A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century 9781350028944, 9781350028913

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LIST OF FIGURES

1.1 Engraving by James (?) Hulett, in Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard, Orthopaedia: Or, The Art of Correcting and Preventing Deformities in Children. London: printed for A. Millar, 1743. Book III, p. 210. Hathi Trust. Public domain

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1.2 Oval wax portrait of Josef Boruwlaski by Samuel Percy, 1798. The Glenn Tilley Morse Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain

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1.3 Portrait of Maria Teresia (in male dress) by William Hincks, 1774. RCSSC/P 251. Hunterian Museum Collection, Royal College of Surgeons, London. By permission

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1.4 Engraving of Maria Teresia (in female dress) by Robert Cooper, London, 1821. Wellcome Collection. CC BY

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1.5 Engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, “The surprizing Irish giant of St. James’s Street [Patrick Cotter O’Brien].” London: Thomas Smith, 1785. 1868,0808,5425,AN156768001. British Museum. CC BY

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1.6 Benjamin Marshall, “Portrait of Daniel Lambert,” Leicestershire Museums and Art Galleries. Public domain

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2.1 Three men wearing orthopedic apparatus exercising. Lithograph by Paul Sandby (?), 1783. Wellcome Library, London

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2.2 Two disabled veteran sailors, employed by an admiral as messengers, delivering a letter to the servant at the front door of a town house. Colored etching after G. M. Woodward, 1790. Wellcome Library, London

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2.3 Merlin’s mechanical chair for the elderly or infirm. Hand-colored etching with aquatint, 1811. Wellcome Library, London

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2.4 Artificial left leg, Europe 1901–40, following a design first made for the Marquis of Anglesey, who lost his leg at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815. Wellcome Library, London

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5.1 Title page of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell. London: E. Curll, 1720

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5.2 Portrait of Duncan Campbell, Frontispiece of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell. London: E. Curll, 1720

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LIST OF FIGURES

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5.3 The abbé de l’Epée instructing his pupils in the presence of Louis XVI. Painting by Gonzague Privat, 1875. L’Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris

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5.4 Title page of Pierre Desloges’ Observations d’un Sourd et Muèt sur “Un Course Élémentaire d’Éducation des Sourds et Muèts”

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Dwight Codr is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut. He has two primary areas of research. The first is the cultural history of money in the British eighteenth century; the second is the history of disability, with a particular emphasis on disabilities of speech, in the same period. Having published on Frankenstein in PMLA, Alexander Pope and sneezing in Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, and Elizabeth Inchbald and stuttering in Philological Quarterly, Professor Codr is also author of Raving at Usurers: Anti-Finance and the Ethics of Uncertainty in England, 1690–1750 (University of Virginia Press, 2016), a cultural history of risk in the age of financial revolution. Isabella Cooper has a PhD in English literature from the University of Maryland, where she works as an academic advisor in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department. She also has a B.A. in English from Grove City College and an M.A. in English from the University of Virginia. Her research has focused on the Victorian novel and animal studies. Her dissertation, “Humankindness: Illness, Animality, and the Limits of the Human in the Victorian Novel,” explores a range of attitudes of sympathy and antipathy toward both invalids and animals in the works of the Brontës and Thomas Hardy. D. Christopher Gabbard is Associate Professor of English at the University of North Florida, where he teaches courses in British Enlightenment literature, Disability Studies in the Humanities, and creative non-fiction. His work has appeared in PMLA, Eighteenth Century Studies, SEL, Restoration, and The Disability Studies Quarterly. He is the author of A Life Beyond Reason: A Father’s Memoir (Beacon, 2019), and he has published chapters on cognitive ableism in Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (Intellectual Disability: A Conceptual History (Manchester University Press, 2018)) and on caregiving in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (The Madwoman and the Blindman: Jane Eyre, Discourse, Disability (Ohio State University Press, 2010)). Forthcoming in Literature and the History of Medicine (Cambridge University Press) and the Routledge Companion to Literature and Disability are his chapters on disability in eighteenthcentury British literature. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies and is assembling a collection of essays titled “Representations of Care/Ethics of Care.” C. F. Goodey holds a PhD from the Department of the History and Philosophy of Science at the University of Cambridge. He formerly held research and teaching posts at the University College London Institute of Education and The Open University. He is the author of A History of Intelligence and “Intellectual Disability”: The Shaping of Psychology in Early Modern Europe (Ashgate, 2011) and Learning Disability and Inclusion Phobia: Past, Present, Future (Routledge, 2016).

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Allison P. Hobgood​ is Associate Professor of English and Women’s and Gender Studies at Willamette University. She is the author of Passionate Playgoing in Early Modern England (Cambridge University Press, 2014), co-editor of Recovering Disability in Early Modern England (Ohio State University Press, 2013) and “Disabled Shakespeares” (in Disability Studies Quarterly, 2009), and editor of a special issue on disability, care work, and teaching in the journal Pedagogy (2015). Her other essays have appeared in venues such as Shakespeare Bulletin, Textual Practice, Shakespearean Sensations (2013), Disability, Health, and Happiness in the Shakespearean Body (2015), and The Cambridge Companion to Literature and Disability (2017). She is currently completing a second monograph, Beholding Disability in the English Renaissance. Simon Jarrett is an associate lecturer at Birkbeck University of London. He writes about the history of intellectual disability in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. His work explores the role of the idea of intelligence, and its changing meanings over time, in the construction of social forms and the importance of the idea of the “absent” or “deficient” mind in the human sciences, philosophy, medicine, law, and literature. Kristin Lindgren teaches literature, writing, and disability studies at Haverford College. She is co-editor of two books on Deaf culture, Signs and Voices and Access: Multiple Avenues for Deaf People, and has contributed chapters to collections including Gendering Disability, Illness in the Academy, Disability and the Teaching of Writing, Transforming the Academy, Disability and Mothering, and Anti-Portraiture. She served as faculty organizer of the exhibition What Can a Body Do? and is co-curator of Consent to Be Seen: Portraits by Riva Lehrer. She has convened several symposia on disability arts and culture, bringing together scholars, artists, curators, and activists to discuss how our varied approaches might generate new practices and partnerships. Susannah B. Mintz is Professor of English and chair of the department at Skidmore College. A specialist in disability studies and a scholar of autobiography, she is the author of four monographs, including Unruly Bodies: Life Writing by Women with Disabilities (University of North Carolina Press, 2007), Hurt and Pain: Literature and the Suffering Body (Bloomsbury Academic, 2014), and The Disabled Detective: Sleuthing Disability in Contemporary Crime Fiction (Bloomsbury Academic, 2019), in addition to articles, chapters, and edited collections on disability culture and memoir. She has also published extensively as a writer of creative non-fiction, with essays in American Literary Review, The Writer’s Chronicle, Epiphany, Ninth Letter, Michigan Quarterly Review, and elsewhere. She was the winner of the 2014 South Loop National Essay Prize and a finalist for both the 2010 William Allen non-fiction prize and the Epiphany chapbook contest in 2015. Her work has received special mention from Best American Essays and the Pushcart Prize Anthology 2018. Current projects include a collection of personal essays called Love Affair in the Garden of Milton. Jared S. Richman is Associate Professor of English at Colorado College, where his teaching centers on literatures of Britain’s long eighteenth century, radical culture, satire, critical disability studies, and comics and graphic narrative. He is currently finishing a manuscript entitled “Transatlantic Realms”: British Romanticism and the Idea of America, 1780– 1832. He has published essays on various authors, including William Blake, Charlotte

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Smith, Anna Seward, John Thelwall, and Mary Wollstonecraft. His most recent project traces the relationship between nascent elocutionary theories of the Enlightenment and disability in Anglo-American culture. Kate E. Tunstall is Professor of French at the University of Oxford, and Fellow of Worcester College. Her publications include Blindness and Enlightenment (Continuum, 2011). David M. Turner is Professor of History at Swansea University. He is the author of Disability in Eighteenth-Century England: Imagining Physical Impairment (Routledge, 2012), which won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Award. His recent research has focused on meanings and experiences of disability in industrializing Britain. His latest book, Disability in the Industrial Revolution: Physical Impairment in British Coalmining 1780–1880, co-authored with Daniel Blackie, was published by Manchester University Press in 2018. Sara van den Berg, Professor of English at Saint Louis University, specializes in Early Modern literature, medical humanities, and disability studies. Her publications include books and essays on Jonson, Shakespeare, Milton, the plague, dwarfs, and Freud’s case histories. She has chaired the MLA Division on Psychological Approaches to Literature and the MLA Committee on Disability Issues.

SERIES PREFACE

As general editors of A Cultural History of Disability, we are based on either side of the Atlantic—in the Department of Disability and Education at Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom and in the School of Social Sciences at Liverpool Hope University, United Kingdom, and in the Department of English at George Washington University, USA—but we are unified by our work and interests in disability studies, with a particular emphasis on culture and cultural production. This being so, the genesis of the project was in cultural disability studies, from which grew discussions about history that led us in many fruitful directions (e.g., Longmore 1985; Davis 1995; Garland-Thomson 1997; Mitchell and Snyder 2000; Kudlick 2003; Snyder and Mitchell 2006; Burdett 2014a; Coogan 2014; Doat 2014; Tankard 2014; Rembis 2017). The name mentioned more than any other was that of Henri-Jacques Stiker, whose work was prominent in our thoughts at the proposal stage, and as such resonates here. The method in his most famous book, A History of Disability, “ranges from close readings of literary texts as exemplary of dominant myths to discussions of the etymology of disability terminology to medical taxonomies of specific conditions and test cases to an examination of current legislative initiatives” (Mitchell 1999: vii). The real interest, as Stiker states in an interview published more than thirty years after the first edition of his book, is not “History with a capital H like trained historians do,” but “grand representations, systems of thought, the structures beyond history” (Kudlick 2016: 140). The spirit if not the letter of this method is adopted in A Cultural History of Disability, our focus being how disability has been portrayed in various aspects of culture and what these representations reveal about lingering and changing social attitudes and understandings. A Cultural History of Disability is indebted to contemporary disability activism and to other movements for social justice. As David Serlin writes in the introduction to an important anthology on the intersections of disability and masculinity, Within academic culture, tectonic disciplinary and intellectual shifts of the 1960s and 1970s gave rise to the fields of ethnic studies and critical race theory, women’s and gender studies and men’s studies, LGBT studies and queer studies, and disability studies, and crip theory. Scholars in these fields have not always been in alignment, of course, but they do increasingly recognize each other as workers and activists in adjacent and overlapping fields of critical inquiry, cultural production, and social justice. (Serlin 2017: 8) Many chapters in A Cultural History of Disability are thus deeply and necessarily intersectional, attending to gender, race, sexuality, nation, and other axes of human difference. In the process, the project attends to multiple modalities of disability experience, past and present. In presenting such an interdisciplinary and theoretical project, we therefore depart from the kind of history of disability that, for example, focuses on the story of so-called special schools from the perspective of their governors

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(Burdett 2014b), or the history of major medical advances (Oshinsky 2005), in favour of one that delves into the underpinning social attitudes faced by disabled people beyond and long before such institutions or advances. We are keenly attuned as well to the many ways in which disability has been represented. A “system of representation,” according to Stuart Hall, “consists, not of individual concepts, but of different ways of organizing, clustering, arranging, and classifying concepts, and of establishing complex relations between them” (Hall 1997: 17). From this cultural studies perspective, a cultural history of disability is attuned to how disabled people have been caught up in systems of representation that, over the centuries (and with real, material effects), have variously contained, disciplined, marginalized, or normalized them. A cultural history of disability also, however, traces the ways in which disabled people themselves have authored or contested representations, shifting or altering the complex relations of power that determine the meanings of disability experience. In formal terms, A Cultural History of Disability is a six-volume work on renderings of disability from Antiquity to the twenty-first century. The set of volumes is interdisciplinary insofar as it engages scholars with interests in disability studies, education, history, literature, cultural studies, drama, art, and several other related fields and disciplines. Each volume covers one of six historical periods: Antiquity (500 BCE–800 CE); the Middle Ages (800–1450); the Renaissance (1450–1650); the long eighteenth century (1650– 1789); the long nineteenth century (1789–1914); and the modern age (1914–2000+). These individual volumes are edited by accomplished scholars who provide an outline of the major ideas and themes concerning disability in their given historical period. The internal structure of the six volumes is notable. Following the period-specific introduction, each volume comprises eight chapters whose principal titles correspond throughout the set. This means that many themes can be traced across all six volumes— and thus across all six historical periods. The overarching themes of the eight chapters in each volume are tentatively listed as atypical bodies; mobility impairment; chronic pain and illness; blindness; deafness; speech; learning difficulties; and mental health issues. All of these themes are manifestly problematic, on account of the terminology and apparent focus on impairment rather than disablement or disability, not to mention categorization that swerves from the fact that many disabled people have multiple impairments. Accordingly, many of the volume editors and chapter contributors have creatively and critically worked with and beyond these problematics. The eight-part categorization across time is ultimately extended not in a positivistic but in an analytical mode, offering not sameness but a critical difference across the historical periods under review. “Learning difficulties,” for example, materialize quite differently under modes of industrial or neoliberal capitalism (with their demands for a particular kind of productivity and speed) than they do in Antiquity or the Middle Ages, when “learning” and education were stratified more obviously according to caste or gender. Deaf people have not always conceptualized themselves as having a distinct language or inhabiting a “minority” identity; such a conceptualization clearly requires particular historical conditions that have only begun to germinate in the past three or four centuries. These two examples illustrate that, if somewhat simplistic, the overarching themes of the project assist readers who are keen to understand more about how disabled people are represented in culture and how ideas and attitudes have both resonated and changed down the centuries. Historical changes in ideas and attitudes have been at times merely adaptations of a more general pattern; they have, however, at other times been more akin to what are often understood as “paradigm shifts,” which fundamentally alter or reinvent the conditions in

SERIES PREFACE

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which human beings are located or rescript the underlying assumptions that give rise to how we apprehend the world. The concept of a paradigm shift comes—perhaps paradoxically for a cultural history of disability—from the history of science; Thomas S. Kuhn famously used the term to describe what happens when advocates for new scientific approaches or models (those Kuhn termed “young Turks”) overturn what they perceive as the outdated views of those who came before them (Hamilton 1997: 78). As Peter Hamilton explains, however, where other systems of representation or “aesthetic domains of painting, literature or photography differ from sciences is their essentially multi-paradigmatic as opposed to uni-paradigmatic nature” (Hamilton 1997: 80). Paradigm shifts in the history of disability have thus been about pluralizing the ways in which disabled experiences might be apprehended or have been apprehended over the centuries. For example, the activist invention of “disability identity” itself, in the twentieth century, could arguably be understood as an example of a paradigm shift that generated completely new vocabularies, multiplying the ways in which we might understand the embodied experience of disability. From this multi-paradigmatic perspective on embodiment, we can recognize that disablement on an attitudinal level involves a historical and changeable metanarrative to which people who have impairments are keyed in social encounters (Bolt 2014). Tracing these multiple paradigms across and through the cultural patterns of history, as well as noting the discontinuities between periods, can greatly enhance our critical understandings of the present. In turn, the new vocabularies of contemporary activism can enhance our critical understandings of the past. Indeed, only with the activist vocabularies of the present have we been able to conceive of disability as something that might have a cultural history worthy of being studied and debated. A Cultural History of Disability demonstrates particular interest in the etymology of disability terminology (in keeping with the method exemplified by Stiker). In English, “disability” as a term appears to date from at least the sixteenth century, according to the Oxford English Dictionary (Adams, Reiss, and Serlin 2015: 6). The political scientist Deborah A. Stone linked the term to the needs of an emergent capitalist order, which newly demanded “able-bodied” workers, but which also needed to differentiate between those who would be sorted into what she identified as a “work-based” system and those who would be placed in a “needs-based” system. For its own consolidation, the emergent capitalist order needed to prioritize the former and stigmatize the latter, and Stone argues that “the disabled state” was charged (from the time “disability” circulated widely as a term) with the sorting, prioritizing, and stigmatizing (Stone 1984). Of course, various other examples of disability terminology have circulated both before and after the period Stone surveys. Often those other terms—freak, retard, idiot, and even handicapped, which until recently in English was dominant in many locations—have served to reinforce deep stigmas against disabled people and to valorize able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. At other times, various terms for what might now be understood through a disability analytic have functioned quite differently, and the early volumes of this series provide thorough considerations of the languages of disability that were available, say, in Antiquity or the Middle Ages. Contemporary activists have put forward disability as an identity and as the preferred term in many locations, as against “handicap” and so many other discarded terms, both the negative and the seemingly positive terms Simi Linton calls “nice words” (terms activists generally perceive as patronizing, like differently abled or physically challenged) (Linton 1998: 14). For decades, in ways similar to the world-transformative reclamations in the queer movement, activists have also played with the ways in which formerly derogative words such as crip might be resignified in culturally generative ways

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(McRuer 2006; Bolt 2014). Disability terminology, although sometimes overlooked, thus reveals much about changing ideas and attitudes. Languages besides English have of course similarly been the staging grounds for vibrant conversations about disability terminology. Many Spanish speakers roundly reject minusválido (literally, less valid) or discapacitado/a; some activists and artists, particularly in Spain, have put forward the preferred term persona con diversidad funcional (person with functional diversity). Although the revision of these terms has had a more uneven reception across Latin America, the very existence of such debates testifies to ongoing and vibrant conversations about language—critical debates that resonate in Japan (Valentine 2002) and India (Rao 2001). The anthropologist Julie Livingston uses “debility” for her important work on Botswana, since no word in the languages spoken there translates easily into “disability,” even though a concept is needed for encompassing a range of “experiences of chronic illness and senescence, as well as disability per se” (Livingston 2006: 113). The international and historical scope of these debates is immense. What we begin to explain here is that A Cultural History of Disability is not meant to provide readers with the history of disability. The history of disability is in fact, from one perspective, the history of humanity, and as such too vast for any collection, no matter how extensive, illustrative, or indicative of key periods and moments. From another perspective, what we think we understand in our own moment as “disability” varies immensely across time and space, which is why this set of volumes ultimately presents multiple and variegated histories of disability. The cultural history of disability thus is not something we could or would endeavor to document, not even with the esteemed editors and authors we have gathered to conduct this research. Rather, what we offer here is a cultural history that leads readers down various and sometimes intersecting paths. The cultural history this set of volumes presents is an interdisciplinary one that is driven by an appreciation of disability studies and thus disability theory, recognizing that disability as an analytic—like a feminist or queer analytic—can be brought to bear on many different topics and cultural contexts, even if other time periods have conceptualized bodies and minds using very different language from our own. David Bolt and Robert McRuer, General Editors

REFERENCES Adams, Rachel, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (2015), “Disability,” in Rachel Adams, Benjamin Reiss, and David Serlin (eds.), Keywords in Disability Studies, 5–11, New York: New York University Press. Bolt, David (2014), The Metanarrative of Blindness: A Re-Reading of Twentieth-Century Anglophone Writing, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Burdett, Emmeline (2014a), “‘Beings in Another Galaxy’: Historians, the Nazi ‘Euthanasia’ Programme, and the Question of Opposition,” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 38–49, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Burdett, Emmeline (2014b), “Disability History: Voices and Sources, London Metropolitan Archives,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 8 (1): 97–103. Coogan, Tom (2014), “The ‘Hunchback’: Across Cultures and Time,” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 71–9, Abingdon and New York: Routledge.

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Davis, Lennard J. (1995), Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body, New York and London: Verso. Doat, David (2014), “Evolution and Human Uniqueness: Prehistory, Disability, and the Unexpected Anthropology of Charles Darwin,” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 15–25, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie (1997), Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Literature and Culture, New York: Columbia University Press. Hall, Stuart (1997), “The Work of Representation,” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, 13–74, London: Sage Publications. Hamilton, Peter (1997), “Representing the Social: France and Frenchness in Post-War Humanist Photography,” in Stuart Hall (ed.), Representation: Cultural Representation and Signifying Practices, 75–150, London: Sage Publications. Kudlick, Catherine (2016), “An Interview with Henri-Jacques Stiker, Doyen of French Disability Studies,” Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, 10 (2): 139–54. Kudlick, Catherine (2003), “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’,” American Historical Review, 108 (3): 763–93. Linton, Simi (1998), Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, New York: New York University Press. Livingston, Julie (2006), “Insights from an African History of Disability,” Radical History Review, 94: 111–26. Longmore, Paul (1985), “The Life of Randolph Bourne and the Need for a History of Disabled People,” Reviews in American History, 13 (4): 581–7. McRuer, Robert (2006), Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, New York: New York University Press. Mitchell, David T. (1999), “Foreword,” in Henri-Jacques Stiker (ed.), A History of Disability, vii–xiv, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Mitchell, David T. and Sharon L. Snyder (2000), Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Oshinsky, David M. (2005), Polio: An American Story. The Crusade That Mobilized the Nation against the 20th Century’s Most Feared Disease, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rao, Shridevi (2001), “‘A Little Inconvenience’: Perspectives of Bengali Families of Children with Disabilities on Labelling and Inclusion,” Disability and Society, 16 (4): 531–48. Rembis, Mike (2017), “A Secret Worth Knowing: Living Mad Lives in the Shadow of the Asylum,” Centre for Culture and Disability Studies YouTube Channel, May 10, https://www. youtube.com/watch?v=Ls5BgJ2x8U0 (accessed May 17, 2017). Serlin, David (2017), “Introduction,” in Kathleen M. Brian and James W. Trent, Jr. (eds.), Phallacies: Historical Intersections of Disability and Masculinity, 1–21, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Snyder, Sharon L. and David T. Mitchell (2006), Cultural Locations of Disability, Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Stone, Deborah A. (1984), The Disabled State, Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Tankard, A. (2014), “Killer Consumptive in the Wild West: the Posthumous Decline of Doc Holliday” in David Bolt (ed.), Changing Social Attitudes Toward Disability: Perspectives from Historical, Cultural, and Educational Studies, 26–37, Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Valentine, James (2002), “Naming and Narrating Disability in Japan,” in Mairian Corker and Tom Shakespeare (eds.), Disability/Postmodernity: Embodying Disability Theory, 213–27, London and New York: Continuum.

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Introduction D. CHRISTOPHER GABBARD AND SUSANNAH B. MINTZ

One of the eighteenth century’s most prominently disabled people was William Hay, a member of the British parliament. In 1754, Hay, who had a spinal deformity, published what is arguably the first disability memoir, Deformity: An Essay, a tract that touts the benefits of its author’s unique corporeal shape. The opposite view had long prevailed: that physical deformity correlated with malicious character. Indeed, misshapen persons were presumed to be malevolent. William Shakespeare’s history play Richard the Third famously thematizes this attitude. Frequently staged in the eighteenth century, Richard features the Duke of Gloucester, the murderous usurper of the English crown who was, by his own account in the opening soliloquy, “[d]eformed, unfinish’d, sent before my time/ Into this breathing world, scarce half made up” ([1597] 1998: 1.1.20–1). Embodiment provides explicit motivation for iniquitous behavior: “since I cannot prove a lover …,” Richard tells the audience, “I am determined to prove a villain” ([1597] 1998: 1.1.28– 30). He thus becomes the archetype of the bitter cripple, killing his family members to obtain the throne. Shakespeare’s Richard may have influenced Francis Bacon (founder of the modern scientific method) when he composed the essay “Of Deformity” less than a decade after one of the play’s first performances in the 1590s. “Deformed persons,” writes Bacon, “are commonly even with nature; for as nature hath done ill by them, so do they by nature; being for the most part … void of natural affection; and so they have their revenge of nature” ([1612] 1982: 158). The essay suggests that deformities are due to natural as opposed to supernatural causes, but it also maintains that society’s abuse of people with deformities accounts for their resentment, leading to the formation of a bitter cripple complex. Revenge here is the operative word: the deformed seek vengeance upon others for the way that they have been mistreated. Cripples want to get even. With differing degrees of sympathy for the malformed figure and social prejudice against it, Shakespeare and Bacon play out competing explanations for both the contours of the body and the temperament of the person: physical deformity is at once cause and effect of an unsavory character, even as it is also potentially devoid of moralized implications until subjected to the insults of culture. Writing autobiographically, William Hay approaches the conundrum of body and identity in full recognition of the negative slurs his own body might provoke, particularly about his character. Hay’s tract presents deformity not as Bacon had, as the subject of a supposedly disinterested scientific inquiry, but rather as a personally lived experience that can be understood only from that individualized perspective (in this, Hay anticipates by centuries the tendency of much contemporary disability memoir). Deformity argues powerfully against longdominant stereotypes, stressing disability’s incentive to goodness rather than evil and disrupting the equation of a misshapen bodily exterior with a morally questionable

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A CULTURAL HISTORY OF DISABILITY IN THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

interior. Indeed, Hay observes that a deformed body “tends to the Improvement of the Mind” because an individual “that cannot shine in his Person, will have recourse to his Understanding: and attempt to adorn that Part of him, which alone is capable of Ornament” ([1754] 2004: 42). In this way, Hay explicitly links the disabled body to virtue. Hay breaks new ground in this essay in connecting deformity with goodness. From whom or what did he draw the inspiration to construct a counter-narrative depicting deformity in such a positive light? Jason Farr suggests that it may have been Æsop, since Hay directly compares himself to the ancient Greek storyteller: “[I]n person I resemble Æsop” ([1754] 2004: 24). Æsop would have been a household name in the eighteenth century, for many editions of his fables had been published and were commonly used to nurture a love of reading in the young. Tradition had it that the Greek fabulist, a slave, was strikingly ugly. Emphasizing this part of his reputation, the frontispiece to John Ogilby’s Fables of Æsop (1651) portrays him as hunchbacked, potbellied, and hideous in countenance. In a 1793 “biography” of Æsop, Samuel Croxall states that “[a]ll agree that his person was uncommonly deformed” (quoted in Farr 2014: 5). Farr explains that “Hay’s argument that a crippled body may be the ideal host of a brilliant or learned mind seems to have existed throughout the eighteenth century in the figure of Æsop, whose cultural impact on this time period is significant” (2014: 5), and he observes that the figure of Æsop allows Hay to contend that “bodily impairments actually facilitate a strengthening of the intellect” (2014: 4). Æsop, then, may have provided an impetus for a new way of thinking about the anomalous body in eighteenth-century culture. As a writer wholly persuaded of the scientific, philosophical, and cultural ideals of the Enlightenment (roughly 1690–1780), Hay takes part in the intellectual movement that ushered in modernity. Fiona Kumari Campbell writes that the Enlightenment introduced “a new spirit of optimism about rationality and autonomy of man and afforded the attributes of will, authority, and reason new prominence. Such sentiments held out promises of the perfectibility of the body” (2015: 12). Characterizing the period was a move away from strict adherence to religious doctrine and toward a less constrained, more autonomous pursuit of knowledge. One of the signature documents to define these emancipatory principles is What Is Enlightenment? in which German philosopher Immanuel Kant ([1784] 1959) posits that “enlightenment” is an attitude of maturity: no longer would humans turn to God to solve their problems, but would instead employ science and technology to take control of their destiny. Over time, Enlightenment ideals would prove to be a double-edged sword for disabled people. On the one hand, the inquiries and commitments of Enlightenment rationalism cast doubt upon the claims of certain disabled people to full membership in the human species and so would deny them their rights, even their right to live (we will return to the concept of “personhood” below). On the other hand, for disabled people to invoke “human rights”—what would become the rallying cry of twentieth-century activism—is to draw upon one of the chief legacies of the Enlightenment: the argument that such things as human rights exist at all. This is one of the great conundrums of Enlightenment philosophy, whose embedded contradictions about the status of the human are difficult, if not impossible, to resolve. A memoirist such as William Hay, in mounting his case for the rational intelligence attendant upon an imperfect body, thus both complicates and exemplifies what we understand of eighteenth-century intellectual trends and the history of disability.

INTRODUCTION

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0.1. THE SUPERNATURAL, THE NATURAL, AND BIRTH “DEFECTS” The long eighteenth century is usually understood to mark a transition away from ancient prejudices against physical and mental disabilities and toward medical and scientific explanations. Prior to this period, the ancient symbolic model held sway. This model imposed metaphysical meanings upon corporeal difference, interpreting it as the sign of divine intervention, sometimes as benefit, but far more often as curse. In the Christian tradition, anomalous bodies have typically been read in one of two ways: either inspiring a sense of awe with regard to God and his creation or signaling demonic possession. Augustine of Hippo (354–430 CE) understood the congenitally deformed as signs and wonders, occupying a legitimate place in the fabric of creation. For Augustine, they demonstrated the range and variety of nature’s productions; he thus encouraged acceptance of individuals with deformities on the grounds that they provided insight into God’s plan. During the Protestant Reformation, various forms of physical, sensory, and mental difference were feared as the mark of devilry, loss of salvation, or punishment for sin. A transition occurred in the eighteenth century away from such religious explanations for physical anomaly and toward relatively scientific ones. The period increasingly embraced the scientific method, with its empirical and systematic approach to understanding the physical world. Yet the broad nature of this move can be overstated, for the historical record indicates that rising scientific interest did not sweep away older spiritual concerns so much as coexist with them. The same can be said with regard to physical difference. Well into the eighteenth century, the traffic in a cosmic economy of blessings and curses vis-à-vis deformity coexisted alongside more rational accounts: anomalous bodies are sometimes beheld as spiritual wonders and at other times as the spark of scientific interest. As we shall discuss below, a strong correlation between physical features and both moral and social status would come to define the literature of the eighteenth century, as well as its major philosophical movements. The period is best understood, then, as one of interpretive flux in which the same bodily characteristic might indicate the individual’s relationship to the divine, the quality of his or her ethical nature, or simply biological pathology. The period’s vacillation between natural and superstitious paradigms can be detected in common explanations for congenital birth defects. In ancient times, the birth of a physically anomalous child was interpreted as the gods’ warning that human conduct must be reformed. By the time of the Protestant Reformation, a “monstrous birth” was often construed as God’s punishment for sinful actions. From the mid-seventeenth century onward, the etiology of congenital birth defects was increasingly determined by the rise of biological science, but had not lost an older, moralized inflection. Problematic births might be ascribed to material causes such as a lack or excess of “seed.” But natural philosophers also attributed birth anomalies to the maternal imagination: something the mother witnessed or experienced during the gestation period could account for an infant’s malformation. This belief in so-called monstrosity as the hideous outcome of something that had impressed itself on the mother’s mind during pregnancy was widely accepted until the middle of the nineteenth century, when Jules Guérin finally debunked it (Stiker 1999: 95). Such a theory of cause obviously perpetuates older, more mystical paradigms in understanding the situation of the body as a direct result of emotion (indeed, it blames the mother’s state of mind for her

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child’s unpleasing body). But at the same time, it also represents a newer attempt to demystify the causes of impairment—to identify a physiological rather than a heavenly or supernatural source.

0.2. THE WORLD BEFORE “NORMAL” The idea that physical defects might result from emotional imbalance is a holdover from humoral theory. The humoral conception of the self was a legacy of classical physicians such as the ancient Greek Hippocrates (460–370 BCE) and Roman Galen (129–200 CE). These two physicians, as well as medieval and early modern readers of medical texts, understood both physiology and temperament in terms of a delicate balance of four humors—yellow bile, black bile, blood, and phlegm. Bodily fluids correlated with various dispositions: choleric, melancholic, sanguine, and phlegmatic. Prior to the eighteenth century, it was believed that while the human body could achieve equipoise of these humors, moments of stasis were invariably preceded and followed by periods of imbalance since the body was innately porous and volatile. Too much red meat or a damp environment could throw the entire system into disarray. The humoral theory of a leaky body would be supplanted by that of a sealed body with the early seventeenth-century concept of mind–body dualism, most famously propounded by René Descartes (1596–1650). Cartesian dualism encouraged thinking about the body not only as separate from the mind, but also as insulated from external stimuli, a closedoff and self-regulating container. This new way of understanding the body—in which it is not a unified entity but rather the sum of its parts—would greatly impact the unfolding story of disability, as doctors began treating ailments in specific parts of the body rather than the whole of it. It also coincides with the advent of Baconian empirical science and breakthroughs in physics, which regarded the universe, and thus also the human body, in mechanical rather than holistic terms. During this period, a pair of interrelated concepts—like the twin lenses of a pair of binoculars—became powerful. One such lens was the concept of the natural. Throughout the seventeenth century, older religious doctrines concerning the heavens were joined by the discovery of the laws governing the operations of the natural world, which now extended into the cosmos. New mechanical models of the universe stripped it of transcendental meaning. Isaac Newton was the crucial figure in establishing a picture of both the heavens and the earth as subject to the same operations of gravity. He posited that the heavenly bodies moved in perfect harmony and that human reason could apprehend the laws of physics governing these movements. Newtonian physics created a template for understanding how the physical world ordinarily, or “naturally,” operates. (Subsequent Enlightenment thinkers likened the universe to a vast, perfectly operating piece of machinery—an enormous clock.) Eighteenth-century scientists also shifted their attention to the study of plant and animal life. A preoccupation with the dynamic qualities of organic existence led to the formation of disciplines such as biology, zoology, and botany, all of which dedicated themselves to closely observing the vitality of living forms. New biological models required in turn the creation of innovative naming systems and templates for organizing the knowledge being acquired—Swedish botanist Carl Linnaeus is particularly associated with this development—initiating the grand Enlightenment project of ordering, bureaucratizing, and regulating the component parts of the natural world.

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The other lens dominating eighteenth-century epistemology was the concept of the beautiful. Theories of beauty had been articulated by philosophers since Plato and Aristotle, but the discourse of aesthetics emerged centrally in the eighteenth century and became virtually its own discipline as the “science” of the beautiful. Typical of Enlightenment preoccupations, this science attempted to discover the laws governing the essence of the beautiful, and it was influenced, once again, by Newtonian mechanical models that claimed to reveal the harmonious operations of the heavenly bodies. The Augustinian understanding had been that creation is made beautiful through its messy abundance, but as Naomi Baker states, the Newtonian vision “insist[ed] that the beauty of the universe lay in its rigid conformity to natural laws, [so that] all instances of apparent deviation became repellent” (2010: 40). This notion of a graceful universe both buttressed and was informed by classical ideals of beauty, ones that were rooted in expectations of symmetry and order. In fact, the classical ideals and Newton’s model of an elegant universe became mutually reinforcing concepts. These interwoven concepts inspired thinkers like Anthony Ashley Cooper, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, Francis Hutcheson, Edmund Burke, and Adam Smith, who sought to understand the principles underlying why human beings found certain scenes and objects attractive and others repulsive. These theorists grappled with the admittedly subjective nature of perception, for each more or less recognized that such assessments ultimately sprang from the imagination rather than objective reality. Still, they strove to organize and understand beauty along theoretical lines. They did in fact agree, in Martin Battestin’s terms, that “beauty was objectively founded in a principle of Nature as firmly fixed as the law of gravity: namely, the principle of symmetry and proportion” (quoted in Lund 2005: 96). Eighteenth-century theoretical writing on the subject of beauty coalesced in an ideology of form, one promoting an aesthetic standard for all human bodies. These twin concepts of the “natural” and the “beautiful” would have profound implications for people with disabilities. The major thinkers in aesthetics discuss deformity quite extensively, but they do not treat it as a formal category. Rather, they address it as a counterfactual in thought experiments, as something against which to contrast aesthetically pleasing forms. It goes without saying that in these thought experiments, the defective and disfigured, deviating from proper outward show, were not only the antithesis of beauty, but also, more emphatically, unnatural. Deformity was characterized as disproportionate, disharmonious, and peculiar—the index of deterioration, asymmetry, illness, and decay. While beauty is pleasing to the eye, deformity causes uneasiness, discomfort, disgust, and disappointment. As such, beauty and deformity became coupled in a commonly recognized binary opposition, and any body significantly deviating from the regular order would be cast out as disturbingly strange. Aesthetics arose as a discipline in no small part because of the great social changes that were taking place in this period. People were migrating to rapidly expanding metropolitan centers and being thrown together in unprecedented numbers. Physical appearance mattered in a way it had not before because strangers living in close quarters were inclined to make snap judgments based on what could be seen. Acceptance into (and by) the community depended in large part on appearing, at the very minimum, unremarkable—or at least not eliciting negative attention due to a visible defect or deformity. A person was expected to exhibit the standard human form, a reasonable degree of symmetry and smoothness in facial features, and an unexceptional health status. Standing out in a crowd for the wrong reasons could be disastrous. By establishing what

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constituted facial and physical harmony, symmetry, and bodily integrity, aesthetics thus participated in the making of public judgment. From Newtonian physics, then, to a hegemonic ideology of form that was thoroughly interwoven with stratifications of social class, embodiment became thickly entwined with Enlightenment attitudes toward social organization as a microcosm of the very workings of the universe. As supposedly more civilized beings, members of the aristocracy and the wealthy classes were required to embody the universal bodily ideal and expected to model it for both social equals and inferiors. Physical deformity, representing as it did a violation of an ideology that the upper classes were meant to uphold and display, would become inevitably linked in the social imagination with lower-class undesirability. The beautiful—or its opposite, the grotesque—was therefore far more than an aesthetic category; it served as an important criterion for judging how well the affluent and noble were fulfilling their appropriate social roles, as well as for enforcing an increasingly reified category of undesirables.

0.3. THE HUMAN AND THE ADVENT OF “INTELLECTUAL DISABILITY” The biological sciences’ drive to categorize and taxonomize everything in the living world required establishing borders for all species, including the human. And yet, the boundary separating humans from animals was increasingly perceived as insecure. What divided humans from animals? Growing knowledge of human variety across the globe, as well as of the world’s primate populations, contributed to a weakening sense of humanity as uniquely itself. A chief Enlightenment project was to mark out the limits of the human, and various borderline cases supposedly representing troublesome intersections of human and animal became fetish objects of philosophical inquiry. The question famously posed by Kant—“What is man?”—stoked scientific curiosity about the deaf and blind, feral children, orangutans, idiots, and indigenous non-European peoples, and also promoted investigations into a mythical Natural Man living in an equally fabulous State of Nature. Feral children allegedly proved the existence of Natural Man. Because they were presumed to have been raised in the wild, they were particularly captivating for natural philosophers eager to examine the animal–human divide. They seemed to be living examples of an existence untouched by society, thus offering the possibility of separating out how the uncultivated mind functioned free of civilizing influences. And because they seemed to be so close to animals, they offered philosophers and scientists the opportunity to determine which qualities distinguished humans from animals. At the heart of such investigations was always the question of what constituted the truly human. Peter of Hanover, known as “Peter the Wild Boy,” was a feral child secured in the German forests in the early 1720s and brought to the Hanoverian British court. He gained such prominence that Daniel Defoe met with him and published a long piece entitled Mere Nature Delineated. Defoe (1726) concluded that, in all likelihood, the lore about Peter the Wild Boy was a mixture of imposture and exaggeration: Peter was simply a boy with cognitive impairment whose family had abandoned him. To describe Peter as an “idiot,” however (the period’s preferred term for intellectual disability), did not rescue him in any simple way from a sensationalized wildness, since the concept of idiocy was to become central to how the period defined the fully human.

