperative environment. Coutts took all unemployed people under her wing, but disabled Victorians were a population especially well-represented at her institution and at places like it. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived “The Royal Hospital for Incurables.” The Graphic. (30 July 1881): 119. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1881 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Kristen Starkowski Relation A related resource <ul><li> Anonymous. Baroness Burdett-Coutts: A Sketch of Her Public Life and Work. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. </li> <li> Cook, Gordon C. “Caring for ‘incurables’: The 150th Anniversary of the Royal Hospital for Neuro-Disability, Putney.” Postgraduate Medical Journal 80 (2003): 426-430. <a href="http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/945/426.full">http://pmj.bmj.com/content/80/945/426.full</a> </li> </ul><ul><li> Cook, Gordon C. The Incurables Movement: An Illustrated History of the British Home. Abingdon: Radcliffe Publishing, 2006. </li> <li> Richardson, Ruth. Dickens and the Workhouse: Oliver Twist and the London Poor. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. </li> </ul> Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Four scenes from the Royal Hospital for Incurables at Putney Heath, London. Wood engraving, 1881. Courtesy of the <a title="Wellcome Images" href="http://wellcomeimages.org/">Wellcome Library, London</a> under a Creative Commons License (Wellcome Library: ICV No 48264). Title A name given to the resource The Royal Hospital for Incurables Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Anonymous https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/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/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/fb32d389da8b7819ba4e831598371425.jpg 2baeb3b4db322a53d34161814c73f5cb Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1860 to 1880 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. Now, after lessons, he<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> would occasionally be persuaded to quit that beloved study, and take a walk along the loch side, or across the moor, to show his pupil the country of which he, poor little fellow! was owner and lord. He did it at first out of pure kindness, to save the earl from the well-meant intrusion of neighbours, but afterward from sheer pleasure in seeing the boy so happy. To him, mounted in Malcolm’s arms and brought for the first time into contact with the outer world, everything was a novelty and delight. And his quick perception let nothing escape him. He seemed to watch lovingly all nature, from the grand lights and shadows which moved over the mountains, to the little moorland flowers which he made Malcolm stop to gather. All living things too, from the young rabbit that scudded across their path, to the lark that rose singing up into the wide blue air--he saw and noticed every thing. But he never once said, what Helen, who, as often as her house duties allowed, delighted to accompany them on these expeditions, was always expecting he would say, Why had God given these soulless creatures legs to run and wings to fly, strength, health, and activity to enjoy existence, and denied all these things to him? Denied them, not for a week, a month, a year, but for his whole lifetime – a lifetime so short at best; – “few of days, and full of trouble.” Why could He not have made it a little more happy? Thousands have asked themselves, in some form or other, the same unanswered, unanswerable question. Helen had done so already, young as she was; when her mother died, and her father seemed slowly breaking down, and the whole world appeared to her full of darkness and woe. How then must it have appeared to this poor boy? But, strange to say, that bitter doubt, which so often came into Helen's heart, never fell from Child’s lips at all. Either he was still a mere child, accepting life just as he saw it, and seeking no solution of its mysteries, or else, though so young, he was still strong enough to keep his doubts to himself, to bear his own burden, and trouble no one. Or else – and when she watched his inexpressibly sweet face, which had the look you sometimes see in blind faces, of absolutely untroubled peace, Helen was forced to believe this – God, who had taken away from him so much, had given him something still more – a spiritual insight so deep and clear that he was happy in spite of his heavy misfortune. She never looked at him but she thought involuntarily of the text, out of the only book with which unlearned Helen was very familiar—that “in heaven their angels do always behold the face of my Father which is in heaven.” <h3>Note</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Mr Cardross, the Earl’s minister and tutor, and Helen’s father.</div> Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource A Noble Life (1866) is Dinah Mulock Craik’s second novel to feature a disabled protagonist. It resembles her earlier novel, Olive (1850) in representing disability as a spiritually uplifting and morally improving experience, which renders the protagonist selfless, compassionate and pious. However, whereas Olive is able to pursue a career and marry, despite being “deformed”, the protagonist of A Noble Life, the Earl of Cairnforth, has to come to terms with a life of almost total self-denial. The orphaned Earl is born with multiple disabilities, described as “the smallest, saddest specimen of infantile deformity”, his body “thin, elfish, and distorted, every joint and limb being twisted in some way or other” (1.24). The doctor suggests it would be a mercy if he simply died, but the narrative works to validate the minister’s counter-argument that “God can work out His wonderful will, if He chooses, through the meanest means – through the saddest tragedies and direst misfortunes” (1.28). Although in adulthood the Earl has weak health and restricted mobility – he is carried everywhere and can only just hold a pen – he is shown to be a capable and reforming landlord, and above all to exert a good influence upon everyone he meets. His love for the minister’s daughter, Helen Cardross, is depicted as tragically impossible – since he accepts that he can never marry – but after her unworthy husband’s early death, he adopts and co-parents her son. The passage below is typical in highlighting the Earl’s moral virtues but also his reserve, implying that there is something unspeakable in the experience of disability, which somehow cuts the Earl off from those around him, forcing them to speculate about his true feelings. Although he is only a child at this point in the novel, he is already represented as being both morally superior and enigmatic to those around him. Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Craik, Dinah Mulock. A Noble Life. Vol 1. London: Hurst and Blackett, 1866. Pages 125-8. Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen, ed. Women’s Writing 20.3 (2013) Special Issue: Re-Reading Dinah Mulock Craik. </li> <li> Mitchell, Sally, Dinah Mulock Craik. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1983. </li> <li> Stoddard Holmes, Martha. Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004. </li> <li> Walker Gore, Clare, "Noble Lives: Writing Masculinity and Disability in the Late Nineteenth Century." Nineteenth-Century Contexts 36.4 (2014): 363-375. </li> </ul> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1866 Title A name given to the resource A Noble Life Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Dinah Craik Publisher An entity responsible for making the resource available Hurst and Blackett Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Eilean Donan Castle, reflects the Scottish setting of A Noble Life. Image courtesy <a title="Eilean Donan Castle" href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eilean_Donan">Wikipedia </a>under a Creative Commons License. Dinah Craik Masculinity Novel Orthopaedic Disability https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/c392364e16b17477096cb4d98a9d801e.pdf b3e3db832ed2c6354884a83d63aa0076 Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource Illustration of The Heir of Redclyffe by Kate Greenaway. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890, page 89. Image courtesy Clare Walker Gore. Description An account of the resource This black and white illustration shows Amy and Laura flanking Guy, wearing the fashions of the late nineteenth-century (tight skirts with a bustle on the women and a bowler hat on the man) rather than those of the mid-century when the novel was published. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1837 to 1860 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “ ‘You don’t know what a bore it is to lose the one bit of quicksilver in the house!’ said he, yawning. ‘I shall only drag out my existence here till you come back.’ ‘You, Charles, the maker of fun!’ said Guy, amazed. ‘It is a case of flint and steel,’ said Charles; ‘but be it owing to who it will, we have been alive since you came here. You have taken care to be remembered . We have been studying you, or laughing at you, or wondering what absurdity was to come next.’ ‘I am very sorry—that is, if you are serious. I hoped at least I appeared like other people.’ ‘I’ll tell you what you appear like. Just what I would be if I was a free man.’ ‘Never say that, Charlie.’ ‘Nay, wait a bit. I would never be so foolish. I would not let the best hunter in the country go when I had wherewithal to pay for him.’ ‘You would not have such an ill-conditioned self to keep in rule.’ ‘After all,’ continued Charles, yawning, ‘it is no great compliment to say I am sorry you are going. If you were an Ethiopian serenader, you would be a loss to me. It is something to see anything beyond this old drawing-room, and the same faces doing the same things every day. Laura poking over her drawing, and meditating upon the last entry in Philip's memorandum-book, and Amy at her flowers or some nonsense or other, and Charlotte and the elders all the same, and a lot of stupid people dropping in and a lot of stupid books to read, all just alike. I can tell what they are like without looking in!’ Charles yawned again, sighed, and moved wearily. ‘Now, there came some life and freshness with you. You talk of Redclyffe, and your brute creation there, not like a book, and still less like a commonplace man; you are innocent and unsophisticated, and take new points of view; you are something to interest oneself about; your coming in is something to look forward to; you make the singing not such mere milk-and-water, your reading the Praelectiones is an additional landmark to time; besides the mutton of to-day succeeding the beef of yesterday. Heigh-ho! I'll tell you what, Guy. Though I may carry it off with a high hand, ‘tis no joke to be a helpless log all the best years of a man's life,—nay, for my whole life,—for at the very best of the contingencies the doctors are always flattering me with, I should make but a wretched crippling affair of it. And if that is the best hope they give me, you may guess it is likely to be a pretty deal worse. Hope? I've been hoping these ten years, and much good has it done me. I say, Guy,’ he proceeded, in a tone of extreme bitterness, though with a sort of smile, ‘the only wonder is that I don't hate the very sight of you! There are times when I feel as if I could bite some men,—that Tomfool Maurice de Courcy, for instance, when I hear him rattling on, and think—’ ‘I know I have often talked thoughtlessly, I have feared afterwards I might have given you pain.’ ‘No, no, you never have; you have carried me along with you. I like nothing better than to hear of your ridings, and shootings, and boatings. It is a sort of life.’ Charles had never till now alluded seriously to his infirmity before Guy, and the changing countenance of his auditor showed him to be much affected, as he stood leaning over the end of the sofa, with his speaking eyes earnestly fixed on Charles, who went on: ‘And now you are going to Oxford. You will take your place among the men of your day. You will hear and be heard of. You will be somebody. And I! – I know I have what they call talent – I could be something. They think me an idle dog; but what’s the good of doing anything? I only know if I was not – not condemned to – to this – this life,’ (had it not been for a sort of involuntary respect to the gentle compassion of the softened hazel eyes regarding him so kindly, he would have used the violent expletive that trembled on his lip;) ‘if I was not chained down here, Master Philip should not stand alone as the paragon of the family. I’ve as much mother wit as he.’ ‘That you have,’ said Guy. ‘How fast you see the sense of a passage. You could excel very much if you only tried.’ ‘Tried? And what am I to gain by it?’ ‘I don’t know that one ought to let talents rust,’ said Guy, thoughtfully; ‘I suppose it is one’s duty not, and surely it is a pity to give up those readings.’” Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Description An account of the resource The Heir of Redclyffe (1853) was Charlotte M. Yonge’s first bestseller, establishing her reputation as an enjoyable as well as an improving novelist; as one critic wrote nearly twenty years later, “Anything written by the author of ‘The Heir of Redclyffe’ is sure not only to find a good number of readers, but to provide them with good pabulum.”<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> Its hero, Guy Morville, is not only a morally serious and deeply Christian young man, but also the heir to a gothic castle, a fierce temper, and an ancient feud with the other branch of the Morville family, represented by his irritatingly priggish cousin Philip. The two are brought together when Guy comes to stay with his Edmonstone cousins (with whom Philip also lives), and although Guy makes every effort at conciliation, Philip’s unacknowledged jealousy causes a rift between them. Despite Philip’s efforts to thwart their romance, Guy marries the younger Edmonstone sister, Amy – his dealings with her family highlighting Philip’s unworthy action in becoming secretly engaged to the older Edmonstone sister, Laura – but on their honeymoon in Europe, sacrifices his life by nursing Philip through a near-fatal fever. The family feud is finally settled upon Guy’s death, as Philip retrospectively recognises his true worth, and the Christian allegory of Guy’s life and death is brought out in the novel’s famously tear-jerking conclusion. Although this summary of the novel’s main action suggests that disability does not play much part in the narrative, in fact, Amy and Laura’s disabled brother, Charles, is very much at the forefront of the novel. Although he is confined to his couch as a result of his tubercular hip, he offers an amusing and insightful commentary on all the action of the novel, acting as Guy and Amy’s confidant, seeing through Philip’s pretensions to moral superiority, and modelling for the reader, through his own reaction to Guy, what we might have to gain from reading the novel. Yonge was to become famous for her saintly invalids – typified by Margaret May in The Daisy Chain – but Charles is anything but a saintly character. In contrast to Guy, he is frequently selfish, spiteful, sarcastic and impatient, but he is also capable of great loyalty, kindness and stoicism. As a sympathetic and believable character, Charles is perhaps the Edmonstone with whom the reader is most likely to identify, and Yonge offers a sensitive and realistic portrayal of his struggle to come to terms with physical impairment. Although, as in the passage below, Charles is shown to resent his physical suffering and immobility, he is shown to be a valuable member of the Edmonstone family, better able to advise his mother and sister than his impetuous and easily-led father, and he is finally shown as Amy’s closest companion in her widowhood, promising to help her bring up her daughter. Moreover, his own relationship with Guy is dealt upon at such length that it comes to seem almost as important as the marriage plot from which he is excluded. <h3>Note</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> ‘Review of The Caged Lion’, John Bull, 1870, 413–14.</div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Yonge, Charlotte Mary. The Heir of Redclyffe. (1853) London: Macmillan, 1888. Pages 70-71. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1853 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Clare Walker Gore Relation A related resource <ul><li> Bourrier, Karen, ‘ “The Spirit of a Man and the Limbs of a Cripple”: Sentimentality, Disability, and Masculinity in Charlotte Yonge’s “The Heir of Redclyffe”’, Victorian Review 35.2 (2009): 117-131. </li> <li> Budge, Gavin. "Realism and Typology in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe." Victorian Literature and Culture 31.1 (2003): 193-223. </li> <li> Wells-Cole, Catherine, "Angry Young Men: Anger and Masculinity in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge." In Masculinity and Spirituality in Victorian Culture. Ed. Andrew Bradstock. Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000. </li> <li> Walker Gore, Clare. "'Setting Novels at Defiance': Novel Reading and Novelistic Form in Charlotte M. Yonge’s The Heir of Redclyffe." Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies 10.1 (2014) </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource The Heir of Redclyffe Rights Information about rights held in and over the resource "Guy was pacing the terrace with Laura and Amabel." Illustration of The Heir of Redclyffe by Kate Greenaway. London: Macmillan and Co., 1890, page 89. Image courtesy Clare Walker Gore. Creator An entity primarily responsible for making the resource Charlotte Yonge Charlotte Yonge Invalidism Masculinity Novel https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/808b46dd6ea7968d1fd078d547cdae01.jpg 66505229236caf8973e661a0fc830074 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 Philadelphia: American Artificial Limb Company, 1865, 27. Image courtesy of the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD. Description An account of the resource Illustration of the mechanism inside a Palmer Patent Leg. From The Palmer Arm and Leg, Adopted for the U.S. Army and Navy by the Surgeon-General, U.S.A. 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. Brigadier-General Bartlett. [This gallant General has risen from the rank of Captain while using the Palmer Leg in the service. Amputation above the knee.] Boston, Mass., January 6, 1865. Dear Sir: I have now used the Palmer Leg (full length) for more than two years. During most of that time I have been on active duty in the field. It has stood the severe test of campaigning, exposure to all weathers, and constant use in the saddle, admirably; not better than I had hoped, but far better than I expected. I have never been kept off duty an hour by any fault in its mechanism. I willingly bear testimony to its merits, and express my satisfaction with the result of the test to which I have subjected it. (It is not bullet-proof—few legs are!) I am, sir, very respectfully, W.F. Bartlett, Brigadier-General <div> </div> *** James S. Stackhouse, Esq. Philadelphia, January 9, 1865. Dr. B. Frank. Palmer. Dear Sir: On the 22d of April, 1857, it was my misfortune to lose a foot and ankle-joint by a railroad accident. Since wearing your Artificial Leg, I have, the greater portion of the time, been employed on the Pennsylvania Central Railroad in the capacity of conductor, and in the position have run, at different times, the most difficult trains on the road (accommodation trains<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>), from the fact of these requiring greater activity on the part of the conductor, such as jumping on and off at stations, passing quickly through the train from one car to another, &c. It affords me great pleasure to add my testimony to the superiority of your limb. In fact I can scarcely realize that I have suffered so severe a loss as that of a foot. During the six years I have worn the leg I have thoroughly tested it in the most trying position in which a leg, particularly an artificial leg, can be used, and am happy to say I have never found it wanting. Should you wish to refer any parties to me for information concerning the good qualities of my limb, I would be happy to see them at my residence, No. 1344 Coates Street. I remain yours, truly, Jas. S. Stackhouse, Conductor P.R.R.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> <div> **** </div> The Opinion of a Lady [Syme Operation.]<a title="" href="#_ftn3">[3]</a> Irving House, Twelfth Street, Near Broadway, New York, January 12, 1865. Dear Doctor: Having derived so much benefit from your skill in the adaptation of an artificial foot, I cannot refrain from expressing my gratitude—daily increasing as it is—for I more and more experience the ease and facility movement through your invaluable invention. The 17th of last March my foot was amputated. The period of deep distress, and the frightful future of helplessness then opening before me in my 22d year, can only be realized by those of similar sad experiences. Unfortunately, not a few, in this day of crippled humanity from war’s sad footprints, will understand me. When Dr. Olcott,<a title="" href="#_ftn4">[4]</a> of Brooklyn, after close investigation of the subject, made me acquainted with your wonderful invention, I confess I had but little faith in the possibility of so far repairing my loss; but, from your care, I found myself not only able to throw aside my crutches, but was surprised immediately to find myself an independent walker. The second day of the trial I walked, without crutch or cane, full two miles; and now, after five months’ use, part of that time travelling, I find that I can run up and down stairs, walk without limping, and, with a perfect feeling of security, make my way through the crowds of a metropolis; indeed my most intimate friends would scarcely suspect the presence of an artificial foot. It would be an easy matter to conceal my loss, were I so disposed; but my sympathy with the unfortunate, and my gratitude to you, my dear Doctor, forbids anything of the kind; and I ask you to permit me to offer my public testimony to your skill, and will ever hold myself ready to gladly respond to any inquiries from those who may be interested. I remain yours, gratefully, Mrs. John B. Eagan. <h3> Notes</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Local trains that make frequent stops, often carrying both passengers and freight.</div> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> The Pennsylvania Railroad, founded in 1846.</div> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref3">[3]</a> An amputation technique pioneered by James Syme (1799-1870), which removed the foot by disarticulating the ankle, removing the malleoli, and using a heel flap to cover the ends of the tibia and fibula.</div> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref4">[4]</a> Cornelius Olcott, who graduated from the Medical Department of the University of the City of New York in 1849 and practiced at 104 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn.</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 Illustration of the mechanism inside a Palmer Patent Leg. From The Palmer Arm and Leg, Adopted for the U.S. Army and Navy by the Surgeon-General, U.S.A. (Philadelphia: American Artificial Limb Company, 1865), 27. Image courtesy of the <a title="National Library of Medicine" href="http://www.nlm.nih.gov/">National Library of Medicine</a>, Bethesda, MD. Description An account of the resource In 1846, B.F. Palmer filed the first patent for an artificial leg in the United States. His product, characterized by its smoothly articulated knee, ankle, and toe joints, as well as its elegant and lifelike appearance, was an immediate success. It won awards at dozens of industrial fairs and competitions in the United States, but Palmer was most proud of his invention’s performance at the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. Not only did the Palmer Patent Leg win a silver medal, it was also celebrated in the London Times and lampooned in Punch, a popular satirical magazine.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> By 1857, Palmer had sold nearly three thousand of his famed appliances, and almost five hundred of them belonged to women. The Civil War (1861-65) resulted in thousands of amputations and dramatically changed the retail landscape for prostheses. The number of patents issued for artificial legs in the United States more than quadrupled from 21 between 1846 and 1860 to 88 between 1861 and 1873.<a title="" href="#_ftn2">[2]</a> In 1862, the United States government agreed to supply artificial limbs to injured soldiers, and manufacturers fought vehemently for both government contracts and the patronage of wounded clients. Palmer’s advertising included this brochure, The Palmer Arm and Leg, Adopted for the U.S. Army and Navy by the Surgeon-General, U.S.A., which featured testimonials from surgeons and artificial limb wearers, both military and civilian. The three letters excerpted here articulate three different experiences of disability in nineteenth-century America, but their perspectives remain limited, as they were curated and likely edited by a manufacturer who aggressively controlled his product’s reputation. Still, the testimonials illustrate how the artificial limb intersected with popular ideals of military masculinity, as well as men’s physical command over railroads and other symbols of industrial growth and achievement, even as these technologies were responsible for much civilian limb loss. Both men and women put a premium on physical activity and ease of movement, and many of these advertising letters, including the third excerpted here, also appealed to the conventions of sentimentalism. In the end, Palmer’s greatest achievement was his ability to present the artificial limb as a desirable consumer product, bearing the diverse values and priorities of his time and place. <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> “The Great Exhibition,” Times [London] (19 September 1851): 4; “Palmer’s Legs,” Punch (27 September 1851): 137. </div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref2">[2]</a> Laurann Figg and Jane Farrell-Beck, “Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions,” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993): 461. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived The Palmer Arm and Leg, Adopted for the U.S. Army and Navy by the Surgeon-General, U.S.A.. Philadelphia, PA: American Artificial Limb Company, 1865. 30, 41, 42-43. Full text available at <a title="Archive link" href="https://archive.org/details/101462403.nlm.nih.gov">https://archive.org/details/101462403.nlm.nih.gov</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 Caroline Lieffers Relation A related resource <ul><li> Figg, Laurann, and Jane Farrell-Beck. “Amputation in the Civil War: Physical and Social Dimensions.” Journal of the History of Medicine and Allied Sciences 48 (1993): 454-475. </li> <li> Hasegawa, Guy. Mending Broken Soldiers: The Union and Confederate Programs to Supply Artificial Limbs. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. </li> <li> Herschbach, Lisa. “Prosthetic Reconstructions: Making the Industry, Re-making the Nation.” History Workshop Journal 44 (1997): 22-57. </li> <li> Life and Limb: The Toll of the American Civil War. National Library of Medicine Web Exhibit. 2011. Curated by Manon Parry. http://www.nlm.nih.gov/exhibition/lifeandlimb/index.html . </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource The Palmer Patent Leg Language A language of the resource English Prosthesis https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/06f5b1577456228044d43531780df354.jpg 03315ef06120b10c195a07432d8be15f 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 Druck von Leo Krause & Ewerlien “Maximo und Bartolo die leßten lebenden Azteken,” a 1909 postcard of siblings Bartola and Maximo, most likely from their final engagement in Germany. Image from author’s collection. Description An account of the resource The front of this black and white postcard shows the siblings sitting cross-legged. https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/da2709afa118b3b1b303e3d3c3ba675b.jpg da3256faf98e55ba86751fda32347a86 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 back of the postcard shows a faded address and stamp. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1860 to 1880 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. The place of residence assigned to our travelers was the vacant wing of a sumptuous and spacious structure, at the western extremity of the city, which had been appropriated, from time immemorial, to the surviving remnant of an ancient and singular order of priesthood called Kaanas, which it was distinctly asserted in their annals and traditions, had accompanied the first migration of this people from the Assyrian plains. Their peculiar and strongly-distinctive lineaments, it is now perfectly well ascertained, are to be traced in many of the sculptured monuments of the Central American ruins, and were found still more abundantly in Iximaya. Forbidden, inviolably sacred laws, from intermarrying with any persons but those of their own caste, they had here dwindled down, in the course of many centuries, to a few insignificant individuals, diminutive