Disability and the Victorians

Iain Hutchison is Research Affiliate in Economic & Social History at the University of GlasgowMartin Atherton is Retired Course Leader for British Sign Language and Deaf Studies at the University of Central LancashireJaipreet Virdi is Assistant Professor in History at the University of Delaware

• Foreword – Karen Sayer Introduction – Iain Hutchison, Martin Atherton and Jaipreet VirdiPart I: Attitudes1 Restoration to usefulness: Victorian middle-class attitudes towards the healthcare of the working poor – Amy W Farnbach Pearson2 Imperial lives – confronting the legacies of empire, disability and the Victorians – Esme Cleall3 Disabling the author in Mid-Victorian realist fiction: case studies of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau – Deborah M FratzPart II: Interventions4 Medicalising deafness in Victorian London: the Royal Ear Hospital, 1816-1916 – Jaipreet Virdi5 Drunkenness, degeneration, and disability in England – Joanne Woiak6 Victorian medical awareness of childhood language disabilities – Paula Hellal and Marjorie Lorch7 ‘Happiness and usefulness increased”: Consuming ability in the antebellum artificial limb market – Caroline LieffersPart III: Legacies8 The disabled child in an industrial metropolis: Glasgow’s children’s hospital, Scottish convalescent homes ‘in the country’, and east park home for infirm children – Iain Hutchison9 The panopticon: Towards an intimate history of special schools for the blind – Fred Reid10 Allowed to be idle: Perpetuating Victorian attitudes to deafness and employability in United Kingdom social policy – Martin AthertonIndex

'Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Interventions, Legacies is a very timely work. In the midst of a global pandemic that has left many people newly impaired, there is an increased need for scholarship that provides frameworks for coming to terms with disability as a sociocultural phenomenon and a lived identity. [...] Disability and the Victorians makes an important contribution to the history of medicine and attitudes toward disability in Victorian Britain and beyond and provides a useful resource for scholars of nineteenth-century Britain.'Joyce L. Huff, Journal of British Studies 'Disability and the Victorians encourages the reader to perceive these [Victorian] attitudes not as an event but as a chapter in a story that continues to this day. This collection challenges us to critically examine the systems and structures that perpetuate marginalization[...]Even though it encompasses tough subjects, Disability and the Victorians offers an academic study that eschews jargon; it guides the reader through the research in the field as if it were narrated through experience rather than academic findings.Alberto Ruiz, SEL's MarginaliaDisability and the Victorians certainly fulfils its editors’ desire to generate debate and spur further research: its contents encourage critical reflection on disabled people’s experiences in the present day, thus enabling us to see how monumentally important the task of exploring the history of disability is.Caitlin Doley (University of York), British Association for Victorian Studies