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The borders of the human have shifted according to historical context. For many centuries, the Judeo-Christian-Aristotelian view held that bodily shape and parentage were all that mattered in determining whether an individual was human. Aristotle’s definition privileged upright gait, human appearance, and language. For Jews and Christians through the Middle Ages, what mattered was a related but transcendent principle in which God, in a creative act, provided the source of human nature—the immortal soul, which any individual born of human parents and having a human shape would possess. The soul was presumed to be present no matter how deficient the mind. Being immaterial, the soul was the disembodied, incorporeal essence of the human. Interlocking with it was the less important intellect or “rational soul,” which referred to the individual’s thought process of reason and consciousness, the mortal faculties. These in turn existed closer to the corrupt organic flesh, its passions and five senses. The two—soul and mind—were interrelated, but the former took precedence over the latter when determining the human because it emphasized the fundamentally spiritual nature of human existence. During the Protestant Reformation, however, this assumption was challenged, at least to the extent that a human form did not necessarily guarantee the presence of a human soul, since nonhuman entities such as devils might assume human shape. The mind–body binary put similar pressure on an inherent conflation of physical form with human essence. When Descartes identified the pineal gland as the place where soul and body interact, he raised the possibility that the soul might not be entirely inorganic, that it might have material extension. This prospect in turn shifted the emphasis away from the spiritual to the physical, back to the rational soul or mortal faculties. And once these faculties gained prominence at the expense of the immaterial soul, the question of whether they are working properly became increasingly pertinent. Implicit in Descartes’ articulation of “I think; therefore, I am” was the assumption of an individual mind capable of reflecting upon itself. Equally implicit was the potentiality of a human body that could neither think nor engage in self-reflection because its mortal faculties were malfunctioning. As a result, then, it became possible to posit a being with a human shape but without a working mind. Philosophers subsequently began speculating about whether or not “mindless” beings could legitimately be considered human. Two types of human being in particular were assumed to lack reason: fools and madmen. Idiots were believed to have lacked reason from birth and to be incurable, whereas lunatics, who had somehow lost it, could be restored to sanity. The mad were understood to have too many ideas, while idiots were presumed to have too few. This paucity of mental activity and the hopelessness of cure left the latter group vulnerable to exclusion from the category of human. The idiot seemed to intersect the species boundary and came to serve as the archetype for all similarly ambiguous figures. These issues are central to John Locke’s 1690 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, in which Locke argues that humans develop knowledge not from innate ideas (ideas with which they are born), but from an inborn capacity to reason about the information gained from the five senses. The individual mind’s capacity to transform consciousness into an awareness of self becomes crucial in Locke’s determination of what makes someone fully human. Locke specifically defines a human being as a person: a “thinking, intelligent Being, that has reason and reflection, and can consider it self as it self, the same thinking thing in different times and places” ([1690] 1979: 2.27.9). He then ponders what to  do about the exceptions—human-shaped entities who cannot think abstractly and self-reflect—and posits a new category of human, a rung below person, which he terms man. According to social historian C. F. Goodey (2011: 313–46), Locke is the first

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philosopher to claim this distinction between person and man, the latter an entity having human appearance and issuing from human parents but who cannot think abstractly, process information swiftly, or retain and recall memories—and another who can. The political implications of this division between person and man could not have been more profound. Locke was constructing a definition of who would be capable of taking part in the social contract that had its origin in the 1689 Glorious Revolution. The new political and social order required some kind of criterion for determining who could participate in the public affairs of the emerging, relatively more democratic order. If someone could demonstrate mental capability, then he qualified as a person and so could be recognized as an autonomous, rights-bearing individual. But this privileged status of person was constituted through negation. To drive the point home concerning who fails the mental-performance test, Locke cites idiots, children, and “savages” as counter-examples. He homes in particularly on the idiot, which he often refers to as the changeling—an inferior, dull, irrational man who will require surrogates or guardians to represent him (see McDonagh 2018). It goes without saying that women were also assumed to lack the ability to think abstractly, and so, lumped in with idiots, children, and savages, they too bore the sign of political and social inferiority. By establishing a normative human mental standard, Locke invented the modern concept of the intellectually impaired individual, which would bring about a paradigmatic shift in Western thinking. It set in motion the restructuring of society along the lines of cognitive ableism, which is the belief that the mentally deficient individual is lesser in status than his swifter-thinking counterpart. As Goodey argues, it facilitates a social, political, and economic order in which persons assume prerogatives over men (2011: 313–46). In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, aristocratic birth and the prospect of salvation had operated as the chief indicators of social status. In the eighteenth century, intelligence began to vie with lineage and election as the most important marker of rank. A new hierarchy mapped intelligence onto existing social and cultural domains (Goodey 2011: 313–46). In this pecking order, mental acumen became linked with the acquisition of wealth. Just as social status seemed to be guaranteed by beauty, so too did the possession of resources become an important demonstration of who was smart and, by implication, who would sit at the pinnacle of society. Eighteenth-century philosophers like Locke and Kant generally believed that the ability to reason was rooted in anatomy. Writing many decades after Locke, Kant would pose his famous query about the nature of humanity. By asking the question in the way that he does—“What is man?”—Kant implied the possibility of a unified answer, one that would include some and exclude others. For both philosophers, full membership in the human species required sufficient intelligence to be able to act independently. “Autonomy,” as Kant writes, “is the basis of the dignity of human and every rational nature” (quoted in Kittay 2010: 4). Only persons in the Lockean sense could be said to be autonomous, and this is because their brains had fully formed. The intellectually defective individual supposedly suffered from a biological inferiority, one having to do with a poorly developed brain structure. Something was wrong with the mental apparatus of the idiot, and indigenous peoples and women were similarly believed to be subordinate on account of what were essentially physiological deficiencies. The figure who epitomized the highest level of cognitive ability was the Western European male, one with a fully functional brain. As the Enlightenment self was limited to a Western European male with a functioning brain, Africans conversely were presumed to be cognitively impaired—the equivalent of

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Locke’s changelings—and, therefore, subject to guardianship in the form of servitude. It is not surprising that European “rationality” depended on conceiving of an irrational “other” against which to define itself, and this belief system in turn “rationalized” the system of chattel slavery upon which the economies of Western Europe and North America depended in the eighteenth century. Servitude justified on the basis of supposed poor mental status meant for Europeans that Africans had to be managed with the kind of brutal treatment usually reserved for animals. In The Interesting Narrative, former slave Olaudah Equiano writes that he himself “experienced many instances of ill usage, and [has] seen many injuries done to other negroes in our dealings with whites” ([1789] 1995: 116). He also observes that Africans working on the sugar plantations in the Caribbean were subject to “human butchers, who cut and mangle the slaves in a shocking manner on the most trifling occasions, and altogether treat them in every respect like brutes” (105). Equiano’s and other slave narratives call attention to the frequently disabling damage to slaves’ bodies. Punishments and the labor conditions themselves impaired bondspeople, but the very fact of being held captive played havoc with the health of these non-wage-earning plantation laborers. Stefanie Kennedy contends that “physical debilitation” did not result solely “from a natural process but [also] from enslavement itself” (2015: 38). She additionally argues that disability as it was comprehended at the time (a combination of the ancient symbolic model and physiognomic thinking) was key to European understanding of the essential characteristics of the enslaved: the “display of maimed unfree bodies served to perpetuate the longstanding English notion that Africans suffered from a supposed inner depravity made manifest on their bodies” (37). There was circular reasoning involved in this enterprise of deliberately maiming people in order to make visible their “inner depravity.” In any case, slave owners depicting “maimed and disabled enslaved bodies … in runaway advertisements” was “a key part of the logic of enslavement and to emerging notions of race in the Atlantic World” (38). In sum, intellectual and corporeal impairment became integral to both the institution of slavery and the overall assessment of those held in bondage. In the construction of race during the Enlightenment, physical and mental disability went hand in hand.

0.4. STARING AND LAUGHING AT CRIPPLES IN THE AGE OF SENSIBILITY Establishing the boundaries of the human extended beyond cognitive considerations to physical ones. The deformed body was, in fact, one of the central topics of Enlightenment debates regarding the limits of the human, since deformed individuals inhabited a category that inversely defined nature’s proper or rightful standards. Freak shows were the very hub in which these debates played out (though often in the spectators’ unconscious), consisting of the exotically deformed put on display before the paying general public. At Bartholomew Fair, a late-summer fair held annually in London, viewers could see giants, dwarfs, Siamese twins, hermaphrodites, hirsute women, and other “monstrous” human beings. Such shows flourished after the Restoration of the Stuart monarchy in 1660, when “freaks” were commonly displayed for profit in marketplaces and specially hired venues: enclosed spaces in which the able-bodied stared unabashedly at extravagant forms of physical difference. Showmen or “monster mongers” tended to offer their “specimens” under two pretenses. The first had to do with feeding the public’s desire for “signs and wonders” and its curiosity concerning the diversity of nature. Anomalous bodies presented as monsters and prodigies served as objects of sensational

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public display and provoked reactions of both wonder and fear. The second involved affording the public the opportunity to partake in dispassionate scientific observation, thereby simulating the impulse of modern natural philosophers. Just after the 1660 restoration of the monarchy, King Charles II licensed the Royal Society, the world’s first formal scientific organization, and interest in natural philosophy was great. Thus, the spirit of Baconian empiricism pervaded some of the monster viewing. Freak shows, however, were far more show than science. Extraordinary bodies were not presented to audiences in neutral, objective terms, but were subjectively represented to them as supposedly exhibiting the liminality of the monster. The heavy-handed suggestion was that these embodiments of spectacular difference blurred the line between man and beast. The quality of “freakishness” resided not in the individual “specimens” put on show, but in the way that they were framed and turned into drama. So-called freak shows attracted English men and women of all ranks, creating spaces where the able-bodied could reaffirm their own human status by gazing upon those who supposedly lacked it. In other words, dramatically anomalous individuals served as objects of visceral fascination because the implicit negative polarity shored up the viewers’ sense of their own wholeness and proper formation. Such a dynamic depended on the sharp distinction inherent in these performances between the onlooker and the freak. The viewing public could experience the frisson—the simultaneous surprise, excitement, discomfort, bewilderment, and fear—that came from encountering what was dramatically different from themselves and yet unsettlingly and startlingly similar. Ultimately, freak exhibitions proved profitable because they played on this conundrum of sameness and difference, like and unlike, in ways that both frightened and fascinated. The staged freaks were the exceptions. Most people with deformities were considered too ordinary to put on stage and were conducting their everyday lives, earning a living (or doing so as best they could), raising families, and participating in public life to the best of their abilities. Individuals with less dramatic physical conditions were frequently objects of derisive laughter. The eighteenth century is in fact notorious for the cruelty directed toward the deformed and disabled, and the question must arise as to why people during this time did not respond with compassion to those with anomalous bodies. This period was, after all, the great age of sensibility. Sensibility was a set of cultural beliefs encompassing the notion that nature instills instincts in human beings that guide them to cooperate with one another. The moral philosophers of the time developed this belief system in reaction to seventeenth-century Stoicism, which emphasized reason and the unemotional will as the principle motives of virtue. Even more directly, sensibility as a belief system arose to refute the writings of political philosopher Thomas Hobbes. In his 1651 Leviathan, he argues that human beings are innately selfish and that the mainsprings of human behavior are self-love and the drive for power and status. Sensibility came into being as a reaction to a pessimistic philosophy that egotism and self-interest are the sole drivers of human social behavior. The term sensibility itself derived from the newly emerging belief in the predominance of the senses in human physiology. In the mid-seventeenth century, the physician Thomas Willis discovered the human nervous system, which he depicted as an organization of pathways connecting the senses throughout the body to the brain. Locke, who was Willis’ medical-school pupil, extended his mentor’s insight about the senses by arguing in the 1690 Essay for Sensationalism the belief that the basis of all knowledge is sense experience and mental reflection upon it. In the decades following, Willis’ myriad filaments of the nervous system came to be perceived as the fibers of the emotions. The Scottish moral philosopher

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Francis Hutcheson—following in Locke’s sensationalist tradition—hypothesized that human beings have a sixth sense: a moral sense. This sixth sense “hard-wires” humans, so to speak, through their nervous systems to sympathize with fellow human beings, to have “fellow feeling.”1 Lennard J. Davis observes that it was generally believed during this time that people’s nerves were like violin strings that “vibrated sympathetically with each other” and that, in some way through this mutual vibrating, “humankind [was] connected on the emotional level” (2008: 36). Signs of this harmonious vibrating became evident through benevolence, the impulse to wish other people well. It was also manifested through a hair-trigger instinctive responsiveness to another person’s distresses and joys.2 Shedding tears, for example, provided a visible index of intense emotional responsiveness and so revealed good-heartedness and harmony with others. Despite such intense interest in sensitivity as both a physical and emotional phenomenon linking people in fellow-feeling, expressions of compassion did not often extend to disabled people. Impaired and deformed beggars could be found throughout the streets of London, but far from eliciting pity, they usually provoked horror and hostility. Broadsheets and newspapers portrayed them as malevolent agents—as menacing, villainous, and violent— and these representations shoved them well beyond sympathy’s reach. Pulpit exhortations portrayed them as proper objects of Christian charity, but such preaching often clashed with congregants’ feelings of disgust. Drawing from the period’s jest books, Simon Dickie has demonstrated that cruel laughter at the expense of the deformed and the impaired was common: “The cripple’s awkward shuffle; the hunchback’s bent spine; the confusion of the blind; the comically inappropriate responses of the deaf; the stomp-stomp-stomp of a man with a wooden leg—to these and other afflictions laughter was an immediate and almost unquestioned reaction” (2003: 16). These figures were “automatic figures of fun” (2003: 14). Where did this cruel merriment come from? Departures from what eighteenth-century aesthetician Edmund Burke called “the compleat common form” were thought to be ridiculous, and this laughter may be explainable in terms of the dominance of aesthetic theories that beauty is determined by proportion and balance ([1757] 1999: 93). Roger Lund contends that “ridicule of deformity was not a random expression of human cruelty, but was authorised by an ideology of form which necessarily dismissed the deformed or the disabled as foreign, transgressive, ugly and inherently worthy of contempt” (2005: 111). Lund maintains that cruel laughter occurred because deformity disrupted the observer’s sensory field and called forth an aesthetic rejection of anything that violated ideals of line and form. The deformed were perceived to be creation’s misfirings, to deviate humorously from the straightness, harmony, and symmetry that ordinarily characterized the natural world. Viewed as aberrations, disabled people did not fit in with the beauty of an otherwise harmonious universe and so must be “God’s little jokes” (2005: 92). Given this context, the report Catherine Packham gives of the blind Scotsman Thomas Blacklock should not surprise. A renowned poet, Blacklock was appointed in 1762 to serve as minister for a congregation in Kirkcudbright on Scotland’s southwest coast. However, when he arrived at his new position, his parishioners, not wanting a blind minister, hooted and hissed and eventually forced him out of the appointment (2007). The misshapen did not receive much sympathy in the Age of Sensibility, then, because deformity jarred, rather than harmonized with, the nerve strings. Moreover, cruelty was an easy response if one believed that external deformity disclosed internal depravity. Deformity might have been less and less associated with sin, specifically, but outward appearance was in fact thought more than ever to register an individual’s internal moral

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status. Throughout the eighteenth century, it was increasingly believed that a person’s exterior features revealed his or her interior nature. Not surprisingly, the ancient pseudoscience of physiognomy experienced a resurgence during this time. Physiognomy purported to correlate external and internal states: in physiognomic thinking, it was not just the eyes serving as a window to the soul, but the entire body, and particularly the face. Johann Caspar Lavater published a series of Essays on Physiognomy (1775–9) in which he asserts that “[b]eauty and ugliness have a strict connection, with the moral constitution of the Man. In proportion as he is morally good, he is handsome; and ugly, in proportion as he is morally bad.” He somewhat qualifies this claim, but he does fundamentally believe “that virtue beautifies, and vice renders a man ugly” (quoted in Paulson 1972: 66). Robert Jones observes that novels in the middle of the eighteenth century increasingly include descriptions of characters’ faces, with the countenance “generally imagined to have a moral significance or at least to give a key to the moral standing of the man or woman who possesses it. … [T]he reader was expected to understand [these descriptions] in terms that are ultimately more ethical than physical” (2000: 280). In this formulation we are not very far, after all, from older notions of physical form as the consequence of moral or spiritual insufficiency. Indeed, eighteenth-century deformity came to serve as a condemnatory tool, useful for singling out anything unacceptable, repellent, or loathsome. Drawing by inversion upon the Platonic association of the beautiful with the good, the rhetoric of deformity invokes the distorted, the evil, the odious. The real point behind this rhetoric was to alert people to the presence of vice. In this way, the attractiveness and unattractiveness of bodies informed people’s moral evaluation of one another and even of themselves. Adam Smith, in his Theory of Moral Sentiments, writes that we examine ourselves in the mirror to determine whether we are one or the other and try to imagine how others view us. In the end, he states, “[o]ur first ideas of personal beauty and deformity, are drawn from the shape and appearance of others, not from our own” ([1759] 1976: 3.1.4). The same goes for conduct, opines Smith. [We] examine our own passions and conduct, and to consider how these must appear to [others], by considering how they would appear to us if in their situation. We suppose ourselves the spectators of our own behaviour, and endeavour to imagine what effect it would, in this light, produce upon us. This is the only looking-glass by which we can, in some measure, with the eyes of other people, scrutinize the propriety of our own conduct. ([1759] 1975: 3.1.5) In a discussion of Smith’s Theory of Moral Sentiments, Paul Kelleher argues that the increasing awareness of one’s own beauty or deformity, and the beauty and deformity of others, becomes in the eighteenth century a condition of possibility for morality itself. Kelleher writes that the moral philosophy of civil society, at least as Smith construes it, is underwritten by this binary of beauty and ugliness, which in turn lays the groundwork for, and is recapitulated in, the ideology of normal and abnormal that takes shape in the nineteenth century (2015: 48). Not everyone laughed at cripples, of course, as Dickie acknowledges: people of the middle and upper classes generally regarded them as “objects of sympathy rather than figures of fun” (2003: 18). And the general attitude among the educated seems to have been that one should not mock: conduct books—popular guides for how to behave in public—counseled against staring at deformities. The cult of sensibility increasingly depicted the deformed and defective as objects of pity and charity. In fact, the callousness

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and cruelty of which Dickie speaks may have stirred a reaction that in turn became an important aspect of sensibility. Social historian David Turner maintains that demonizing disabled people sprung in part from the mid-seventeenth-century English civil wars, when deformity tropes were weaponized in propaganda attacks against political and religious enemies. By the early eighteenth century, moderate Anglican religious authorities were pushing back by promoting the notion that deformity could be a site of virtue (2012a: 147). Narrative would inevitably reinforce but could also change attitudes, and from the middle of the eighteenth century onward, novels increasingly portrayed impairment to produce compassion. Linking disability to the drama of an individual’s life helped get the sympathy strings vibrating. Turner writes that “these sympathetic portrayals were to some extent reliant on … negative images in order to achieve their impact. ‘Sentimental’ representations … required the production of ‘innocent’ disabled characters deemed worthy of compassion, in contrast to ‘guilty’ figures that were deserving of derision, fear, or contempt” (2012a: 73). In other words, sensibility depended on the possibility of cruel laughter at the expense of the deformed, the ugly, the frail, to elicit pity for its subjects. The fact that they were frequently ridiculed itself became reason enough to shed tears. The pathos evoked and the tears of sympathy that were shed were self-serving: like the freak shows, sentimentalism ultimately aimed to make the able-bodied feel better about themselves. Mid-century novels and other media began offering moralizing narratives in which disabled figures were presented for readers to admire. Sympathy could be extended to disabled ex-servicemen if they were afforded an opportunity to tell their stories. Sarah Scott’s feminist utopian novel Millenium Hall (1762) depicts the philanthropic women of the titular establishment setting up an enclave for the deformed escapees of freak shows, shielding them from the public’s prying eyes. Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling (1771) portrays a limping war veteran with an arm in a sling and a sentimental story to tell, moving the novel’s protagonist to tears. And Frances Burney’s novel Camilla (1796) sympathetically presents Eugenia Tyrold, who was scarred by smallpox and deformed during childhood. In such tales we can also locate the antecedents of later narrative tropes of disability that entail both triumph over adversity and social or moral reform. Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1856 Life of Samuel Johnson, for instance, describes its subject’s mental illness as a matter of overcoming hardship, so that in being narrativized, disability is also safely contained, transformed from a source of potential shame or ridicule to a matter of personal strength and perseverance. As Davis has argued of such stories, “disability becomes a positive virtue, particularly in women, children, the elderly, that signals spiritual and moral dignity achieved through suffering” (2000: 69).

0.5. THE RISE OF THE MEDICAL MODEL AND INSTITUTIONALIZATION Over the course of the long eighteenth century, as the stare of wonder associated with an ancient symbolic model was gradually replaced by the clinical gaze, the human body was increasingly positioned as an object of scrutiny. Faith in empirical observation coincided with the emerging prevalence of the medical model, a paradigm of doctor–patient relations that would come to dominate cultural attitudes toward disability in the nineteenth century. The medical model defines disability as an individual affliction, a matter of dysfunction and deficiency within the body that requires intervention—management, cure, repair—

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by medical professionals. It understands the body as an ahistorical, natural, ultimately passive object whose pathologies, having little to do with social attitudes, are properly subjected to the unifying authority of scientific discourse. The medical model grew out of quintessential Enlightenment ideals and processes. Just as other branches of science during the period had sought to catalog and taxonomize the material of their study, so too did medicine. The attempt to understand the workings of the body led to identifying, naming, and classifying the myriad forms of dysfunction the body could take. This effort in turn produced “increasingly complex diagnostic and etiological classification systems” that medicalized what had once been the proof of divine judgment or nature’s abundance (Braddock and Parish 2001: 13). As the types and causes of human anomaly were steadily documented in this way, and as medical researchers published their findings in scientific treatises and monographs, disabled people became patients. The significance of this cultural shift was enormous. Problems of the body were just that—problems to be solved by authoritative experts, whose knowledge about the meaning of the body in question far exceeded that of the patient, and whose interest in the patient was increasingly trained on specific aspects of anatomy rather than the experience or perception of the whole person. It would be centuries before the medical profession turned its attention once again to the therapeutic validity of how individuals experience—and narrate their experience—of the conditions or maladies they have. A by-product of the medical model was the effect it had of grouping a scattered array of syndromes and conditions under the rubric of “disability” as an organizational concept. Prior to the mid-eighteenth century, as Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park explain, “the only thing” impairments like deformity, blindness, and deafness “had in common was that each was anomalous” (quoted in Deutsch and Nussbaum 2000: 3). However frequent physical, sensory, and mental impairments might have been in the general population, no one thought of the blind, lame, and paralyzed as having anything to do with one another; disability as a formal discursive category did not exist until science and medicine “discovered” it. By mid-century, however, a continuum was starting to form. Most importantly, the term ability, which until then had little to do with what is now assumed to be its opposite, began to couple with disability in a binary formation. The foundation was being laid for a highly regulated and divided structure in which nondisabled people would be construed as fundamentally different from disabled people. Coinciding with this conceptual dichotomy was the rise of hospital medicine. Asylums and general hospitals opened for the purpose of housing destitute “invalids” in enclosed spaces apart from the general population. The cult of sensibility as well as the forces of humanitarianism and religion combined in providing this assistance. In retrospect, it might seem obvious that the good intentions behind these custodial residential institutions too often had serious and harmful side effects. Institutional approaches over-medicalized “what was, in large measure, a social, educational, and economic problem,” as Braddock and Parish argue, “separating many disabled people from their families, communities, and society at large” (2001: 51). Institutionalization undermined the self-determination of disabled people, and as Foucault and others have correctly pointed out, increased control over and surveillance of disabled populations amplified their social exclusion. But whatever we might understand today about the perils of the institution (especially in the wake of Foucault’s philosophical dismantling of psychiatry, the mid-twentieth-century anti-psychiatry movement, and more recent Mad

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Pride activism), Enlightenment thinking held that it was more progressive, therapeutic, and humane to house disabled people, the idiot, and the mad in institutions than to leave them to their own devices. Consequently, institutional care flourished, and hospitals represented progress. By 1800, a large number of institutions serving these populations had been established across Britain. Certain impairments drew more attention in the period than others. Blindness, in particular, problematized Enlightenment epistemologies that drew heavily on ocularcentric (sight-oriented) metaphors. Enlightenment philosophers prized the sense of sight above the other four as the vehicle—indeed the guarantor—of perception, reason, and knowledge, and both optics and the psychology of sight were catching the attention of leading scientists. What legitimate place, then, could the blind occupy in a world in which dependable knowledge was thought to derive from empirical observation, social commentators assumed the guise of spectators, understanding was equated with physiological sight, and the very term Enlightenment explicitly yoked intellectual acuity with the conditions of vision? Not surprisingly, as the feared but fascinating obverse of the mastery accorded to seeing, blindness provoked rich philosophical speculation (another ocularcentric term). In 1688, Dublin lawyer William Molyneux inaugurated a line of philosophical inquiry by posing the question (first in a letter to Locke) of how a blind man would recognize objects if his sight were suddenly restored. What became known as “Molyneux’s Problem” prompted Locke and subsequent thinkers like Berkeley, Condillac, Leibniz, and Voltaire to theorize just how it is that we know the world—but they did not in any explicit way inquire into the lived experience of blind people. It was only in 1749—with Denis Diderot’s published Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who See—that the philosophical discussion moved away from abstract theorizing and toward consideration of actual people with visual impairments. Deaf people also served as subjects of abstract intellectual conjecture. Like the blind, idiots, and native peoples, the deaf were a point of reference in the century’s discussion of what constituted the human. It was commonly assumed throughout the Middle Ages and the Early Modern period that the deaf could not be educated. The supposition was that language was necessary to form thoughts and that, because the deaf did not have access to language, they could not think. Philosophers like Rousseau, Herder, Condillac, Monboddo, Locke, and others argued, sometimes vehemently, that language and thought were intertwined in human consciousness and that the lack of oral language deprived people of higher-order consciousness. Davis comments that deaf people provided “living examples of the mind untouched by civilization. Here questions such as the following could be put: Are there thoughts prior to language? Can a being be human without language?” (1995: 55). Kant regarded deaf people as machines who were incapable of reason. From this philosopher’s perspective, Nicholas Mirzoeff observes that “the deaf, like other quasi-human brutes, remain trapped within a private interiority of passion cut off from public discourse” (1995: 71–2). Deafness, unlike blindness, was overtly coded as an inability to cultivate morality, and manual language was maligned well into the twentieth century. What philosophers of the period ignored was the fact that deaf people had long been forming their own Deaf cultures, communicating with one another through grammatically complex visual languages and so defying the social and educational pressure of oralism. The opening of l’Abbe Charles Michel de l’Epée’s deaf school in Paris in 1760 marks the beginning of a new era of Deaf culture: one of l’Epée’s students was Laurent Clerc, who founded the first schools for the deaf in America in the early nineteenth century with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet.

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0.6. TERMINOLOGY The terms norm, normal, normality, normative, and abnormal did not circulate in the eighteenth century—they had not yet been coined. As Davis has explained, these words do not enter common usage and acquire their present-day meanings until the middle decades of the nineteenth century. They did so as a function of the Industrial Revolution, which reached full gear in Britain roughly between 1760 and 1830, and of the new discipline of statistics, which formed in order to answer the needs of governmental bureaucracies to measure populations and increase productivity. With its nomenclature of deviations, averages, and errors, statistics also created the concepts of norm and normal to identify the mean, median, and average of a measured population. Although Enlightenment epistemologies increasingly valued measuring, this method of sorting human attributes did not yet hold sway in the eighteenth century. This is not to say that communal standards for what was typical or socially acceptable did not exist. As with every human society, collective expectations influenced individual comportment and appearance. The language for articulating these expectations in the eighteenth century, however, came from sources other than statistics. The word disability has circulated in English since at least the sixteenth century. The Oxford English Dictionary traces its first recorded usage to 1547 with the presentday sense of “a physical or mental condition that limits a person’s movements, senses, activities [or] the fact or state of having such a condition.” But the word was not used in the eighteenth century with the nuances of contemporary signification. In Britain during much of this time, “disability” most often denoted a soldier’s or sailor’s lack of fitness for service, a deficiency of robustness most likely resulting from an injury incurred in armed conflict. Over the course of the century, the term’s range of meanings slowly broadened to include men unable to work due to causes other than war injury, but it only referred to physical incapacity, never to mental impairment or sensory deficits like blindness and deafness. Toward the end of the century, the term’s reach extended to impaired women and children, but always to refer to lack of function, the inability to carry out certain activities, rather than unusual shapes or odd appearances. While the word disability was limited in scope, the terms defect, deformity, and monstrosity were broadly employed to signify unusual bodily configurations and appearances—the “outward shell.” As Essaka Joshua explains, “Eighteenth-century ‘deformity’ describes how someone or something looks, without explicitly referencing [diminished physical] function, and is applied to a vast range of congenital and acquired impairments that are visible” (2016: 30). Dramatic bodily configurations took the form of giantism, dwarfism, hunchback formations, extreme disfigurement (from smallpox), and other atypical somatic manifestations. Defect and deformity were more often than not applied to the repercussions of accidental occurrences, such as work mishaps. Monstrosity was reserved for particularly striking deviations usually deriving from congenital defects. Still, the three could also be used interchangeably, and all three represent operative cultural tropes of considerable weight. No matter what the cause of the aberration, these terms stigmatized. In addition to defect, deformity, and monstrosity, there were other, less encompassing expressions. Turner explains that the term lame was applied to an impaired gait, but it was also associated with both sickness and infirmity. Both lame and crippled might be used to describe a person with any physical defect, and these words were used interchangeably. And yet, while lame referred “to all kinds of impairments, whether temporary or permanent,

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‘cripple’ described a more ‘pitiable,’ all-encompassing state of incapacity” (2012a: 33). Indeed, the word cripple “conveyed a strong sense of devaluation” (2012a: 23). Dumb “referred to lack of function in any part of the body, not just the voice; hence ‘Dumb Arm’ meant ‘a lame arm.’” Common also were “words describing the ‘crooked’ body,” including hump-backt and crook-backt (2012a: 25).

0.7. CONCLUSION In the eighteenth century, as now, discursive structures shaped thinking about disability. As the chapters throughout this volume enumerate, the period’s treatment of anomalous embodiment and atypical modes of speaking, thinking, moving, and communicating is shaped by a lengthy conceptual transition whereby older “supernatural” explanations were gradually subsumed into medical and scientific demarcations of abnormality and pathology. As Davis has argued, a shift was underway by the end of the period that encompassed a more expansive category of disability, one that included not only defect, deformity, and monstrosity, but also madness, idiocy, blindness, facial disfiguration, and other conditions. Fierce debates about what constituted the “human” coincided with the period’s preoccupation with taxonomy, so that variations of all sorts were subject to categorization and, in turn, regulation. Efforts to standardize spoken and written English, to solidify class and gender boundaries through the governance of ambulatory style, and to control social order through management of behavioral deviance all led to increasingly elaborate—and also stringent—mechanisms of classification and containment. Evidence of this expanding tendency toward categorization was prominent in the literary marketplace, with deaf, blind, hunchbacked, pockmarked, and simpleminded characters playing functional roles in the formation of narrative plot. A key component of this shift, and the representations symptomatic of it, was the perception of disability as a challenge for individuals to surmount through strength of will. Disabled characters would display their virtue by either prevailing over their “afflictions” or living patiently with them. Such portrayals formed the basis of the “overcoming” or triumph paradigm, which would become a frequently employed trope in the cultural landscape of the nineteenth century and beyond. The prevailing beauty–deformity binary, along with the pseudoscience of physiognomy that it underwrote, also manifested in novelistic descriptions of characters’ interior moral conditions (thoughts and passions) through outward attributes (bearing and appearance), and the discursive power wielded by the novel helped to embed a new paradigmatic emphasis on appearance in the cultural imaginary. Another legacy of the beauty–deformity binary is its role in establishing statistical averages and deviations as the basis for social judgments. As Kelleher has remarked, “the aesthetic ideology that informs eighteenth-century moral philosophy lays the groundwork for, and is recapitulated in, the ideology of the normal and the abnormal, which begins in the nineteenth century and continues unabated into the contemporary moment” (2015: 48). This latter mode—of forming judgments based on statistics—accelerated a trend toward the medicalizing and pathologizing of anomalous bodies and minds. Those who were deemed physically, mentally, or sensorially deviant were the outliers on a statistical bell-shaped curve representing a particular population, while those who did not significantly deviate from the common, average, or typical occupied the center of the curve. The apparent objectivity of statistical analysis, making the practice difficult to refute as biased or motivated, has had ultimately disastrous consequences for disabled people, as the notion of scientifically provable “normalcy” infiltrated even laypeople’s way of thinking about human function, behavior, and formation.

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The philosophers of the period were preoccupied with theories of the natural and the beautiful, the sublime and the sensible, all of which overlapped with and informed questions having to do with the status of the human. Along with women, wild children, and “savages,” the idiot, mad, blind, deaf, deformed, and defective prompted inquiry into and anxiety about who was and was not a member of the human family. These anxieties and inquiries in turn mobilized various theories regarding where and upon what terms to demarcate the boundary of the species. Freak shows offered audiences the opportunity to ponder the question by gazing at specimens supposedly straddling the divide between the human and nonhuman. The human exhibits at the center of these attractions constituted the spectacularly deformed, but those whose bodily anomalies were insufficiently remarkable were simply ridiculed in the streets of common life, the implication being that the public considered them to be less than fully human. Indeed, this period is notorious for its cruel treatment of those exhibiting physical difference. At the same time, the rising popularity of autobiographical prose in the long eighteenth century gave access—or seemed to—to the “interiority” of individuals deemed ugly, deficient, or “mad.” An essentially new genre of life writing—what today we would call disability memoir—begins with William Hay’s essay Deformity, in which (with little more than Æsop as his guide) Hay had the audacity to speak out both as one of the deformed and on behalf of people like himself. In doing so, he deconstructed the widely accepted linkage of external malformation with internal malevolence. As several chapters in this volume explore, life writing in a range of literary forms (including poetry and mockmanifesto) represented a counterpoint to the use of disability in novels as a quick and dirty way to disclose characters’ moral status, as well as scientific discourse that enforced increasingly rigid boundaries between defectiveness and the norm. Hay and writers like him protested that they were neither animals nor liminal not-quite-human beings, and in presenting their case for the humanity of the deformed, they became part of the new spirit of optimism about rationality and autonomy. Hay and others helped fashion a new way of imagining deformity, one that must be understood as central to the development of Enlightenment thought.

CHAPTER ONE

Atypical Bodies Difference and Assertion SARA VAN DEN BERG

During the long eighteenth century, the increasing popularity of autobiographical writing made it possible to know more about the experiences and attitudes of disabled people. Although most severely disabled people led lives of private struggle, even in public spaces, some—especially dwarfs and giants, and others with visible anomalies in the size and structure of their bodies—chose to lead public lives, to tell their stories, and to seek justice both for themselves and for others marginalized because of poverty or social status. The interpretation of disability as a sign or cause of character flaw steadily receded, and the emergent medical model of disability as a flaw to be corrected was challenged by as early as 1754, when William Hay wrote that deformity, far from being “prejudicial to Health,” was instead “most commonly an advantage” ([1754] 2004: 29). Hay’s essay contributed to a model of disability we would now call psychosocial, which was articulated in the arguments and narratives of disabled people themselves. Autobiographical essays and memoirs enabled the figures described in this chapter to share their experiences on their own terms and to claim for themselves both autonomy and membership in society. They sought acceptance rather than cure. For the first time, they not only displayed their bodies in public shows, but also presented their stories, perceptions, and talents through advocacy, autobiography, and art. The spectacle of disability had been a prominent but ambiguous element of Early Modern European courts. Even at court, disabled people found their opportunities constrained. The court dwarf, in particular, could be at once a pet and confidant of noble authority, an entertainer, and an object of mockery and scorn, often humiliated for the amusement of privileged spectators. As Eva Sage Gordon argues, the court dwarf “makes a business of displaying him or herself, of sacrificing the interior for the exterior” (2019: 242). Other disabled people in noble households, especially giants and “natural fools,” often served as a foil to the dwarf’s size or wit. By the eighteenth century, however, the fashion for court attendants with disabilities had faded so much that Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in a letter to her sister (January 16, 1717), expressed surprise and disdain at the presence of dwarfs in German courts:

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I forgot to tell you one Curiosity in all the German Courts, which I cannot forbear takeing notice of. All the Princes keep favourite Dwarfs. The Emperour and Empresse have 2 of these little monsters as ugly as Devils, especially the Female, but all bedaw’d with Diamonds and stands at her majesty’s Elbow in all public places. The Duke of Wolfumbutel has one and the Duchesse of Blankenburg is not without hers, but indeed the most proportionable I ever saw. I am told the King of Denmark has so far improv’d upon this fashion that his Dwarf is his cheife Minister. I can assign no reason for their fondness for these pieces of deformity but the opinion that all Absolute Princes have that ’tis below them to converse with the rest of Mankind; and not to be quite alone they are forc’d to seek their companions amongst the refuse of Human Nature, these Creatures being the only part of their Court priveleg’d to talk freely to ’em. (1995: 1.294) The rhetoric of this long passage conveys Lady Mary’s contempt for dwarfs: they are “little monsters as ugly as Devils,” “pieces of deformity,” and “the refuse of Human Nature.” Given the spread of such attitudes, even the German court dwarfs could not be confident of their positions. The autobiography of the dwarf Peter Prösch, for example, describes his movement from court to court, his wit and strategies for survival, and the fragility of his popularity (Enderle et al. 1994: 252–60). Dwarfs dismissed from service had to provide for themselves, often by commodifying their anomalous bodies and putting themselves on display. Some court dwarfs made this transition successfully. By citing their royal credentials, they linked their new public audience to the court, and seemed to offer the common crowd a glimpse of court culture. Giants also seemed to be featured in every public show. Unlike most dwarfs, a male giant, often weak in body, rarely demonstrated any wit or social skill, but simply let the spectator walk under his arm. Others, like the extraordinarily obese Daniel Lambert, just displayed their deformities (Altick 1978: 254–5). As the display of anomalous bodies became a lucrative business, disabled people who had never been attached to a court, even children who had severe anomalies, began to appear in public exhibits. An Essex boy, Thomas Hall, a victim of progeria, “passed through the several stages of childhood, youth, manhood, and old age in a space of about 70 months,” and at the end “presented a most piteous spectacle, having several bald places on his head” (Wood 1868: 146–7). Hall died “of extreme old age” in 1747 at the age of five. Richard Altick mentions four other children on display at various times in London: a boy “cover’d all over his body with Bristles like a hedge Hog”; seven-year-old Hungarian twin girls, “Born with their Backs fastn’d together … [who] Talk three different Languages”; and a “giant Baby” (1978: 37). Such descriptions imply that these children were regarded as exotic objects rather than feeling subjects. The twins, in particular, were the likely source of the ribald tale of “The Double Mistress” in The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerius (Pope [1741] 1988: 143–63). This burlesque narrative, originated by Dr. John Arbuthnot and expanded by his friend Alexander Pope, used the marriage of pygopagus twins (joined at the hip) to debate questions important in that era, including “the integrity of the self, the relations of mind and body, and the boundaries between one person and another” (Porter 2004: 166). Misogynist humor aside, adults with anomalous bodies could make a psychological claim on the audience, reaching across the divide of bodily difference to appeal to an imagined bond. Overt cruelty toward people with disabilities remained evident in social behavior, hostile slang, and caricature (Dickie 2011). At the same time, paying audiences looked on these anomalous bodies with a mixture of curiosity, wonder, and sympathy.

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Although older assumptions about disability as a sign of moral or spiritual defect lingered during the Enlightenment, the growing social emphasis on ethical obligation led to an expansion of services for the needy. Institutions to house the disabled poor and other “problem people” (Porter 1990: 47) were mandated in France, a development that would later be critiqued by Michel Foucault as “the Great Confinement” (1965): society claimed to help the disabled poor by confining them out of sight, even if they did not want to be locked away. Increasingly, however, anomalous bodies—formerly regarded as miracles, monsters, or mistakes—were becoming the province of medicine, and the availability of prostheses led to an increased public acceptance and hope for correction, if not cure. More and more physical anomalies were thought amenable to medical intervention. Although David Turner persuasively argues that there was no widespread adoption of a medical model of disability during the eighteenth century (2012a: 1), there are indications that disability was gradually being defined as a medical problem. The English translation of Nicolas Andry’s Orthopaedia described procedures to correct skeletal deformities in children (1743). He originated the term “orthopedics,” and one illustration—a crooked tree braced by a straight pole—became the official emblem of the field (Figure  1.1). Merchants advertised a variety of prosthetic feet, legs, arms, and hands, as well as spectacles and ear-trumpets, for the middle class. Those in the upper class could rely on wheelchairs for mobility (sometimes called “Bath chairs”), while disabled beggars used a tub (“Billie Bowl”) and hand-trestles to move through the streets (Turner 2012a: 84–5). John Hunter—often called the father of modern surgery—and his brother, William, took a special interest in anomalies, dissecting the dead and collecting as many images and records as they could. Hunter and other physicians were especially eager to take measurements of these bodies in order to define the range of human size. The emphasis on observation and measurement, along with prostheses and corrective procedures, was foundational to a new medical model that regarded disability as a flaw to be corrected. Court records—a major source of information about the lives of poor disabled people—reveal contradictory social attitudes toward them. On August 25, 1725, Samuel Street was tried on the charge of raping Elizabeth (“Betty”) Harvison, a 17-year-old dwarf who was also intellectually disabled (“an Idiot”) and who had to be “carried about like an Infant” (Proceedings of the Old Bailey, t17250713-14). The combination of gender, disability, and poverty could be toxic. One witness reported telling Street that he could not even imagine wanting to lie with “such a Creature,” and Street seemed to distance himself from responsibility for the crime even as he admitted it, saying only, “The Devil bewitcht me.” Betty, according to her mother and a physician, had acquired the pox from the rape, but another physician testified that Street showed no sign of infection. On those grounds, despite the testimony of eight witnesses against him, Street was acquitted of felony rape. The other rape trials at the Old Bailey that day also ended in acquittal, even those that involved children 5–12 years of age, but only in the Harvison case did the judge order that Samuel Street be retried at the next Sessions. On October 13, 1725, the same evidence was brought against him at his second trial (Proceedings of the Old Bailey, t172251031-25). Street was found guilty of misdemeanor rape, fined 20 marks, and sentenced to six months’ imprisonment. Patricia Crawford and David Turner cite this case as evidence of maternal love for a disabled child, but the trial record also indicates social attitudes that range from Street’s contempt to the jury’s indifference to the judge’s sympathy (Crawford 2010: 137; Turner 2012a: 132).