in stature. They were, nevertheless, held in high veneration and affection by the whole Iximayan community, probably as living specimens of an antique race nearly extinct. [ … ] Such is the marvelous story detailed by Velasquez. Containing all elements which can well stimulate curiosity, it also lays claim to a credence which further inquiry must either substantiate or withdraw. The Aztec Children stand independently as the most wonderful members of the human race, whatever their origin or descent; yet at the same time, all testimony professing to throw light on this is worthy of calm and considerate attention. To view these children is less to inquire whence they came, than to regard them as they are; to watch the progressive dawn of intelligence and continually stronger development of individual characteristics. To see them is an event in the life of the beholder, which will never be forgotten. Were they deformities, without proper lineage or name, excrescences or mere freaks of nature, their history would little merit the inquiry or examination now courted. They are here—the descendants of a people probably passed over to the Américan continent at a period too remote to be ascertained, members of a race kept preserved in rocky fastness, and now discovered on the eve of physical decline and disappearance. [ … ] It might be considered just, with great propriety, to class these remarkable specimens of humanity with fabulous existences, if the truth of their being rested on mere individual assertion—BUT HERE THEY ARE! LIVING!—and open to public examination—not merely imaginary creatures, like the strange men of Africa mentioned by Herodotus, the phoenix or the mermaid. Not a fictitious people, like the dryads of the Arcadian vales—not the moonlight fairies; the little grey men of Norse legends—not nymph, sprite, nor elf—but human beings of flesh and blood—the remnant of strange and wonderful race—the greatest marvel of a land of wonders, and of the nineteenth century—more strange than the vast skeletons of the Mastodon, which have been exhumed in the same region—but, like the black swan of New Holland formerly regarded as a myth, but now a well-established existence. In short, as curious and as well substantiated as the singular sightless fish of the mammoth cave of Kentucky. In brief, these Aztec Children present the most extraordinary phenomenon in the human race ever witnessed by the modern world: let their origin be what it may – let their history and their country’s history be every so vague and traditionary—doubt the truth of Velasquez’s narrative or believe it wholly—these children present in themselves the eighth wonder of the world. They are, without exception, the most remarkable and intensely interesting objects that were ever presented to the European public. 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 Druck von Leo Krause & Ewerlien “Maximo und Bartolo die leßten lebenden Azteken,” a 1909 postcard of siblings Bartola and Maximo, most likely from their final engagement in Germany. Image from author’s collection. Description An account of the resource Pedro Velasquez’s gripping 1851 Illustrated Memoir of an Expedition into Central America chronicles the enterprising Hammond expedition that absconded with a pair of native children after discovering Iximaya, a fabled city hidden in deep in the jungles of untouched Central America. These, however, were not just any children, but the two last living members of a pureblood priestly caste: Bartola and Maximo, “The Aztec Children.” Diminutive in stature and well beloved by the otherwise war-like Iximayans, after their “rescue,” the siblings became two of the most sought-after freak show performers of the nineteenth century. However, Bartola and Maximo were not Aztecs; and neither Pedro Velasquez nor Iximaya actually existed. Their life story pamphlet was actually a doctored up version of American lawyer and explorer John Lloyd Stephens’ travelogue, Incidents of Travel in Central America, Chiapas, and Yucatan (1841), a text that revitalized interest in Mayan antiquity during the nineteenth century. The wild romance of the “Aztec Children” was nothing more than freak show fabrication. Bartola and Maximo’s actual origins are unknown, but they were most likely born in San Salvador. They were both born with microcephaly, a neurodevelopmental disorder that impaired physical and cognitive development, earning them the nicknames the “Aztec Children” and “Aztec Lilliputians.” They first appeared with their impresario J. Morris in Boston, MA in the early 1850s. After catching the attention of Horace Greeley and President Millard Fillmore, they travelled to London in 1853 to meet Queen Victoria. For the next fifty years, they were continuously exhibited in London, Europe, and the US. They even briefly worked with P.T. Barnum, one of the most famous nineteenth-century showmen, which testified to just how popular the “Aztecs” were. Eventually interest in the siblings faded, and their last known sighting was around 1901. The postcard is a souvenir from one of their final performance engagements in Germany. Throughout their career, Bartola and Maximo sparked hot debates over the nature of physical, cultural, and racial difference. The conclusion of the “Aztec Children’s” pamphlet reveals how disability, science, and colonialism supported each other during the nineteenth century. On the one hand, they were routinely used as medical, ethnological, and anthropological evidence of the existence of degenerate species. But, Bartola and Maximo were also deemed imposters: they were little more than imperfect Aztec knockoffs, much like their fraudulent life story pamphlet. The twists and turns of their long career represent the freak show’s signature “artful deception,” a clever interweaving of truth and fiction, authenticity and fabrication, cover ups and exposé.