History
Deaf people have long been the objects of religious salvation, of philanthropy, and educational reform. By the early twentieth century, science and medicine claimed to turn deaf people into productive, rational citizens. Eugenics, too, was part of these progressive reforms. Schools became the centres where these scientific, moral, and educational claims about normalizing deaf people came together, and no school embodied these ideals better than the Clarke School for the Deaf in Northampton, Massachusetts. Founded in 1867 as the first permanent oralist school in the US, it established, in 1928, a research department with divisions for psychological, audiological, and heredity research, all working towards the scientific management of deafness. Yet collaborating with scientists from other institutions, the school also had to engage with approaches to deafness that did not align with its own.
In 1984, the Gallaudet Genetic Services Center (GSC) opened its doors, offering ASL-based and Deaf culture-specific genetic counselling and evaluation. It was made possible through federal funding to remove barriers to genetic services for ethnocultural minorities. The three hearing geneticists who drove the GSC’s foundation – Walter Nance, Joann Boughman, and Kathleen Shaver Arnos – considered genetic research a collaborative enterprise with Deaf communities, creating, for example, ASL signs for genetic concepts. Combining non-directive with culturally sensitive counselling, they promoted genetics not as a means for preventing deafness, but as a way to gain self-knowledge. Acknowledging deafness as a normal, even desirable trait, the GSC helped prepare the notion of genetic awareness as an integral part of one’s identity and a tool of empowerment for Deaf activism.
This chapter examines the mind-sets that frame twentieth- and early twenty-first-century United Kingdom social policy. These thought processes continue to marginalise deaf people from opportunities for meaningful employment and can be traced to their roots in the Poor Law legislation for England and Wales of 1834. The concept of ‘deserving and undeserving poor’ that underpinned the Poor Law placed deaf people in a legally ambivalent situation that has never adequately been resolved, and so they came to be regarded as ‘deserving’ almost by default because of their inability to hear. Although this legislation was finally abolished upon the creation of a welfare state in 1948, its ethos continues to practically exclude deaf and disabled people from the workplace by emphasising what it is assumed an individual cannot do, rather than on what (s)he can do.
The Victorian era, encompassing the latter six decades of the nineteenth century, was a period by which significant areas of the British Isles had become industrialised and urbanised. Both processes exacerbated the extent of impairing conditions, ranging from industrial injury through the prevalence of debilitating physiological illnesses. Disability and the Victorians: attitudes, interventions, legacies brings together the work of eleven scholars and focuses on the history of disability and, while showcasing the work of a diverse gathering of historians, also gives a flavour of how disability history engages the work of scholars from other disciplines and how they, in turn, enhance historical thought and understanding. Equally, while the focus is on the Victorian era, a time during which society changed significantly, both at the bottom and from the top, it was also a time in which patterns developed that were to have an enduring influence. Therefore, a taste of that enduring influence is presented in chapters that suggest the resilience of Victorian thought and practices in the modern era. Consequently, an underlying aim is to encourage readers to take a broad view, both of ‘disability’ and of Victorian influences and values.
The boundary between definitions of ill health and disability becomes apparent in this chapter on children’s experiences in Glasgow in the Victorian period. Early efforts to establish a children’s hospital were resisted on purely financial grounds, as they were seen as a threat to the established institutions by taking away vital income. After Glasgow’s Hospital for Sick Children finally opened, it soon became apparent that many children who had been treated needed a longer time to recover but too-early discharge to poor housing conditions and diet could result in their recovery being arrested and reversed. As a result, a number of convalescent homes in the countryside were established to assist with children’s recovery and formal agreements were reached between the Royal Hospital for Sick Children and homes such as Ravenscraig and the East Park Home. This chapter traces continuity of the Victorian ethos when the children’s hospital and charity-run convalescent homes evolved in the aftermath of the Great War.
This chapter explores representations of impairment and disability in the ‘Literary Realism’ writings of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau and investigates a different medium of popular perceptions and representations of disability, that of popular fiction. Criticism addressing the use of disabled characters in Victorian fiction frequently acknowledges how such characters function by invoking feelings of sympathy, both within the narrative and in readers. However, Deerbrook’s Maria Young and Philip Wakem in The Mill on the Floss reverse our expectations: rather than being the subjects of observation and sympathy, they operate as model observers of the world around them. In this, they differ from the stereotypical role assigned to disabled characters in other Victorian novels and seek to follow one of the guiding principles of Literary Realism, the accurate portrayal of daily life, rather than some romanticised notion.
The debates surrounding what constitutes ‘disability’ and what are considered appropriate reactions to disabling conditions are highlighted in this examination of the historical background to psychiatric, eugenic and wider societal responses to inebriation. The author explains how alcohol addiction became seen as what she terms a ‘borderland’ disability, a condition that should be recognised as both a cause and a symptom of disability, rather than an illness or a life-style choice. Furthermore, inebriation needs to be evaluated through the longer-term consequences of constitutional weakness or feeble-mindedness that might be detected in the offspring of inebriants. Discourses and policies that connected the concepts of alcoholism and degeneration were prominent sites at which disability was constructed in the Victorian and Edwardian eras. The chapter emphasises the roles that gender and social class played in eliciting responses that demonstrated either compassion or prejudice towards the debilitating effects of alcohol addiction.
‘Passing’ was an objective of the prosthetic limb developed by Benjamin Franklin Palmer. Palmer produced the first patented leg in New Hampshire and he gradually developed a worldwide following for a device that became a must-have accessory for those who wished to blend back into society following the loss of a limb. Palmer aligned his invention with medical progress, but he was also adept at marketing the benefits of his prosthetics in both practical and aesthetic terms. The prosthesis was able to merge with the body, making the wearer ‘whole’ again, physically and mentally, and it could facilitate masculine ideals of sociability, labour and business success. International marketing of his invention created a following for a device that was ‘conspicuously inconspicuous’ and demonstrated that Victorian values and ideals were not limited to Britain and its empire.
The British Empire reached the peak of its power and influence during the Victorian era, presenting opportunities to a wide spectrum of entrepreneurs, missionaries, government administrators and adventurers. This chapter examines how disabled white Britons fitted into the imperial matrix by exploring the life histories of three deaf educators and social reformers, John Kitto, George Tait and Jane Groom. As the lives of these three individuals intersected with the workings of the British Empire, this provides an opportunity to consider the intersection between disability and colonialism. As Cleall demonstrates, scholars of disability have often used the language of colonialism to evoke the exclusion, discrimination and subjugation of disabled people by society, following a similar pattern to that used in issues of race.
‘Disability’ is a wide and multifaceted concept and Victorian elites drew heavily on a whole range of ways of classifying not only sections within society but also behaviours that they considered to be socially and morally deviant. Notably, through the application of Poor Laws in the United Kingdom and beyond, what Victorians were guided by their perceptions, on the one hand, of able-bodiedness and the ability to perform productive and self-supporting work and, on the other hand, of people who were disabled from working through a range of physical, sensory and mental impairments. They increasingly tried to differentiate between those whom they considered to be worthy of aid and those they deemed to be unworthy of assistance and support, through being unable or unwilling to find employment. The chapters presented in this collection represent some of the ways in which support was offered or withheld and how those deemed to be worthy of such support were identified.