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FIGURE 1.1  Engraving by James (?) Hulett, in Nicolas Andry de Bois-Regard, Orthopaedia: Or, The Art of Correcting and Preventing Deformities in Children. London: printed for A. Millar, 1743. Book III, p. 210. Hathi Trust. Public domain.

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1.1. ALEXANDER POPE Although many disabled people depended on others for physical support and advocacy, some achieved personal and professional success because of their own talent and savvy. Alexander Pope rose to fame despite his many impairments: rickets, migraine headaches, insomnia (exacerbated by all the coffee he drank), severe myopia, asthma, lung compression, and above all kyphoscoliosis and Pott’s disease (curvature of the spine resulting from tuberculosis), which restricted his growth. According to E. M. Pepper, “The end result of his major thoracic cage impairments was total heart failure” (1989: 359). Although Pope was not born a dwarf, he lived his adult years perceived as one. Pope’s attitude toward his impairment varied from self-mockery to defense. At times he made fun of his deformity, but at other times concealed it or more frankly admitted it. He employed these different strategies to control how he was perceived. Pope joked about his diminutive stature in two early Guardian essays on “The Club of Little Men” (1713). Writing as “Bob Short,” Pope gives pride of place to “Dick Distick,” the Poet and President of the Club. This barely disguised self-portrait embraces the size that others reject. Dick dresses in black “that he may appear yet Less,” and to maximize his shortness “stoops as he walks.” He intends “to undertake a long Work in short Verse to celebrate the Heroes of our Size.” The height of would-be members is meticulously measured, and any member found wearing two-inch pumps or a high hat would be immediately expelled in these words: “Go from among us, and be tall if you can!” (1936: 121–9). Over the space of some years, Pope used artistic representations to craft an image of himself that minimized his impairment. He had his portrait painted at least twelve times, and each portrait was reproduced as a print, engraving, or mezzotint for public sale; all of these images concealed his deformities and emphasized his greatness (Wimsatt 1965; Deutsch 1996). In a verse epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735), his friend and physician, Pope mocks those who flatter him when he knows his physical faults all too well: There are, who to my person pay their court: I cough like Horace, and, though lean, am short, Ammon’s great son one shoulder had too high, Such Ovid’s nose, and “Sir! You have an eye”— Go on, obliging creatures, make me see All that disgrac’d my betters, met in me. (1963: 119–24; 601–2) But he also aligns himself with classical forebears, Horace and Ovid, and the earlier Alexander who conquered the world, men whose greatness, along with their impairments, “met” in Pope. Pope was well aware of his bodily defects and, in his own words, suffered “this long Disease, my Life” (1963: 132, 602), but he based his sense of self on his achievements as a poet and translator. His counterattacks on those whose insults centered on his disability indicate that he was not spared ridicule. After his friendship with Lady Mary Wortley Montagu soured, for example, she and Pope satirized each other viciously in verse. Pope mocked both her body and her art. Her friends were either “P—x’d by her love, or libell’d by her hate” (1963: 84, 616). Her poetic retort, “Verses Address’d to the Imitator of the First Satire of the Second Book of Horace,” labeled Pope “our own Species in Burlesque,” “a little Monster,” and a “little Insect,” and mocked his body as a “wretched little Carcass,”

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his deformed back “the Emblem of thy crooked Mind” (Montagu 1733). In a short poem, “To Ld. Harvey & Lady Mary Wortley,” Pope replied in kind to Lady Mary, who “enrag’d crys out your Back is round”: “you teach me what to say, / When you attack my Morals, Sense, or Truth, / I answer thus—poor Sapho you grow grey” (1963: 820). Lady Mary was not alone in linking Pope’s physical deformity to his mind and, therefore, to his writing. Many of his contemporaries and later critics reduced the origin of his imaginative work to no more than his body. Helen Deutsch rightly asks if physical aberration can ever be “the point of origin” that explains the power of a literary work. In such an explanatory scheme, she argues, “The poet’s deformity becomes the center of a vicious circle of cause and effect from which Pope as an author, objectified as an infantilized and feminized cripple, is excluded” (Deutsch 1996: 34–5). Although Pope acknowledged his deformities and overcame the scorn they provoked in others, he did not present them as a formative dimension of his character. Current disability theorists protest the separation of mind and body, but Pope found that separation essential to his claim for acceptance. His mind was master of his body and created the new body of his works.

1.2. ADVOCACY: WILLIAM HAY AND BENJAMIN LAY William Hay, a self-described “hunchback dwarf,” also achieved great success, not as a writer, but as a Member of Parliament for twenty-two years in the Whig administration of Walpole and Newcastle. In his best-known work, Deformity: An Essay (1754), Hay offers an apologia for disabled people and describes his personal experience and the social challenges he faced. Success did not always mean acceptance, and Hay compares the insults he endured to those that confronted Alexander Pope: “Even Mr. Pope was not invulnerable: … For when the Dunces were foiled by his Writings, they printed a Caricatura of his Figure: and it is evident that this stung him more than a better Answer: for he ranks it among the most atrocious Injuries” ([1754] 2004: 25). Deformity enlists autobiography in the service of argument. Hay devotes almost half the essay to refuting the claim in Bacon’s “Of Deformity” that deformed people lack “natural affection” ([1612] 1985: 191–2). Bacon had proposed that deformity should be treated not as a sign but as a cause of defective character. Cruel treatment of the deformed, he suggested, could lead them to resentment and vice. Yet Bacon also made the opposite argument: that physical deformity could lead to greater effort and virtue. As he so often did, Bacon veers from one side to the other, balancing disadvantages and advantages. His initial assertion is finally replaced by its opposite: the presumption of malice is replaced by the likelihood of virtue. Hay contests the cultural judgment that would have excluded him not only because of his small size, but also because of his presumed lack of human feelings. His first task, as he sees it, is to reveal the feelings that he might otherwise conceal, if only to prove that he has them: “Bodily deformity is visible to every Eye; but the Effects of it are known to very few; intimately known to none but those, who feel them; and they generally are not inclined to reveal them” ([1754] 2004: 24). Like Bacon, he seems to reverse himself, only to qualify and explain why he does not always shed a tear for someone else. Deformed people, he admits, “are despised, ridiculed, and ill-treated by others … [so] it is no wonder, if they repay but little” (35). He seems “to acquiesce to the vile charge of the stereotype, but, by doing so, to turn that accusation into a vindication of himself,” writes Dennis Todd, and his apparent stoicism conceals “a plethora of emotion” (1995: 235–6). Hay offers himself

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as a model of informed, rational benevolence, but he was caught in an “impossible contradiction”: he had to declare his benevolence “without a hint of egocentricity,” but could do so only as “a witness against himself, candidly admitting his deformity” (Todd 1995: 248–9). Hay’s solution is to privilege his interior being over his exterior deformity, thereby earning inclusion in the mid-eighteenth-century culture of sensibility: “When I have thus anatomized myself, I hope my Heart will be found sound and untainted, and my Intentions honest and sincere” (Hay [1754] 2004: 24). The condition of the body defines personal value only when weakness and social prejudice overwhelm the person with a disability. Hay’s political works, now rarely discussed, show the empathy and benevolence that grew out of his personal experience. As he reveals in Deformity, “I have been in a Situation as to see not a little of the Pomp and Vanity, as well as of the Necessity and Misery of Mankind: but the last only affect me: and if, as a Magistrate, I am ever guilty of Partiality, it is in favour of the Poor” ([1754] 2004: 38). His Remarks on the Laws relating to the Poor (1735, reissued 1752), which has attracted some scholarly attention (Landau 1990; Feldman 2006), argues that parishes could not meet the legal requirements to support the poor: “Every parish is in a state of expensive war with the rest of the nation, regards the poor of all other places as aliens, and cares not what becomes of them if it can banish them from its own society.” Hay proposed instead that England be divided into Districts, each with a workhouse, a hospital, and a house of correction, and that these be governed by “a group of leading citizens” (Hay 1735; Landau 1990: 151–3). Hay also called attention to the plight of all those who were ineligible for relief under the Settlement Law of 1602: English people born outside England, children of vagabonds, French Huguenots, and other “Outcasts of Mankind; who, as the Law now stands, are doomed to Beggary” (1735: 5). He defends his proposal as “Work of the greatest Piety towards God, of the greatest Humanity to our own Species, and of the greatest Utility of the Publick” (52). Many of these “Outcasts of Mankind” would have been the disabled poor, forced to wander in search of food and shelter. They were voiceless, but Hay drew on his own experience and his political authority to speak for them. Hay expanded his argument for social justice in Religio Philosophi, contending that God’s first rule was that people should “love their own Species and assist them” (1753: 36). “However distant others may be in Condition or Situation,” he wrote, “however different in Custom or Complexion, they are still their Brethren, and derived from one common Mass” (68). Hay considered every person “as a Citizen of the Universe in general, and as an Inhabitant of this Globe in particular” (38). The most startling extension of this idea was his belief that life existed on other planets. He insisted that “every Globe in [the Universe] is inhabited,” and that there are “numberless other Saviours and Mediators, which God hath established between himself and the rational Beings which he hath created” (142–4). Hay’s body—or the prejudice he experienced because of it—did not limit his mind’s ability to imagine a better life here and life throughout the universe. The liberal ideal of inclusion that motivated Hay also inspired Benjamin Lay, an English dwarf who was an early Quaker abolitionist. Nathaniel Smith Kogan has published a detailed study of Lay’s life and beliefs, although he does not mention Lay’s references to his disability (Kogan 2016). Lay and his wife were both people of short stature whose work took them to Barbados, back to England, and finally to America. Lay’s idealistic crusade against slavery alienated him from many of his fellow Quakers, who had not yet adopted anti-slavery views. In All Slavekeepers … Apostates, his 277-page attack on

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slaveholding, Lay argues that “Liberty is Life, Slavery is Death” (1737: 55). His argument is largely Bible based, but he does include his own experiences in self-referential passages that Kogan does not mention. In the Preface, for example, Lay describes himself as “very unfit almost every way, as a Man” (1737: 4) and repeatedly mentions his short stature. In Barbados, “The poor Blacks would come to our Shop and Store, hunger-starv’d, almost ready to perish with Hunger and Sickness, great Numbers of them would come to trade with us, for they seem to love and admire us, we being very much alike in Stature and other ways” (32). Lay offers himself and his wife as emblems of the imperative for everyone to do something to help others in need. His social activism had the same sort of personal value for him as it did for Hay and allowed him to live beyond the limiting social prejudice generated by his anomalous body.

1.3. AUTOBIOGRAPHY: GEORGE COLMAN THE ELDER AND JOSEF BORUWLASKI Unlike William Hay and Benjamin Lay, whose disabilities informed their political advocacy, George Colman and Josef Boruwlaski wrote autobiographical works to shape how they were understood. They invited others’ curiosity, and asked readers to consider what it felt like to live in an anomalous body. As public figures, they were often judged initially by their size in comparison to other men, but both of them move beyond an initial focus on problems of size to shift their narratives to an affirmation of character. Colman develops his argument in a single essay, Boruwlaski over the course of the four editions of his Memoirs. George Colman the Elder had success as a journalist, playwright, and theater manager. At five feet tall, Colman was not quite a dwarf, but his 1761 essay in The Guardian described what it meant to live as a short man: I am of a remarkable low stature; a sort of diminutive plaything of Madam Nature, that seems to have been made, like a girl’s doll, to divert the good Lady in her infancy … an human figure in miniature … a minim of nature; a Mannikin, not to say minnikin. (1787: 21–2) For Colman and his culture, height was gendered: to be tall was manly; to be short was not. He was always aware of being looked at, and regarded himself as having none of the advantages of short size, but all of the disadvantages: I may be seen, it is true, without the help of a microscope; and am not even qualified to [be] exhibited to my countrymen at six-pence a-piece. I am, however, so low in stature, that my name is hardly ever mentioned without the epithet little being prefixt to it. (1787: 22) Short, but not short enough, Colman may be seen by all without cost to them or profit to himself. He wanted above all to escape that identity, and he imagines the lengths to which he would willingly go if he could only increase his height: I would go through a long regimen to be raised ever so little nearer heaven. I think I could not endure to have my limbs stretched to a nobler length in the bed of Procrustes; but if I could be rolled out like dough or paste, or extended by relaxation, like a rope or an eel’s skin in dry weather, I believe I should readily assent to it. (1787: 23)

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That desire, of course, could never be fulfilled. When Coleman paraphrases a passage from the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6.27 and Luke 12.27), it seems that even the Bible shuts the door on growth: “No man is able to add a cubit to his stature” (1787: 24). However, correctly understood, the text warns against anxiety rather than provoking it. Colman had learned to reject such anxiety by relying on his inward strength to overcome social prejudice against his short stature. He doubtless recalled that Matthew and Luke quote Jesus as advising against worry about health, worldly security, or status: “Therefore, I say unto you, take no thought for your life … nor yet for your body” (Matthew 6:25; Luke 12:22). The way others thought of him most galled Colman. In recounting the slights he endured—being “trampled and run over in a crowd” or pushed aside at a show—his greatest lament is that everyone defined him by his height: Though I can sometimes forget my littleness, as if I was as big as a Goliah [sic], yet my friends and acquaintances cannot, for one moment, lose the consideration of it. The minuteness of my person so entirely governs their idea of my character, that they are not able to detach the contemplation of one from the other. (1787: 24) Even the Italian Giant refuses to let Colman pay the customary fee: “he thought it full as great a curiosity to see me as for me to see him” (1787: 26). Colman, declaring himself “content to submit my littleness, fairly to the world” (1761: 27), concludes, as William Hay and Benjamin Lay did before him, that character is more important than size. He had begun by citing the mockery of little people in the works of Homer and Cicero. He ends by quoting Clarendon’s praise of short men, especially Lucius Cary, Lord Falkland: “That little person and small stature was quickly found to contain a great heart” (1787: 30). Unlike Hay, Colman embraced Bacon’s views on deformity as wise counsel for little men who would “become great and wonderful,” concluding his essay by approving these lines from Bacon’s “Of Deformity”: “Whosoever hath any thing fixt in his person that doth induce contempt, hath also perpetual spur in himself to rescue and deliver himself from scorn” (1787: 31). In contrast to Hay, Colman endorses Bacon without addressing his suggestion that physical deformity could deform character. Hay had protested Bacon’s suggestion that the challenge of deformity could twist or corrupt a man’s character, but like Colman, he endorsed Bacon’s opposite suggestion that deformity could motivate a man to virtuous action. For both Hay and Colman, the interior self was the true measure of a man and inspired his active life in the world. Their emphasis on an interior self that transcends the limitations of the body and of personal identity shaped by the opinions of others had a larger cultural consequence. These two men were among the pioneers of the subjectivity that became a touchstone of the Romantic era that followed the long eighteenth century. The ideal of manly character motivated another dwarf, Josef Boruwlaski. He exemplified the new category of celebrity, famous not for his talents, but for being himself; his physical stature was the only commodity he could use for his own profit (Adelson 2005: 19–21). Boruwlaski lived the transition from cosseted court dwarf to public entertainer. He spent his youth as the court dwarf of a Polish countess, but she discharged him from her service when he married without her approval. As he traveled with his wife to Vienna, Paris, and London, first in search of noble patronage, then as a person on public display, he took pains to supplement his short height with impeccable manners and graceful conversation. The four editions of Boruwlaski’s memoirs offer complex self-representations and commentary on his size (Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz 2012). These autobiographical narratives

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rewrite the cultural script that society too readily assumed (Couser 2006: 399–401). A corrective autobiographical narrative could be a prosthesis for the disabled body, providing a way to erase difference, or at least, as David Mitchell and Sharon Snyder have argued, to “return one to an acceptable degree of difference” (2000: 6–7). Boruwlaski wrote his autobiography for money, but also to control others’ opinions of him and to secure his identity as a “Count”—or at least a gentleman—and as a man. He struggled with issues of identity all his life and alternated between exhibition and privacy, both commodifying his size and doing his best to overcome it. He at once acknowledges and minimizes the importance of his size, and uses it to augment other aspects of his identity. He exploits that paradoxical acknowledgment and minimization in the four different versions of the Memoirs, first emphasizing episodes that relied for impact on his diminutive size and then, in later editions, replacing those episodes with anecdotes that stress his acceptance in society (Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz 2012). In the progressive revisions of the Memoirs, Boruwlaski increased his emphasis on the interior self. Taken as a whole, his autobiography rests on his belief in his interior worth and dignity. The frontispiece of each edition of the Memoirs illustrates Boruwlaski’s changing attitudes toward his size and his changing relationship with his wife. The frontispiece to the first edition shows Boruwlaski holding out a toy bird to his daughter, who sits on her mother’s lap. His wife and daughter are so much larger than Boruwlaski that he himself seems like a toy. The frontispiece to the second edition shows him standing alone, in what seems to be a reproduction of a miniature. In the final edition, Boruwlaski in dark shadows points an accusing finger at his wife, whose sketch in profile, although much larger than the image of Boruwlaski, has no shadowing and thereby diminishes her presence. By that time, his wife had left him. (Anna Grzeskowiak-Krwawicz’s recent biography of Boruwlaski contains important discoveries about the end of the marriage, and his wife’s subsequent life in the Caribbean with their child [2012].) The frontispieces also trace his changing relationship to his size. The first accentuates his small stature, while the fourth enhances his masculine authority by foregrounding Boruwlaski to make him seem physically large. The text of each successive edition documents these changes in the motif of size. In the first edition of the memoir, Boruwlaski emphasizes the negative impact of his height. He candidly describes his disappointment when a lady he loves ridicules him for his temerity in loving her. The courtship letters to his wife, included in the Memoirs, confide his feelings of desire, embarrassment, anger, and resolve. In later editions, his size becomes a less prominent feature of the narrative. As his recent biographer points out, “Above all, the scenes that the author deemed to have impinged upon his dignity have disappeared”: his scuffle with a jealous court dwarf, his discussion of his sexuality, his meeting with a giant, the details of his affairs, his marriage, and details of his family life. He no longer complains of being treated like a child, but portrays himself as a sophisticated traveler and student of “the human mind” (Grzekowiak-Krwawicz 2012: 66). Boruwlaski never mentions the breakup of his marriage or the loss of his daughter. What remains are assertions of his manly desires and his insistent claims to full social and manly status. Not content to be an object on display, he insists on his subjectivity and portrays himself as the embodiment of eighteenth-century ideas of manliness (Armintor 2011). Ordinarily, a person with a disability was a secondary figure in visual and verbal works, but Burowlaski’s narrative reverses that relationship. He is the focal point, and larger people are used to advance his claim to embody their ideals of sensibility and masculinity. Boruwlaski’s long career illustrates the extent to which his personal identity was shaped and achieved as a performance. This assertion was especially necessary for Boruwlaski,

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FIGURE 1.2  Oval wax portrait of Josef Boruwlaski by Samuel Percy, 1798. The Glenn Tilley Morse Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public domain.

whose appearance did not conform to any identity other than that of a dwarf. An unusual wax portrait in an oval frame places his image in the bottom portion of the frame (Grace 1980). The extensive blank space above his head makes the spectator focus on his small size, both in the space of art and in the space of the world (Figure 1.2). Samuel Percy, the wax modeler who created this work in 1798, always attempted to “please” his sitters (Strickland 1913), but in this portrait he seems to show that the space of the world,

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like the space of art, may be too large for Boruwlaski to fill. The portrait, that is to say, reinforces the focus on size that Boruwlaski sought to overcome. His created identity as a gentleman of honor was precarious, because it depended in part on the circumstances of his performance and the response of the audience. Because his appearance did not signal the kind of person he was and the social position he sought to occupy, Boruwlaski had to advertise his chosen courtly identity (as a “Count”) in his autobiographical writings, his dress, and his public activities. His images, writings, and demeanor were a lifetime performance by which he created himself, and at which for the most part he succeeded.

1.4. THE ARTS: MATTHEW BUCHINGER AND FRANÇOIS CUVILLIÉS Narrative was not the only way for disabled people to express themselves and share their distinctive point of view. Two men of short stature, Matthew Buchinger and François Cuvilliés, gained fame for their art. Buchinger, born without hands, thighs, or feet, displayed remarkable skill in micrographia and sold engravings of his self-portrait and other works in public shows. Cuvilliés, after beginning as a court dwarf, became the leading Rococo architect and designer in Germany. Matthew Buchinger was a man whose talents were remarkable because of his deformity. Born without hands and feet (dismelia), he developed extraordinary skill in magic, cards, shooting, and playing musical instruments—including the trumpet, hautboy, and several of his own invention—but won fame for his skill in micrographia, or miniature writing, in works that often included alternating lines of conventional, inverted, and mirror writing. Other dismelic dwarfs, including Thomas Inglefield and Sarah Bidden, were also celebrated for their work in micrographia and miniature painting. Some artists who lacked hands used their mouths, their toes, or even their cheeks, to control their pen (Turner 2012a: 95–104). Buchinger seems to have written by holding a pen between his arms, one of which had a knob end he could use for stability. Barbara Benedict suggests that “Being seemed to replace doing as the source of fame and fortune” for people who exhibited themselves, but the labor of these artists “was so difficult that it constituted a rarity itself” (Benedict 2004: 11). Buchinger stood out among this group for his remarkable success; he was even commissioned to draw an ornately embellished portrait of Queen Anne (Jay 2016: 72). After he was denied an appointment in the court of George I, Buchinger went to Ireland, where he won renown for his talents. For the rest of his life, he staged exhibitions in England and Ireland. Buchinger tells his story through a remarkable self-portrait, which was engraved in 1724. His image features an elaborate hairstyle that, on close inspection, consists of words: the texts of seven psalms and the Lord’s Prayer. The psalms seem especially relevant to his life. The first suggests that he was aware of his size: “I lift up my eyes to the hills” (Psalm 121). The next may reflect on his unusually large family: “your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house” (Psalm 128). The protection of God’s loving care sustains him in times of trouble: “Often have they attacked me from my youth, yet they have not prevailed against me” (Psalm 129). The great penitential Psalm 130 is evocative of his deformity: “If you, O Lord, should mark iniquities, / Lord, who could stand?” Psalm 146 calls to mind Buchinger’s struggle to find patrons: “Do not put your trust in princes. The Lord lifts up those who are bowed down.” The Book of Psalms ends with two prayers of praise that would have had special resonance for Buchinger as a musician: “Make melody to him with tambourines and lyre” (Psalm 149), and “Praise him with trumpet sound, praise him

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with lute and harp” (Psalm 150). These seven psalms not only form the exterior material of his hair, but also suggest his interiority and the influences on his thought. In order to see the words, a viewer with ordinary eyesight must use a magnifying glass. It is not known if Buchinger used any form of magnification in his miniature writing, but Ricky Jay, an authority on Buchinger, suggests he did not (2016). Buchinger’s self-portrait is a wondrous achievement of Rococo intricacy and intimacy, and his artistry was recognized in his own day and after his death. When the self-portrait was sold in 1798, the catalog described it as “most exquisitely delineated and  … a very Rare Curiosity, and really UNIQUE £52 10s” (Jay 2016: 63). The production of extremely small writing—seven psalms hidden in (and constituting) a head of hair—disrupts the spectator’s ordinary perception of scale. Buchinger used micrographia to make the spectator see differently, to broaden understanding of the art and the person who created it, and perhaps to open a dialogue about the meaning of size. Buchinger and other dismelic dwarf artists may have been attracted to micrographia because it turned the miniature mode into something wondrous, and implied that the small person had this special skill because of their own size. Their skill in micrographia carried other implications as well: it transformed disability from a lack to a gain, expressed in form the special experience of the artist, and revised the customary relationship of large and small, demanding that the spectator attend to the miniature. In that regard, as Susan Stewart observes of the miniature book and its author, micrographia is “an emblem of the self” (1984: 41), and it relocates the dwarf from the margin to the center of the spectator’s attention. At the same time, the artists submitted their micrographic work to the spectator’s judgment; the first criterion for judging this writing was not its content, but its formal accuracy. As Stewart argues, “Minute writing is emblematic of craft and discipline; while the materiality of the object is diminished, the labor involved multiplies, and so does the significance of the total object” (1984: 38). The craft and discipline of the miniature was especially evident in the Rococo style, with its intricate designs and play with delicate forms. The greatest dwarf artist, and certainly the greatest architect, of the Rococo style was François Cuvilliés, who made the transition from court dwarf to noted architect by staying within the court system. After training in Paris, he returned to Munich as the court architect in 1726. Cuvilliés’ masterpiece is the Amalienburg, built for Carl Albrecht’s wife, Maria Amalia of Austria. This pink and white intimate retreat and hunting lodge, located in parkland surrounding the Nymphenburg palace, features a glistening central hall of mirrors flanked by two wings of smaller rooms (Hofer 1986). The visitor moves from room to room, each distinctive in color and design. Three rooms in particular call attention to perception itself. In the lemon-yellow bedroom, for example, the portraits of Carl Albrecht and Maria Amalia set rather high in the wall reduce in size both royalty and viewer. Anyone standing in the Hall of Mirrors feels even smaller when looking up into the mirrors and up higher to the elaborately carved pediments and ceiling. That feeling continues in the adjoining flax-colored Hunting Room, its vertical rows of paintings not so much an art gallery as a family scrapbook. These paintings contain more than 200 portraits of specific people. Viewers who gaze on the spaces, portraits, and carvings not only see with the dwarf who created the Amalienburg, but also feel like dwarfs themselves. Asking the viewer to take on the perspective of a dwarf reverses the dialectic of observer and observed, as the giant had to Colman. The viewer also needs to consider how dwarfs see themselves, and how everyone might think of themselves. The Amalienburg, at once intimate and majestic, invites viewers to do all that in its playful spaces.

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1.5. THE COMPLEXITIES OF PERFORMANCE: MARIA TERESIA Female dwarfs, while less common as public attractions, made a strong appeal to the spectator’s imagination as an expression of femininity. Maria Teresia, “the Corsican fairy,” whose surname may have been “Souvray” (North Derbyshire Reporter, August 5, 1771), has never been mentioned by cultural or disability scholars, yet she was such a popular entertainer that other women dwarfs borrowed the language of her advertisements and referred to themselves as fairies. This special category of women dwarfs developed as part of the eighteenth-century cult of celebrity. Prior to that, dwarfs of all varieties, proportioned or not, were valued in courtly households. In the eighteenth-century culture of public entertainment, not all dwarfs were considered equal. Those such as Maria Teresia, who styled themselves as “elegant fairies,” rejected being called dwarfs. According to her advertisement, Maria Teresia did not have “the Character of a Dwarf, … for besides that of her being a Beauty, her exact Proportion and Symmetry, may without the least Falshood, allow her to be called one of the most perfect and admirable Productions of Human Nature in Miniature” (Souvray 1775). The advertisement also reassured the audience that she was not, as many performers were, a fraud. The advertisement further claimed that Maria Teresia was more than an appealing anomaly: “She possessed much vivacity and spirit, could speak Italian and French with fluency, and gave the most inquisitive mind an agreeable entertainment” (1775). Her skill in languages was a special sign of her worth. As Barbara Benedict notes, “Eighteenth-century thinkers considered language the quintessential test of humanity: the more languages, the more cultivated a man was” (2004: 82). Maria Teresia’s linguistic skills attracted an educated audience who were not merely seeking to view “Human Nature in Miniature.” Thomas Sheridan’s Theatre Royal in Dublin featured her as a special attraction. In the production of The Merchant of Venice, she appeared between the acts to perform a minuet, a Corsican jig, and an allemande (Greene 2011). The company’s production of Shakespeare’s Henry VIII featured Maria Teresia as “the King’s Champion” in the dumb show wedding of Henry and Anne Boleyn. Maria Teresia made her entry “riding on the learned horse,” after which she was slated “to descend and move a minuet and dance a new Corsican jig upon a table” (Hitchcock 1788: 2.257–8). The Dublin reviewer, Robert Hitchcock, disliked the use of such “wretched resources” to garner large audiences: However the lovers of curious sights might have been gratified by the appearance of this little lady, it must be confessed, the admirers of Shakespeare could have no great reason to rejoice at her introduction into one of his most celebrated tragedies.  … A champion of 34 inches high could at best inspire us with but little opinion of his prowess or dignity, but we must utterly lose sight of both, when we behold him mounting a table, to dance a Corsican jig. (1788: 2.258) The King’s Champion was not in Shakespeare’s original text, but having been introduced in a 1727 London production, the character became an expected part of the play. No female dwarf (or any dwarf) had ever played the role, nor was there any precedent for the horse being “the learned horse” familiar to audiences. Moreover, those who admired “the Corsican fairy” would have known that performing “a Corsican jig” was part of her own regular act as a dancer.

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FIGURE 1.3  Portrait of Maria Teresia (in male dress) by William Hincks, 1774. RCSSC/P 251. Hunterian Museum Collection, Royal College of Surgeons, London. By permission.

Hitchcock linked Maria Teresia to Josef Boruwlaski: “It is much to be regretted that the celebrated little count Boruwlaski was not contemporary with this Lady to have joined both in the fight and in the dance. The dignity of tragedy would then have been uniformly supported” (1788: 2.258). For Hitchcock, dwarfs were merely an “amusing spectacle,” lacking aesthetic and human dignity. Hitchcock’s sarcasm is especially sad when one recalls Boruwlaski’s attempts to maintain his personal dignity. William Hincks, a Dublin artist, painted Maria Teresia in male costume, wearing a wig and a red frock coat (Figure 1.3). This painting may represent her “breeches

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role” in Henry VIII. In her brief foray into cross-dressing, Maria Teresia joined Peg Woffington and other actresses who played “breeches roles.” Such roles put the actress in a boundary position. The audience saw Woffington both as male and female, as one eighteenth-century commentator observed: “It was a most nice point to decide between the gentlemen and ladies, whether she was the finest woman, or the prettiest fellow” (quoted in Nussbaum 2010: 197–8) (Figure 1.4). The review of Henry VIII indicates similar gender instability, first describing the “little lady” who played the “well-suited champion” and then commenting on “his prowess and dignity.” According to William Clift, assistant to John Hunter, she married “a great fellow,” and died during childbirth because her pelvis was too small for the baby’s head (1816). The memory of Maria Teresia lingered into the nineteenth century, and British cartoonists may be making a veiled allusion to her when, for example, Napoleon Bonaparte is portrayed as “the Corsican Fairy,” a tiny sword-wielding dwarf on the dining table of a gigantic King George III and Queen Charlotte (Ashton [1888] 1968: 166). The mockery

FIGURE 1.4  Engraving of Maria Teresia (in female dress) by Robert Cooper, London, 1821. Wellcome Collection. CC BY.

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of his short height would have been intensified by the gender-bending appropriation of her name for a cartoon image of the Corsican-born Bonaparte.

1.6. OUTSIZED BODIES: DANIEL CAJANUS, CHARLES BYRNE, AND DANIEL LAMBERT Height and surplus had always been associated with military might, so Wilhelm Frederick I of Prussia assembled a regiment, known as the Potsdam Giants, all well proportioned and at least seven feet tall. Because many giants could not perform physically or intellectually well in battle, the regiment primarily paraded in ceremonial events. Their size caused their weakness: the human body comes up against the limits of its structural, skeletal ability to stand upright, “crippled by the tug of gravity” (Fiedler 1978: 106). The Swedish giant Daniel Cajanus, in an “autobiography” actually written by Thomas Boreman, established the pattern of “the gentle giant” that remained popular in children’s literature (Boreman 1742). He began his career at the Polish court, but went to England, where he billed himself as “The Human Colossus,” and made a substantial fortune as a showman (Bondeson 2000: 217–36). Retiring to Holland, he composed a long poem to the Prince of Orange, comparing himself to a giant who had served in the Dutch army (Bondeson 2000: 217–36). After Cajanus, every show had a giant. The two best-known giants in London were Charles Byrne and Patrick Cotter O’Brien (henceforth, Cotter). Both men were popular attractions, and both feared their bodies would be taken after death by the unscrupulous “resurrection men” who procured corpses for dissection. Byrne arranged to be buried at sea, but despite his plans, his body was sold to John Hunter, who measured and dissected it (Wood 1868: 157–65). Byrne’s skeleton has remained on display at the Museum of the Royal Society of Physicians and Surgeons. Cotter was more successful than Byrne in life and in death. His grave, built in twelve feet of solid rock, the entrance secured by iron bars and bricks, thwarted the resurrection men who would have sold his body (Wood 1868: 165–86). Unlike a “Miniature of Nature,” an immense body cannot be beautiful, writes Stewart, because “we cannot take it all in together, and so our vision loses its unity and wholeness” (1984: 94). Both fascination and fragmentation are evident in a satiric print by Thomas Rowlandson showing Cotter on display, surrounded by an eager audience (Figure 1.5). Cotter stands, calm and self-possessed, while those who paid to see him are caricatured, their bodies distorted by obesity and awkward movements, as they concentrate on seeing parts of his body. A short man using a spyglass stands on a chair but still has to gaze up at Cotter’s waist. A woman lifts her skirt to compare her delicate ankle to Cotter’s massive leg. Cotter’s pose, reminiscent of Michelangelo’s David, makes him far more appealing than his visitors. Given a choice, anyone looking at this image might well prefer to identify with Cotter, sharing his position looking down on his gawking audience and their limited perception. Although no giant at 5’11”, Daniel Lambert of Leicester was a man of massive size, weighing 739 lbs. at the time of his death. Admired as a breeder of horses and dogs, Lambert was a healthy, athletic man during the years he worked as a jail-keeper. After that, he steadily gained weight until his extreme corpulence made mobility difficult. At the end of the eighteenth century, financial need drove this shy man to travel to  London and charge admission for the curious to meet with him (Bondeson 2000: 237–60). Affable to paying customers, he was acerbic to those who intruded on his private

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FIGURE 1.5  Engraving by Thomas Rowlandson, “The surprizing Irish giant of St. James’s Street [Patrick Cotter O’Brien].” London: Thomas Smith, 1785. 1868,0808,5425,AN156768001. British Museum. CC BY.

moments. To one such man, who supposedly wanted advice about a mare, Lambert declared, “She was got by Impertinence out of Curiosity.” When a woman asked the price of his coat, she received this cutting reply: “If you think it proper to make me a present of a new coat, you will then know exactly what it costs” (Life of That Wonderful and Extraordinary Heavy Man 1809: 23). His anonymous biographer records in detail Lambert’s meetings with Boruwlaski. As a young apprentice, Lambert had paid to see Boruwlaski several times in Birmingham. When Boruwlaski came to see him twenty years later, the little count remembered their earlier encounters and could not resist feeling Lambert’s legs: “‘Ah,’ he exclaimed, ‘pure flesh and blood. I feel de warm. No deception!’” (1809: 21). Because deception and fraud were rife in the display of human anomalies (Altick 1978: 49), even the then-retired Boruwlaski felt it necessary to test the truth of Lambert’s body. The two men had more in common than their anomalous bodies. They had won the affection and respect of those who knew them, and are still commemorated by museum exhibits, Boruwlaski in Durham and Lambert in Leicester (Figure 1.6) (Bondeson 2000: 260).

1.7. CONCLUSION Narratives and images give human faces to the meaning of disability and help us discern how cultural values translated imperfectly into the personal lives of real people (Gabbard 2011). Their writings and their art voice their struggles and aspirations, but they also

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FIGURE 1.6  Benjamin Marshall, “Portrait of Daniel Lambert,” Leicestershire Museums and Art Galleries. Public domain.

speak for the many whose lives remain unknown to us. Some remarkable disabled people advocated for social justice while others developed strategies to participate in society, to support themselves, and to flourish. Whether poor or privileged, whether beggar or performer or Member of Parliament, the disabled people profiled here presented themselves, in Colman’s words, “fairly, to the world” (1761: 27), seeking acceptance for their anomalous bodies in the body politic.

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CHAPTER TWO

Mobility Impairment Experiences of “Lameness” in Eighteenth-century England DAVID M. TURNER

This chapter examines the social and cultural meanings of mobility impairment in eighteenth-century Britain and the experiences of those with limited or nonstandard ambulation. “A man with a pair of ordinary legs, seldom thinks of anything but of walking straight forward,” remarked The Morning Chronicle on Wednesday, October 1, 1800, “but break one, twist it, or cut it, and his manner of thinking entirely changes” (Morning Chronicle 1800). Impairments affecting physical mobility might derive from a variety of causes, including illness and injury, amputation, war, and violence. In the eighteenth century, as today, reduced powers of locomotion were also synonymous with aging. For example, in 1711, the diarist Lady Sarah Cowper described her own old age as bringing on a “kind of hobbling march” (Kugler 2009: 202). People may experience problems of mobility in the hands, arms, and head, but the focus of this chapter is on the history of impairments that affected independent walking or movement involving the lower parts of the body (Iezzoni 2003: 9). Impairments affecting the ability to walk, as The Morning Chronicle intimated, affect not just the body’s functionality, but also the ways in which people engage with the world and conceive of their place within it. Walking is a form of behavior that is shaped by rules, norms, and cultural values, by social variables such as class and gender, and by the physical environment. It is also individual and expressive, a gesture that reflects the walker’s feelings, their place in society, their aspirations, and their values (Amato 2004; Solnit 2014). During the long eighteenth century, the physical act of walking came under increasing scrutiny and regulation. The development of military drill in Prussia established ordered marching as a means of instilling discipline and displaying military power (Amato 2004: 79; McCormack 2011). In French and British cultures of politeness, the poise and movement of the body communicated manners, social standing, moral values, and character. Conduct books advised would-be ladies and gentlemen to walk in a controlled manner that reflected their “breeding” and avoided giving offence to others. In walking, “go not like a Ninny, nor hang thy hands downwards, shake not thy arms, kick not the earth with thy feet, throw not thy legs across here and there,” advised one late seventeenth-century guide to civility (Hawkins 1672: 17). In urbanizing society, walking the streets became an “art” in John Gay’s famous description, a pastime that taught valuable insights into the virtues and vices of the city and its people. Improvements such as street lighting, introduced in the early eighteenth century, and the paving of streets, mandated in London in 1762, together with the development of parks and pleasure gardens, led to an increase in urban promenading (McNiel and Riello 2005: 179). “Walking matches” demonstrated the capabilities of the (male) human

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body for speed, stamina, and endurance, and created sporting heroes (Thom 1813: 33–67). English words for walking increased significantly during this period, and by the turn of the nineteenth century, different styles of ambulation had become revealing markers of social class, from the entitlement of aristocratic “lounging,” to the businesslike “stride” of the economically and politically aspirational middling sort (Guldi 2012). Yet eighteenth-century society was made up not just of walkers, but of what Michael Oliver has termed “non-walkers” and “nearly walkers” (Oliver 1993: 2). While the role and meanings of walking in eighteenth-century Britain have begun to receive historical attention, the experiences of people with mobility impairments are often seen as marginal to this story. In his book On Foot: A History of Walking, Joseph Amato portrays mobility impairment as a universal and unchanging indicator of social degradation. For much of history, he argues, those who could not walk well, or at all, were negatively classified and formed the lowest ranks of humanity. With distorted bodies, they moved, if at all, slowly, clumsily, or, in the worst instances, like an animal, crawling on their stomach or swinging along on their knuckles. Literally lower than others, they were contaminated by being in more intimate touch with the netherworld of waste and decomposition. (2004: 10) Such animalistic comparisons would have been familiar in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment natural philosophers followed Plato in identifying walking erect (along with speech, reasoning, and culture) as a defining characteristic of humanity. In works of comparative anatomy, orangutans or chimpanzees were frequently depicted clutching walking sticks or crutches. Such images demonstrated simultaneously primates’ closeness to humans in their capacity to walk on two legs, and their difference, since such activity was difficult without assistance (Schiebinger 1993: 84–5). Yet the comparison also raised questions about the status of those humans who could not walk or stand upright (Taylor 2017: 87). Medical authors described human immobility as deathlike and devalued. A person who loses the power of locomotion “can no longer be said to live, but only to vegetate, since the want of necessary exercise must soon impede the due development of every other faculty, whether bodily or mental,” warned one “experienced Chiropodist” (Anon. 1818: xi). Nevertheless, the presence or absence of impairment does not necessarily predict quality of life, either now or in the past. Critical disability studies challenges us to go beyond studying the uses of walking as a form of transport, literary pursuit, or leisure activity, to ask more fundamental questions about how norms of ambulation have been constructed at different historical moments—to ask, as Oliver (1993) puts it, “What’s so wonderful about walking” anyway? What value did people in the eighteenth century place on physical mobility, and how did people experience and make sense of their own—and other people’s—mobility impairments? What environmental and attitudinal barriers did people with mobility impairments face and how did they respond to them? Such questions lie at the heart of this chapter. As Katherine Ott has observed, “[b]odies that are unmodulated in movement, speech, or thought, those that cause a scene or bring attention to themselves because they do not fulfil standards of etiquette” are often “hard to recover” from the historical record (2014: 120). Piecing together how bodies moved in the pre-modern era remains a difficult task, yet as we shall see, orthopedically impaired people were conspicuous across a range of eighteenth-century sources. A visitor to London at the end of the century remarked that he had witnessed more people wearing “wooden legs” there than in any other European

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city (Meister 1799: 184). Walking impairments might be seen as the quintessential “visible disability” since they were often difficult to hide—recognizable by distinctive gait or the use of prosthetics or assistive devices such as sticks or crutches. However, they were also deemed particularly prone to simulation and misinterpretation. Fed on stories of counterfeit beggars that had been ubiquitous since the Middle Ages, people in the eighteenth century scrutinized and described the bodies and movements of the impaired closely. Sources from newspaper reports to personal testimonies in criminal court records articulated expectations of what a “lame” person should look like, how their bodies should move, and what were the appropriate props and postures to communicate mobility impairment to others. As we shall see, if walking during the eighteenth century was a richly communicative act, then so too was limping and stillness.