<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a> The freak show does not just calm anxieties and uncertainties that accompany physical difference, but also incites energetic debate that complicates cultural standards of normalcy. <h3>Note</h3> <div><a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> Including the freak show, automatons, stage magic, and trompe l’oeil, James W. Cook maps out the modern form of trickery he refers to as “artful deception “ in The Arts of Deception: Playing with Fraud in the Age of Barnum. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2001) </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Illustrated Memoir of an Eventful Expedition into Central America Resulting in the Discovery of the Idolatrous City of Iximaya in an Unexplored Region; and the Possession of Two Remarkable Aztec Children Maximo (the Boy) and Bartola (the Girl,) Descendants and Specimens of the Sacerdotal Caste (now Nearly Extinct), of the Ancient Aztec Founders of the Ruined Temples of That Country. Edited by John L. Stephens and Other Travelers. Translated by Pedro Velasquez. New York: Wynkoop, Hallendeck, and Thomas, 1860. Pages 30 to 34. Available at: <a href="https://archive.org/details/101188943.nlm.nih.gov">https://archive.org/details/101188943.nlm.nih.gov</a> Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1860 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Ann McKenzie Garascia Relation A related resource <ul><li>Aguirre, Robert D. Informal Empire: Mexico and Central America in Victorian Culture. Minneapolis: Minnesota, 2005. </li> </ul><ul><li>Bogdan, Robert. Freak Show: Presenting Human Oddities for Amusement and Profit. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1988.</li> <li> Durbach, Nadja. Spectacle of Deformity: Freak Shows and Modern British Culture Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010. </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Bartola and Maximo, “The Aztec Children” https://nineteenthcenturydisability.org/files/original/330ec4540b1eaa1ced6a997f31704ba3.png 7bd31ae1f48e2961b4f55d86c291f079 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 This image is reproduced by courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. Description An account of the resource A white plastic glove with all the letters of the alphabet printed in lower case along the fingers and palm. Dublin Core The Dublin Core metadata element set is common to all Omeka records, including items, files, and collections. For more information see, http://dublincore.org/documents/dces/. Title A name given to the resource 1880 to 1901 Description An account of the resource Document A resource containing textual data. Note that facsimiles or images of texts are still of the genre text. Text Any textual data included in the document. “The moment he evinced the independent desire to communicate with others by written words, I felt that the time had come to give him a means of forming written words for himself by teaching him his letters and a manual alphabet.” “For this purpose I adopted the plan, recommended by George Dalgarno, of writing the alphabet upon a glove. This glove I presented to him one morning as a new plaything He put it on his left hand, and then went to the card-rack, as usual, and presented me with the word for some object he desired; we shall suppose the word “doll.” I then covered up the word with the exception of the first letter, “d,” and directed his attention to the glove. After a little searching he discovered the corresponding letter upon the glove. I then showed him the letter “o” on the card, and he soon found it on the glove; and so with the other letters.” “After a little practice of this kind he became so familiar with the places of the letters that he no longer required to search, but pointed at once to the proper letter upon the glove. Every time he required a card from the card-rack I made him spell the word upon his fingers.” “In communicating with me it was unnecessary for him to wear the glove, as we both remembered the places of the letters. I kept up the practice of writing to him, as before, but required him to spell the words upon his hand while I wrote them on the board. He soon became so expert that he could spell faster than I could write, and often finished his sentence by guessing what I was going to add before I had written more than two- thirds. When this stage had been reached I often used the manual alphabet with him, instead of writing. I took his hand in mine and touched the places of the letters upon his hand. He did not require to look; he could feel where he was couched. He recognized the words in this way, however rapidly I spelled them upon his hand. As I had five fingers, I could touch five letters simultaneously, if I so desired, and a little practice enabled me to play upon his hand as one would play upon the keys of a piano, and quite as rapidly.” “I could also give emphasis by pressure upon the fingers, and group the words together as they would be grouped in utterance, leaving pauses, here and there, corresponding to the pauses made in actual speech.” “The more I used with him this means of communication the more I rejoiced in the fact that I had decided to employ an alphabet addressed to the sense of touch, instead of sight. It left his eye free to observe the expression of my face and the actions and objects which formed the subject of our conversation.” 