2.1. MEDICINE AND MOBILITY The relationship between bodily mobility and physical and mental well-being has a long history. Hippocrates had argued that “exercise gives strength and firmness to the body, and vigour to the mind,” and Early Modern medical texts frequently associated healthiness with movement and unhealthiness with stagnation (Pugh 1794: 9; Wear 2000: 155). Mobility helped digestion and aided the circulation of humors and blood that was deemed essential to good health. It “strengthens the fibres, preserves the fluids in their proper state, procures an appetite, facilitates the secretions … raises our spirits, and produces an agreeable sensation in the whole nervous system,” wrote Samuel Tissot in 1769 (47–8). By contrast, a sedentary lifestyle, whether voluntary or enforced due to illness or impairment, served to “destroy the strength of the muscles, and render them, for want of use, unable to bear action” (48). Those working in sedentary occupations, such as scholars, tailors, or shoemakers, were deemed particularly at risk of their blood and humors stagnating, causing general “feebleness,” and in some cases complete incapacity (Buchan 1772: 61). Concerns about the relationship between inactivity and ill health took on a new urgency during the eighteenth century, in the context of debates about the effects of luxurious consumption that, in the view of its critics, threatened the strength and morals of the nation (Berg 2005). Medical men frequently blamed “luxury and indolence” for enervating the constitutions of the ruling class. “Inactivity and Intemperance” were regarded as key contributors to patrician ailments (Wynter 1725: 4). If “inactivity and want of exercise are joined with luxury,” argued George Cheyne, “the solids become relaxed and weakened, and the acrimony of the fats and humours generally increase, then chronical disorders are produced, such as gout, erysipelas, rheumatism, with all the pains, miseries, and torments, arising in this low-sunk state of the constitution” (cited in Pugh 1794: 7). Making no distinction between those who needed help to get about and those simply too lazy or self-important to walk, Dr. William Buchan warned that the excessive use of sedan chairs or coaches put rich town dwellers at risk of “losing the use of their limbs altogether” (1772: 61). For the highest ranks of society, walking was regarded as an unnecessary burden and an activity of the poor. Elite men’s and women’s footwear was decorative rather than practical, its unsuitability for walking distances serving to reinforce the wearer’s social standing (McNiel and Riello 2005: 185). The taste of both sexes for wearing high heels, together with women’s fashion for wearing shoes that were too small in order to present a dainty foot, and men’s taste for stiff leather boots designed “to expose a muscular thigh” but difficult to walk in, were all regarded as causes of

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“lameness” (Vaughan 1792: 45–6; McCormack 2017: 468–70). In contrast, although they might be worn out prematurely by their toils, laborers were considered healthier because of the “necessary Labour and Exercise” associated with manual work (Wynter 1725: 4). Susceptibility to mobility impairment through unhealthy “lifestyle” was not just related to class, but also to gender. Young “ladies” were deemed particularly susceptible to ill health and orthopedic deformities due to the “delicacy of their frames” and sedentary lifestyles, “for close confinement, want of proper exercise, and fresh air greatly contribute to weaken the system [and] retard circulation” (Jones 1788: 22). Exercise was thus recommended in many eighteenth-century medical texts as a means of preserving and restoring health, even for those with significant impairments. One guide to longevity published in 1748 recommended exercise even if “Old Age, inability to Motion, and Slothfulness” made activity difficult without being “tormented with Pain.” Gout sufferers were urged to take light exercise if they were able so that the humors affected by the disease were distributed through the body and did not attack one particular part (Anon. [1748] 2008: 128), while some practitioners, such as Abraham Buzaglo, went further in prescribing “muscular exercises” for patients, of the kind satirized in Figure 2.1 (Buzaglo 1778). For older people, walking was considered the best

FIGURE 2.1  Three men wearing orthopedic apparatus exercising. Lithograph by Paul Sandby (?), 1783. Wellcome Library, London.

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exercise, “but feebleness and various accidents often deny its use to those who most of all want motion.” In these cases, riding on horseback or “frequent jolting in a coach,” or else “being driven along in those chairs which are made to run about garden-walks,” might stimulate circulation enough to restore health and movement (Anon. [1748] (2008): 129; Hill [1750] 2008: 143). In contrast, for John Pugh, writing in his Treatise on the Science of Muscular Action (1794), only full restoration of the ability to walk unassisted could guarantee bodily health. He criticized the use of mobility aids such as “gouty-wheelingchairs,” raised shoes, crutches, and leg-irons as serving only to “impede the circulation, and waste and contract the muscles” (vii). Crutches, he argued, should never be used except in cases of lower limb fractures “because the more the body weighs on them, sooner will the thighs and legs lose their power and waste away,” while upper body injuries might occur from the compression of muscles caused by the body pressing down on the crutch (ix, 55). People with mobility impairments with limited capacity to walk or exercise were thus seen as naturally unhealthy. In An Essay on Crookedness (1788), Phillip Jones argued that not only did deformities of the spine give a body a “most unpleasing appearance,” they also, by limiting exercise and movement, “retarded, perverted or destroyed” the healthy functions of the body such that “disease in various forms becomes the constant associate of these miserable beings” (2). This idea extended beyond those claiming expert medical knowledge. For example, Samuel North, a poor prisoner at Clerkenwell Bridewell, claimed in his petition for release in 1773 that he was a “real object of compassion being a cripple from his infancy,” and was prone to being “sickly,” since his infirmities prevented him “the Exercise of Body most conducive to health.”1 Mobilization was a primary goal of eighteenth-century medicine. “To restore action lost by disease, when the disease has been removed, is the ultimate of our desires,” wrote the surgeon John Hunter (cited in Pugh 1794: viii), and many illness narratives emphasized the transition from “confinement” to “walking abroad” as a key moment in the journey from sickness to health (Turner 2012a: 53, 109–10). Mobilization was also represented among the middling and upper sections of society in particular as permitting polite sociability free from the shame of a distorted or limping body. Thus Mrs. Parkes, the wife of a dealer in small wares from London’s Paternoster Row, was treated in 1736 by the famous Epsom bonesetter Sally Mapp for a “lameness” that caused her to walk with a “Twist on the left side,” which made her “drag her hind parts behind her” in an inelegant manner. Through careful manipulation, she was duly restored to walking “steady and upright”—a cure that was as much about mending the appearance of the body and making it “presentable,” as it was about restoring function (Weekly Miscellany 1736). Guides to polite manners placed a premium on graceful movement and deportment. Nicolas Andry’s Orthopaedia (1743), published as a guide to parents to help their children achieve a “straight and agreeable look,” included advice on avoiding problems of gait that would cause a person to “walk ungracefully” (vol. 1: 38, 150). What mattered in polite society was not so much a person’s capacity to walk, but their ability to do so in an aesthetically pleasing way. Mending posture and restoring mobility were thus closely aligned in both orthodox and unorthodox medical practice. Jones published his Essay on Crookedness in 1788 to advertise the success of his spinal “machine” in restoring his young patients to mobility and an acceptable shape. Jones, a staymaker by trade and the inventor of “different kinds of contrivances to hide the defects of form from the observing eye,” claimed that by suspending or elevating “deformed” patients over a period of time, their spines might

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fall back into a “perfectly straight” position (viii–ix). His case notes emphasized the awkwardness and isolation of patients prior to their treatment. Patients’ “misery” was reflected in their dependence on others, whereas independent walking was presented as a mark of inclusion, happiness, and acceptance. The ten-year-old nephew of a “gentleman” was described as suffering “violent pain in the viscera, thighs and legs,” leaving him without power to stand “without leaning on a table; or when out of bed, obliged to lay across a chair on his belly, and frequently walked with his hands on his knees.” Within seven weeks of his treatment beginning, Jones boasted, the boy was able to walk six miles “without stopping to rest,” and he has “now continued healthful these eight years” (57). Treatment for an eight-year-old girl enabled her to go from a state of lonely confinement to one where she could “walk, run, and romp about with most children” (99). “Kitty,” a twelve-year-old girl from Church Stretton (Shropshire) with total limb paralysis, who spent most of her time lying on her back “and received her food or nourishment through a tea pot as she was not able to sit upright,” was similarly healed so that “she was able to walk by herself … to the great satisfaction of her parents and friends” (59–60). Curing mobility impairment became a badge of honor for orthodox and unorthodox healers alike. Jones was one of several notable bodily practitioners whose businesses flourished in the second half of the eighteenth century who offered technological solutions to people with bodily deformities or associated functional impairments, especially children (Withey 2016: 18–40). Such inventions sought to address a growing public concern about the future prospects of “deformed” or disabled children, set against the backdrop of fears about the social and economic costs of supporting them into adulthood (Turner 2017). Some practitioners swore to the efficacy of elastic bandages over leg-irons in helping those with “weaker” joints or palsied limbs to attain mobility, while others offered a wide variety of appliances. For instance, in 1795, Mrs. Eren of Bath offered for sale “medical appliances including back braces, leg irons (for weak legs), trusses, bandages etc” (Bath Chronicle 1795). Alongside an increasingly sophisticated market for prosthetic limbs, such advertisements reflected the growing market for technological solutions to impaired locomotion (Turner and Withey 2014). At the same time, advertisements filled eighteenth-century newspapers for cordials and medicines that would help middling patients rendered immobile or lame by gout, rheumatism, or sciatica to return to “business” (Turner 2012a: 51–3). But in the medical marketplace of eighteenth-century England, people desperate for assistance were vulnerable to exploitation. For example, in 1761, Londoner Isaac Blanchard was approached by a healer named Tousant Felix Urvoy, who offered to provide free treatment for his “lame son” on the grounds that “if he cured him, it would do him a great deal of honour.” Urvoy’s treatment involved rubbing “yellow grease” comprised of chicken fat and sage leaves on the boy’s hip. He subsequently charged Blanchard for the treatment—contrary to his word—and the case ended up in court.2 The valorization of physical mobility as a route to health, happiness, and economic well-being is evident in the emotional and financial investment made by some in seeking a cure for orthopedic impairment.

2.2. MAKING SENSE OF MOBILITY IMPAIRMENT Despite increasing medical attention to diseases and deformities that caused mobility restrictions during the long eighteenth century, the popular language of physical impairment was often ambiguous. People with mobility impairments were often described

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as “lame” (and described themselves using this term), but it is frequently unclear from our sources what impairments were present. Rather than being fixed or self-evident, “lameness” was an opaque term that captured the variability of human immobility, from temporary states of incapacity to more permanent disablement experienced by those described as “cripples” (Turner 2012a: 22–3). The physical descriptions of witnesses or defendants in criminal court records capture different variations of “lame” walking. Charles Candy, an elderly victim of theft in 1739, was described as a “lame walker at best”; in a trial of 1788, the defendant William England’s walk was described as “a little limping; he could not walk without a stick,” while John Roberts, defendant in a trial of 1800, “was a little lame, neither walking nor running, but [having] a sort of shuffle.”3 In petitions for poor relief, the term “lame” was frequently accompanied by statements attesting that the supplicant was “not capable of getting [their] living,” “unable to help” herself or himself, or reduced thereby to a “very low condition.” Older petitioners sometimes described themselves as “lame and past [their] labour” as a general catchall term to cover the frailties of old age. For example, in 1716, William Platt of the London parish of St. James Clerkenwell petitioned for poor relief, describing himself as “seventythree years old and very lame and past his labour and having little or no trade is reduced to great straights and necessity.”4 Such phrases linked “lameness” with an inability to work, but there was an expectation in the Early Modern period that people with functional impairments would undertake such labor as they were capable of performing (Pelling 1998). Voluntary hospitals for the “sick and lame” poor spread during the eighteenth century, informed by an ethos of economic rationality that placed emphasis on restoring enough function for a patient to return to work unaided (Borsay 1998). Disabled claimants of poor relief and private charity likewise presented themselves as “industrious” of character and willing to work if their health allowed (Turner 2012a: 139–40). There was an expectation that in physically demanding occupations such as the army, where chronic conditions such as leg ulcers were common, soldiers would continue to serve as long as possible (Nielsen 2014: 197). Eighteenth-century prints show physically impaired servicemen performing other active roles, such as working as porters or runners of errands (Figure 2.2) or working as ship’s cooks. Beyond this, the kind of sedentary occupations criticized in eighteenth-century medical texts as liable to make men “cripples” could conversely provide a means by which people with significant impairments could continue to make a living. Alongside the devices examined earlier that were advertised to wealthier parents to correct their children’s deformities in order to aid their future prospects, late Georgian Poor Law authorities invested considerable resources in subsidizing the labor of physically disabled children and others so that they might learn a trade and become self-sufficient (King 2015). During the eighteenth century, people used a variety of methods to describe and make sense of their “lameness.” In the first place, mobility impairment was often described in spatial or temporal terms. Lameness marked out periods of “confinement” or reduced capacity; witnesses in criminal trials, for example, recalled being “lame” at the time when events occurred. For defendants, this could act as an alibi, as they explained that their period of “lameness” made them incapable of committing alleged offences (Turner 2012b). For many people, “lameness” was a fluctuating rather than a fixed state, with common diseases such as rheumatism having seasonal patterns. Coping with chronic illnesses that might occasion periods of incapacity was made easier by predictability of symptoms, as the personal narratives of eighteenth-century gout patients testify.

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FIGURE 2.2  Two disabled veteran sailors, employed by an admiral as messengers, delivering a letter to the servant at the front door of a town house. Colored etching after G. M. Woodward, 1790. Wellcome Library, London.

A person’s capability of adapting to mobility impairment furthermore depended on the time available to come to terms with changed circumstances, their personal expectations, and the nature and degree of support available to them (Turner 2012a: 107–16). Since symptoms and individual circumstances varied, so people’s descriptions of the ways in which their “lameness” affected their lives had different markers. In its most immobilizing forms, being “lame” confined a person’s movements to their homes, to particular rooms, or to beds or chairs. John Davies, who sought help from John Pugh after having been “disabled from walking” after damaging his hip from a fall on Westminster Bridge, described his capacity only to “go a few steps about the room, bearing on one leg, with the assistance of two sticks” (Pugh 1794: 89, 90). For others, “lameness” manifested itself in terms of greater reliance on others. In 1793, one Mr. Brooks applied to Pugh for help after contracting rheumatism in his right knee, which “obliged [him] to be carried by two … servants from one room to another” (Pugh 1794: 97). Elite male diarists and correspondents complained of having to be “fed like a child” or “dandled” like a “baby” in the arms of their servants (Turner 2012a: 111). Being restricted to a particular room or dependent on servants to move about was particularly disabling for men as it threatened their patriarchal command of their households. However, there was also a transgressive intimacy in these descriptions of returning to a passive, infantile state, of the weak bodies of masters being held by the strong arms of their social inferiors. Mobility problems and other impairments exposed the limits of bodily independence and masculine power. For

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the elite men seeking cures from Pugh and others, the restoration of mobility was a means of regaining control over themselves and their social inferiors. In contrast, the expectation that elite women’s lives would be more constrained and inactive, a product of “the cultural suppression of their intellectual and physical utility,” fostered the opinion found in some eighteenth-century texts that “function impairment” might be “irrelevant to women of rank” (Joshua 2018: 49). But if men’s impairments that “confined” them to particular domestic spaces were deemed particularly demeaning, women found other ways of articulating the disabling effects of illness or impairment. Since modesty was emphasized as a feminine virtue, women of all ranks may have been particularly concerned about impairments that prevented them from dressing. For example, the wife of Anthony Drury claimed that she could not visit her husband in prison in 1726 since “she was extremely lame, and her Servant being gone could not put on her own Cloaths.”5 She, like other women, measured the effects of her “lameness” in terms of how they affected her capacity for propriety. Likewise, Ann Haley, prosecutor in a theft case at the Old Bailey trial of 1784, described herself as a “poor lame woman, I cannot pull on my stockings or take them off” without the help of others.6

2.3. GETTING ABOUT: MOBILITY IMPAIRMENT AND THE PHYSICAL ENVIRONMENT The “urban odyssey” became an important genre of writing during the eighteenth century (Corfield 1990). Part guidebook, part imaginative meditation on the manners and morals of the many types of people who were lured by the prospects of social and commercial success to the metropolis, such texts advised would-be pedestrians how to navigate the many pitfalls of urban society. Despite the gradual spread of innovations that would improve the accessibility of the streets such as streetlighting, paving, and the use of crossing-sweepers to clear away dirt in eighteenth-century London, the city could be a disorienting, confusing, and dangerous place for pedestrians, especially people with impairments (McNiel and Riello 2005: 177–8). In Trivia: Or the Art of Walking the Streets of London, published originally in 1716, John Gay recognized that the “groping Blind” and the “lame” needed special protection in the crowded metropolis, and urged his readers to offer assistance where needed (1720: 17). Yet for the most part, the eighteenth-century literary character of the “pedestrian” was rarely imagined as someone with a physical impairment (O’Byrne 2008). One exception to this neglect was an anonymous pamphlet published by the Irish bookseller George Faulkner in 1734. Based on real-life characters, the account documented the courtship between two Dublin “cripple-beggars,” Thomas Murphy, alias “Manupedirus,” and Joanna Magennis, nicknamed “Stumpanympha.” Murphy was described as having a body a little bowed together, he wants one Foot and Leg intirely, and his Limbs beside, what between Maim’dness and Distortion together, are so disabled, that on one Foot, the Stump of the other Thigh, and his two Hands in Shoes, he crawls about on all fours. (Anon. 1734: 3) His “intended Spouse” had also been born with significant impairments, “without Hands and Part of the Arms, and without Legs from the Middle of the Thigh” (4). Apparently attracted to each other by their “equal Oddity of Figure” (4), the pamphlet described their courtship and reflected on the ethical issues relating to a possible marriage between two severely disabled mendicants.

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Central to the narrative was a lengthy description of Murphy’s journey across Dublin to meet Magennis. Though suffused with mock-heroic hyperbole and ambulist assumptions (the narrator noting that “this was the first time he sorrowfully missed his feet” (4)), the description of Murphy’s urban odyssey nevertheless provides one of the few attempts to imagine how the physical environment might appear to someone with nonstandard ambulation. The half-mile journey from Thomas Street to Castle Square was one that took Murphy three days, despite travelling at “incredible speed” due to his ardent desire to meet the object of his affections (8). The ways in which impairment challenged and inverted conventional notions of speed and time are recurrent themes in this account. The increasing speed of urban life was commonly noted in this period (e.g. Gay 1720; Anon. 1780), but impairments produced their own rhythms and pace. Murphy was described as moving not as “nimble as the little flirting Moment-hand of a Clock, nor yet so imperceptibly slow as the Hour-hand, but between and between at the moderate Pace of the Minute-hand” (5). In this narrative, physical impairment changes a person’s relationship with time and space. It also magnified a long list of dangers, bringing heightened awareness of the manifold hazards of the urban street that others might take for granted: “the Dirt of our narrow, crooked Streets”; “Brewers Drays, heavy Horses, and Drunken men”; “coachmen, carters, Carmen and scavengers”; children “coming from School with satchels of Books”; crowds of theatre goers, the “Mob running with a Malefactor to Stephen’s Green”; and stray dogs (8–9). All were familiar sights, yet they presented particular threats to those who crawled awkwardly through the city streets. Murphy’s journey was accompanied by physical discomfort. His face was contorted into a “memorable Grin,” which “did proceed from both Pleasure and Pain together” (7). As modern physiological studies have shown, walking slowly or with difficulty requires considerable energy for muscles and other structures to provide balance, whereas efforts to avoid pain “typically distort Center of Mass (COM) movements, increasing the energy required to walk a given distance” (Iezzoni 2003: 25). Eighteenth-century orthopedic practitioners such as Nicolas Andry likewise noted that defects of gait caused patients to move both “ungracefully” and in ways that produced fatigue (Andry 1743, vol. 1: 150). The art of walking the streets of eighteenth-century cities was very different for those with impaired or painful bodies. For example, William MacDonald, a former soldier defending against an accusation of being involved in the Gordon Riots of 1780, told the jury at the Old Bailey that he tried to avoid crowds and was “obliged to hold my hand before me” as he walked the streets, “for fear any body should touch it, for if any thing touches it,” he explained, the pain was such that “it goes to my heart.”7 Slower bodies were vulnerable to jostling, to traffic accidents (being unable to get out of the way of heedless carts and carriages), and to attack. The city was a “dismal wilderness” populated by “wild beasts” eager to prey on the vulnerable and unwary, noted one late eighteenth-century guidebook (Anon. 1794: 81), and the “lame” presented easy targets. Another guidebook described an assault on one “Mr F—d” by two men who, seeing that he was “a little lame in one leg, gave them good reason to expect an easy conquest.” One ran up to him, “pushed a leg between him, and brought him to the ground,” before rifling through his waistcoat pocket and making away with some money (Badcock 1819: 43). In this context, assistive devices such as canes could double up as a tool of defense. For instance, in 1773, the Public Advertiser described a method for fixing a thin crescent of wood to the upper end of walking sticks so that users could “choak” street robbers if attacked (Public Advertiser 1773).

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The more conventional use of sticks or crutches was to provide balance or to aid movement by easing the weight on diseased or damaged limbs. Assistive devices communicated much about their users, including their assumed degree of impairment. Whether a person walked with a stick or a crutch revealed to others just how “disabled” they were. For example, in 1780, John Frank (or Franks) faced trial at the Old Bailey for allegedly burgling a house by climbing up a ladder and entering via an upper floor window. Witnesses called by Frank in his defense testified that the defendant was “extremely lame, and was supported by a crutch,” and therefore (by implication) physically incapable of such a feat. In the view of a witness for the prosecution, however, Frank “walked with a stick” (not a crutch), which signified instead that he “appeared to be lame, but not very lame.” The jury dismissed the defense’s argument that he was unable to have committed the crime and found him guilty. He was sentenced to death.8 Frank’s trial illustrated dramatically how people in eighteenth-century England made judgments about the assumed (in)capacities of the “lame” based on the ways in which a person’s “lameness” was made visible to others. The use of assistive devices, or adaptation of footwear and clothing to accommodate pained and swollen feet and limbs, gave people with mobility impairments a distinctive appearance. Samuel Badham, found guilty of murder at the Old Bailey in 1740, was described as “very lame in his Feet, which he said was occason’d by an illness which seized him some Years ago.” As a consequence, he “could never wear any shoes, but always walk’d with a thick Bundle of Rags tyed under the Soles of his Feet, and with a Stick in each hand.”9 William Lycett, accused of stealing in 1786, was described as “very lame” and scarcely able to cross a room unaided due to a swollen leg, forcing him to wear a “cut shoe,” or one without a buckle.10 Court records furthermore reveal how sticks, crutches, raised shoes, and a limping gait were all important tools of identification. While orthopedic impairments may have been more commonplace sights on the streets of eighteenth-century London than today, thanks to the poor mending of fractures, diseases, and the influx of a sizeable population of disabled beggars, they were often described by witnesses in criminal trials as signs of a person’s “remarkable” and memorable appearance (Turner 2012a: 84–6). For example, Francis Buller Yard, the victim of robbery and attempted extortion, was picked out to his blackmailer “by his walk,” since he had the “misfortune to be lame.”11 Witnesses or defendants with physical impairments acknowledged their personal sense of uniqueness. “I don’t think there’s a man with such a foot as mine, and to go with a stick as I do,” said Henry Myers, runner of messages and cleaner of shoes, when he testified in a highway robbery trial of 1753.12 Assistive devices were both practical and personal objects invested in meaning for the individuals who used them. At the high end of the market, canes, artificial legs, and wheelchairs were considered symbols of the user’s status, as well as functional items. During this period, canes replaced the carrying of swords as symbols of genteel masculinity, making them objects of fashion as well as tools for “invalids.” As a result, walking sticks became more individualized and decorative (Amato 2004: 89). Advertisements for lost walking sticks placed in London and provincial newspapers during the eighteenth century attest both to the ornate nature of some canes and the value placed on them by their owners. A reward of twenty shillings was offered for the return of a “brown Cane, with a silver Head and Screw, fill’d with Cotton perfum’d and having a black Ribbon to it,” left in a Hackney coach on May 21, 1702 (Post Boy 1702). That same year, the owner of a “black Cane, with a Whistle in the Head of it, marked R. B.,” offered to pay “the worth of it, with thanks” to the person who could return it after being left in a stagecoach

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on Paddington Road (Post Man and Historical Account 1702). The design of the stick, monogrammed with (presumably) the owner’s initials, together with the willingness of the owner to pay the full value to have it returned (rather than purchase a new one) suggest the depth of personal attachment to such items as extensions and projections of their owners’ identities. It is impossible to determine from these sources whether the walking sticks in question were used to aid mobility or were simply accoutrements of fashion. Indeed, the idea that a walking stick could be both an aid to an infirm body and an object that conveyed taste and status was one that eighteenth-century social commentators found difficult to accept. Conduct books advised readers not to draw attention to their infirmities, and guides to polite manners sought to differentiate those who genuinely needed sticks for balance from those who carried them as fashion objects. In 1709, the Tatler proposed a licensing scheme so that canes might only be issued to the truly “lame” and denied to “fashionable limpers.” Such was the criticism of this fashion that one correspondent suffering from a “very honest Claudication” in his left foot complained that his condition was a “double Affliction,” since it not only reduced his mobility, but also “must pass upon the world for a Piece of Singularity and Affectation” (Bond 1987, vol. 1: 524–7; vol. 2: 11–12, 130–5). Those who made a fashion statement out of their infirmities, such as “gaudy grandmothers and gay grandfathers” who placed a “glittering Buckle upon the gouty Foot,” or wore a “white Stocking tightly garter’d upon the lame Leg” (McNeil and Riello 2005: 190, citing Anon., The Man of Manners 1737), or the “fashionable lord” depicted by Hogarth in Marriage A La Mode (1743), who was so status conscious that he put “coronets on his crutches,” were mocked (London Chronicle 1764). By the end of the century, the careless and dangerous “twirling” of walking sticks by those who bore them “for the sake of ornament” rather than “use” had become symptomatic of a kind of urban bad manners associated with aristocratic entitlement (Anon. 1809: 7; Guldi 2012: 131). Despite the enduring belief that items designed for the “infirm and weary” should be strictly functional, the increasing commercialization of assistive and prosthetic aids over the course of the century led them to be depicted or advertised in ways that stressed their aesthetic as well as their utilitarian value. From the late 1770s, inventories of household goods and auction catalogues list “gouty chairs” or “merlin chairs”—the recently invented high-backed chairs fitted with small wheels and hand-operated gears to allow propulsion (Figure 2.3)—as items of “genteel and excellent household furniture” (Morning Herald 1798). One “gouty chair on wheels,” listed for sale at an auction in Haymarket in 1779, was described as “handsome” (Morning Chronicle and London Advertiser 1779). By the end of the century, increasingly sophisticated designs of artificial limbs, such as “cork legs” that resembled the shape of the natural human form, were advertised as not only practical and functional, but also as objects of desire in their own right (Figure 2.4). Such products—advertised in gendered ways that often pitched them at heroic ex-servicemen— mirrored eighteenth-century fashions that showed off the male leg as a symbol of virility and of social status (Harvey 2015; McCormack 2017). Through finely crafted products, wealthier people with mobility and other impairments were offered means of integrating into the worlds of genteel consumption in ways that used assistive technologies to demonstrate polite taste and cultural discernment (Turner and Withey 2014).

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FIGURE 2.3  Merlin’s mechanical chair for the elderly or infirm. Hand-colored etching with aquatint, 1811. Wellcome Library, London.

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FIGURE 2.4  Artificial left leg, Europe 1901–40, following a design first made for the Marquis of Anglesey, who lost his leg at the Battle of Waterloo, 1815. Wellcome Library, London.

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2.4. CULTURAL STEREOTYPING AND THE “CRIPPLE” FIGURE Despite the promise that finely crafted mobility aids might allow the impaired person to “pass,” or even make a virtue of their physical difference, many people with functional impairments had to negotiate a raft of negative cultural stereotyping and potentially face suspicion about the veracity of their bodily symptoms. Perceptions of mobility impairment depended on its causes, how it presented itself to others, and the character and conduct of the impaired person. On the one hand, men injured in the national service might claim heroic status and find their limping bodies the target of patriotic eulogizing, particularly in literary or visual representations of the “broken soldier” that were popular against the backdrop of Britain’s late eighteenth-century imperial and European conflicts (Parkes 2012). On the other hand, those whose impairments were caused by their own ill-discipline or bad habits were viewed with disdain. Hell upon Earth (1729), a satirical account of London life, described a staggering soldier, “his knees contending with every little Breeze, and his Wire-drawn Legs hardly able to support him; a black Patch on his Nose, and a Flannel Bandage round his neck.” Yet sympathy for this figure evaporated when it was revealed that his impairments stemmed from the venereal disease contracted from a “debauched” life, rather than battlefield injury. “His wretchedness could not move my Compassion,” wrote the pamphlet’s anonymous author, “that a Man should waste those Limbs in Debauchery, which he lived out for the Service of his Country, is as much a Publick Injustice, as it is a private Misfortune.” Such a man “is neither to be pitied nor excused when at any Time he disables himself from doing his Duty” (25). Compassion for people with mobility and other impairments was further circumscribed by the fear that such bodily defects were easily faked. Cultural stereotypes of the fraudulent “cripple” beggar emerged in Europe during the later Middle Ages due to increasing criticism of indiscriminate almsgiving, and attitudes toward the “undeserving” poor hardened further in England with the development of the Poor Laws at the end of the sixteenth century (Row-Heyveld 2009; Pestilli 2017: 69–77). As I have argued elsewhere, by the eighteenth century, the problem of the displaced disabled poor congregating on the streets of London and other cities challenged Enlightenment ideals of urban life as promoting refinement, taste, and commercial progress (Turner 2012a: 81–4). Although, as we have seen, allegations of simulated “lameness” might also be leveled at the fashionable rich, the idea that beggars presenting impairments on the street were not to be trusted is one that can be found throughout this period. Ned Ward’s satirical depiction of the “Beggar’s Club”—a fictitious account of a London underworld where street beggars met to revel in their fleecing of unwary pedestrians, published in the first decade of the century— provided a model for representing fraudulent disability (Ward 1709). Johann Wilhelm von Archenolz included in his account of his travels in England a similar story relating how a friend of his had infiltrated a beggar’s club, located appropriately in London’s St. Giles (the patron saint of “cripples”), where he had witnessed mendicants in a “great deal of gaiety and ease”: One cast his crutches to a corner of the room; one unbuckled his wooden leg; another took off the plaister which concealed his eye; all, in fine, discovered themselves in their own natural forms; recounted the adventures of that day, and concerted the stratagems to be put in execution on the morrow. (1790: 73)

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In the imagined world of “sham cripple” beggars, vulnerability was represented as bodily capital, a commodity for winning sympathies, something to be performed and manipulated. Francis Grose described in The Olio (1792) how “natural defects or bodily misfortunes are reckoned advantages and pre-eminences.” This was a “community” where “a man who has lost one leg yields the pass to him who wants both; and he, who has neither legs nor arms, is nearly at the head of his profession” (34). Attempts such as this to view physical impairment as a begging dividend rather than a source of real disadvantage were common in eighteenth-century culture and allowed “respectable” pedestrians to suspend their sympathies when confronted with the spectacle of suffering. London “abounds with hurry … villainies, cheats and impostors,” warned The New Cheats of London Exposed (1794: 61). The illegibility of the limping body meant that the “truth” of the disabled body remained elusive. Indeed, the distinction between “real” and “false” mobility impairments was blurred by the alleged activities of vagrants themselves. Matthew Martin’s survey of the poor in London undertaken during the 1790s, which included physical examinations of beggars, found that in several cases they “counterfeit [lameness] till they actually lose the use of the limb” (Anon. 1816: 10). John Badcock’s late Georgian London guide described the tactics of male beggars dressed as sailors who “sing frightfully, and caper round you, ex-limbed, with as much nimbleness as monkeys, showing by their leaps the agility of squirrels or kangaroos, and leaving you in no doubt which order they belong” (1819: 141). In such a situation, the pedestrian was advised to avoid eye contact, or else “put on a scowl, by drawing your eyebrows close together; one shake of the head and ‘No, not a silver,’ finishes the business.” To do so was not “taunting the distress of others,” but rather an act of “queering the attempt of a bold beggar to impose upon your softness” (142). The aggressive behavior described in this account reiterated a theme found throughout the eighteenth century. For many writers, men with mobility impairments begging on the streets of London were not considered weak or vulnerable due their impairments, but rather dangerous and threatening. Gay’s Trivia had described the beggar’s crutch in the daytime acting as a symbol of poverty and need, but at night it transformed into a dangerous weapon (1720: 43–4). Evidence brought before the Parliamentary Committee inquiring into the state of mendicancy and vagrancy in the capital, established at the end of the Napoleonic Wars in response to fears about the rising cost of poor relief and the threats to public order caused by demobbed servicemen, documented aggressive behavior involving the disabled poor. One witness said of “one, a soldier, who has lost a leg” that there was not “a more violent and desperate character” than he “in the metropolis” (Anon. 1816: 32). Another, “a great fat man who moves himself on a wooden board,” was also feared as a “very violent” character and considered unsafe to approach (58). As Caroline Nielsen has argued, displaced disabled military or naval personnel aroused considerable anxieties in eighteenth-century England, since it was believed that such men never ceased to be servicemen after discharge (2014: 199). The hyper-masculinity of such men who had become disabled from active service may have been a means of survival or a way of coping with their reduced capacities in ways that powerfully rejected the emasculating potential of physical impairment.

2.5. CONCLUSION Walking was valorized in Georgian England as a sign of the body’s health, as a way of communicating status and manners, as a way of knowing the world, and as a badge of humanity itself. In this context, “non-walking” or “nearly walking” bodies were often

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devalued, but as this chapter has shown, the meanings of mobility impairment were varied and cannot simply be subsumed under a monolithic category of human degradation. By putting impairment at the center of a study of eighteenth-century walking and mobility rather than relegating it to the margins, and by exploring the medical, aesthetic, technological, social, and cultural contexts in which meanings of mobility impairment were formed, a more complex picture emerges. During the long eighteenth century, the motions of the body were understood to be important to the production of health and longevity. Restoring movement was a key goal of medicine, and over the course of this period, the idea that bodies that moved gracelessly—or not enough—were deviant was reinforced by prescriptions for polite manners that celebrated the elegant movement and poise of the body, and by critiques of luxury and effeminacy that attacked the indolence of the elite. In medical and educational texts, exercise became a “religion” (Buchan 1772: 103), and the restoration of bodily movement and a good “shape” was tasked to a variety of practitioners, from bonesetters to specialists in bodily technologies designed to help those with “crooked” or “deformed” spines and limbs. Yet these broad precepts that associated mobility with health and social success were cut across with ideas of class and gender. For the elite, choosing a degree of immobility reflected their status and privilege, whether by wearing footwear that was ornamental rather than practical, by riding in carriages or sedan chairs rather than going on foot, or, by the nineteenth century, choosing at times of “invalidism” to be pushed by servants in bath chairs rather than to hobble on sticks or crutches (Janechek 2015). Likewise, for elite women, the assumption of a “decorative” or sedentary role in married life made their mobility less important—in theory at least—than for their husbands for whom gender ideology demanded a more public role. Despite the importance of mobility in eighteenth-century medicine, the terminology of orthopedic impairment was often opaque. The term “cripple” denoted a more pitiable and permanent state of incapacity, whereas the language of “lameness” captured both permanent and temporary conditions. People’s descriptions of their “lameness” and styles of ambulation captured the variability of experiences of impairment that were shaped by their degree of physical (in)capacity, their capability to adapt (in turn shaped by class, occupation, and gender), and how their bodies acquired different meanings when encountered by others (Mounsey 2014). “Lameness” contributed to a person’s sense of his or her own individuality, and mobility aids were not just practical items, but also personal objects invested with meaning. At the more expensive end of the market, walking sticks and artificial limbs could be presented as objects of beauty and taste in their own right, although users were sometimes accused of vanity or affectation. Satirists seized upon fashionable attempts to appropriate the symbols of invalidism, such as walking sticks, or to adopt a limp or other infirmity out of emulation, such as at the time when Queen Anne had a “lame leg,” fashionable women supposedly “carried crutch sticks” (Morning Post and Daily Advertiser 1786). Over the course of the century, attacks on foppish “fashionable limpers” coalesced into critiques of urban bad manners, where the careless “twirling” of canes without care for the eyes or clothes of others became symbolic of a form of entitled behavior that stood for the broader ills of aristocratic privilege. However, concerns about other forms of dissembled disability, the simulated mobility impairments of beggars, or those caused by deliberate mutilation of a body that was otherwise healthy and capable of work were a constant refrain in the eighteenth-century press and popular culture, and they intensified as the period wore on thanks in large part to the rising cost of poor relief.

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While mobility impairment was never an automatic bar to employment, fear of beggars faking impairments to obtain alms cast suspicion over all of the disabled poor. Cultural representations of “cripple” beggars permitted people to read the vulnerability of the impaired body as a tool of manipulation, allowing them to suspend or deploy selectively the principles of charity and fellow-feeling, revealing in the process the limits of sympathy toward the disabled poor. Bound up in the limping walks of the eighteenth-century poor were histories of accidents, diseases, and hardships (Guldi 2012: 127), but stories of feigned “defects” attested to the perceived plasticity of the non-normative body and its potential to deceive and to resist categorization.

CHAPTER THREE

Chronic Pain and Illness Enlightenment and Romantic Responses ISABELLA COOPER

To write a history of pain is to undertake something of an oxymoronic quest; it is an effort not just to cross the barrier of time, but also to grapple with something that defies analysis, quantification, and description. Histories of pain also run up against the difficulty of intersubjective knowledge, of understanding someone else’s experience of pain, particularly when that pain forms a central part of someone’s life and not just an interruption of that life. William Wandless observes that “[c]ouching pain in narrative form thus involves a fundamental tension, as it calls for the expression of an ineffable reality in a communal medium. The problem for authors and their audiences is plain: the pain that is written is never the same pain that is read” (2005: 52), nor is it the same as pain that is experienced. Furthermore, as Roselyn Rey observes: “when pain is intense and persistent or simply chronic, it always involves the entire being. It does not limit itself to the painful region, but it is the whole person as an individual entity who then becomes affected as a result” (1993: 3). Such pain can be totalizing and alienating. Individuals can thus be isolated by pain; “pain’s triumph,” as Elaine Scarry argues, is its creation of an “absolute split between one’s sense of one’s own reality and the reality of other persons. … What pain achieves, it achieves in part through its unsharability, and it ensures this unsharability through its resistance to language” (1985: 4).1 Even theorists who argue that chronic as opposed to acute pain can generate language instead of resisting or fracturing it, as Martha Stoddard Holmes does, still see chronic pain as presenting a “more challenging project for both theory and narrative” than acute pain (Holmes and Chambers 2005: 132). Pain is not only difficult to share or express, but in chronic cases is also in fact non-chronological, and here again it poses a challenge to historians. As various scholars have observed, “enduring pain conflicts with the requirements of narrative structure” (Mintz 2013: 131), because of the “intermittent yet ongoing nature and … lack of clear trajectory” (Holmes and Chambers 2005: 132). It is hard to have history without narrative. Nevertheless, historians and literary critics have sought to overcome the challenges to understanding what living with chronic pain and illness was like in times before our own. The long eighteenth century is a period of particular interest in terms of the human relationship to pain, as it was on the cusp of, but still before, modern medications and treatments for pain. Texts from the period ranging from medical or

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philosophical treatises to letters, poems, and novels can give us a glimpse of attitudes toward and experiences of pain in the eighteenth century. What we discover is a widespread grappling with the meanings of pain and illness made all the more urgent because of the limitations defining the era’s medical knowledge and ability to alleviate pain.

3.1. RELIGION AND MEDICINE In eighteenth-century Europe and America in the days before anesthesia or analgesia, people lived their day-to-day lives with an amount of pain that is hard to comprehend now. Pain was a force both mysterious and quotidian and largely beyond human control; as Rey observes, “a large part of the population only took to their beds and went to the physician when pain prevented them from working” (1993: 93–4). Even going to a doctor often ensured additional pain, as treatments could involve anything from bleeding and purging to invasive surgery without the benefit of effective sedation.2 Experimental methods and scientific inquiry into bodily impairment were gaining ground in the eighteenth century. The treatment of mental illness was similarly becoming more professionalized and secularized. Nevertheless, much medical knowledge was still theoretical, and medical authority had not yet become the central discourse it would be by the end of the next century, when more of the causes and treatments of pain and illness had been discovered. Furthermore, as Joanna Bourke observes, “distinctions between bodies, minds, and souls were not clear-cut” (2014: 71). Thus, especially in the first half of the century, many people viewed pain through a theological framework, as natural and God-ordained. Lucy Bending argues that the popular view was “that a beneficent God inflicted pain both for the pragmatic reason that it short-circuited serious bodily dissolution by prompting individuals to start back from the source of pain, and for the metaphysical reason that it kept errant humans on the straight and narrow” (2000: 1). Such providentialism framed “disability as punishment for, or manifestation of, evil,” in David Turner’s words, and the “‘just desserts’ of sinners” (Turner 2012a: 36). While variations of this theological framing of pain continued throughout the century, the Enlightenment discourses of medical and moral rationality and the discourse of sensibility also created new ways to understand pain. As society grew more secularized over the course of the century, a focus on sensory experience gave physicians and philosophers a new framework for thinking about pain outside the former providential or theological one. As Turner points out, however, to describe the eighteenth century view of illness and debility as clearly shifting from a religious to a medical understanding is to oversimplify, as the two frameworks could be complementary rather than opposed (Turner 2012a: 5–6). Thus, there remain moral if not religious undertones to the way thinkers and doctors tried to ascribe meaning to pain and illness. Some viewed pain as useful in terms of its being a sort of physical alert system or “sixth sense,” by which nature warned of the approach of illness and encouraged a change of behavior (Rey 1993: 91–2). Others blamed the intemperate lifestyles of parents as contributing to disease and debility of their offspring (Turner 2012a: 43–4).3 Some also thought of pain as useful in providing clues for physicians at a time when diagnostic tools were limited. Increasingly, as empiricists and natural philosophers like John Locke made “sensation the starting point for all knowledge,” doctors sought a practical mode of treatment based on observation of symptoms, rather than the previous

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century’s classification of causes (Rey 1993: 90–1). Where chronic illnesses causing long-term pain were involved, however, doctors focused on alleviating the pain before treating the illness. In such cases, especially where illnesses were incurable or could not be identified based on pain symptoms, the usefulness of pain seemed harder to defend. As an experience beyond reason and in many ways incommunicable, pain challenged the rationality of the Enlightenment. Nevertheless, physicians continued to seek to explain the causes of such pain and to alleviate it. There were three primary theoretical approaches to bodily pain. One was a mechanistic theory, which portrayed the human body as a machine made up of organs, nerves, and fibers that must be kept in balance. This was similar to humoral theories that “viewed the body as consisting of hot, cold, dry, and moist humors which were sensitive to social and environmental influence” and that saw “the cure for ‘chronic distempers’” as dependent on “restoring the body’s equilibrium” (Turner 2012a: 49). Mechanistic explanations were dominant in medical circles in the first half of the century, but were displaced in prominence by the century’s end by vitalist theories, which focused on the dual nature of sensations like pain as both physiological and psychological. Vitalists emphasized sensibility (physiological, not aesthetic) as “the cornerstone of life” and as a property of all living things and all their parts, making pain “the ideal experience from which to study the relationships between the physical and the mental” (Rey 1993: 117). Vitalists secularized the idea of pain as punishment for sin by representing it as instead “nature’s punishment for omissions in one’s regimen, while mental illness was perceived as a sign of conflict between the demands of each individual character and the constraints of the social order” (107). Some vitalists also saw pain as strengthening the organism it afflicts; as Rey observes, it was only insofar as pain awakens or stimulates weak or dormant vital forces that one may refer to the usefulness of pain: in a philosophical context where pain was indeed what nature—restored to its rightful place by the medical outlook of the 18th century— urged us to avoid, pain was worth only as much as it was able to contribute to the development of life. (115) Thus, for vitalists, the physical sensation of pain served as nature’s warning that her rules had been disregarded, and also as a stimulus to change. Finally, throughout the century, animist theories, which emphasized the soul’s responsibility for all physical functions, saw pain as “an important sign in illness and the sign of internal strife” (Rey 1993: 102). Nevertheless, unlike the vitalists, animists saw pain as largely detrimental rather than useful, distracting the soul’s attention from everything but the pain itself. Their theories gestured toward an integration of the psychological and the physiological, rejecting Cartesian dualism. They thus provided a more holistic way of viewing the body in pain. Across the theoretical divisions between mechanists, vitalists, and animists, however, physiologists and physicians published an ever-expanding number of books devoted to the problem of pain. One such work was The English Malady by physician George Cheyne, who exemplified a mechanistic approach, although elements of vitalism and animism also make their way into his work. He saw the human body as a “machine of an infinite number and variety of different channels and pipes, filled with various and different liquors and fluids, perpetually running, gliding, or creeping forward, or returning backward, in a constant circle,” with the “Intelligent Principle, or Soul” residing

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“somewhere in the brain” (1733: 3–4). His argument was that moderation in one’s diet was key to maintaining both physical and mental health; he believed that much chronic illness, particularly nervous illness, in England was due to rich or heavy food, as well as a moist climate, sedentary lifestyle, and city living (iii). Writing to help his “fellow-sufferers” of nervous illness and melancholy (5), he argued that “a milk, seed, and vegetable diet” is helpful for those “distempers commonly reckoned incurable, the reproach of physic and physicians, and which are in their own nature, either mortal or insupportably painful” (iv–v). A simple dietary regimen, he believed, was a more efficacious treatment than any the medical profession could provide. Cheyne called on nature, reason, and his own experience in his examination of chronic disease. He directly rejected the idea of a God so malicious as to cause pain or illness and sought to make sense of these phenomena by arguing that people bring such pain or illness on themselves (1733: 18). In particular, he contended that many illnesses were virtually exclusive to the wealthy due to their luxurious diets, saying, “what is swallowed down and received into the habit, is the first and chief efficient cause of all that mankind suffer in their bodies,” and adding that “miserable man himself creates his miseries, and begets his torture” through lack of moderation (19–20). This view, which holds individuals accountable for their physical pain, was common among Cheyne’s contemporaries and is still countered for its ableism by scholars in disability studies. Cheyne was also very much of his time in his emphasis on moderation as a primary preventive and treatment. His writing is thus emblematic of the eighteenth-century view of medicine’s role as largely an assistant to nature in restoring the body’s balance. This assistance often came in forms more aggressive than Cheyne’s regime, however, in medical remedies varying in intensity from sedatives and ointments to bleeding, purging, and even electric shock. Some remedies were meant to provide balance by providing qualities opposed to those of the ailment, while others sought to bring the ailment to a crisis, turning it from something chronic to something acute, “inflicting pain in order to cure it” (Rey 1993: 129). Barbara Ehrenreich and Deirdre English go so far as to say: “It is impossible to calculate the harm done by late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century regular doctors,” due to their use of “heroic” treatments and dangerous procedures like bleeding and purging (1978: 42). Surgery prior to the use of anesthesia—a terrifying prospect for patients—exemplified this use of pain to cure pain. In a category all its own was opium, one of the most pervasive remedies for a wide range of pains and illnesses—physical and mental—throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. It was often taken in the form of laudanum, a solution containing opium and sometimes alcohol. Laudanum was prescribed both to alleviate pain and to increase vitality and was not considered especially dangerous. The physician Nicholas Robinson, writing in 1729, even sung opium’s praises for the treatment of “spleen” (melancholia or depression): “But of all Medicines in the Spleen, I know none equal or fit to compare with that truly noble Drug we call Opium. It’s our Refuge in all Distresses; it gives Ease and Relief in the most torturing Pains, and when all other remedies fail” (quoted in Ingram 1998: 5). There were some dissenting voices: Cheyne described opiates as “slow poison” (1733: 239), and Coleridge lamented his dependence on the “accursed poison” (Coleridge [1814] 1998: 222).4 In addition to opium, treatments of chronic illness and pain took on a wider scale in this era. Secular and religious moralists encouraged sympathy in the form of social action and philanthropy, leading to new types of assistance, including the founding of numerous new hospitals. These hospitals “became powerful symbols of social progress,

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of enlightened social action that united the social and religious elite in the common purpose of alleviating the suffering of society’s most vulnerable members” (Turner 2012a: 43), but the motives behind such social actions were more complex than mere wide-scale compassion. Hospitals often restricted admission to those who were not morally reproachable (or, in many cases, incurably ill) and could be returned to economic productivity in society. Thus, hospitals and asylums became places where the souls as well as the bodies of the diseased were monitored and treated. The alleviation of pain and the remediation of illness shared priority with moral and social control of patients. This was even more true of asylums like Bethlam (“Bedlam”) Hospital in London, where patients were often kept in inhumane conditions that added to their distress. Outside the hospital context, manufacturers, entrepreneurs, and quacks all sought commercial profit by marketing products that purportedly alleviated painful chronic conditions. Those experiencing pain were now exhorted by those selling such products not to stoically bear with it, as many religious texts had advocated, but to help themselves, as part of their duty to be productive members of society. As hospitals claimed superior authority, however, the expertise of the medical marketplace was devalued, as was patients’ personal experience of pain. “The development of hospital medicine increased the authority of doctors in the diagnosis and treatment of sickness,” writes Turner, “resulting in a gradual ‘deskilling’ of patients as interpreters of their own symptoms” (2012a: 55). Many patients found themselves treated less as subjects (or even objects of sympathy) and more as puzzles for a physician to solve.

3.2. SUBJECTIVE EXPERIENCE The experiences of eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century people with chronic illness and pain, from their own perspectives, are accessible to us through their writings, particularly the letters exchanged among the upper classes. We know that conduct books often exhorted those experiencing pain not to make excessive demands on others’ sympathy, and this convention applied even to personal letters. Even so, correspondence and other documentation gives us a sense of how people came to grips with long-term pain. Fanny Burney’s 1812 letter to her sister, for example, details her breast cancer and harrowingly conveys the experience of undergoing a mastectomy prior to the use of anesthesia (Burney [1812] 2001). Citing a “terror that passes all description” before the operation, Burney graphically describes the intensity of pain: “when the dreadful steel was plunged into the breast—cutting through veins—arteries—flesh—nerves—I needed no injunctions not to restrain my cries. I began a scream that lasted unremittingly during the whole time of the incision—and I almost marvel that it rings not in my Ears still! so excruciating was the agony” (442). This personal account remains a most vivid example of the sensation of pain, and specifically of the agony that treatment itself could cause. The writings produced by those experiencing pain and illness in the long eighteenth century also reveal how the authors sought to manage their individual and social identities in the midst of their pain. Horace Walpole’s letters in which he describes coming to terms with the functional limitations of gout give us a glimpse of long-term pain management in one man’s life. In one letter he complains with a veil of humor of being an “absolute cripple” (Walpole [1760] 1906 “Strafford”: 331), and in another laments that the “beggarly virtue temperance” and the absence of gout in his ancestors has not kept him from “gout in all the forms” (Walpole [1760] 1906 “Conway”: 332). As Turner notes, disabling conditions like

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gout functioned as a sort of confinement, an “involuntary withdrawal from engagement with the wider world and shrinking of one’s spatial horizons” (109); he adds that “chronic conditions such as gout forced many sufferers to accept limitations of function and, in the language of many patients, adopt the role of ‘cripple’—whether temporarily or for longer periods” (106). In such cases, illness could become both a defining and a confining identity. Such confinement, Turner suggests, was perhaps particularly challenging to the selfconception of men at the time, as it “posed a threat to the liberty and independence which were heralded as the qualities of the eighteenth-century gentleman” (2012a: 110). However, while women may have been more accustomed to confinement in the domestic sphere, women’s writing reveals that they experienced equal distress at being removed from their usual activities. In her poem “The Head-ach,” for example, Jane Cave Winscom laments such effects from her severe headaches: Myself for action form’d would fain thro’ life Be found th’ assiduous-valuable wife; But now, behold, I live unfit for aught; Inactive half my days except in thought. (1793: ll. 27–30) Cave Winscom clearly finds chronic pain a challenge to her sense of identity, since it prevents her from undertaking the domestic actions that society expects her to fulfill as a wife and homemaker and that she is used to fulfilling.5 Equally frightening for both men and women of the upper classes, then, was chronic affliction’s ability to remove one from the social sphere. As Turner notes: “Impairment not only threatened control of oneself and others, but also potentially rendered one antisocial, unable to participate in polite society”; many people “judged the seriousness of disabling symptoms in terms of the ways in which they rendered a person unfit for social interactions” (2012a: 111). Pain and illness, many believed, rendered one too focused on one’s own suffering to participate in the give and take required for such interactions. Thus, Samuel Johnson, who himself experienced chronic depression and frequent ill health, in his discussion of Alexander Pope in Lives of the Poets, blames Pope’s “unsocial habits” on his tuberculosis of the spine, which caused chronic pain and disability so that “his life was a long disease” (Johnson ([1779–81] 1896). In contrast, William Hay in his autobiographical essay Deformity (1754) argues that deformity had led him to cultivate his mind, manners, and sensibilities so as to be socially useful and to avoid scorn. Deformity, he claims, put “a Restraint on my conduct” (Hay [1754] 2004: 43) since there are vices he is unfit to pursue. Deformity also “tends to the improvement of the mind,” according to Hay, since “A Man, that cannot shine in his Person, will have recourse to his Understanding” ([1754] 2004: 42). Physical debility can thus provide a spur to virtue and wisdom. Such texts are products of the middle and upper classes; fewer documents written by the lower classes remain. Their experience was radically different from those of the upper classes, as it was not the removal from polite society that terrified them about illness, but the loss of work and economic security and the reduction to poverty and dependence—whether that dependence was on a hospital or workhouse, parish alms, or family members. For these classes, illness and debility had dire economic ramifications, no matter which member of the family was afflicted, but when the breadwinner became debilitated, the result could be the compromise of secure occupation or even a turn to crime.

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3.3. PHILOSOPHICAL AND LITERARY RESPONSES Like physicians, philosophers of the Age of Enlightenment were concerned with understanding the meaning (if not the treatment) of pain, but their focus was also on how one does and should respond to another’s pain. Eighteenth-century “moral sense” philosophers elevated sympathy for pain and saw such sympathy as grounded primarily in sentiment, rather than reason (Wandless 2005: 56). Adam Smith marked “sympathy itself as pain,” as an “expansive sensibility … shrinking” away at the sight of suffering (Jaffe 2000: 11). David Hume wrote that sympathy for pain is a response that “depends, in great measure, on the continuity, and even sight of the object”: All human creatures are related to us by resemblance. Their persons, therefore, their interests, their passions, their pains and pleasures, must strike upon us in a lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to the original one, since a lively idea is easily converted into an impression. If this be true in general, it must be more so of affliction and sorrow. These have always a stronger and more lasting influence than any pleasure or enjoyment. (1826: 115–16) Such a view naturalized sympathy for pain as being not only moral, but part of the groundwork of what makes us human. Similarly, Smith wrote of sympathy for pain as putting oneself in another’s “situation, and … lodging … our own living souls in their inanimate bodies, and thence conceiving what would be our emotions in this case” (Smith [1759] 1976: 13). Such a view of sympathy as the natural response to pain had social implications. Turner remarks that the period “is often seen as a time of growing sympathy for the plight of the disabled. In the culture of sensibility, the sight of human suffering triggered … the humanitarian impulse that David Hume and other Enlightenment thinkers regarded as integral to the human condition” (2012a: 7). Sympathy for those in pain was thus both an interpersonal emotional exchange and, by extension, a challenge to social action. At the same time, moral sense philosophers were careful to keep sympathy hedged within what they considered reasonable bounds, so that one person’s pain should not overwhelm another. As Smith acknowledged, “[m]ankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive for what has befallen another that degree of passion which animates the person principally concerned. That imaginary change of situation on which their sympathy is founded is but momentary” ([1759] 1976: 21).6 Thus, as David Marshall observes, in the theory of moral sentiments articulated by Smith and Hume, sympathy, while blurring the boundaries of the self, still maintains the integrity of the self; it depends on distance between self and other even while attempting to bridge that distance (1986: 179–80). Furthermore, as Jeremy Davies points out, Smith’s arguments suggest that those experiencing pain should moderate their behavior and expressions of pain “to a level with which the impartial spectator could sympathize” (2014: 6); Smith also argues that those with chronic pain should behave stoically, contending that pain that is not brief must by nature be bearable (Davies, J. 2014: 31).7 This suggests that despite the value moral sense philosophers placed on sympathy, they understood sympathy as having clear natural limits and prioritized a tacit social contract by which those afflicted with long-term pain would be careful not to overtax others’ sympathy. The complex ideas about natural sympathy for pain detailed by eighteenth-century moral philosophers like Hume and Smith were enshrined in the literature of that century. Smith himself described the process of sympathy for pain, in which we “chang[e] places

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in fancy with the sufferer, [so] that we come either to conceive or to be affected by what he feels,” as something that could occur in readers engaging with literature, relating to “those heroes of tragedy and romance who interest us” ([1759] 1976: 10). As Wandless points out, moral sense theory and the cult of sensibility worked together to present feeling as preeminent over reason in our response to fictional pain: Faced with the impossibility of expressing fully those inexpressible aspects of the human condition, yet unwilling to forfeit their power to engage audience sympathies, writers sought out methods of using the body to reveal the inner lives of characters and to manipulate the moral implications of their behavior … By attaching interest to the body—the one thing a writer could be sure his or her readers had in common with the characters—appeals could be made directly to the sensibilities. (2005: 57–8) Fiction thus appealed to sensibilities both physiological and moral in appealing to its audience to feel for characters. Over the course of the eighteenth century, Wandless argues, fictional representations of pain became less conventional and stylized, and instead increasingly emphasized the individual subjective nature of pain (57–8). This made for more effective appeals to sympathy for those experiencing such pain. Many eighteenth-century authors, critics, and readers saw such an inculcation of the sympathetic imagination, achieved primarily by readers’ identification with characters, as the novel’s primary role. Catherine Gallagher summarizes this conception of the novel, saying that sympathy or “compassion” was at this time “generally acknowledged to be the end of fiction … [F]iction in the eighteenth century was believed to be a vehicle for moral sentiments. It was thought to allow the exercise of sympathy, the process by which one feels the joys and sufferings of another and may thereby be motivated to perform benevolent actions” (1994: 167). This conception of the novel’s power to stir up moral sentiment gave it a moral stature, a gravitas, enabling its rise from a literary form considered at best mere popular entertainment and at worst a source of danger and corruption to one with the high purpose of expanding sympathy. However, few literary works present pain and illness purely sympathetically; authors use both to create disgust or antipathy toward a character as easily as fellow feeling. Images of pain and illness estrange as often as they evoke the reader’s compassion, depending on whether the author emphasizes the pathos of the painful experience or the distastefulness of the symptoms. Illness could dehumanize a character or represent moral judgment either on the invalid or on those who respond to her pain. Toward the end of the period, textual presentations of pain and sympathy became entwined with a Romantic discourse of sensibility, in which, as J. Davies observes, “the physiological analysis of sensitivity and responsiveness was readily accommodated by literary aesthetics” (2014: 6). Perhaps the most important formulation of pain in aesthetic terms was Edmund Burke’s in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Here, Burke places pain in the realm of “the sublime,” as an emissary for “the king of terrors,” death: Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. ([1757] 1990: 36)

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J. Davies explains that in the Burkean formulation pain “is like the sublime in that it offers the subject a form of self-awareness precisely by the way it exceeds the normal bounds of subjectivity” (2014: 33). Pain, Burke suggests, causes the individual to experience sensation at its most heightened pitch, transcending any other state of consciousness in sheer power. Besides defining pain itself as sublime, Burke also frames sympathy for another’s pain as a possible exposure to the sublime. By sympathy, he writes, “we enter into the concerns of others; that we are moved as they are moved, and are never suffered to be indifferent spectators,” adding that this sympathy in “turning upon pain may be a source of the sublime” ([1757] 1990: 41). This formulation of sympathy as a sort of sharing in pain is not at first glance very different from Smith’s or Hume’s. However, Burke also notes that the pain of others may be a source of pleasure to the beholder. This, he says, is commonly acknowledged when the objects of sympathy are fictional, yet he contends that we find a similar pleasure in sympathizing with real pain not our own. When we “consider how we are affected by the feelings of our fellow creatures in circumstances of real distress,” he says, “I am convinced we have a degree of delight, and that no small one, in the real misfortunes and pains of others. … [F]or terror is a passion which always produces delight when it does not press too closely; and pity is a passion accompanied with pleasure, because it arises from love and social affection” (42). Others’ pain, he suggests, gives us pleasure both because we are relieved that it is not our own and because it spurs sympathy within us. The representation of pain as a sublimely terrible power made its way into poetry. At this time, many writers were finding that the immediacy of lyric verse and its freedom from narrative structure made it an effective way to convey the subjective experience of pain. Women, in particular (like Jane Cave Winscom), seemed to find poetry a natural outlet for conveying physical and mental affliction, and often addressed pain directly in their work as a sublimely powerful, terrifying force. In Lady Emmeline Stuart-Wortley’s “To Pain,” for instance, pain is addressed in sublime terms as “ruthless Pain, / Dark uncreator!” ([1838] 1992: ll. 43–4), which suggests that its force is great enough to be the inverse of the Creator’s. “Thou art the known, felt, Truth—the Certainty, / The touchstone of Existence, since to thee / The keenest sense of Being still we owe” (ll. 21–3), Stuart-Wortley extols pain, in words that resonate with Burke’s idea that pain can provide us with a keener sensation than any pleasure. Another striking example of the use of verse to express both a personal and sublime pain is the poetry of Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. Finch experienced depression, then called melancholia or spleen. In her ode “The Spleen,” first published in 1701, Finch discusses the impossibility of fixing the cause of her melancholy: What art thou, Spleen, which ev’ry thing dost ape? Thou Proteus to abused mankind, Who never yet thy real cause could find, Or fix thee to remain in one continued shape. ([1701] 2006: ll. 1–4) Her splenetic pain, she suggests, can take on many forms and mimic other disorders; it is a powerful, shape-shifting force. Finch particularly fears spleen’s effects on her literary endeavors, lamenting: “I feel my verse decay, and my cramped numbers fail” (ll. 74–8). Here she presents pain as having the power to stifle language, even though ironically the poem only exists as a response to that pain.

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Finch also finds pain fearful because of its resistance to medical intervention. “In vain to chase thee ev’ry art we try, / In vain all remedies apply,” she writes (ll. 128–9), and says of physicians that spleen “dost … baffle all [their] studious pains” (l. 141). They cannot discover “The secret, the mysterious ways, / By which thou dost surprise, and prey upon the mind” (ll. 144–5). Pain’s terrible sublimity here lies partly in its mysterious inaccessibility to medical reason and its rebellious rejection of those who would claim authority over it. Despite this depiction of pain’s great and mysterious power, another of Finch’s poems shows her finding some triumph over it in religious consolation, and such consolation is one more common theme in the lyric verses of the time. In “On Affliction,” Finch boldly invokes pain as welcome to her reason, though her body recoils from it: “Welcome, whate’er my tender flesh may say, / Welcome, affliction, to my reason, still” (1701: ll. 1–2), she says, and the following lines explain why she welcomes it. Pain, in her formulation, is the “rod” that proves her spiritual “adoption” (l. 6), and affliction is the “line, which every saint / Is measured by, his stature taken right” (ll. 11–12). She thus embraces pain as God’s discipline of his children, in conformity with one eighteenth-century view of pain as a test from God and an opportunity to show grace. Other poems by women throughout the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century would take a similar approach. Anne Bannerman’s and Anne Blanchard’s poetic addresses to pain and Lady Stuart-Wortley’s poem “From This Dark Prison of My Pain” all seek comfort in the idea of a heaven where the “fierce tyrannic power” of pain will be no more (Bannerman xxxx; Stuart-Wortley 1846; Blanchard 1823: 1. 14). While many of these poems gesture toward Christian religious consolation for pain, others find comfort in those other eighteenth-century deities, Nature and Reason. StuartWortley’s “To Pain,” for example, which details the awful experience of pain and opens by asking, “Why, what is Life but thee! triumphant Pain? / Vast is thy power and endless is thy reign” (ll. 1–2), turns for consolation to the strength of human nature and reason: The mind—the mind can blunt Pain’s deadliest sting, And teach the flesh to brave its suffering— … Our Human Nature can thy might defy, When keen roused energies their strength supply. (ll. 101–2, 111–12) This suggests an Enlightenment belief that mind and will can transcend matter, that pain’s great power is overmatched by reason, but the assertion of this belief is undermined by what has come before; the poem has already forcefully established pain as the source of our “deepest powers,” which are not our reasoning capacities, but our “Capacities of suffering” (ll. 24–5). While the lyrics above convey the experiences of women in this era, men, too, expressed their experiences of pain, and their attempts to make meaning of it, through poetry. The publisher Robert Dodsley’s 1743 poem “Pain and Patience” strongly advances the view of that “dire, inexorable Fury,” pain, as Heaven’s “vengeance” (1. ll. 3–4) for intemperance. He writes that pain “keep[s] mankind in awe” (3), thus preventing “Moral Ills” (4). Pain is thus presented as the natural consequence of individual habits, and even as a means of preventing the person experiencing it from continuing down an immoral path. Patience is another key theme in this poem; Dodsley describes it as God’s gift to keep us from falling into despair when we experience pain. The poem also suggests, however, that patience is equally necessary to endure being treated for pain as for enduring the initial pain itself:

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But Heav’n grant Patience to the Wretched Wight, Whom pills, and Draughts, and Bolusses assail! … Dear Doctors, find some gentler Ways to kill, Lighten this Load of Drugs, contract yon length of Bill. (13. ll. 1–2, 4–6) Despite Dodsley’s praise of such patience, however, his focus comes back at the end to pain, as he exclaims: “in raging pain I sing” (17. l. 6), suggesting that his experience of pain is the true driving force of his song. In reflecting experiences of chronic pain, poetry in the Romantic era fed into the idea of the artist as a tortured genius. Romantic poets had plenty of fodder for expressions of pain. Coleridge was a laudanum addict due to his schiatic rheumatism and other chronic afflictions; Shelley had chronic pain due to “kidney disease and nervous hyperaesthesia” (Davies, J. 2014: 3); Byron had painful operations for his club foot; and Keats had consumption. The creative endeavors of these poets were fueled as much as hindered by their experiences of pain.8 Thus, Romantic poetry has been “characteristically presented as the work of an isolated and often suffering artist, compelled to utterance by an acute excess of sensibility,” and therefore having “a special affinity with the physical pain that at once devastates language and insists upon new forms of expression” (3). Romantic poetry seeks to express that which seems unutterable, including the experience of pain and illness. As Section 3.4 will suggest, however, eighteenth-century novels also sought to tackle these weighty subjects.

3.4. CLARISSA Samuel Richardson’s novel Clarissa is an exemplary text for examining attitudes and conventions surrounding pain and illness in the eighteenth century. This is partly due to its expansiveness; it is a novel of sensibility with “the eighteenth century’s most thoroughgoing case study of affliction” (Wandless 2005: 62), containing characters with a wide range of responses to pain and illness. The novel’s epistolary form also opens a window to its time; the way in which the characters use sickness as a means of explaining lapses in communication, for example, is very much in line with actual letters of the time, as is the minute detailing of fluctuations in health and the characters’ constant anxieties about potential illness. Beyond this, however, the novel illuminates the interplay that existed between the eighteenth century’s discourses about illness. It is a novel of sensibility that keeps a theological framework very much in place: Richardson presents disease as divinely ordained, though also rooted in one’s constitution. He consistently suggests that illness is meant to teach the person experiencing it and those around him a spiritual or moral lesson. One’s response to illness—one’s own or another’s—is strongly indicative of one’s moral state. But in this focus on the moral response to illness and in its discussion of the medical practices of the time, the novel also partakes of the discourse of the era’s moral philosophers and medical practitioners. In the middle of the century, as Wandless notes, “[v]ictims of affliction were set before readers as examples of responses to pain; by developing the personalities and delineating the fates of these victims, authors could countenance or denounce their patterns of behavior” (2005: 58). This is clearly the case in Clarissa. At the same time, the Romantic discourse of sensibility comes to the fore in Clarissa as the novel culminates in a tragedy truly sublime in the Burkean sense—evoking awe

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and pity, and fitting Burke’s maxim that “our delight, in cases of this kind, is very greatly heightened, if the sufferer be some excellent person who sinks under an unworthy fortune” ([1757] 1990: 42). Clarissa is precisely such an excellent person. Richardson presents Clarissa’s behavior as exemplary both in sickness and health and contrasts it with that of other characters who bring illness and pain on themselves through their vices. (In this, the influence of George Cheyne, discussed earlier, is clear; he was Richardson’s physician.) In the beginning of the novel, Clarissa’s good health is attributable to her virtues: as Lovelace states, “by a temperance truly exemplary, she is allowed to have given high health and vigor to an originally tender constitution” ([1747–8] 1985: 400). In contrast, her father’s gout is indicative of overindulgence, though Clarissa generously uses it to excuse his ill-temper, saying he was “soured by the cruel distemper” (55). The Harlowe patriarch illustrates both sides of the eighteenth-century view of gout, which was believed to be “caused by an intemperate lifestyle in the eighteenth-century elite,” but also “became an intrinsic part of their class identity,” even conferring status (Turner 2012a: 113). Similarly, Lord M., Lovelace’s uncle, has “gout in his stomach” due to his eating and drinking. Lovelace notes that Lord M. prays piously when experiencing gout, only to return to asking Lovelace to entertain him with his “rogueries” ([1747–8] 1985: 1023). Lovelace expresses disgust for this hypocrisy, asking: “But what must his notions of religion be, who, after he has nosed and mumbled over his responses, can give a sigh or groan of satisfaction, as if he thought he had made up with heaven, and return with new appetite to my stories? … The old peer has been a sinner in his day, and suffers for it now” (1023). Though he does not apply the lesson to himself, even Lovelace can see that Lord M.’s inability to learn from illness is a moral failing. Furthermore, he recognizes his uncle’s pain as a punishment for previous misdeeds. Lovelace’s friend, Belton, is an even more morally deficient chronic invalid than Lord M. He is consumptive, but does not take advantage of the opportunities his slow decline gives him to prepare for death. Clarissa observes of him that “his irregularities threaten a brief duration to the sensual dream he is in; for he has a short consumptive cough, which seems to indicate bad lungs; yet makes himself and his friends merry by his stupid and inconsiderate jests upon very threatening symptoms, which ought to make him more serious” ([1747–8] 1985: 543). Neither Belton nor Lord M. learn the lessons their illnesses and pains should teach them, and they endure pain as a result. The novel’s characters also reveal much about themselves through their responses to others’ pain and illness. Anna Howe demonstrates a sympathetic response to illness and pain by saying after seeing a dying woman: “Death, to one in health, is a very terrible thing. We pity the person for what she suffers, and we pity ourselves for what we must some time hence, in like sort, suffer; and so are doubly affected” ([1747–8] 1985: 274). She demonstrates an ability to learn from the example of others’ pain and illness, in a way that parallels Adam Smith’s notions of rational, self-interested sympathy. Similarly, Belford, as he comes under Clarissa’s moral influence, begins to read pain and illness as just retributions from which witnesses can profit; he tells Lovelace of his uncle: I often wish thee present … to see the dregs of a gay life running off in the most excruciating tortures that the colic, the stone, and the gangrene, can unitedly inflict; and to hear him bitterly bewail the dissoluteness of his past life in the bitterest anguish of a spirit every hour expecting to be called to its last account. (715)

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Belford has learned to understand pain as the beginning of a punishment that will continue into the afterlife unless its lesson is learned in time. In the same vein, Belton’s afflictions teach Belford that “[w]e ought to begin early to study what our constitutions will bear, in order to root out by temperance, the weeds which the soil is most apt to produce; or at least to keep them down as they rise” ([1747–8] 1985: 1241). He believes that living a more temperate life could have slowed or eased Belton’s consumptive decline, and once again seeks to learn from another’s mistakes. In contrast, the villainous Mowbray, faced with Belton’s fatal illness, is incapable of learning from the experience of his friend, or, for that matter, of showing sympathy. As Belford observes, Mowbray “enjoys too strong health to pity the sick” (1231). In this novel, pain and illness in oneself and others is a crucial prompt to self-examination and a source of moral instruction, to be ignored at one’s temporal and eternal peril. Unlike Belton’s, Clarissa’s illness in the final months of her life is unspecified, but she rarely complains of pain and is more focused on spiritual concerns than physical ones. Belford stands in as the text’s ideal reader of Clarissa’s illness. He emphasizes the refined beauty Clarissa—that “lovely skeleton”—achieves through her illness; he calls her “emaciated,” but adds that “were she only skin and bone, she must be a beauty” ([1747–8] 1985: 1351). But he expresses his deepest admiration for her moral character, a character exemplified in her manner of dying. He admires her because she is “more of soul than of body” (1103). While he insists that Lovelace is responsible for her death, he also emphasizes that her death is a triumph, by constantly reiterating the moral and spiritual gulf her sufferings have put between Clarissa and Lovelace. Clarissa’s courageous willingness to die exemplifies for Belford her piety and blamelessness. As Donnalee Frega notes, it “allows her to become an authoritative voice as she suffers … directing and managing her resources as she could not have done as a well-nourished, healthy woman” (1998: 4). Similarly, Clark Lawlor observes that, “For Richardson, physical debility indicates a higher spiritual value for woman in that she becomes a redemptive and beatific icon” (2007: 70). Her illness and pain thus return to her some of the agency of which she has been robbed, and also become means of achieving even greater virtue. Richardson also sets Clarissa’s spiritualized, painless death scene in stark contrast with the grotesquely physical and agonizing deaths of Belton and especially Mrs. Sinclair. These marked contrasts suggest an authorial hope that the reader, revolted with such scenes, will return in awed reverence to the deathbed of the ascetic Clarissa, as Belford does. Belford tells Lovelace: “I see so much difference in the behavior of this admirable woman in her illness, and that of poor Belton in his, that it is plain to me that the sinner is the real coward, and the saint the true hero” ([1747–8] 1985: 1124). For Belford, Clarissa’s willingness to die and lack of fear of death or pain demonstrate both saintliness and heroism, while he condemns the agony and terror Belton and Sinclair experience as indicating cowardice and guilt. Belton, as Belford’s words suggest, is terrified of death, and refuses to accept the seriousness of his illness to the very end. On his deathbed, he rails against his doctor’s ineffectualness to cure his chronic malady, and remains unwilling even to believe he is dying despite his long decline. Belford laments: “I heartily wish, we could have seen one ray of comfort darting in on his benighted mind before he departed. But all, alas! to the very last gasp was horror and confusion” (1243).

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The “madam” Sinclair’s death, which takes place after Clarissa’s and results from the mortification of a leg wound obtained while drunk, is even more horrible. She is not spiritualized like Clarissa, but more grossly physical than ever. Like Belton, she cannot give up her “apprehensions of death and her antipathy to the thoughts of dying” ([1747–8] 1985: 1387). She laments that she is “snatched away by my own intemperance!” (1387). There is, as Belford observes, “a hell already begun in her own mind” (1394). The narrator (“editor”) includes a note that after “hourly increasing tortures of body and mind,” Sinclair dies “in such agonies as terrified into a transitory penitence all the wretches about her” (1394). Her pain on her deathbed is the more terrible as Richardson presents it as just the beginning of an eternal punishment. There is a clear didactic purpose in the way such deathbed scenes present physical pain and mental anguish as punishments for vice. As Brigitte Glaser points out, they convey a “moralistic message: those who have not been able to replace or displace bodily desires are subjected to painful diseases and horrifying deaths, while those who are willing to reject the body or assign it a place of inferiority when compared with the mind are rewarded by beatification and long-lasting renown” (1994: 74). The contrasting death scenes thus encourage the reader to view Clarissa’s wasting away as a “holy death” (Doody 1974: 169), in opposition to the deaths of the sensualists who lack her self-denial and ability to prioritize her mind and spirit over her body. Compared to Belton’s and Sinclair’s terror of death and unpreparedness for it, Clarissa’s enthusiastic preparations for every aspect of her death, even her longing for it, seem Christian and ennobling. “I shall have agonies, I doubt—Life will not give up so blessedly easy, I fear—Yet how merciful is the Almighty to give his poor creature such a sweet serenity!” she says ([1747–48] 1985: 1329). Belford admires “the patience and resignation with which she supports herself in a painful, lingering and dispiriting decay; and the greatness of mind with which she views her approaching dissolution … from motives in which a dying saint might glory” (1332). Even in her final moments, she is serene, with “such a charming serenity over-spreading her sweet face at the instant as seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already begun” (1362). Here again she contrasts with Belton and Sinclair, whose eternal torment begins on their deathbeds. Richardson himself in the Postscript describes “poetical justice” as one of his aims ([1747–8] 1985: 1495), exemplifying again the attempts to make moral meaning out of pain that characterized so many in his century. In the same Postscript, he hints at his aspirations to the tragic sublime, saying that “Terror and commiseration leave a pleasing anguish in the mind” (1497). He thus aligns himself not only with his era’s moral wrestling with pain and illness, but also with some of its methods of aesthetically appropriating such pain and illness. This approach, and the voices of his numerous characters, make his novel a channel for many of the disparate discourses—medical, theological, philosophical, and literary—which shaped and expressed his contemporaries’ perspectives on chronic pain.

3.5. CONCLUSION Despite the difficulties involved in writing a history of pain or illness, there is still much we can learn from attempting such a history. A rich array of texts from the long eighteenth century allow us some insight into what it meant for a person of that era to experience

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bodily pain. These documents include medical, theological, and philosophical treatises that grappled with the meaning of pain, letters and autobiographical writings in which those in pain sought to convey their experience firsthand, and poems and novels in which authors sought to turn pain into a source of creativity. In reading these texts, we can understand more of the ways in which experiences of illness and pain are historically and culturally determined. At the same time, the familiar aspects of the pain presented in these works suggest the ways pain transcends contexts to constitute a universal attribute of embodied human experience.