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 A replica of the talking glove used by Alexander Graham Bell to teach George Sanders and, later, to communicate with Helen Keller. This image is reproduced by courtesy of Alexander Graham Bell National Historic Site in Baddeck, Cape Breton, Nova Scotia, Canada. Description An account of the resource In 1873 Alexander Graham Bell was employed to teach George Sanders, a five year-old congenitally deaf boy. As part of his instruction of Sanders, Bell used the ‘talking glove’ found in the 1680 book, Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor, by George Dalgarno (1628-1687), with slight modification. The letters of the alphabet were written on a glove in specific places on the glove’s surface. A sighted person would then spell words by touching the appropriate letter on the glove. Because of his success with this method of communication with George Sanders, Bell employed it when he met with Helen Keller in Washington in May of 1888. Keller, who was anxious to utilize any method that would allow her to communicate with others, was quite interested in this technology. On 15 May 1888, Anne Sullivan wrote to her former teacher at Perkins Institute for the Blind, Sophia Hopkins, to tell her that when the then-former Governor of Maine, Dr. Alonzo Garcelon, asked Keller what she would like to have as a present, Keller responded with “‘Some beautiful gloves to talk with.” Sullivan continues, writing that the “Doctor was puzzled. He had never heard of ‘talking-gloves’; but I explained that she had seen a glove on which the alphabet was printed, and evidently thought they could be bought. I told him he could buy some gloves if he wished, and that I would have the alphabet stamped on them” (Keller 261-62). While she could understand the potential the glove presented as a method of communication, Sullivan was also concerned by the accessibility of communication she saw with the glove. Dorothy Herrmann quotes an undated letter from Sullivan to Michael Anagnos, the director of the Perkins School for the Blind, in Helen Keller: A Life. In this letter, Sullivan is reluctant to have Keller use the talking glove as she saw its potential to allow anyone the ability to communicate with Keller, giving Sullivan little control over what Keller was exposed to: I cannot bring myself to the mental state, where I can feel contented to allow irresponsible and unreasoning persons to have easy access to my darling’s pure and loving little heart. I am sure that while I stay with her, she will never have occasion to feel the solitude of her life, and when I go, the glove, I doubt not, will add greatly to her enjoyment. But until then I am determined to keep my beautiful treasure pure and unspotted from the world. (quoted in Herrmann 71) In the end, although Keller herself was, initially, enthusiastic about the glove, it became inconvenient, as she grew more skilled at fingerspelling. Keller expressed her thoughts and opinions so rapidly with fingerspelling that the glove became slow and awkward for her. Indeed, the talking glove, or alphabet glove as it is now commonly called, is still used today by deafblind individuals, but, according to the National Federation of the Blind in Baltimore, Maryland, it “is a cumbersome communication method, but it works well when no other system is available.” As early as 1868, Bell had been involved in teaching deaf students how to speak through his father’s system called Visible Speech. However, rather than challenging Bell’s beliefs that the deaf could be integrated into American society through articulation, the alphabet glove was a part of his larger method of instruction intended to achieve this goal. Bell envisioned that the introduction to language through the alphabet glove and other tools would eventually lead to his students being able to lip-read and speak. While Keller did go on to realize Bell’s problematic oralist agenda and eventually learn to speak, Sanders was not able to master articulation<a title="" href="#_ftn1">[1]</a>. Sanders was, nevertheless, skilfully educated by Bell at least in part through the use of the alphabet glove. Bell’s success in instructing Sanders, who would go on to attend The National Deaf-Mute College in Washington, D.C. in 1882 and work as a printer, added to Bell’s growing reputation as an accomplished instructor to the deaf. Additionally, Thomas Sanders and Gardiner Greene Hubbard were so impressed with the alphabet glove and Bell’s success in educating George that they became major investors in Bell’s phone company. Building on the reputation that came from his use of tools such as the alphabet glove in his teaching and the proceeds from his invention of the telephone, Bell became one of the most influential figures in the oralist movement, a movement that sought to suppress sign language in favour of speaking and lip-reading and would have, and still has today, significant negative ramifications for deaf communities throughout the world. Note <div> <div> <a title="" href="#_ftnref1">[1]</a> In a forced emotional scene in the 1939 The Story of Alexander Graham Bell, George Sanders is depicted as being able to eventually say “father” while his father, Thomas, weeps with happiness. </div> </div> Source A related resource from which the described resource is derived Bell, Alexander Graham. “Upon a Method of Teaching Language to a Very Young Congenitally Deaf Child.” American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb. XXVII (1883): 124-139. Date A point or period of time associated with an event in the lifecycle of the resource 1883 Contributor An entity responsible for making contributions to the resource Nadine LeGier Relation A related resource <ul><li> Clark, Harold T. Talking Gloves For The Deaf and Blind: Their Value to Men Injured in the Present War. Cleveland, Ohio, 1917. </li> </ul><ul><li> Dalgarno, George. Didascalocophus, or the Deaf and Dumb Man’s Tutor. Oxford: Printed at the Theater, 1680. </li> </ul><ul><li> Herrmann, Dorothy. Helen Keller: A Life. Chicago: Chicago UP, 1998. </li> </ul><ul><li> Keller, Helen. The Story of My Life. New York: Modern Library, 2003. </li> </ul><ul><li> National Federation for the Blind. <a href="https://nfb.org/deaf-blind-resources">https://nfb.org/deaf-blind-resources</a> </li> </ul> Title A name given to the resource Talking Gloves Language A language of the resource English 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