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CHAPTER FOUR

Blindness Conversations with the Blind, or “Aren’t You Surprised I Can Speak?” KATE E. TUNSTALL

The opposition between blindness and sight is no ordinary one in the European cultural tradition, in which sight and light are powerful metaphors, notably for faith and knowledge (Jay 1993). It is a tradition populated by figures who are “blind” because they do not share the Christian point of view to which revelation is fundamental, and by figures who do not share the Christian point of view because they are blind and thereby excluded from witnessing the revelation. When Christ made the blind to see, he also made them to “see”; pagans, atheists, and Jews are “blind,” as are many other nonconformists (Derrida 1991); and the link between not seeing and not believing can  be particularly powerfully underlined in French, in which to say someone has no eyes—“n’a pas d’yeux”—is phonetically identical to saying s/he has no God—“n’a pas Dieu.” Further, the tradition is animated by blind figures whose reliance on their other senses, notably that of touch, a “contact sense” (Rée 1999: 34), ensures their corporeality with all its attendant connotations of moral and epistemic baseness. And yet it is a tradition that is also animated, and just as significantly, by figures who can “see” all the more clearly precisely because they are blind. Seeing being notoriously unreliable, more so than touch (Clark 2007), not seeing is, on this model, not so much not believing as not being deceived. Moreover, the tradition is characterized by blind figures who are “monsters” in the etymological sense of the term (Curran 2001; Williams 2011), which is to say they de-monstr-ate to the sighted, make them “see” that it is they, in fact, who are “blind.” No eighteenth-century text more powerfully mines that metaphorical complex than Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (Letter on the Blind for the Use of Those Who Can See) ([1749] 1978a, English transl. 2011), to which he added a supplement over thirty years later, entitled Additions sur la Lettre sur les aveugles (Additions to the Letter on the Blind) (Diderot [1782] 1978b1). These two texts will be the main focus of my attention here. Now, metaphors have been the topic of much debate in disability studies, which has sought to resist, precisely, the process of turning disability into a metaphor for something else. As Lennard J. Davis has put it: “The problem with metaphor and disability is that disability already involves looking away” (2012: x). So, if one of the aims of disability studies is to read the blind figures in literary texts as literally blind, to read for

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representations of the experience and embodiment of blindness, the cultural history of disability (providing it is not simply to conclude that disability has, in fact, as such, no cultural history) requires objects that do not—or that do not only—turn blindness into a metaphor. The Lettre sur les aveugles and the Additions are such texts: they do not only look away from blindness toward that for which it can be made to stand (e.g. atheism, abstract truth, palpable truth); they also, and at some length, describe and investigate blindness as a lived, embodied experience. These are texts that heed Davis’ injunction “to look directly at blindness” (2012: x). In fact, it is not so much the abstract concept of “blindness”—albeit conceptualized as an embodied experience—that we look at directly when reading the Lettre and the Additions as it is blind men and women. Or, rather, blind characters, male and female, though it is significant that they are, to some degree, based on real people, two of whom it is safe to assume Diderot knew personally—which is not to say that we can simply conflate the characters in the texts with the historical people whose names and/or characteristics they share, nor the author with the character of the letter-writer in the Lettre (Tunstall 2011: 16–19, 35–46). Still more accurately, reading the Lettre and the Additions involves us not so much in looking directly at blind men and women as it does in listening to what they have to say. Attenuating the voyeuristic quality of these texts, in which sighted writers describe looking directly at blind characters who are (apparently at least) unaware that they are being looked at, is the fact that the Lettre and the Additions are full of direct speech, of blind voices. Indeed, we might say that the blind figures get to look back by talking back. We even hear one blind man in the Lettre tease the sighted letter-writer for being constantly amazed at all the things a blind man can do—the blind man quips he’s surprised that the letter-writer is not surprised that a blind man can speak (1978a: 25; 2011: 178). A good deal of the significance of the Lettre and the Additions for the cultural history of disability is, then, that they give a voice to the blind—they make blind voices audible. My focus in this chapter will be on what the blind figures have to say in the Lettre and the Additions, as much as on what is said about them by the writer and the author, and, in particular, on the blind figures’ challenging of three prevailing discourses about them. The first of these three discourses is the philosophical discourse that relies on the topos of the “man born blind,” to which most cultural histories of blindness in the European eighteenth century (e.g. Paulson 1987) accord a major role, and that is known as “the Molyneux Problem” or “Molyneux’s Question.” In fact, the question does not so much concern a blind man as a man who was born blind but who can now see, and it is, moreover, as Georgina Kleege has also observed (2011), only in his capacity as a newly sighted man that he is of any interest to philosophers. If I also begin with that material here, I do so on different grounds: my analysis will focus on the ways in which Molyneux’s Question fed into the second discourse challenged by the blind in the Lettre and the Additions, namely the medical discourse of curability. The main premise of that discourse (one to which the blind would increasingly become subject over the course of the eighteenth century) was—is—that blindness is a lack, a privation—the etymology of the French “aveugle” is “ab oculis” (without eyes)—and therefore that the restoration of sight by means of medical intervention could only be a good thing. Third is the discourse of compassion—a vexed discourse both in general (Ibbett 2017) and in disability studies in particular (e.g. Shapiro 1993)—and that is not so much challenged as reworked and made more capacious by the blind men and woman of the Lettre and the Additions, who might be said to pre-echo another of Davis’ terrifically pithy formulations, namely: “People with disability: they are you” (2002: 1).

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4.1. DISCOURSES OF SIGHT SUPREMACY Molyneux’s Question, a philosophical thought experiment imagined by the Irish philosopher William Molyneux (1656–98), was designed to test the implications of the claim that the sensations of sight and touch had nothing in common with each other (that there was no haptic sensation of red, no visual sensation of cold), and to investigate what this meant, if anything, for the perception of three-dimensional shapes. Were the qualities spherical and cuboid available, unlike red and cold, to both sight and touch? Or were they not directly perceptible by means of either sense? Molyneux set out his thought experiment in 1693 in a letter to John Locke (1632–1704), author of the recently published An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) that was causing much debate owing to its anti-Cartesian revival of the Aristotelian maxim, “Nihil est in intellectu quod non sit prius in sensu” (“Nothing is in the mind that was not first in the senses”). When Locke decided to include Molyneux’s Question in the third edition of the Essay (1693), he guaranteed it publicity and posterity. The question goes as follows: Suppose a Man born blind, and now adult, and taught by his touch to distinguish between a Cube and a Sphere of the same metal, and nighly of the same bigness, so as to tell, when he felt one and t’other, which is the Cube, which is the Sphere. Suppose then the Cube and Sphere placed on a Table, and the Blind Man made to see. Quaere, Whether by his sight, before he touch’d them, he could now distinguish, and tell, which is the Globe, which the Cube. (Locke [1693] 1979: 146) If haptic and visual sensation had something in common, then, so Molyneux assumes, a man who had been able to tell a cube from a sphere by touching them ought to be able to recognize them immediately were he to acquire the ability to see them. Locke’s answer to Molyneux was negative: “the Blind Man, at first sight, would not be able with certainty to say which was the Globe, which the Cube, whilst he only saw them; though he could unerringly name them by his touch, and certainly distinguish them by the difference of their Figures felt” ([1693] 1979: 146). Haptic and visual perception had nothing in common in Locke’s view; the newly sighted man would not be able to recognize the shapes as a cube and a sphere, and would need to see and touch them at the same time in order to establish any connection between the cube as seen and the cube as touched. Molyneux’s Question and Locke’s answer to it were debated across Europe by philosophers as diverse as Leibniz, Berkeley, Voltaire, La Mettrie, Maupertuis, Condillac, Turgot, Mérian, and Reid, to name only the most famous, who also offered their own answers. From the perspective of the cultural historian of the blind, however, Molyneux’s Question and its various answers are not in themselves of any great interest, not least because before the man is able to see, he is of no interest to those posing the question. Moreover, once he can see, the philosophers speak for him, answering their question in his place—he was, after all, never anything more than an imaginary hypothesis. Readers are not asked to imagine how the man born blind gained his sight, only that he did, and it is only having done so that he can feature in the philosophical scenario. Yet Molyneux’s Question gains in interest for the cultural historian of blindness when it becomes, as soon it would, a question for medical science, and when postoperative narratives begin to circulate and come under critical scrutiny. Today, neuroscientists have answered Molyneux’s Question on the basis of their observations not of men “born blind and made to see,” but of neonatal babies, who acquire the sense of sight only after that of touch. And the newborns have proved

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that Locke was wrong (Gallagher 2005). In the eighteenth century, however, the experimental subjects of Molyneux’s Question were young men and women with cataracts, who became part of the new discourses of disability and curability. One highly significant cataract operation was performed in 1727 on a teenage boy by the surgeon royal William Cheselden (1688–1752), who reported on it in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and thereby guaranteed its circulation across Europe. His account of the young man’s post-operative visual experience not only echoed Molyneux’s Question, albeit with a cat and a dog as the cube and the sphere, but also confirmed Locke’s answer. Cheselden reported to his learned friends the results of the operation he performed on an unnamed boy, who was “born blind, or lost his sight so early that he had no remembrance of it” (1727–8: 447). No details are given of how the operation was done, and the boy appears to pass easily from blindness to sight, if not to immediate visual recognition of shapes. Cheselden reports that when the boy saw for the first time, “he knew not the shape of any thing, nor any one thing from another, however different in shape, or magnitude,” and “having often forgot which was the cat and which the dog, he was ashamed to ask; but catching the cat (which he knew by feeling) he was observed to look at her steadfastly, and then setting her down, said, So puss! I shall know you another time” (1727–8: 448). Cheselden’s boy thus clearly recalls the hypothetical man supposed by Molyneux, who had to distinguish “which the cube, and which the sphere”—the syntactic echo of Cheselden’s “which was the cat and which the dog” is notable, and given that he needed to see and touch the cat and the dog at the same time in order to establish any connection between the dog as seen and the dog as touched, he also appears to prove Locke right. Cheselden’s operation would not be the first to turn Molyneux’s hypothetical scenario into an empirical reality. The surgeon’s report also exceeded the requirements of answering Molyneux, and a curious detail of his narrative is worthy of our attention here. Cheselden relates the following with regard to the boy’s visual perception of color: Now Scarlet he thought the most beautiful of all Colours, and of others the most gay were the most pleasing, whereas the first time he saw Black, it gave him great Uneasiness, yet after a little Time he was reconciled to it; but some Months after, seeing by Accident a Negroe Woman, he was struck with great Horror at the Sight. (1727–8: 448) What are we to make of the appearance of a “Negroe Woman” here? Whereas the color black simply provoked “Uneasiness,” presumably because it reminded the boy of his former life in the dark and confirmed the joys of the light, Cheselden’s account of his “accidental” sighting of a black woman turns it into a much more complex experience, and it needs some closer commentary. In contrast to the “Uneasiness” provoked by seeing black objects, to which the boy is said nonetheless to become “reconciled,” the sight of the black woman provokes “great Horror,” and there is no mention of the boy becoming reconciled to it. A black person is, we are to understand, forever an intolerable sight. The color of her skin is viewed to be a terrible misfortune, one akin to blindness, but not one for which the newly sighted boy feels any pity. Rather, it seems that her black skin spoils his view, and moreover, black skin, unlike blindness, is, so we are given to understand, an ill that is incurable.2 This is a moment in the cultural history of blindness that intersects, then, with the cultural history of race, and shows up sight supremacy also to be white supremacy.

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Now, had anyone actually asked the blind boy whether he wanted to see? Voltaire wanted to know and, developing a line in Cheselden’s account where he states, “before he was couch’d, he expected little Advantage from Seeing, worth undergoing an Operation for” (Cheselden 1727–8: 449), the French philosopher suggests that the boy could not have given his informed consent to the operation ([1738] 1992: 319). Whereas Cheselden is clear that the operation has improved the boy’s life and the boy clearly thinks so too, Voltaire’s claim is rather more ambiguous—perhaps sight would not make the boy any happier because he was happy being blind; and in that respect, Voltaire’s suggestion has the merit of raising the question of consent, and of whose interests might be best served by the operation—the boy’s, Cheselden’s, and/or philosophers’? That question is the starting point for Diderot’s Lettre, though the blind subject in question was female, a young woman by the name of Simoneau ([1749] 1978a: 17; 2011: 171), and the surgeon was a man named Hilmer. The Lettre presents the latter as having been invited by René-Antoine Ferchault de Réaumur (1683–1757) of the Académie Royale des Sciences (Royal Academy of Science) to remove the girl’s cataracts, unveil her eyes to the light in front of an audience, and ask her Molyneux’s Question. Information from other sources suggests that Mademoiselle Simoneau was indeed operated on in mid-April 1749 by a Viennese surgeon by the name of Josef Hillmer, whom the Lettre no doubt refers to as the “Prussian” because Frederick II had appointed him to the post of “Hof-Rath” (Advisor to the Court) (Tunstall 2011: 128; Stenger 2014: 204). Hillmer’s celebrity reputation for miraculous curing of the blind was rapidly undermined during his stay in Paris: in mid-July, for instance, Montesquieu told Madame de Tencin that Hillmer’s operations were “téméraires, lucratives pour lui et … fatales pour les malades” (“reckless, lucrative for him and … fatal for his patients”) (quoted in Stenger 2014: 199). Yet the ethical concerns of the Lettre are centered not so much, in fact, on Hillmer’s charlatanism as they are on the self-promotional strategies of the academician, Réaumur: “les observations d’un homme aussi célèbre ont moins besoin de spectateurs, quand elles se font, que d’auditeurs, quand elles sont faites” (“the observations of such a famous man do not so much need spectators while they are being performed as an audience once the performance is over”) ([1749] 1978a: 17; 2011: 171). Réaumur’s desire for fame took precedence, so the Lettre claims, over the subject’s postoperative physical discomfort, also absent from Molyneux, Locke, and Cheselden, all three of whom present the transformation from blind to sighted, imagined philosophically or performed surgically, to occur instantaneously. By contrast, the Lettre is attentive to the postoperative subject’s needs and desires: On cherche à restituer la vue à des aveugles-nés mais je ne conçois pas, je l’avoue, ce que l’on espère d’un homme à qui l’on vient de faire une opération douloureuse sur un organe très délicat que le plus léger accident dérange, et qui trompe souvent ceux en qui il est sain et qui jouissent depuis longtemps de ses avantages. (Attempts are being made to give sight to those born blind, but I cannot, I confess, understand what it is hoped might be gained from someone who has just undergone a painful operation on a very sensitive organ that is disturbed by the slightest accident and often deceives even those in whom it is healthy and who have enjoyed its benefits for some time.) ([1749] 1978a: 54; 2011: 204) Moreover, whether Mademoiselle Simoneau wanted to see or not, and whether or not Hillmer was a reckless charlatan, the mere fact of going from blind to sighted did not make someone able to answer Molyneux’s Question. That would require some

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philosophical training, “ce n’est pas l’ouvrage d’un moment que de faire un philosophe” (“making a philosopher is not something that can be done overnight”) ([1749] 1978a: 55; 2011: 204). The claim that something more than just sight was necessary for answering Molyneux’s Question posed a significant challenge to the conception of truth put forward in the question itself, in which the accuracy of a subject’s knowledge of the world seems to stand in an inverse relationship to the length of time he or she has experienced it. Such a conception might be said to characterize much Enlightenment philosophy; to quote Foucault: Childhood, the youth of things and of men, were endowed with an ambiguous power: to speak the first words of truth and to test the truth of older men, to rectify it, and strip it back … In every child, things speak tirelessly in their youthful voices, and the world resumes contact with its earliest form. The world is never old to someone who sees it for the first time. When it has untied its aged bonds of kinship, the eye can peel away layers and generations, and of all the senses and all the sources of knowledge, the eye appears effortlessly to retain its longstanding ignorance … The ear has its preferences, the hand, its lines and folds, and the eye, akin to the light in this respect, only has time for the present. It is this bright, longranging, and open naivety of the gaze that allows man to reconnect with childhood and keep witnessing the birth of truth. Hence the two great foundational myths of eighteenth-century philosophy: the experience of the foreign spectator in an unknown country, and that of the man-born-blind restored to the light. (1973: 64–5, translation modified) What the Lettre makes clear is the extent to which Molyneux assumed that sight alone would be sufficient to answer the question, and that nothing the man had learned while blind, apart from what cubes and spheres felt like, could be of any help—or of any hindrance—in answering the question. There is a sense in which blind experience was considered to be nonexperience, that the blind mind was almost a blank. But what if, while blind, the man had been trained as a mathematician? What if blind experience was, in fact, formative, if there was nothing naive or childlike about “the man born blind and restored to the light,” and if the educational level of the subject to whom Molyneux’s Question was posed had an influence on his/her answer? The Lettre argues that a person trained in geometry would surely have a better chance at naming the cube and the sphere ([1749] 1978a: 67; 2011: 216), and a person with a good grounding in philosophy would know to be skeptical of visual experience ([1749] 1978a: 68; 2011: 215), whereas a person who had received no education at all would simply fail to understand the question ([1749] 1978a: 67; 2011: 215), and their answer could be of no philosophical value. Of course, in so arguing, the Lettre does not so much solve Molyneux’s Question as dissolve it. More importantly, it suggests that the blind could be educated, which, some thirty-five years later after its publication, more blind men and women would be, following the establishment of the first school for the blind, the Institution des jeunes aveugles (Institution for Blind Youth), by Valentin Haüy (1745–1822) in Paris in 1784. It would receive royal endowment two years later, was nationalized by the Constituent Assembly in 1791 (Weygand 2003: 103–51), and still exists today as the Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles on the boulevard des Invalides. It owed much to Diderot’s Lettre (Weygand 2003: 111).

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4.2. BLIND LIVES MATTER Instead, then, of wishing to make a blind man see, the Lettre makes its sighted reader hear some blind people speak, hear them describe their embodied experiences as blind people in a predominantly sighted world. One of those who is “made to hear” is, of course, the character of the letter-writer himself. Writing to a sighted reader known only as “Madame,” he first recounts his visit to the home of a man born blind and the conversations they had together, and second reports on the life and career of a blind Cambridge mathematician and, in particular, on his deathbed conversation with his sighted vicar, which the letterwriter claims to have translated from the English. That latter conversation has been the privileged subject of commentary in Diderot scholarship, not least because of the atheist worldview it contains. If I make space more here for the account of the visit to the man born blind, it is because, from a disability studies perspective, the Lettre is important not only because it requires the reader to listen to the blind, but also because it requires the reader to listen to the sighted letter-writer as he listens to—and sometimes does not hear—what the blind man said. The same is true for the later Additions, in which we read an account of the conversations that the sighted author had with a blind woman, in which it seems she may have said more than Diderot heard.

4.2.1 The man-born-blind of Puiseaux The letter-writer distances himself from Molyneux, Hillmer, and Réaumur by declaring: “Le jour même que le Prussien faisait l’opération de la cataracte à la fille de Simoneau, nous allâmes interroger l’aveugle-né du Puiseaux” (“The very day that the Prussian was performing the cataract operation on Simoneau’s daughter, we went to question the manborn-blind of Puiseaux”) ([1749] 1978a: 18; 2011: 171–2). And he goes on to provide a wealth of details about the man’s life: c’est un homme qui ne manque pas de bon sens; que beaucoup de personnes connaissent; qui sait un peu de chimie, et qui a suivi, avec quelques succès, les cours de botanique au Jardin du Roi. Il est né d’un père qui a professé avec applaudissement la philosophie dans l’université de Paris. Il jouissait d’une fortune honnête, avec laquelle il eût aisément satisfait les sens qui lui restent; mais le goût du plaisir l’entraîna dans sa jeunesse: on abusa de ses penchants; ses affaires domestiques se dérangèrent, et il s’est retiré dans une petite ville de province, d’où il fait tous les ans un voyage à Paris. Il y apporte des liqueurs qu’il distille, et dont on est très content. Voilà, Madame, des circonstances assez peu philosophiques, mais par cette raison même, plus propres à vous faire juger, que le personnage dont je vous entretiens n’est point imaginaire. (He is a man not lacking in good sense, with whom many people are acquainted, who knows a bit of chemistry, and who followed the botany lessons quite successfully in the King’s Garden. His father taught philosophy to much acclaim in the University of Paris. His wealth was decent and would easily have been enough to satisfy his remaining senses, had his love of pleasure not led him astray in his youth. People took advantage of his inclinations, and he retired to a little town in the provinces whence he comes to Paris once a year, bringing with him liqueurs of his own distillation, which are much appreciated. There you have, Madame, some not very philosophical details, but which are, for that very reason, all the more suitable for persuading you that the character of whom I speak is not imaginary.) ([1749] 1978a: 18; 2011: 171–2) Modern readers have tended to read that last sentence addressed to Madame as an ironic declaration that “imaginary” is exactly what the man-born-blind of Puiseaux was. He

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was not (Tunstall 2006). It seems likely that Diderot met him in the late 1740s while researching the artisanal crafts for the Encyclopédie (1751–72), for there is a reference to the blind man of the Lettre sur les aveugles in an article in the second volume (1752), which reports the advice he gave about the most efficient use of water in textile manufacturing— advice that drew, presumably, on his knowledge of chemistry and practical experience of distillation. Of course, this does not guarantee the truthfulness of the account of the letter-writer’s visit to Puiseaux, but it does suggest that if the reader was tempted to think that the blind man must be imaginary because sight is necessary for learning chemistry and botany, and because a blind man could not possibly have had a wayward youth, then s/he should think again. And, clearly, this is no patient awaiting a cure—the writer reports that, when asked whether he would wish to see, the blind man replied: J’aimerais bien autant avoir de longs bras: il me semble que mes mains m’instruiraient mieux de ce qui se passe dans la lune que vos yeux ou vos télescopes; et puis les yeux cessent plus tôt de voir que les mains de toucher. Il vaudrait donc bien autant qu’on perfectionnât en moi l’organe que j’ai, que de m’accorder celui qui me manque. (I’d just as well have long arms for it seems to me that my hands could teach me more about what’s happening on the moon than your eyes or telescopes can, and besides, eyes stop seeing a long time before hands stop touching. It would be just as good to improve the organ I already have, as to grant me the one I lack.) ([1749] 1978a: 23; 2011: 176). Now, some of the writer’s responses to the blind man call out for our critical attention. When the writer imagines him having wandering hands—“il n’y aurait pas à craindre qu’il prît sa femme pour une autre, à moins qu’il ne gagnât au change” (“there would be no reason to fear he might mistake his wife for another woman, unless he stood to gain by it”) ([1749] 1978a: 24; 2011: 177)—we might wonder whether he is not simply mobilizing the comedic stereotype of the blind man as a groper with the aim of flirting with Madame, and whether Diderot is not also enjoying his own joke. Yet the blind man also talks back to the letter-writer. Here he does so with a fantastically sarcastic one-liner: “‘Je m’aperçois bien, messieurs,’ nous dit-il, ‘que vous n’êtes pas aveugles: vous êtes surpris de ce que je fais; et pourquoi ne vous étonnez-vous pas aussi de ce que je parle?’” (“It is clear to me, Gentlemen, that you are not blind, for you are amazed at what I can do; but why aren’t you also surprised I can speak?”) ([1749] 1978a: 25; 2011: 178).3 The writer does not say how he responded to the put-down at the time, but he is condescending about it to Madame: “Il y a, je crois, plus de philosophie dans cette réponse qu’il ne prétendait y en mettre lui-même” (“There is, I believe, more philosophy in that reply than he intended”) ([1749] 1978a:25; 2011: 178). And yet the theory of language that he goes on develop, which holds that it is indeed very surprising the blind can speak, given that so many words have referents that are, to them, empirically unknowable ([1749] 1978a: 26; 2011: 178), is in turn undermined by what he reports of the blind man’s mastery of social codes, notably his knowledge of exactly when to use the visual adjective “beau” (“beautiful”) ([1749] 1978a: 19; 2011: 172). His theory is further called into question by the sheer loquaciousness of the second blind man of the Lettre, Saounderson.

4.2.2 Saounderson He is based to some degree on Nicholas Saunderson, who held the Lucasian Chair of Mathematics at the University of Cambridge between 1711 and 1739, a post that had previously been held (1669–1702) by Sir Isaac Newton (1643–1727), and has recently been

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held (1979–2009) by the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking (1942–). His Elements of Algebra, published posthumously in 1740, contain “An Account of the Author’s Life and Character, collected from his Oldest and Most Intimate Acquaintances” (Saunderson 1740: i–xx), and an explanation of his invention of a haptic method for doing complex arithmetical calculations, entitled “Dr Saunderson’s Palpable Arithmetic Decypher’d” (1740: xx–xxvi). Diderot draws on both in some detail ([1749] 1978a: 34–41; 2011: 185–93), reporting, for instance, that Saounderson gave lectures on optics (Saunderson 1740: xxiv; Diderot [1749] 1978a: 42; 2011: 94), the apparently paradoxical nature of which it swiftly exposes by explaining that optics is a mathematical science, requiring powerful analytical skills and no direct experience of light.4 In the Lettre, Saounderson, arguing on his deathbed with Holmes, his Anglican vicar, about the existence of God, makes a case for atheism, which exploits the pun mentioned earlier, as Saounderson says “je n’ai point d’yeux” (“I have no eyes”) ([1749] 1978a: 51; 2011: 201). There is no historical evidence to suggest that Saunderson was an atheist (Diderot 2000: 219; Tunstall 2011: 109–11), and it would seem that the Lettre made use of the blind man to make a philosophical argument. It is one that scholars have examined in great detail, and it need not detain us for long here, though it is worth briefly noting Saounderson’s mobilization of many of the possible and contradictory connotations of blindness that were available in the early modern period (Curran 2000). He speaks of himself as “monstrueu[x]” (“monstrous”) ([1749] 1978a: 51; 2011: 201) as a sign, if only the sighted Anglican could see it, that if his God exists, he cannot both intend the proof of his existence to consist in visual phenomena, such as the beauty of nature, and be loving, benevolent, and just: “Voyez-moi bien, monsieur Holmes, je n’ai point d’yeux. Qu’avions-nous fait à Dieu, vous et moi, un pour avoir cet organe, l’autre pour en être privé?” (“Look me in the face, Mr. Holmes; I have no eyes. What have we done to God, you and I, such that one of us has that organ and the other is deprived of it?”) ([1749] 1978a: 51; 2011: 201). When Holmes says nothing, thereby giving an eloquent answer to Saounderson’s question, he unwittingly confirms the blind man’s view of himself as a demonstration to the sighted that there simply is no divine cosmic order, in relation to which a blind man could be understood to represent any meaningful deviation. Saounderson says he is, instead, a wholly random product of nature, which in the beginning produced beings with bodies that were configured in all kinds of ways that we might today call “disabled”: Imaginez donc, si vous voulez, que l’ordre qui vous frappe a toujours subsisté; mais laissez-moi croire qu’il n’en est rien; et que si nous remontions à la naissance des choses et des temps, et que nous sentissions la matière se mouvoir et le chaos se débrouiller, nous rencontrerions une multitude d’êtres informes pour quelque êtres bien organisés. Si je n’ai rien à vous objecter sur la condition présente des choses, je puis du moins vous interroger sur leur condition passée. Je puis vous demander, par exemple, qui vous a dit à vous, à Leibniz, à Clarke et à Newton, que dans les premiers instants de la formation des animaux, les uns n’étaient pas sans tête et les autres sans pieds? Je puis vous soutenir que ceux-ci n’avaient point d’estomac, et ceux-là point d’intestins; que tels à qui un estomac, un palais et des dents semblaient promettre de la durée, ont cessé par quelque vice du cœur ou des poumons; que les monstres se sont anéantis successivement; que toutes les combinaisons vicieuses de la matière ont disparu, et qu’il n’est resté que celles où le mécanisme n’impliquait aucune contradiction importante, et qui pouvaient subsister par elles-mêmes et se perpétuer. … Je conjecture donc que, dans

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le commencement où la matière en fermentation faisait éclore l’univers, mes semblables étaient fort communs. (You go on imagining, if you will, that the order that strikes you has always been in existence, but allow me to believe that nothing could be further from the truth, and that if we went back to the beginning of the universe and time, and we felt matter start to move and chaos dissipate, for every couple of organized beings, we would encounter a multitude of disorganized ones. If I have no objection to your view of the present state of things, I can nonetheless question their former state. I can ask, for example, who told you all—you, Leibniz, Clarke, and Newton—that when animals first came into being, there weren’t some with no heads and others with no feet? I can claim that some had stomachs missing and others lacked intestines, that the ones with stomachs, teeth, and palates, who looked as though they might survive, ceased to exist owing to some heart or lung defect, that monsters were wiped out one after another, that all defective combinations of matter disappeared and that the only ones to remain have mechanisms with no serious disorders, and can survive on their own and reproduce. … It is therefore my conjecture that in the beginning when the universe was hatched from fermenting matter, my fellow men were very common.) ([1749] 1978a: 50–1; 2011: 200–10) Whatever else we may conclude from such a vision—and some have argued for some kind of evolutionary thinking (Ballstadt 2009: 168)—it is clear that it rules out any theological justification for societal discrimination against the blind or, indeed, against any person on the grounds of the way in which his or her body happens to be organized.

4.2.3 Mélanie de Salignac Diderot’s Lettre had, it seems, at least one blind reader, a friend of his by the name of Mélanie de Salignac (1741–63). In the Additions, written some thirty years after the Lettre was published, and some twenty years after Salignac’s death, Diderot gave an account of her life and their conversations. She was, he said, independent-minded and quick-witted, describing the men her aunt had invited to dinner as nineteen “ostrogoths” (1978b: 98) and declaring incomprehensible the social pressure on women to please men they did not like: “Pour moi, je ne veux plaire à ceux que j’aime” (“I wish only to please those I love”) (1978b: 98). She claimed that one of the great advantages of blindness for women was that they would only fall for a man with a good heart and mind: “Jamais … un bel homme ne me fera tourner la tête” (“Never will a handsome man turn my head”) (1978b: 102), and she enjoyed mimicking the gestures of sighted women: Elle faisait quelquefois la plaisanterie de se placer devant un miroir pour se parer, et d’imiter toutes les mines d’une coquette qui se met sous les armes. Cette petite singerie était d’une vérité à faire éclater de rire. (She would sometimes joke at standing in front of a mirror to put her jewelry on and imitate all the expressions of a coquette, preparing for battle. This little act was hilariously accurate.) (1978b: 101) Moreover, it seems she liked to play with the fact of not knowing whether she was being looked at by a man or, rather, with the fact of him not knowing whether she knew he was looking at her: [Ma mère] m’a répété tant de fois que la vue de certaines parties du corps invitait au vice, et j’avouerais, si j’osais, qu’il y a peu de temps que je l’ai comprise, et que peut-être il a fallu que je cessasse d’être innocente. ([My mother] was always telling me that the

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sight of certain body parts was an invitation to vice, and I should confess, if I dared, that I have only recently understood what she meant, and that the time has come, perhaps, for me to stop being innocent.) ([1782] 1978b: 101) If the blind man of Puiseaux was a groper, Salignac was quite the flirt, and Diderot teases his reader into imagining whether she was displaying herself, and if so, whether she did so knowingly. Like Saounderson, Salignac was well educated; she had a good knowledge of astronomy, algebra, geometry, history, geography, and music. Her equivalents of his palpable calculator were her palpable maps, which Diderot says he saw firsthand: Les parallèles et les méridiens sont des fils de laiton; les limites des royaumes et des provinces sont distinguées par de la broderie en fil, en soie et en laine plus ou moins forte; les fleuves, les rivières et les montagnes, par des têtes d’épingles plus ou moins grosses; et les villes plus ou moins considérables, par des gouttes de cire inégales. (The latitudes and longitudes are lengths of brass wire; the boundaries between kingdoms and provinces are marked by stitching in different thicknesses of cotton, silk and wool; the rivers, large and small, and the mountains, by differing sizes of pin; and the towns and their relative importance, by smaller or larger drops of wax.) ([1782] 1978b: 104) She could read, not only the books that were made especially for her by the well-known Parisian printer, Prault, who would print one side of the page only ([1782] 1978b: 104), but also music: “On lui avait appris la musique par des caractères en relief qu’on plaçait sur des lignes éminentes à la surface d’une grande table” (“She had been taught to read music using raised characters placed on the surface of a large table along palpable lines”) ([1782] 1978b: 103). And she could write “avec une épingle dont elle piquait sa feuille de papier tendue sur un cadre traversé de deux lames parallèles et mobiles, qui ne laissaient entre elles d’espace vide que l’intervalle d’une ligne à une autre” (“using a pin, with which she would make pricks in a sheet of paper inside the space created by two parallel rules, which could be moved down the sheet, making lines”) ([1782] 1978b: 104). These are practices that we might think of as the prehistory of the notation invented by Louis Braille (1809–52) in the late 1820s and that is, alongside other more recent technologies, still commonly in use. Reading was not always in the eighteenth century the solitary practice we often think of it as today, however; instead, to read could also be to be read to, out loud, and in company (Williams 2017). In the absence of any evidence that Prault produced a special edition of Diderot’s Lettre sur les aveugles for Salignac, we must assume it was read to her. And she seems to have been a critical listener, for Diderot reports that she challenged him on what the Lettre said about blind people’s incapacity for fellow-feeling, namely: Comme de toutes les démonstrations extérieures qui réveillent en nous la commisération et les idées de la douleur, les aveugles ne sont affectés que par la plainte, je les soupçonne, en général, d’inhumanité. (Of all the different outward demonstrations that arouse commiseration in us and the ideas of pain, the blind are only affected by the sound of suffering, and so I generally suspect them of inhumanity.) ([1749] 1978a: 27; 2011: 179, translation modified) Salignac, understandably perhaps, never forgave him: “Elle ne me pardonnait pas d’avoir écrit que les aveugles, privés des symptômes de la souffrance, devaient être cruels” (“She would not forgive me for having written that because the blind are deprived of access

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to the symptoms of suffering, they must be cruel”) ([1782] 1978b: 99–100). Yet the claim in the Lettre, which is not so much, in fact, that the blind are cruel as that they are unfeeling, is followed by an example in the form of an apparently rhetorical question, which is, I think, so outlandish as to compromise the plausibility of the claim it illustrates: “Quelle différence y a-t-il pour un aveugle, entre un homme qui urine et un homme qui, sans se plaindre, verse son sang?” (“What’s the difference, to a blind man, between a man who is urinating and one who is silently bleeding out?”) ([1749] 1978a: 27; 2011: 179, translation modified). It is a peculiar moment in the text, a moment when the writer seems not to hear himself, and in that sense, it is not unlike the moment when he reported the blind man teasing him for his gawping. One way of engaging with it might be to note the extent to which it presents a reversal of expectation: it does not stage sighted fellowfeeling for the blind but stages, rather, blind fellow-(un)feeling for the suffering of others. The blind are no longer in their usual position as the objects of compassion on the part of the sighted, who view blindness as suffering. It is as though the encounter with the blind man has left the letter-writer at a loss as to how to structure the relationship, and what he has come up with is a version of “if they don’t want compassion, they didn’t deserve it anyway.” As such, it is part of a broader—and overall rather more successful— reconfiguration in the Lettre and the Additions of the fellowship of feeling between the sighted and the blind, and of that between people more generally.

4.3. BLINDNESS AND KINDNESS In a less outlandish moment, the letter-writer tells Madame the following about the blind man of Puiseaux: À minuit, rien ne le gêne; et il n’est incommode à personne. Son premier soin est de mettre en place tout ce qu’on a déplacé pendant le jour; et quand sa femme s’éveille, elle trouve ordinairement la maison rangée. La difficulté qu’ont les aveugles à recouvrer les choses égarées les rend amis de l’ordre; je me suis aperçu que ceux qui les approchaient familièrement partageaient cette qualité, soit par un effet du bon exemple qu’ils donnent, soit par un sentiment d’humanité qu’on a pour eux. Que les aveugles seraient malheureux sans les petites attentions de ceux qui les environnent! Nous-mêmes, que nous serions à plaindre sans elles! Les grands services sont comme de grosses pièces d’or ou d’argent qu’on a rarement occasion d’employer; mais les petites attentions sont une monnaie courante qu’on a toujours à la main. (At midnight, there is nothing to disturb him and he disturbs no one. The first task he undertakes is to put back in its place everything that has been moved during the day, and his wife usually wakes up to a tidy house. The difficulty the blind have in finding things that have been mislaid makes them fond of order, and I have noticed that people who are well acquainted with them share this quality, either owing to their good example or out of the fellow-feeling we have for them. How unhappy the blind would be without the small acts of kindness of those around them! And how unhappy we would be too! Grand gestures are like large gold and silver coins that we rarely have any occasion to spend, but small gestures are the ready currency we always have to hand.) (1978a: 18–19; 2011: 172, translation modified) There may be, as Saounderson argued, no divine order in the universe, but there is a human one in the domestic space that is shared by the blind and the sighted: the blind man of Puiseaux tidies his house, and the sighted, seeing the blind tidy, do so too. Contact with the blind produces, we might say, an economy of kindness.5

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Now, Salignac told Diderot about the effect she had on the sighted around her. In response to him asking her why she had no desire to see, she is said to have said that whereas a sighted person has his or her own eyes, she has everyone else’s: C’est … que je n’aurais que mes yeux, au lieu que je jouis des yeux de tous; c’est que, par cette privation, je deviens un objet continuel d’intérêt et de commisération; à tout moment on m’oblige, et à tout moment je suis reconnaissante; hélas! si je voyais, bientôt on ne s’occuperait plus de moi. (It’s because then I would only have my eyes whereas now I have everyone’s; because my deprivation means I am the object of everyone’s concern and commiseration; people are constantly obliging to me, and I am constantly grateful; if I could see, then—alas!—people wouldn’t care about me any longer.) ([1782] 1978b: 99) So, in contrast to the blind man of Puiseaux who, judging by his sarcastic quip, might have felt patronized had he been the object of sighted “concern and commiseration,” Salignac enjoyed being the center of emotional attention, being looked out for, as well as being looked at. And while all eyes were on her, she was all ears: Et vous croyez, me disait-elle, que vous entendez la plainte comme moi? Il y a des malheureux qui savent souffrir sans se plaindre.—Je crois, ajoutait-elle, que je les aurais bientôt devinés, et que je ne les plaindrais que davantage. (And you think, she said me, you can hear suffering like I can? There are some poor souls who have learnt to suffer in silence.—I believe, she added, that I would find them out in no time and that I would only feel for them all the more.) ([1782] 1978b: 99–100) Diderot might claim the blind were unfeeling but, according to Salignac as reported by Diderot, he was wrong: not only was her sensitivity, so she claimed, much superior to that of the sighted, but if he thought the blind were unfeeling, it was because blind fellowfeeling, like silent suffering, was much too subtle to be perceived by the sighted. The gestures that made up Salignac’s economy of compassion could barely be seen or heard. To conclude, we might ask whether, in the lines just quoted, Salignac was not testing the sighted Diderot’s hearing or, rather, listening skills, and his readers’ in reporting them. Did he miss the suggestion—audible, I think, in all those instances of the first person—that she was herself silently and invisibly suffering, and that although—or perhaps because—the sighted were all eyes on her, they were missing something? That she was indeed suffering is confirmed several pages later when Diderot reports that Salignac died of cancer affecting what he calls her “parties naturelles intérieures” (“internal natural parts”), the womb, perhaps, which he says the rules governing female modesty prevented her from mentioning (1978b: 101). And yet Salignac had, in fact, mentioned her suffering, albeit barely audibly, to Diderot who, though he quoted her in the Additions, may not have heard her. In the final instance, then, the Additions enables the reader to reflect on the invisibility and the inaudibility of women’s suffering, while also establishing, as the Lettre had already done, the dignity of blind lives.

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CHAPTER FIVE

Deafness Language and Personhood in the Enlightenment KRISTIN LINDGREN

The Deaf-Mute is always a savage, always close to ferocity, and always on the point of becoming a monster … [but] the deaf will be restored to civilization, just as the men of color are about to be restored to their rights. Perier, deputy to the abbé Sicard Deafness held a central place in the eighteenth-century European imagination. During the age of Enlightenment, deaf people were objects of philosophical speculation, cultural fascination, and educational experimentation. In an era consumed by questions about what makes humans human, they were often viewed as marking the boundary between human and beast. Presumed to lack language and rationality, deaf people were described even by their advocates as savages and brutes, and debates about their status intersected with discourses of race and species. The racialized category of “savage” generally described non-white Africans, and early educators of deaf people sometimes described their mission in the rhetoric of liberation from savagery and enslavement, language that drew on and intersected with abolitionist rhetorics of the time (Mirzoeff 1995). During this period, Linnaean taxonomy exemplified the cultural desire to categorize and rank humans, animals, and other elements of the natural world. As Felicity Nussbaum notes, “the emerging standards of what it means to be human in the eighteenth century are increasingly articulated, clarified, and located within a system of classification which needed to be flexible enough to incorporate the world’s variety” (2003: 2). This variety included so-called deaf-mutes, human in form yet lacking the facility of speech.1 How, then, to classify and conceptualize them? Fascination with deafness, and especially with non-speaking deaf people, overlapped with the study of wild children, designated as Homo ferus, a subspecies of Homo sapiens. Dr. Jean-Marc Itard, famous for his efforts to train the child he named Victor, the Wild Boy of Aveyron, also pursued medical experiments on deaf children. In an entry on deafness he wrote for a medical encyclopedia, he described deaf people as “civilized men on the outside, barbaric and ignorant as a savage on the inside,” and he claimed, “indeed, the savage is superior if he has a spoken language, however limited” (quoted in Lane 1984b: 135). Without speech, deaf people were seen as barely human. Along with feral children, however, deaf people were described on the one hand as savages and on the other as examples of Rousseau’s natural man, a tabula rasa on which civilization could be written (Davis 1995). Inhabiting a liminal space in the cultural and taxonomical

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imagination—between human and animal, savage and civilized—the figure of the deafmute was frequently mobilized to demarcate the boundary between these categories. In part because speech was deemed crucial to being human, early efforts to educate deaf individuals were grounded in oralism, an approach that focuses on training students to speak. In the late eighteenth century, manualism—the education of deaf students through the use of sign language—became more widely known and practiced, but oralism persisted, and debates about oral versus manual education continue today. In the eighteenth century, sign languages were not understood to be bona fide languages; indeed, it was not until the 1960s that linguists established that sign languages are complex natural languages.2 Enlightenment thinkers conceived of signs as primitive gestures and sign languages as lacking the grammatical and syntactical complexity of spoken and written languages. Theorizing the relationship between gesture, language, and reason, Rousseau, Condillac, Diderot, Locke, and other Enlightenment philosophers often drew on the example of nonspeaking deaf people as both thought experiment and empirical evidence. Diderot, for example, in his Letter on the Deaf and Dumb, considers what we might learn about the evolution of language by imagining a “theoretical mute,” a hearing and speaking person who, for the sake of experiment, attempts to communicate through gestures alone ([1751] 1916: 163). He goes on to suggest that it might be even more instructive to observe “one born deaf and dumb,” and he claims, “I know of one who would be useful for experimental purposes, because he is intelligent and has expressive gestures” (166–9). Although Diderot attributes intelligence to this congenitally deaf man, whose gestures he uses to test his theories of language and aesthetics, he has a limited understanding of the capacities of deaf people. Allowing that his experimental subject expresses his meaning effectively through gesture and facial expression, he nonetheless echoes the prevailing idea of deaf people as liminal creatures, suggesting that “a man born deaf and dumb … is closely analogous to those beings people have imagined who with no trace of education, very few perceptions, and almost no memory, might easily pass for two-footed or four-footed animals” (167). Even as he argues for the sublimity and power of gestural communication, Diderot conceives of gesture as an early stage in the development of language. Like Condillac and others, he claims that deaf people lack memory and the ability to understand abstractions: “In talking to a deaf-mute it is found to be almost impossible to describe to him indefinite portions of quantity, number, space, or time, or to make him grasp any abstract idea” (177). These ideas about limited understanding and memory pervade eighteenth-century writing about deaf people. Condillac, however, in a glimpse of shifting perceptions to come, changed his mind about the possibilities of deaf people and of sign language after seeing a public presentation by educated deaf people (Lane 1984b: 59). Philosophical speculation coincided with a tremendous popular interest in deaf people. The rise of print culture changed the cultural landscape and began to reshape how deafness was perceived. Numerous books about deafness and deaf education were published (Davis 1995). Writing became an important means of communication between deaf and hearing people. The question at the heart of both scholarly and public engagement with deafness was whether deaf people could be taught to speak, to read, and to write, and if so, whether they could then be characterized as fully human, possessing both language and reason. Citing evidence that literacy in the English-speaking world grew dramatically between 1600 and 1800, Lennard J. Davis argues that the fascination with deafness was linked to the consolidation of a culture of reading (1995: 61). The growing practice of silent reading and the decline of oral culture contributed to the emergent understanding of deaf people as a social and cultural category:

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[D]eafness became visible in the Enlightenment. … Before the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, the deaf were not constructed as a group. There is almost no historical or literary record of the deaf as such. We may rarely read of a deaf person but there is no significant discourse constructed around deafness. The reason for this discursive nonexistence is that, then as now, most deaf people were born to hearing families, and therefore were isolated in their deafness. Without a sense of group solidarity and without a social category of disability, they were mainly seen as isolated deviations from a norm … For these deaf, there were no schools, no teachers, no discourse, in effect, no deafness. (Davis 1995: 51–2) Print culture thus contributed to imagining deaf people as a social group rather than as anomalous and isolated individuals unable to communicate with one another or the wider world. The print revolution also gave rise to the “silent press,” newspapers published by deaf people for deaf readers that were an important means of sharing information and culture, and of the employment for deaf people as compositors and proofreaders, an association with the printing industry that extended into the twentieth century (Mirzoeff 1995: 33). Deaf people were not the only group whose status as literate and reasoning human beings was subject to debate. Like deaf people, black people in eighteenth-century Europe had to establish their humanity by demonstrating their ability to read, and especially to write, in the dominant language of the culture. Henry Louis Gates Jr. details the critical importance of writing as “the very commodity that separated animal from human being, slave from citizen, object from subject” (1987: 25). Explaining why writing was central to debates about slavery in the eighteenth century, Gates notes: Writing, especially after the printing press became so widespread, was taken to be the visible sign of reason. Blacks were “reasonable,” and hence “men,” if—and only if— they demonstrated mastery of “arts and sciences,” the eighteenth century’s formula for writing. So, while the Enlightenment is characterized by its foundation on man’s ability to reason, it simultaneously used the absence and presence of reason to delimit and circumscribe the very humanity of the cultures and people of color which Europeans had been “discovering” since the Renaissance. (1986: 8) Deaf people, like black people, were deemed “reasonable” on the basis of their mastery of the arts and sciences as demonstrated in writing. Gates argues that it was in large part the absence of writing and of a written literary tradition in European languages that relegated black people to the bottom of the human scale on the great chain of being, and writing that enabled them, individually and collectively, to take up a higher place on the ladder. Deaf people, however, were even lower on the scale. The abbé Sicard, an educator who succeeded the founding director of the first school for deaf children, wrote: “We all know the kinds of sentences in use among Negro tribes, but those used by the deaf and dumb are even closer to nature, even more primitive” (quoted in Lane 1992: 111). Because Sicard taught deaf students using a modified version of French sign language, he must have understood that deaf people did have a language, even if he deemed it primitive. However, their use of sign language was seen as aligning deaf people with nature rather than culture. To demonstrate their status as human, they would have to learn to write.3 In an effort to trace the outlines of the long eighteenth century’s engagement with deaf people signing, speaking, and writing, this chapter focuses on three iconic figures: Duncan Campbell, a deaf-mute fortune-teller who was the subject of numerous literary

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accounts published in the 1720s; the abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée, founder of the first public school for deaf students, established in Paris in 1760; and Pierre Desloges, a deaf man who authored a defense of sign language published in 1779. These three figures—the first a popular and literary sensation, the others groundbreaking figures in deaf history— illuminate the contours of a century that saw a changing understanding of deaf people and fierce debates about deaf education. Centered in France, these debates extended throughout Europe and the British Isles, and in the early nineteenth century were taken up in the USA.

5.1. DUNCAN CAMPBELL: THE FAMOUS DEAF AND DUMB GENTLEMAN Between 1710 and 1730, the fortune-teller Duncan Campbell, a Scotsman who was allegedly deaf and mute, was wildly popular, “the equivalent of a London tourist site” (Nussbaum 2003: 40). Campbell claimed to possess clairvoyance or second sight, an ability more commonly associated with blindness than deafness. Indeed, The Spectator compares Campbell’s renown to that of Tiresias: “the blind Tiresias was not more famous in Greece than this dumb Artist has been for some Years last past in the cities of London and Westminster” (June 28, 1714, quoted in Nussbaum 2003: 39). Campbell successfully exploited both the cultural fascination with deafness and the desire to foresee the future, drawing a varied and robust clientele with his oracular pronouncements. His fame crossed class boundaries, reportedly spreading to the far corners of London: The Squares rung with it; it was whisper’d from one House to another, thro’ the more magnificent Streets, where Persons of Quality and Distinction reside; it catch’d every House in the City, like the News of Stock from Exchange-Alley, it run noisily thro’ the Lanes and little Thoroughfares where the Poor inhabit: it was the Chat of the Tea-Table, and the Babble of the Streets; and the whole Town, from the Top to the Bottom, was full of it. (Bond 1720: 157) Although this account suggests that his fame spread via speech—whisper, chat, and babble—Campbell communicated his prophecies through writing. He was said to write his clients’ names upon first meeting them and then to produce in writing a detailed account of past and future events in their lives. The spectacle of a deaf man writing drew as much attention as Campbell’s supposed ability to prophesy future events, and his celebrity drew attention to the capacity of a non-speaking deaf man—at least this purportedly extraordinary man—to communicate easily and fully through writing. The many accounts of Campbell’s life include The History of the Life and Adventures of Duncan Campbell, long attributed to Daniel Defoe, but now believed to have been penned by William Bond (Figures 5.1 and 5.2).4 The novelist and playwright Eliza Haywood published two pamphlets about Campbell: A Spy upon the Conjurer (1724) and The Dumb Projector: Being a Surprizing Account of a Trip to Holland Made by Duncan Campbell (1725). The Secret Memoirs of the Late Duncan Campbell, the Famous Deaf and Dumb Gentleman (1732), appeared posthumously. The narrator of The History, claiming to have known Campbell and his family since the young Campbell was three years old, offers a first-hand account of his life. Orphaned at twelve, he was forced to make his own way in the world, and he chose to make his living as a fortune-teller. The narrator describes him as both unusually attractive and unusually unfortunate: “the most beautiful Boy of his Age I ever knew … a Child of good Birth, and with the Misfortunes of being Deaf and Dumb,

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FIGURE 5.1  Title page of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell. London: E. Curll, 1720.

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FIGURE 5.2  Portrait of Duncan Campbell, Frontispiece of The History of the Life and Adventures of Mr. Duncan Campbell. London: E. Curll, 1720.

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left Fatherless and Motherless in the Wide World, at Twelve Years Old” (Bond 1720: 125). Having lost first his mother, then his father, and finally his stepmother, he was indeed alone in the world. From an early age, however, the narrator recounts, his appealing qualities set him apart not only from other deaf children, but also from other hearing children. After he was orphaned, many “Ladies of Quality, who had known his Perfections,” endeavored to take him in as a playmate for their children, “for though he could not speak, he had such a Vivacity in all his Actions, such a Sprightliness of Behaviour, and such a Merriment Accompanying all his Gestures, that he afforded more Entertainment, than the prettiest and wittiest little Prattlers at these Years are wont to do” (Bond 1720: 126). The narrator’s account of Campbell’s young adulthood confirms this early estimation of his good looks and his ability to entertain more effectively than the wittiest “Prattlers.” In one passage, he describes Campbell surrounded by doting women and offers a detailed physical description of him as possessing “the most winning comeliness of Aspect, that ever pleased the Sight of any Beholder of either Sex” (Bond 1720: 128). Throughout this account, Campbell is presented as an attractive, sexual, social, and intelligent deaf man, a rare exception to the dominant eighteenth-century narratives of deafness. According to The History, a “Learned Divine” from the University of Glasgow told the boy’s stepmother about the Oxford mathematician John Wallis, who claimed to have trained a non-speaking deaf child to read and write and to “utter some Sounds articulately with his Mouth” (Bond 1720: 33). Wallis, a brother-in-law of Daniel Defoe, was well known for his experiments in deaf education, and he had written a book explaining his methods. The Glasgow scholar acquired a copy of Wallis’ book and undertook the education of the young Campbell, who reportedly learned in this way to read and write, though not to speak: In about Half a Year, the Doctor taught his little Dumb Pupil, First, to know his Letters; then to name any Thing whatsoever; to leave off some Savage Motions, which he had taken of his own accord, before to signify his Mind by, and to impart his Thoughts by his Fingers and his Pen, in a Manner as intelligible, and almost as swift thro’ the Eyes, as that is of conveying our Ideas to one another by our Voices, thro’ the Conduits and Port-Holes of the Ears. But in little more than Two Years, he could read and write as well as any body. (Bond 1720: 35–6) Apart from the reference to Campbell’s “Savage Motions,” the narrator does not depict Campbell as animalistic, a notable departure from prevailing representations of deaf people. These “Savage Motions” were likely home signs, a system of gestural communication often developed by a deaf child isolated from other deaf people; they do not constitute a true sign language. Although he claims that Campbell “teaches other Deaf and Dumb to Write and Read, and Converse as well with any Body” (7), the narrator never describes him in the company of other deaf people. Campbell is frequently portrayed as employing “Finger-Talk” with his hearing wife and others, but it is unclear whether he was using sign language or simply finger-spelling. His apparent lack of connection to a deaf community suggests that his signs may not have constituted a shared, vernacular sign language.5 The narrator gives several detailed accounts of Campbell’s prognostications, each followed by alleged confirmation of their accuracy. These anecdotes are notable for their emphasis on the legibility of the facial expressions of both Campbell and his clients. For example, while meeting with a beautiful young woman, the narrator recounts, “he gazed afresh at her very eagerly for some time, and his Countenance during that time of viewing her seem’d to be ruffled by abundance of Disturbance and Perplexity,” leading

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spectators to believe that Campbell has fallen prey to her beauty and charm. Instead, he has foreseen that smallpox will disfigure her comely face, and “he begged to be excused, as his Pen might remain as Dumb and Silent as his Tongue, on that Affair” (131). In another case, the narrator describes Campbell, while meeting with a businessman, “looking earnestly in the Gentleman’s Face, and reading there, I suppose, in that little Space of Time in general (according to the power of Second Sight) that what concern’d him was highly momentous” (147). In other instances, his clients are able to read in Campbell’s demeanor and expression whether his vision of their future bodes well or ill. The power of prophecy is described as relying primarily on visual information, an explanation befitting the insights of a visually oriented deaf man. Indeed, second sight is explained by the narrator as a supernatural vision arising from close inspection of a person or object (175). In Campbell’s Secret Memoirs, he, too, gives numerous examples of specific cases intended to counter claims that he was an impostor, but he argues that the power of second sight cannot easily be explained to those who have not themselves experienced it (1732). Skepticism about the ability of a non-speaking deaf man to communicate through writing also led to claims of fraudulence. The accounts of Campbell’s life detail numerous instances in which skeptical clients or acquaintances accused him of pretending to be deaf and mute. Although he was also accused of being a fake as a fortune-teller, it seems that his contemporaries were more likely to believe that he was clairvoyant than to believe that he was deaf and unable to speak. Many of them reputedly went to great lengths to prove that he could actually hear and speak, in some cases by inflicting physical harm. One woman allegedly slammed his fingers in a door in an effort to make him cry out, a cruel test given that he used his fingers to communicate (Haywood 1724: 146). A group of men lured him to a bar and beat him. The narrator of Haywood’s A Spy upon the Conjurer tells the story of two physicians, one who intentionally failed to treat a serious condition in an effort to elicit speech sounds and another who treated him and is persuaded of the authenticity of his muteness only when he responds to a painful procedure not with speech but with “a Noise which sufficiently testified he was really denied the Benefit of expressing what he felt any other Way” (1724: 148). Given the lack of definitive historical evidence, it is impossible to know whether Campbell was actually deaf. Christopher Krentz observes that “Campbell’s deafness is produced outside his body, through discourse, and one is left to sift through the swirl of language and labels to try to guess at the truth” (2007: 30). The discursive creation of Campbell as a deaf soothsayer both reflects and challenges early eighteenth-century representations of deafness. On the one hand, the persistent claims of fakery suggest that the idea of a deaf man who can read, write, and communicate with his fingers defies belief. The narrator of The History writes: If any learned Man should have advanced this Proposition, that meer Human Art could give to the Deaf Man what should be equal to his Hearing, and to the Dumb Man an Equivalent to his want of Speech, so that he should converse as freely almost, as other Hearing or Talking Persons, that he might, tho’ born Deaf, be by Art taught, how to Read, Write, and understand any Language, as well as Students that have their Hearing, would not the World, and many even of the Learned Part of it say, that nothing could be more extravagantly Wild, and Mad, and Frantick? (Bond 1720: 3)

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Even when Campbell’s deafness and muteness are presented as fact, his literacy is portrayed as a rare exception to the rule rather than as an example of the capacity of deaf people in general to learn to read and write. On the other hand, Campbell’s celebrity introduced to a broad public the idea that deaf people could communicate through writing, and that they could be economically productive and socially active. Whether or not Campbell was actually deaf, his tremendous popularity as a working fortune-teller and subject of literary accounts reflects the cultural zeitgeist and foretells the century’s continuing fascination with the spectacle of deaf people speaking, reading, and writing. His story is a measure of the public’s interest in—and skepticism about—deaf people who defied the popular representation of them as non-literate beasts or savages.

5.2. DEAF EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF ENLIGHTENMENT One of the questions that preoccupied both scholars and the public in Enlightenment Europe was whether deaf people were educable. There were numerous accounts of isolated individuals, including Duncan Campbell, who had been taught to read and write, and numerous methods of education proposed. However, the establishment of the first public school for the deaf in Paris in 1760 transformed the nature of deaf education and the cultural conception of deaf people. The school, founded by the abbé Charles-Michel de l’Epée as the Institution Nationale des Sourds-Muets, still exists as the Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris (The National Institute for Deaf Children of Paris). The disability historian Henri-Jacques Stiker points to the late eighteenth century as the moment when specialized schools came into being and cites two schools established in Paris, Epée’s school and Valentin Haüy’s Institut National des Jeunes Aveugles, the first school for blind students, which was founded in 1785 and later attended by Louis Braille. Stiker writes: Like all founders, [Epée and Haüy] focused on a single concept of great power, simple in its realization: the education (in its broadest sense) of those who were thought afflicted with radical incapacity and who were classified in a kind of subhuman category. They were also able to convince others, upsetting the whole social construction of the psychology and mental faculties of persons with sensory deficiencies. But above all, they created specialized institutions, intended to offset the objective obstacles that hindered access to a personal and social life … and [to] provide entry to the common cultural and social heritage of their fellow citizens. ([1982] 1999: 107) These specialized institutions marked the beginning of “special education,” a concept and practice that was well accepted by the end of the eighteenth century (Winzer 1993). Epée’s school did indeed offer its students access to a common heritage, but its original purpose was saving souls. In an encounter that has become legendary, Epée met deaf twin sisters in a poor quarter of Paris and responded to their widowed mother’s concern that they would be unable to take communion by offering to instruct them in their faith (Lane 1984b: 57–8). Aware of St. Paul’s dictum that “faith comes through hearing” and of St. Augustine’s belief that deafness is an impediment to faith, Epée feared that “these two children would live and die in ignorance of their religion if I did not attempt some means of instructing them” (quoted in Lane 1984b: 58). Convinced that reading, as well as spoken language, could be a path to faith, he determined to teach the sisters to read and write. Epée has often mistakenly been credited with inventing sign language, which was not invented by anyone but rather, like any natural language, developed within the community that used it. Epée’s real contribution was to grasp the importance of sign

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language as a method of instruction.6 In his treatise on pedagogy, he writes, “Teaching the deaf is less difficult than is commonly supposed. We merely have to introduce into their minds by way of the eye what has been introduced into our own by the ear” (Epée [1776] 1984: 54). He used a modified version of sign language that he called “methodical signing” to teach deaf children to read and write French. His method did not fully embrace or recognize the grammar of what we now call French Sign Language; rather, it involved appending signs to represent elements of French grammar not inherent to sign language, including word endings and French word order. Before the establishment of Epée’s school, deaf children born to wealthy, aristocratic families had been educated by tutors, with varying degrees of success, but there had been no systematic education of the deaf and certainly no education available to poor deaf people (Mirzoeff 1995: 34). In the sixteenth century, Pedro Ponce de León, a Spanish Benedictine monk, famously taught deaf children of the Spanish nobility to speak, to read, and to write. His emphasis was on teaching speech, in part because under Spanish law a mute person, even one who could read and write, was not considered a “person at law” and thus was not entitled to inherit either family titles or family fortunes (Lane 1984b: 93). Juan Pablo Bonet, a seventeenth-century Spaniard who, in 1620, published the first book about teaching speech to deaf students, is believed to have drawn on or simply published under his own name the methods of Ponce de León, which included using handshapes to represent discrete speech sounds (Lane 1984b). These methods underlie the ongoing use of manual alphabets and the practice of fingerspelling, but their purpose was to teach speech. In the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English mathematician John Wallis (whose methods had reportedly been used to teach Duncan Campbell), the Swiss physician Johann Conrad Amman, and the Spanish-born educator Jacob Rodrigues Pereire became well known for teaching deaf children of the aristocracy. All three were notable proponents of oralism and authors of books promoting oral education (Lane 1984a: 4–5). Pereire taught in France and was a fierce rival of Epée. In Edinburgh, Thomas Braidwood tutored deaf pupils and established the first of several family-run schools that taught generations of wealthy deaf students using oral methods. Many of these oralist educators were visited by celebrated figures of the time and exhibited their star pupils as evidence of their superior pedagogical methods. For example, Samuel Johnson and James Boswell visited Braidwood’s school, and Johnson later wrote about his favorable impression of the students’ progress (Lane 1984b: 107). In addition to drawing private audiences, teachers of the deaf also held public exhibitions of their students’ accomplishments. Epée himself held public exercises three times a week (Figure 5.3); these tremendously popular events drew visitors including Condillac, John Quincy Adams, the Holy Roman Emperor Joseph II, and other important religious and secular figures. Epée’s successor, the abbé Sicard, who continued the tradition of public classes, wrote of the visitors’ amazement: People born deaf and who are consequently mute are regarded as an irredeemably inferior species, condemned to vegetate like animals without reason or intelligence. In nearly everyone’s eyes these unfortunates are mere organized machines, good only for rendering minor assistance, like the domestic animals trained to serve man. Hence nothing compares to the surprise of certain spectators when they first attend classes in which the deaf show signs of intelligence. These observers would be no less amazed to see a statue come to life. They hardly believe their eyes and find it hard to accept that they are not being deceived. (Sicard [1803] 1984: 83)

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These public exercises were a means of promoting particular teaching methods, but their popularity was also likely a result of the wondrous spectacle they promised: the savage, animal, or “mere machine” transformed into a literate and reasoning human. In order to demonstrate to the public his students’ knowledge and mastery of religious precepts and abstract ideas, Epée posed questions to them about baptism, penitence, the Eucharist, and other topics, and his students responded in writing—not only in French, but also in Latin, Italian, Spanish, and sometimes English and German. Epée aimed to show that deaf people worldwide could be taught to read and write their national languages (Lane 1984b: 46–8). The purpose of these exercises was to establish the efficacy of sign language in educating deaf pupils, but the proof of their education was their ability to write. Although debates about the education of deaf people, then and now, focus on the benefits of speech versus sign language, writing played a central role at this foundational moment in the history of deaf education. It is through his students’ writing that Epée demonstrated to an amazed and eager public the humanity, educability, and national identity of his deaf students—their capacity to be Christians and citizens. Epée died in 1789 at the dawn of the French Revolution. Shortly before his death, he was visited by a delegation from the National Assembly and learned that the new republic had declared his school a national institution, assuring its continuation; the Assembly later recognized him as a Benefactor of Humanity (Lane 1984a, 1984b). During his lifetime, Epée’s disciples founded a dozen schools in Europe, and by 1805 there were schools based on his methods across the continent, including schools in Austria, Germany, Holland, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Poland, and Portugal (Lane 1984b: 64). Laurent Clerc, a deaf man educated at Epée’s institute, went on to found, along with Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, the American Asylum for the Deaf in Hartford, Connecticut. Established in 1817, it was the first school for deaf people and also the first disability-specific institution in the USA (Nielsen 2012: 67). Echoing ideas circulated

FIGURE 5.3  The abbé de l’Epée instructing his pupils in the presence of Louis XVI. Painting by Gonzague Privat, 1875. L’Institut National de Jeunes Sourds de Paris.

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around deaf education in Europe, Clerc averred that the school would raise deaf people from “the class of brutes to the class of men” (quoted in Nielsen 2012: 67). Gallaudet’s son Edward Miner Gallaudet founded the first college for deaf students, The National Deaf-Mute College, in Washington, DC, in 1864. Now called Gallaudet University, it is officially bilingual—offering instruction in both American Sign Language and English— and is known worldwide as a center of deaf education and culture. Epée, by challenging speech as the primary goal of deaf education, demonstrating that sign language could be used as a pedagogical tool, and opening public education to poor deaf people, transformed the course of deaf education and deaf lives. His school demonstrated to Enlightenment Europe that deaf people possessed language and reason and paved the way for the establishment of deaf schools around the world.

5.3. IN DEFENSE OF SIGN LANGUAGE: THE CASE OF PIERRE DESLOGES In 1779, a deaf man, Pierre Desloges, published a defense of sign language; his essay was written in response to an essay by the abbé Deschamps, a follower of the prominent oralist and “demutiser” Jacob Pereire, published earlier that year. Deschamps’ essay attacks sign language and urges that deaf people be taught to speak. Desloges’ response, Observations d’un Sourd et Muèt sur “Un Course Élémentaire d’Éducation des Sourds et Muèts” (A Deaf Person’s Observations on “An Elementary Course of Education for The Deaf”) refutes Deschamps’ points one by one and supports the educational methods of the abbé de l’Epée (Figure 5.4). Desloges is the first person known to have marshaled the power of print to defend sign language (Lane 1984a: 28). His editor also claims that Desloges was the first deaf person to publish a book.7 A bookbinder and paperhanger, Desloges made his living in part by handling printed texts, and according to his editor, he communicated with hearing people primarily through writing.8 A hybrid of autobiography, polemic, and literacy narrative, Desloges’ text is important to deaf history for several reasons. First, it is an early intervention by a deaf writer in debates about deaf education conducted primarily by hearing educators. Second, it shares formal and thematic properties with texts—especially slave narratives—that were written by members of racial and ethnic groups who were just beginning to write and publish books in European languages. Third, it challenges the very definition of literacy, a concept that in eighteenth-century Europe was central to defining who was—and was not—fully human. Nearly two centuries before research by William Stokoe and other linguists demonstrated that sign languages are complex natural languages with their own grammar and syntax, Desloges provides evidence that a vernacular sign language existed in the Paris deaf community and that it was in use before the establishment of Epée’s school. In other words, deaf people in eighteenth-century Paris acquired sign language not through formal instruction, but through exposure to a signing community, much the same way hearing children acquire spoken language. While the conventional notion of literacy denotes the ability to read and write, Desloges calls into question the primacy of spoken and written languages and argues for the importance, for himself and other deaf people, of literacy in sign language. The publication of Desloges’ essay was a way to “talk back” not only to Deschamps and the oralists, but also to an Enlightenment culture that conceived of deaf people as objects of fascination and experimentation rather than as agents and producers of knowledge and culture.

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FIGURE 5.4  Title page of Pierre Desloges’ Observations d’un Sourd et Muèt sur “Un Course Élémentaire d’Éducation des Sourds et Muèts”. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k749465. texteImage.

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Desloges’ essay performs the paradoxical dual function of demonstrating his ability to write in French—thus proving his membership in the human race—and using that ability to argue for the legitimacy of the manual–visual language of the Paris deaf community, and thereby for the humanity of those who use sign language rather than speech or writing. Like other texts, including the slave narrative and the testimonio, written by a member of a group whose literacy is in question, Desloges’ book is authorized by a representative of the dominant culture, in this case by his editor, the abbé Copineau. His prefatory “Editor’s Note” establishes the authenticity of the essay and details his own contribution: “I corrected the young man’s quite faulty spelling. I pruned some repetitions and softened a few words that could have given offense. Aside from these minor emendations, the essay is entirely the work of the deaf Desloges” (Copineau [1779] 1984: 29). Asserting that the “chief interest” of this essay derives from the novelty of deaf authorship, Copineau avers that “such a phenomenon had to be presented to the public in a form as close to its original as possible. Therefore the only liberty I took was to add a few notes to the text at points where they seemed pertinent” ([1779] 1984: 29). Framed by Copineau’s preface and lengthy endnotes, Desloges’ essay is sanctioned as an authentic deaf voice. The preface performs an authorizing function similar to that of prefaces to black slave narratives, which were often penned by white abolitionists. In both cases, the literacy and truthfulness (and sometimes the physical blackness or deafness) of the writer of the narrative is vouched for by an editor or sponsor. The editor’s preface to Desloges’ book is followed by an author’s preface; Copineau has suggested that, in order to “satisfy the public’s curiosity,” Desloges offer “some personal information, the causes of his infirmity, his ideas of sound and speech, and the like” (Copineau [1779] 1984: 30). Noting that “it has been judged that a writer as unusual as I may be permitted to say a few words about himself” ([1779] 1984: 31), Desloges explains that he was deafened by smallpox at age seven, after he had acquired speech and a basic knowledge of reading and writing. His formal education ended with his illness. He attributes his inability to communicate well orally not to his deafness, but to other effects of the smallpox infection, including the loss of his teeth and the slackening of his lips. He recounts: At the beginning of my infirmity, and for as long as I was living apart from other deaf people, my only resource for self-expression was writing or my poor pronunciation. I was for a long time unaware of sign language. … I did not know the art of combining [signs] to form distinct pictures with which one can represent various ideas, transmit them to one’s peers, and converse in logical discourse. (Desloges [1779] 1984: 32) Thus, while Desloges could read and write French, his lack of exposure to sign language hindered his communication with other deaf people. At age twenty-seven, Desloges was introduced to the sign language used in the Paris deaf community by a man he describes as “congenitally deaf, Italian by nationality, and illiterate” ([1779] 1984: 32). Desloges often emphasizes the illiteracy of his deaf acquaintances in order to make the point that they can communicate perfectly well despite their inability to read or write; indeed, it is Desloges’ “illiteracy” in sign language that initially prevents him from communicating with them. In his preface, Desloges represents himself as a cultural mediator; his knowledge of both French and sign language enables him to explicate the language and culture of these deaf comrades to members of the dominant culture. Noting that he is often questioned about the lives of these friends, Desloges claims that the questions he is asked are as

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“laughable as they are absurd,” and they prove that “almost everyone has gotten the falsest possible ideas about us; few people have an adequate notion of our state, our resources, or our way of communicating with each other in sign language” ([1779] 1984: 30). Desloges learned to speak, to read, and to write long before he learned to sign; however, it is sign he represents as the most vital form of language. In his view, sign enables greater economy of expression than writing: “Indeed, sometimes a particular sign made in the twinkling of an eye would require entire pages for a description of it to be complete” ([1779] 1984: 31). It also possesses a performative vitality that may be lost on the page: “I fear that this language, which has so much strength and energy in its performance, would weaken under my beginner’s pen” ([1779] 1984: 31). While his editor prefaces Desloges’ essay by emphasizing the novelty of a deaf man who can write, Desloges uses the authority of authorship to represent himself as a deaf man who can sign. It was the publication of Deschamps’ essay Un Cours Élémentaire d’Éducation des Sourds et Muèts (1779), which in Desloges’ view perpetuated false ideas about deaf people and their language, that prompted him to set the record straight. In his essay attacking sign language, Deschamps claims that signs are vague and indeterminate, arbitrary, and can indicate concrete objects but not abstract ideas. The alleged inability of sign language to convey abstractions, Deschamps suggests, renders deaf signers unfit to be Christians or citizens. Indeed, much of the debate about oral versus manual methods of instruction in pre-revolutionary France centers on how best to enable deaf people to understand principles of theology and nationhood, and thus to participate in both religious and national life.9 Responding to Deschamps’ claim that users of sign language, when referring to God, make no distinction between the firmament—the concrete works of His hands—and God Himself, Desloges asserts: It is I who can assure him, for when I want to designate the Supreme Being by indicating the sky … I accompany my gesture with an air of adoration and respect that makes my intention quite evident …. On the other hand, if I want to speak of the sky or the firmament, I will make the same gesture unaccompanied by any of these auxiliaries. ([1779] 1984: 38) Even this explanation of the non-manual cues used in sign languages, however, does not fully answer the charges of the oralists. Some educators, concerned for the souls of their deaf pupils, believed that they must learn to speak in order to achieve religious enlightenment and expression. Even Epée did not consider sign language in and of itself a path to religious understanding, but he believed that writing, learned through sign language, could provide this path. Desloges characterizes Epée’s teaching as an encounter between native and foreigner, describing Epée as “like a man suddenly transported to a foreign people to whom he wanted to teach his own native language,” one determined that “the best way to manage this would be to learn the country’s language so as to give easily understandable instructions” ([1779] 1984: 34). Representing his signing community as a “foreign people” analogous to a national group, Desloges anticipates by about two centuries the idea that Deaf people have a distinct linguistic and cultural identity. Using Epée’s emphasis on the importance of national identity for his own purposes, Desloges explains why he must defend the validity of the Deaf community’s indigenous language by appealing to his readers’ nationalist feelings: “As would a Frenchman seeing his language disparaged by a German who knew at most a few words of French, I too feel obliged to defend my own language from the

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false charges leveled against it” ([1779] 1984: 30). Invoking French linguistic pride, he constructs himself and his Deaf community as a language group. Desloges’ essay is, among other things, a literacy narrative. However, its plot runs counter to those of slave narratives and most other literacy narratives. In slave narratives, the characteristic progression is from orality to literacy, and it is the ability to read and write that paves the path to freedom. Desloges’ essay, in contrast, emphasizes his entry into the community of signers rather than the community of readers and writers. While his ability to write is the means by which his story is communicated, his late-acquired ability to sign is the centerpiece of the story. In reconfiguring the progress narrative of literacy, Desloges challenges the distinction between literacy and illiteracy that he often invokes in his essay. Sign language, he implies, requires a redefinition of literacy, one that takes into account languages that use a manual–visual modality. And, he suggests, deaf people possess cultural literacy even when they are unable to read or write. However, the paradox at the center of his argument remains: without his ability to write in French, Desloges could not effectively convey his claims to his fellow French citizens whose primary language is a written and spoken one. His act of writing, an intervention in a debate conducted largely between hearing educators of deaf people, registers the desire of deaf people to represent themselves and to negotiate textually the tension between deaf and hearing worlds. At a historical moment when the humanity of deaf people was in question, Desloges wrote himself and his signing community into being.

5.4. CONCLUSION: PERFORMING DEAFNESS Opening in December 1799 at the Comédie Française, Jean-Nicolas Bouilly’s play L’Abbé de l’Epée played to record-breaking audiences in Paris. It was the second longestrunning play of the period, second only to the Marriage of Figaro (Lane 1984b: 42). Reportedly, Napoleon and his wife, Josephine, attended the second performance in Paris, and an English translation entitled Deaf and Dumb opened in 1801 at the Drury Lane theater in London (Mirzoeff 1995: 77–9). Bouilly’s play tells the story of a young deaf orphan, Théodore, disinherited by an evil uncle and, through Epée’s intervention, restored to his proper class and inheritance; it is a fictionalized version of Epée’s relationship with a non-speaking deaf boy who was abandoned by his family or abducted by a family friend. The boy, taken in and educated by Epée, was later believed by Epée and others to be the Count of Solar, scion of a noble family (Lane 1984b: 45–57). Lane observes that the play is an “allegory suited to an age of enlightenment and revolution: the abducted and dispossessed young count is every misérable disinherited by fate and society from all the advantages of social life; his savior, the abbé de l’Epée, is every wise and humble teacher who restores his pupil to his rightful heritage” (1984b: 42). Throughout the play, the characters of Théodore and Epée communicate by signing. Bouilly’s play reflects the admiration and respect accorded Epée, “born of his piety and his charity, but especially born of wonderment at his restoration of the deaf to society” (Lane 1984b: 56). The play was an apt bookend to a century enthralled by deafness and amazed by Epée’s seemingly miraculous transformation of deaf people into literate, reasoning humans. However, it does not fully recognize the agency of deaf people and their use of a vernacular sign language that was not taught to them by Epée or other hearing educators. In 2011, a “highly satirical, twenty-first century culturally deaf take on Bouilly’s play” was performed at Gallaudet University, a testament to the power

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of this eighteenth-century story to shape ideas about deafness even as it is reframed as a satire incorporating contemporary deaf identity politics and educational paradigms (Gallaudet University 2011). Adapted and directed by deaf theater artist Ethan Sinott, this version puts the story in deaf hands, rendering it in American Sign Language with voice interpretation, and producing it at the global nexus of deaf higher education and Deaf culture. Perhaps this adaptation is a more fitting tribute to Epée’s educational legacy, and to the eighteenth-century signing deaf community in Paris, than the celebrated play that cast the hearing educator as its hero. I am grateful to the editors of Biography for permission to use portions of material published in an earlier form in Lindgren (2012), “Contact Zones and Border Crossings: Writing Deaf Lives,” Biography, 35 (2): 342–359.

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CHAPTER SIX

Speech The Sound of Disability DWIGHT CODR AND JARED S. RICHMAN

For early modern writers, speech—and language more broadly—was among the defining features of the human.1 William Holder’s Elements of Speech, to take one of many instances, affirms that “Speech, [is the faculty] wherewith Man alone is endowed, as with an Instrument suitable to the Excellency of the Soul” (1669: 5–6). Michel Le Faucheur’s An Essay upon the Action of an Orator echoes this claim while more loudly declaring the divine nature, the divine gift of speech: “God Almighty hath-blessed Us with the faculty of Speech above all Creatures, and given us words for the interpretation of our Thoughts and the Mirrour or reflection of our passions” (1680: 77). This basic orientation remained consistent over the course of the eighteenth century, as one speculative history on the origins of language suggests: “[b]y [speech] man was raised above the brute creation, and unarticulating tribes of terrestrial animals … Man … received the powers of communicating thought by speech, and the Almighty Father imparted it unto him in all the native sweetness and harmony of human voice” (Adams 1799: 132–3). Or, more simply, as one historian of language succinctly put it: “man is an animal capable of speech” (Burnett 1774: vol. 2, 346). Such views formed the bedrock for the widespread dehumanization of those with speech disabilities—as those with speech difficulties come to seem less than human—and gave impetus to a historical process of medicalization of the problem of speech disfluency, as those with speech disabilities increasingly found themselves obligated to “fix” themselves. This chapter delineates how the eighteenth century, squarely within the Enlightenment and its questions regarding the very definition of humanity, dealt with speech and communication disorders. Taking a historical perspective of disability, we understand that language and its vocalization was a contested space crucial to ongoing efforts to define human nature, and it has remained so from the Early Modern era to the present moment. To discuss speech and disabilities associated with speech, we must begin by delimiting our field of inquiry. This is no easy task when it comes to the long eighteenth century and the Enlightenment attitudes and practices with which that century is often associated. Perhaps because it was marked by an explosion in print culture, the period took a keen interest in the different ways in which verbal communication took place. Grumble, mumble, ramble, maunt, mant, babble, burble, blurt, blather, chatter, flatter, sputter,

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prattle, tattle, utter, whisper, ejaculate, blurt, groan, moan: in order to announce how a thing was said, eighteenth-century Britons inherited, invented, or newly applied a bevy of terms to describe modes or forms of speech. Such variety in nomenclature was particularly valuable for the literary genre that began to define the period: the novel, which needed ever new ways of adding nuance to modalities of verbal expression. When set against such comparatively banal phrases as “he said” or “she spoke,” the proliferation of such terms suggests a particular interest in thinking about how to mark speech that is different from the norm. Indeed, writers were quite conscious of that very difference; the Scottish jurist, philosopher, and linguist James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, to take one example, is reported to have once remarked of William Pitt’s oratorical skills that only he, Pitt, “spoke,” whereas “Fox barked, and Lord North screamed and groaned” (quoted in Wilburforce 1840: 33). Among those terms was one eventually adopted by poet and playwright Hugh Kelly for his journal of the 1760s, The Babbler. “What is a babler [sic]?” asks Kelly (ca. 1770:  3). He would go on to answer that it is a term that encompasses the following personae: someone who “seems extremely earnest to engross the conversation of” a group of people, a flatterer, someone who recites “tedious and unentertaining stories … and anecdotes,” someone who pompously “interlard[s]” his discourse with technical terms, someone who repeats his own jokes, someone who laughs at the “expence of decency,” someone who speaks to display erudition, or someone who talks about what he or she does not understand, an ignoramus (ca. 1770: 3–4). Kelly’s faintly amusing delineation of babblers helps us here to more precisely define that with which this chapter shall not deal: the various moral traits that were responsible for corrupting the speech of certain morally dubious persons. However, it is important to note that those things with which this chapter shall deal—stuttering, stammering, hesitations, and other vocal disfluencies—were often bound up with the moralistic taxonomy of verbal error that we find in Kelly’s attempt to define babblers. So, for instance, in an anonymously written novel, a “Mr. Stammer,” “who was ever willing to display his wit,” insultingly compares a lady’s missing front teeth to a “a-a-t-t-t-trap-door in a pa-pa-pa-pantomime” (Anon. 1767: 170). Stuttering in this instance stamps Stammer’s moral flaws—being witty at the expense of others, trying to control a conversation, and so forth—with a divine imprimatur: the man is flawed in both moral and physiological ways. His morality and his physical speech are in a kind of shameful harmony. One final, important caveat must be put forward: we confine ourselves to a consideration of the ways in which eighteenth-century writers—and English writers in particular—represented and developed the discourse and fact of speech disabilities as we understand them today. There is an obvious risk of anachronism in assuming that the way we understand speech disability today is the best or only possible one. To say that “speech disability” must mean those things that today fall under the category of “speech disability”—stuttering, cluttering, lisping—is to assume that eighteenth-century subjects were in some sense wrong when they aligned moral with physiological causes for vocal impairment. Still worse than assuming that today’s definitions of disabilities are the best or the only ones would be to conceal the fact that we are projecting our definitions backwards onto eighteenth-century subjects. It would be worse because an act of concealment of this kind would imply that we, the authors, believe in a trans-historical reality of the disabled body—that a disabled body today is the same as a disabled body of or from another place or another time. The problem with such a belief, of course, is that it fails to appreciate that disability is a historically and culturally contingent mode of being. A critical disability

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study would be remiss if it refused to acknowledge that history and culture are what make bodily differences into disabilities, since disability is meaningful only in relation to the spaces that allow ability to manifest. So, we undertake this study with two guiding principles: first, that we clarify and elucidate specific contexts and discourses that animated conversation about the physical and physiological conditions that we associate with speech disabilities, and second, that the eighteenth century witnesses the dawn of a modern, disciplinary regime vis-à-vis the disabled voice that is still very much with us today. In the spirit of the first of these principles, we aim to highlight differences, and in the spirit of the latter, we aim to point toward legacies and continuities between the past and the present. Thus, we focus on the era’s construction of speech using the frame of disability studies. While the term “disability” has existed in some form or another in the English lexicon since the mid-sixteenth century, Lennard J. Davis (1995) has shown that it was the nineteenth century that witnessed the codification of a modern understanding of the term, one that problematically framed the concept in terms of deviance, abnormality, and disorder. Nonetheless, it is the eighteenth century that saw the rise of standardized language and the so-called “normal” speech that anticipates the conceptual structure of what Davis identifies as the nineteenth century’s “idea of the norm” (Davis 1995: 24). Because speech is central to cultural production and identity formation, so might conceptions of “defective” or “deformed” speech allow us to understand the ways in which idealized and normalized modes of human communication and expression have helped to constitute various systems of authority and oppression. Shifting our critical attention backwards in time, from the twenty-first century to the eighteenth century, we can begin to understand the role occupied by speech in British political and social discourse. Moreover, because speech was theorized as both emanating from the physical body and apprehended essentially by the senses, it is bound up in the histories of both medicine and aesthetics. As Davis has argued: Disability exists in the realm of the senses. The disabled body is embodied through the senses. So there is a kind of reciprocal relationship between the senses and disability. A person may be impaired by the lack of a sense—sight, hearing, taste, or even touch, although touch is almost never completely gone. Yet paradoxically, it is through the senses that disability is perceived. (1995: 4) Constructions of disability as an expression of physical and social difference rose prominently in the eighteenth century alongside renewed interest in verbal and linguistic fields such as elocution, rhetoric, oratory, pronunciation, orthoepy, and lexicography, to name just a few. Writers engaging these disciplines tended to render vocality primarily through the image of the tongue, which served as a trope for the corporeal embodiment of individual speech. Take, for example, works such as Richard Allestree’s The Government of the Tongue (1675) and William Gearing’s A Bridle for the Tongue, or A Treatise of ten sins of the tongue. Cursing, Swearing, Slandering, Scoffing, Filthy-Speaking, Flattering, Censuring, Murmuring, Lying and Boasting (1663). These are not works about elocution per se, but they treat moral and spiritual matters as physical and physiological in nature. As Gearing observes: Physitians take great notice of the tongue, judging thereby of the health or sickness of the body: so our words shew plainly the quality of our souls; and as a vessel is known

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by the sound, whether it be whole or broken; so are men proven by their speech, whether they be sound or rotten at heart. (1663: v) These words are progenitors of both eighteenth-century elocutionary work, as well as the moralizing attitude toward speech that we find in Kelly’s essay. Gearing’s strict dichotomies—whole/broken, sound/rotten, health/sickness—set up a paradigm wherein all behaviors and bodies and body parts unavoidably lend themselves to evaluation and judgment; words become signs of inner moral life and must therefore be read as indicative of that inner life. On the other hand, Gearing’s easy rhetorical movement from the materiality of the tongue to the decidedly more abstract “quality of our souls” hearkens back to a time when the strict divisions between body and spirit were less visible or only coming into focus. In simple terms, the eighteenth century moves on from but does not altogether abandon Early Modern attitudes—attitudes such as Gearing’s—toward the body and disability. The development of these attitudes was inextricably bound up with questions of both identity and access, in literal and figurative senses of the terms. As Michéle Cohen notes, “tongues and … the tongue were critical sites for the self-fashioning of the gentleman and, eventually, for the forging of national and gender differences” (1996: 4).2 The ability to speak and to speak well enabled or hindered access to public discourse and the venues in which the public discourse was manifested. In the eighteenth century, to be “slow of tongue” or “tongue-tied” (two common epithets for a range of speech impediments) often precluded one from professional advancement and educational access. Daniel Defoe expressed the same sentiment, but believed the exclusions were not effective enough when, in the Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe, he lamented what was to him a too-common practice of putting children into vocations ill-suited for them: “we have so many young Men brought to the Bar, and to the Pulpit, with stammering Tongues; Hesitations, and Impediments in their Speech, unmusical Voices, and no common Utterance; while on the other Hand, Nature’s Cripples, Bow-legg’d, Battle-ham’d, and half-made Creatures, are bred Tumblers and Dancing-Masters” (1720: 72). As a result of exclusionary mind-sets such as Defoe’s here, efforts to “fix” what came to be identified as types of aberrant speech during the eighteenth century gave rise to a new subfield of medical practice by the early nineteenth century. The fact that speech pathology as a profession (one founded upon establishing corporeal and behavioral norms by marking deviant or aberrant speech) began to emerge alongside the discourse of Enlightenment epistemology suggests the degree to which vocal disability was connected to the rise of a modern subjectivity very much concerned with the human body.

6.1. VOICE AND MUSICAL OBLIGATION IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY Within the context of the Enlightenment, speech was arguably the human body’s most essential operation: The ability to speak … was of special importance in defining humanity; indeed, the ability to speak was often deemed the defining characteristic of man, the character that distinguished him from the mere brute. There was, in particular, a close association between language, thought, and individual liberty. Through language—and above all through speech—the human essence represented itself to its fellows, to those capable of recognizing such utterances for what they were, tokens of a deliberative and determining person. (Jacyna 2000: 9–10)

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Insofar as the voice was considered closest to thought and thought was considered coextensive with reason, a failure to speak or to speak well implied a problem with the subject’s reason and, thus, his or her person. Those who could not speak, such as the aphasic or mute, were explicitly or implicitly denied the full status of personhood. And if the ability to speak marked one as human, the ability to speak well marked one human as better than another. Specifically, in addition to insisting that one’s speech be filled with sensible, reasonable content, writers from a variety of social and professional locations overwhelmingly used the language of music to describe what a good voice ought to sound like. The musical paradigm, it might be called, was what defined the terms of evaluation and the logic whereby some voices would be praised and others found lacking. Music had been used as metaphor for speech since Antiquity, of course; but, in the eighteenth century, speech was increasingly measured and systematized in terms of the logic of music, and also in terms of how well its impact on auditors matched the impact of music on audiences. Music and song, in other words, were terms around which vocal norms organized themselves. It was in the eighteenth century that Antoine Ferrein coined the term “vocal cords … on the basis of musical analogies” (MacNamee 1984: 410),3 and the term “oratorio” began to refer to a type of song.4 Such terminological traffic between the realms of speech and music was widespread in the era. As the French writer Eustache Le Noble put it: “tho’ Speech must not be Sung, yet ought it to be Numerous, or have a Cadence, in a soft insensible manner, varying the Tones to please the Ear, and striking with measured Proportions, or a secret Harmony, the Fibres of the Drum” (1701: 70). From such a starting point, it is easy to understand how one might measure and index vocal failure, while speech that met such a standard was enough to inspire rapture in some writers. John Herries, who attempted to align music and pronunciation systematically, put it thusly: How wonderful is the structure of the human organs! How nicely adapted to perform their office! How unequal are all the productions of bungling art to this divine machine! Let us only take a short view of the amazing flexibility, sweetness, and extent of the human larynx. When properly cultivated, its tones can charm the ear, rouse the imagination, or soothe every turbulent passion to harmony and peace! (1773: 133) A properly composed and measured voice could work profound, albeit mysterious effects on auditors, and for Britons, as they saw things, the English language was best suited for this purpose. As Thomas Sheridan wrote, English goes “better to martial music” than Italian and is in general the best language, ancient or modern, for oratory, as it is capable of expressing the maximum “variety of humours, or passions, by its sounds” (Sheridan 1783: 152). Such exuberance, as well as the opposition between nature and art, would continue to inform how the voice was understood into the nineteenth century: [H]ow perfect is that gift [speech] in itself,—how wondrous the organism by which it is effected! The mouth is admirably framed for intelligent and harmonious utterance; it is at once an organ, and a flute,—a trumpet and a harp. Its sublime construction will make it the eternal despair of mechanicians, and the songs which it can modulate, are superior to all the melodies of artificial music. (Farrar 1860: 79–80) Claims such as these plainly informed the market for solutions to speech disabilities, as is indicated by the report of the contents of a course of lectures—themselves never printed—of the fifth lecture by Samuel Angier, known in his time as the “Stuttering Master”: “Lecture V. / The Powers of Speech, particularly those of Eloquence, or Public

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Speaking, considered as producing a wonderful Species of Music … Cadence explained in a new Light. How the Tones of the Voice … may be … diversified” (Anon. 1786: 7). By improving pronunciation, one might communicate with “more force and more music” (Beattie 1797: 34); acknowledging that the point had become proverbial, Samuel Whyte remarked in 1800 that pronunciation “adds energy and beauty to thought, and, if I may be allowed the expression, is the music of speech” (Whyte 1800: 113). As much as the stress upon the musicality of voice would seem to imply a privileging of the auditory, in fact the eighteenth-century attempt to link the voice to music was also a vital part of Enlightenment visual culture. Music was valuable to theorists of voice not because—or at least not solely because—it provided a model of sound, but because in its having been orthographically manifested—as sheet music—it promised a possible way of making speech visible. This was evident in English as well as French tracts, as Terence MacNamee (1984) has shown in an essay charting the rise of normativity in eighteenthcentury theories of speech. To extend his findings, it might be said that what propelled the normative approach to vocal disability in the eighteenth century was not so much a predisposition toward punishment and regulation, or even a biased privileging of certain dialects or forms of expression—although these are both plainly in evidence—as a need for a taxonomy of speech that could be applied far and wide, and that could be reproduced in print. Using the technologies that had been developed to textually reproduce music, speech therapists, as we would call them today, developed a normative science of vocal disability. This is also, incidentally, one of the things that distinguishes the eighteenth-century alignment of good speech with music from earlier, similar alignments: whereas beautiful speech had always been compared to music (or to music’s cousin, poetry), in the eighteenth century there was an attempt to write speech, to orthographically manifest vocalization by drawing on the conventions of print musical culture, which produced a heightened sense of a static, fixed, normative, regulated ideal for speech. A longer study of this intersection in the period would of course also have to consider developments in prosody.5 As voice approaches music, though, it also threatens to get out of control. While writers on the subject of speech spoke of mysterious harmonies and the effect of the voice upon the passions of others, it was critical for them that speech remain regulated and structured. Oratory was decidedly not a swelling of passion into song—like, say, the Romantic utterance, announced by William Wordsworth in the “Preface” to the Lyrical Ballads as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling” (Wordsworth [1802] 2000: 598). Rather, oratory was the artful and deliberate translation of thought into sound, akin to the transmission and structuration of religion in a sermon or devotion in a prayer (a “channeling” of feeling, not a rushing or rapturous overflowing). As the aforementioned Eustache Le Noble worried, one must be on guard while speaking lest the “Fire of ones Fancy, and the Impatience of explaining ones Thoughts, occasion a confused Speech, and ridiculous Stammering, which is very fatiguing” (1701: 71). Such “stammering”— distinct from but similar to “Stuttering,” “another natural Defect,” according to Le Noble (1701: 71)—can be treated through a regimen of exercising “the Muscles of the Tongue and Lips” (1701: 72). Lisping, which Le Noble also classes as a “Defect of Speech,” is affected and disagreeable; for him, “the Tone of Speech … ought to be Soft, Clear, Strong, Harmonious, and Moderate” (1701: 72). “Man cannot intirely change the Tone of his Voice,” Le Noble added, but he might, with some effort, correct it “with Art, Study and Pains” (1701: 69). It was at this point that the celebration of the power of the voice to transform auditors became a set of prescriptions for normalcy and a set of criticisms of deviation from the

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norm. Indeed, the century bore witness to at least four major developments in the management and treatment of speech disorders: the rise of nosology (the classification of diseases); the emergence of psychological explanations for stuttering; careful observation and description of disorder types; and the emergence of teaching for hearing-impaired persons (Rieber and Wollock 1977: 7ff.). Underlying these developments was a drive toward universality, a view that all human beings were, in essence, the same, and that with the benefit of training and care that essential humanity could emerge even in the face of seemingly substantial difference (Rieber and Wollock 1977: 12). According to one tract promising cure, “[m]ore force and more music” could be cultivated in one’s address (Beattie 1797: 34). This enforced musicalization was disciplinary in the most Foucauldian of senses in that it combined a plan for education with a set of scripts for the body inspired by the model of military order. As the early nineteenth-century physician and speech pathologist Andrew Comstock put it: “The stammerer must be taught how to give language the pitch, time, and force which the sense requires. To effect this, his muscles of speech, which have long been refractory, must be trained till they are brought under the control of volition, and like a well-marshalled troop of soldiers, made to act in harmonious concert” (Comstock 1844: 36). The paradox of forcing someone to behave according to their own volition appears to have been lost on Comstock, perhaps himself overcome by the image of himself as a drill sergeant for vocal fitness.

6.2. FROM RENAISSANCE RHETORIC TO EARLY MODERN ELOCUTION Following Galenic physiology, Renaissance understanding of vocal disorders such as stuttering tended to focus on biological causes and medical treatments. Both physiological states and environmental conditions played a role in vocal fluency. Everything from fluctuations in heat and moisture to imbalances in the four humors was thought to affect fluency and verbal articulation (Wollock 1997: 99–108). There was, according to Jeffrey Wollock, a gradual “coarsening” or “dulling of the edges” with regard to types of speech disorders and their treatments in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that led to a “tendency to treat all ‘invisible’ speech disorders as etiologically similar” (1997: 343). British attention to elocution, oratory, rhetoric, and speech tends to bear out this claim. Although there is some attention to individual disorders and so-called defects of speech, including but not limited to stuttering, stammering, lisping, mumbling, muttering, and hesitating, most considerations of speech disorders during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries focus upon stuttering or stammering.6 But as Carla Mazzio notes, these types of medical studies “offer insight into early conceptions of individual pathology without necessarily shedding light on the larger discursive and social contexts in which inarticulate speech could come to mean something to a larger community” (2009: 14). Because eighteenth-century debates over speech were anticipated and framed by Renaissance attention to (and a near obsession with) rhetoric, and because classical attitudes toward communication disorders became part and parcel of England’s emerging nationalism (Bloom 2007; Mazzio 2009; Nicholson 2014), it is important for us to present a brief sketch of attitudes toward speech and disability that preceded the Enlightenment. The linguistic normalization that characterized Georgian elocutionary practice was, to a large extent, preceded by a sixteenth- and seventeenth-century pedagogical penchant for vocal correctness and lexical purity. As Catherine Nicholson (2014) suggests, “if

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eloquence was the original antidote to errancy, more eloquent English would make for a stronger and more cohesive England” (2014: 2). Works such as Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique (1560), George Puttenham’s Arte of English Poesie (1589), and Henry Peacham’s Garden of Eloquence (1577) began to codify linguistic standards for English based upon ancient predecessors such as Aristotle’s Art of Rhetoric and Horace’s Ars Poetica. It was here, in the writing of these Renaissance rhetoricians and elocutionists, that insistent English cries for a common tongue first began to appear. Such urgency was, of course, only quickened by the remarkable explosion of print in Early Modern Britain. The Renaissance devotion to classical rhetorical forms and an increasing desire to consolidate linguistic pedagogies were reflected in the material practices of print production. With such rapid growth of the seventeenth-century publishing industry, standard editions of works could, for the first time, be imagined if not entirely realized (Eisenstein 2005: 56–67). For the purposes of understanding verbal disability, it is worth noting that textual standardization could only be understood in terms of print variants, misprints, mistakes, and corrections issued as errata. As Elizabeth Eisenstein has suggested, the “very act of publishing errata demonstrated a new capacity to locate textual errors with precision and to transmit this information simultaneously to scattered readers” (2005: 56). If textual error could be located, identified, and corrected, then so might various so-called defects of the tongue, meaning that they, too, could be diagnosed and cured. Thus, the eighteenth-century textual archive, replete with lexicons, grammars, pronunciation dictionaries, elocutionary tracts, and oratorical treatises, as well as an increasing number of standard and authorized editions, jointly contributed to the vocal standardization and linguistic normalization of English. Further enriching this standardization were contributions from the language and logic of medicine; it is no accident that terms such as “defect” and “deformity”—terms taken from principally medical contexts—were applied to English speech quite often. Moving from broad claims about the need for integrity in national language to ruminations on the biology of the mouth, in his 1784 Elements of Orthoepy Robert Nares used the Early Modern discourse of disability—the rhetoric of imperfection, irregularity, and so forth—to describe the drift of English away from a “fixed point of purity” (1784: iv). “Various have been the causes of this deformity,” Nares surmises (1784: xiv); “we should … endeavour, as far as we are able, to preserve our speech from further depravations” (1784: xv). Nares’ appeal for heightened precision in pronunciation took on a nationalistic cast insofar as one of the principal causes of these “deformities” was the incursion of foreign words and phrases (1784: iii), a point surely owing to Samuel Johnson’s (1709–84) laments about the decay of English in his writings. If there is a single figure standing at the nexus of the eighteenth-century speech disorders and the era’s push for lexicographical standardization, it is certainly Johnson. His remarkable literary reputation and prolific textual production might be assessed in relation to his reportedly odd manner of speaking. Some modern scholars have suggested that Johnson’s vocal peculiarities provide evidence of a man with Tourette’s syndrome, which might offer some insight into his conception and rendering of language acquisition and verbal expression.7 As such, Johnson’s great cultural achievement, his Dictionary of the English Language (1755), represents just one portion of his prominence in this area, but it is an important one. For as part of his lexicographical project, Johnson articulated the inextricable link between language and speech. As Laura Davies reminds us, Johnson “defines language as ‘human speech’ and ‘language’ is offered as the second definition of speech” (2014: 48).

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The conflation of speech and language would play a key role in the cultural normalization of standardized English, particularly if it is viewed from the perspective of critical disability theory. Keeping in mind Lennard J. Davis’ understanding of the norm as a nineteenth-century concept, we might still recognize notions of normality as heralded by an Early Modern interest in the idea of “nature” and the “natural” in the production of eloquence. Helen Deutsch and Felicity Nussbaum note that this era was one that “legislated differences of sex, race, and able-bodiedness under the aegis of the ‘the natural’” (2000: 19). Thus, relying on nature as a guide for the model of idealized speech was inherently problematic given the range of human vocal variabilities—from regional dialects to speech impediments and communication disorders. The scientist Robert Boyle, for example, cast a suspicious glance at nature for doing its “work very weakly or bunglingly in the production of monsters, whose variety and numerousness is almost as great as their deformity or their irregularity” ([1686] 1996: 78). In the history of disability, nature’s tendency toward difference inevitably functions as the bugbear of the Early Modern elocutionist determined to standardize language. But by adopting rules of classical rhetoric and oratory to govern the English language, Early Modern writers were in another sense moving away from a notion of “natural” verbal expression. As Nicholson argues persuasively, to “speak English eloquently was, by definition, to speak it strangely” (2014: 10). As we noted above, the idea that the production of speech is somehow elemental to humanity underwrites much of eighteenth-century approaches to the cure of speech impediments, despite the fact that elocutionary tracts paint the production of an idealized human speech as anything but natural. This notion can be traced back to Aristotle, who claimed that “Man is the only animal whom Nature has endowed with the gift of speech” (1885: 112). In this sense, the capacity for spoken language appears divinely derived, a notion later echoed by John Milton’s 1667 epic, Paradise Lost, where Adam remembers how he first realized his verbal potential: “To speak I tri’d, and forthwith spake, / My Tongue obey’d and readily could name / Whate’er I saw” (1998: 8.271–3). Here, Milton constructs Adam as a speaker without the need for art or artifice, whose eloquence is divinely ordained. And if, as Milton proclaims in the “Argument” of his text, Paradise Lost is the story of “man’s first disobedience,” then the force of “obey’d” in Adam’s narrative of his “Tongue” might be said to model in a particularly resonant way not simply natural perfection, but Christian perfection as well. That Milton, famous polymath and linguist in his own right, adopted the epic as the form for his English retelling of Genesis also suggests the degree to which Britons were compelled to model their own rhetorical and literary efforts on classical predecessors. Little surprise, then, that the Greek statesman Demosthenes, known for being both a great persuader as well as one of the most famous stutterers in history, figured prominently in elocutionary discourse. Demosthenes’ efforts to forge himself into a master rhetorician and celebrated orator would have been known to any student of Greek in the eighteenth century. Among the most frequently retold stories about him were those concerning his attempts to manage his vocal disability: he would speak loudly to the waves in order to improve his lung capacity, and he would practice speaking with pebbles in his mouth as a therapy meant to mitigate his famous stutter.8 It turns out that the neoclassical revival that  animated an English vogue for ancient Roman and Greek styles of painting, literature, landscape, architecture, aesthetic theory, and government also shaped standards for oratorical practice and elocutionary intervention. The Earl of Chesterfield, Samuel Johnson’s onetime patron, did not mince words when drawing

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a clear line between Greek and Roman vocal standards and those of the modern day: “Copy Demosthenes” (Chesterfield 1932: 333–4). One of the most influential elocutionists of the eighteenth century, John Mason, held up Demosthenes as both an example for various types of communication disorders and also as a model for the stutterer’s self-cure. In doing so, he employed what modern disability studies scholars would recognize as a narrative of overcoming. Demosthenes, according to Mason, was afflicted with “three natural impediments in Pronunciation,” but “he conquered [them all] by invincible Labour and Perseverance” (1748: 11). The example of Demosthenes suggests that those who were affected by a speech disability needed to seek a cure, and, further, it implied that those who subsequently failed to cure themselves were in some way lacking or deficient. Indeed, it is both altogether unsurprising as well as one of the great tragic ironies that those with speech disabilities were made to compare themselves with one of the greatest orators of the ancient world. However, the tale’s pedagogical purpose went beyond rudimentary speech pathology. As oratorical exemplar, Demosthenes modeled national elocutionary mastery and civic constancy for an English people bent on organizing and disciplining unruly and disparate (political) bodies. As Michael Shortland notes, in this way many eighteenth-century proponents of elocutionary reform drew “explicit links between Greek and Roman oratorical techniques and the stability of their forms of government” (1987: 641). Although figures such as Demosthenes served as useful models for oratory, a growing class of professionals rendered such models less important than perhaps they had been in earlier times. Part of a widespread elocutionary movement, professors of elocution, such as Mason and Thomas Sheridan, labored to systematize learning as it pertained to vocal disability. All told, dozens of grammars, dictionaries, and orthoepy texts—including Sheridan’s 1762 Dissertation on the causes of the difficulties which occur in learning the English Tongue, John Walker’s 1769 Elements of Elocution, William Enfield’s The Speaker (1795), and Nares’ Elements of Orthoepy, among many others—were printed over the century. Each asserted a notion of proper speech, intonation, correct syntax, and standardized diction. “The power of the press was to act as prime agency in the dissemination of this intended phonemic ‘remedy’” (Mugglestone 2003: 29). Just as it was for their Renaissance predecessors, at issue for many Britons engaged in these types of studies was the normalization of English and its vocal production. For the Georgian elocutionists, it was an urgent matter of national importance. Sheridan, elocutionist and father of dramatist and Member of Parliament Richard Brinsley Sheridan, used the subtitle of his 1780 General Dictionary of the English Language to announce the work’s intentions: “to establish a plain and permanent Standard of Pronunciation.” He went on to lament that while other European nations (France, Spain, and Italy among them) had “for more than a century been employed, with the utmost industry, in cultivating and regulating their speech[,] we still remain in the state of all barbarous countries in that respect, having left our’s [sic] wholly to chance” (Sheridan 1780: i). Any inquiry concerned with establishing a norm must in due course define what is aberrant, deviant, or defective. A comprehensive dictionary by no means, Sheridan’s Dictionary does contain entries that might be said to reveal his elocutionary and linguistic anxieties: “deform,” “deformity,” “disability,” “hesitation,” “speechless,” “stammer,” “stutter,” and “stutterer.” The varied cultural use of terms related to communication disorders demonstrate their relationship to the vexed history of vocal disability as both lived experience and as metaphor in Early Modern England. Take, for example, the word “lisp.” Alexander Pope’s now famous claim that he “lisp’d in numbers” (2006: l.128) as a child suggests

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not only Pope’s self-identification as poetic prodigy, but also reveals the way in which his era, following classical tradition, infantilized and diminished non-normative speech patterns and modalities, an attitude consistent with historical patterns that code disability as deviant by aligning it with femininity and childhood (Deutsch 1996: 41–2; GarlandThomson 1997: 27–8). Pope’s deployment of the vocal impediment here is further complicated by his physical deformity, but it is his emphasis on his speech that helps us understand how communication disorders registered culturally as remarkably multivalent and complex social markers during the eighteenth century.9

6.3. STUTTERING BETWEEN SENSIBILITY AND MOCKERY A thorough consideration of the cultural status of vocal disfluency in the eighteenth century cannot neglect to address that ubiquitous eighteenth-century moral, psychological, and aesthetic category known as “sensibility.” This is so in spite of the fact that the relation between stuttering and sensibility is hard to pin down; sometimes stuttering seems aligned with sensibility, and at other times it registers a lack of moral sense. As for the former case, toward the end of one supposedly true account of shipwreck and marooning, the author aligns heightened sensibility and moral gratitude with the inability to speak: “I endeavoured to stammer out my acknowledgements, but my sentiment was too strong for me. Lively emotions are but ill expressed by words. Mr. Grant embraced me; ‘It is a trifle not worth mentioning (said he); but you have too much sensibility.’ … I was forced to keep the silence imposed on me; but my heart and eyes were eloquent” (Dubois-Fontanelle 1771: 200). Here, a failure to speak registers the moral worth of the recipient. For to be able to articulate one’s gratitude in a situation like this would, ironically, signal a lack of gratitude because the ability to carefully frame one’s speech in accordance with the formal rules of expression would suggest that the recipient is not sufficiently overcome with emotion. A well-framed and articulate expression of thanks would signal to the giver that the beneficiary of his or her largess was living in the social, political, and otherwise scripted domain of politeness; by not speaking, by stammering, the recipient transmits the message that he or she is beyond ordinary social conventions and in a realm of almost spiritual grace and thanks. So the passage above offers a more than casual deployment of the terms “stammer” and “sensibility.”10 Composers of imaginative literature and physicians alike had long perceived a connection between heightened sensibility and stuttering or stammering. George Cheyne, whose theory of nerves, as Juliet McMaster has put it, constituted “a physical model of the emotional life,” said that those who stutter, stammer, or hesitate “are quick, prompt, and passionate; are all of weak Nerves; have a great Degree of Sensibility; are quick Thinkers, feel Pleasure or Pain the most readily, and are of most lively Imagination” (Cheyne 1734: 104–5; McMaster 2004: 5). Even after sensibility’s heyday had passed, physicians were still remarking that stuttering was common “in those who are endowed with what is figuratively called great sensibility of mind” (Crichton 1798: 80). Jeffrey Wollock and R. W. Rieber observe of Edward Warren—“the first American to write a scientific paper on the problem of stuttering” (1977: 14)—that he was particularly drawn to the idea that stuttering was a characteristic of people who are “subjects of those ardent emotions that are occasional causes of stammering in good speakers” (1977: 14). They add that for Andrew Combe, an early nineteenthcentury stuttering researcher, some stutterers exhibited a “defective organization of the personality, producing a disproportionate amount of energy or sensibility that leads to

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an imbalance between the passions and the will … Since the emotion of the stutterer was interfering with his will to speak, it must be replaced by new emotions, appropriate to the actions that ought to be carried out” (quoted in Rieber and Wollock 1977: 15–16). What had in the eighteenth century been an implicit link between the inability to speak and emotional intensity would appear to have become by the nineteenth century an explicit theory involving emotion’s ability to preclude or disrupt speech. How deeply influential or prophetic the culture of sensibility was in terms of later emotional and psychic etiologies of vocal disability is a matter that warrants further inquiry. For writers like Cheyne, for later speech pathologists, and for many novelists, the failure of the voice marked intensity of feeling in a way that other physiological expressions could not; those who stutter or stammer must, therefore, often be in a heightened state of sensibility. This plugged into a deeper and more complex set of claims about the bond between language and our inner, emotional lives; as Johann Gottfried Herder put it, our voices and our cries are “the elements of all emotion” ([1772] 1966: 96). Given that positive connotations were assigned to quickness of feeling and authenticity of emotional expression within the culture of sensibility, one would perhaps expect to find those afflicted with speech impediments of one kind or another praised, or at least respected, for their uniqueness. Such a reception would have paralleled those given to emotional outbursts celebrated within the context of the period’s artistic Sturm und Drang, in which free expression was encouraged as a reaction to the supposed restraints of Enlightenment rationalism and in which involuntary displays of inner emotional turmoil were regarded as indices of moral sentiments. But those afflicted with speech impediments were on the whole more likely to be portrayed in popular culture as comically bereft of intelligence and/or moral sense; of course, what it meant to be unintelligent or morally bankrupt varied according to the standards set by the one doing the portraying. Because speech figured as one of the sites wherein human difference could be apprehended, it should come as no surprise that speech disorders such as lisping and stuttering appear in satirical or comic representations. Jest books of the era, as Simon Dickie points out, almost always included some jokes poking fun at stutterers (2011: 18). The tradition that laughed at disabled, deformed, or so-called freakish figures in Renaissance courts filtered down through Early Modern print culture in such texts, which placed stutterers alongside dwarfs, hunchbacks, and acrobats as objects of amusement. “Any physical peculiarity,” Dickie argues, “any disability or incapacity, any stutter, lameness, or blindness made one a standing joke—a reminder, perhaps, of the hilarious intransigence of nature, of the physicality that lay behind all attempts at human dignity” (2011: 102). Examples of such mockery abound in the literature. For instance, in Richard Graves’ The Spiritual Quixote, there is the appropriately named “Parson Pottle” (or inappropriately named, depending on how you look at it): he smokes a “pipe,” flies into a “perilous passion” while speaking of the Church’s “po-po-power” to “pu-pu-pu-punish” Presbyterians, and generally looks the fool because of his stutter (Graves 1774: 104–6). Graves here in fact exploits the typical association of sense and stuttering—his “passion” leads him, we are meant to understand, to stumble over the letter “P”—but it gets comically deflated through, first, Graves’ overly alliterative prose and, second, the bathetic juxtaposition of low and high, here manifested in Pottle’s hesitant, even recalcitrant voice stumbling over imperious claims about religious dissent. Or in John Cleland’s Fanny Hill we read that Fanny and her consorts effectively rape a mentally disabled young man, “Good-natured Dick”—although Cleland presents it as comic and erotic. Dick is described as being a “perfect changeling, or idiot, [who]

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stammered so that there was no understanding even those sounds his half-a-dozen, at most, animal ideas prompted him to utter” (Cleland 1749/2001: 197). Further attention might be paid to the many foolish stuttering characters—presented as simpletons, or hypocrites, or sycophants, or lawyers, or any of a number of other easily ridiculed communities—that appeared on the stage, particularly in the later eighteenth century. We will simply note that perhaps the most notable example of such figures is the imbecilic stuttering judge, Don Curzio, in The Marriage of Figaro (1786). So not only were stuttering or stammering excluded from the range of somatic expressions indicative of heightened sensibility; stutterers were also routinely mocked in eighteenth-century literature. What do such things tell us about the limits of sensibility and the status of the disabled in popular culture? Tobin Siebers (2008) trenchantly observes that the figure of “disability operates as an othering other. It represents a diacritical marker of difference that secures inferior, marginal, or minority status, while not having its presence as a marker acknowledged in the process” (2008: 6). So it often was the case on the eighteenth-century stage that villains and fools were villainous or foolish precisely to the extent that they manifested some type of speech impediment. Of the relationship between stuttering and sensibility more broadly, something similar to what Siebers argues might also be said. Notwithstanding an apparent, if not obvious philosophical harmony between the stutterer and the person of genuine sensibility— where subjects are understood as bodies that transparently reveal emotional or psychic interiority—the eighteenth century seems to have used stuttering, at times, to mark the point at which sensibility was no longer virtuous, when the body’s expressiveness became problematic. Stuttering was a figure whereat and wherein was tested the value of that seamless movement between inner and outer life so idealized by the culture of sensibility. Stutterers suggested that the passage from inner to outer ought to be discouraged, or at least managed. It is for this reason that the elocutionary movement overlaps so considerably with the culture of politeness and why both elocution and the polishing of manners seem so far from the culture of sensibility, at least in its ideal form. However much vocal disability might have signified a genuine feeling of pain or compassion, the stammering tongue or mouth would never be fully accepted in the way that tears, blushes, or other bodily manifestations of inner turmoil would be. If the century’s experimental but ultimately abortive alignment of sensibility and stuttering had any silver lining, it may have been that this alignment was the precondition for a more robust understanding and widespread acceptance of the psychic and neurologic etiologies of some vocal impediments.

6.4. THELWALL AND THE FUTURE(S) OF SPEECH PATHOLOGY By the 1790s, the elocutionary movement’s focus on rhetoric and oratory as curatives for communication disorders expanded to include Enlightenment perspectives on natural science and medicine. The fiery orator and writer John Thelwall (1764–1834) exemplified this shift in elocutionary theory and practice, and the tenor of his writings heralded the gradual medicalization of speech disorders into the nineteenth century and beyond. After nearly a decade of ministerial persecution for radical speeches and governmental agitation, Thelwall’s political career ended in a highly publicized 1794 sedition trial. Though he was acquitted, Thelwall would be forever haunted by his detention in both the Tower of London and Newgate Prison. Abandoning London and his public reformist

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agenda, he spent several years in the west and south of England, settling for a time in Wales on the banks of the river Wye, where he lectured and wrote treatises on classical oratory. As Judith Thompson notes, during this period he “became extremely successful, publishing case studies and theories of utterance and ‘rhythmus’ and once again attracting crowds” (2001: 18). Thelwall’s pastoral retreat allowed him to parlay these activities into a new professional identity. Trading lectures on political reform for those on elocution and rhetoric, he returned to London with a strong reputation as a healer of speech defects and plans to open a clinic, which he did in 1801.11 By 1814, he had rebranded himself as “Professor of the Science and Practice of Elocution.” The particular language of his chosen title is suggestive of the way in which he had crafted a new profession grounded in empirical methods and practical application. Indeed, Thelwall is now recognized as the first professional speech therapist in British history, and his 1810 Letter to Henry Cline, Esq. on Imperfect Developments of the Faculties, Mental and Moral, as Well as Constitutional and Organic; and on the Treatment of Impediments of Speech is among the first modern medical treatises dedicated to speech disorders. Moreover, he persists for many historians of the discipline as a key transitional figure in the story of modern speech pathology as a specialized field (Rockey 1980: 13). Building upon his early political ideologies, Thelwall based his approach to speech therapy on democratic principles, stressing individual participation in public discourse, civic life, and social interaction (Richman 2018). Just as Mason urged speakers to improve their elocution by following the example of Demosthenes, Thelwall promoted self-improvement and self-regulation as the key to fluency and eloquence. Certain speech disorders, he insisted, could be overcome, and with “diligence and perseverance, the habit of regular utterance will, progressively, be formed” (Thelwall 1810: 59). What is crucial here is the focus upon speech regulation and habit. Thelwall’s therapeutic methods echo the Early Modern elocutionary movement’s drive toward a vocal norm and its parallel campaign for linguistic standardization. Moreover, he preserves the political import found in the elocutionary writings of Mason and Sheridan by insisting that his aims were “to vindicate the right of diffusing those principles, that were to give to the Mute, and to the convulsive Stammerer, the free exercise and enjoyment of a faculty, which constitutes the essential attributes of our species” (Thelwall 1810: 17). For Thelwall, speech becomes a mechanism for self-expression and self-governance. But more crucially, we again encounter the Enlightenment assertion that speech characterizes the very essence of human identity. Yet for all their political inflections, Thelwall’s writings offer the most explicit framing of speech disorders as a biological and medical concern rather than a pedagogical or cultural one. He takes pleasure in announcing his intention to move beyond the approaches of earlier Georgian elocutionists by appealing to the principles of empirical study: In the prosecution of this object, it is by no means my intention to confine myself to the limits of the former example, or to tread in the beaten paths of my predecessors. I shall not satisfy myself with a mere compilation from the works of Rhetoricians and Grammarians, or with detailing the ill-digested and incongruous rules of Art, which, it is hazarding little to assert—have more frequently been repeated than understood. I … shall attempt to establish my doctrines upon the settled principles of Science, and demonstrate the essential elements of Elocution as a branch of Natural Philosophy. (Thelwall 1805: 1) Casting his predecessors as hopelessly devoted to outdated and unproven methods, he declares an intention to move the entire field away from “the ill-digested and incongruous

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rules of Art” toward another realm of study and practice entirely. Such an assertion would be bold enough, but Thelwall’s desire to reform elocutionary discourse “upon the settled principles of Science” and to recast “Elocution as a branch of Natural Philosophy” illustrates perfectly Michel Foucault’s reading of the eighteenth century’s bio-political turn, where human deformity comes under the gaze of “classificatory medicine” and knowledge of the body moves from the realm of the “philosophical” to that of the “historical” (Foucault 1994: 10, 5). Still, Thelwall’s reframing of speech pathology is less a complete conceptual departure than it is a transitional flashpoint. Like many of the Georgian elocutionists we highlight above, he, too, employs taxonomy strategically. But he does so for the express purpose of medical diagnosis and therapeutic cure. In an outline for one of his lectures, he identifies what he calls “Habitual Impediments—Lisping—Speaking thick—Snuffling— Stammering—Stuttering—Hesitation and Suppression of the Voice—their Causes and respective Remedies” (Thelwall 1805: i). This diagnostic focus of Thelwall’s approach to vocal disability, moreover, can be discerned in the titles of many of his elocutionary works: for example, his 1814 work, Results of Experience in the Treatment of Cases of Defective Utterance, from Deficiencies in the Roof of the Mouth, and other Imperfections and Mal-conformations of the Organs of Speech; with Observations on Cases of Amentia, and tardy and imperfect Developments of the Faculties. Here, Thelwall employs the diction and phraseology of those professionals actively engaged in matters of “physick” and medicine by highlighting “observations,” “treatment,” “case” studies, and “results.” Close attention to Thelwall’s language does reveal a debt to the Galenic rendering of human speech that appears in Renaissance and Enlightenment medical discourse, even if such language is sublimated by Georgian elocutionists. But the commitment to case study and practical application remains paramount in all of his writing on speech disorders during this period, and it constitutes an important historical shift. As the Renaissance reliance on both Galenic physiology and rhetorical performance gave way to Enlightenment materialism and linguistic standardization, the elocutionist movement of the eighteenth century opened new spaces for the rise of alternative treatment modalities in speech therapy and for speech pathology to emerge as a distinct vocation. But Thelwall does not entirely abandon the moral resonance of disability that tended to dominate medieval and Renaissance conceptions of human defect and deformity. Rather, here he gathers together the moral with the medical, suggesting even a turn to the psychological approach to speech therapy that will dominate the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The roots of such constructions are clear in the eighteenthcentury elocutionary movement, as is the lingering anxiety over human difference and the establishment of the norm.

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CHAPTER SEVEN

Learning Difficulties Intellectual Disability in the Long Eighteenth Century SIMON JARRETT AND C. F. GOODEY

Encountering eighteenth-century primary sources that mention idiots, changelings, and fools, or people described as stupid, dull, or feeble-minded, can encourage historians to believe that they have identified early prototypes of those labeled as intellectually disabled in the twenty-first century. These eighteenth-century meanings are more complex than that, and do not offer a logical and unbending ancestral line over three centuries to today. This chapter will examine the etymological complexity of the period and the pathologizing process—of both language and people—that arose in its midst. We confine ourselves chiefly here to literary texts—poetry, drama, and the novel— while also referencing some of their philosophical and medical referents. We do so because literature is the environment where a multiplicity of labels, with their varied meanings, is most likely to flourish, and where the difference between these and the conceptualization of intellectual disability as a specifically modern and “scientific” phenomenon of the natural world is at its most obvious. The eighteenth century is instructive because it helps to expose not only the contrast between the Early Modern and the Modern, but also the transition from Early Modern to Modern. In order to view this broad historical shift, it is necessary to take a generous view of periodization. The period known to historians as “the long eighteenth century” is especially long in our case. Its political inception in 1689 also marks roughly the point at which, in the prototypical field of psychology, an intense interaction begins between the revolutionary science of the period (particularly in medicine) and the incidence of diabolic explanations for individual human behaviors. This takes a long time to play out, and is only fully achieved with the second scientific revolution, that of the mid-nineteenth century, when the “preternatural” causes evoking the Devil are finally absorbed into the concept of the “abnormal,” thus setting out broad terms for the conceptualizations we are familiar with today. First of all, we must take into account the historical difference in semantic habits. At the beginning of our period, the boundaries of meaning between one word and another were less closely patrolled—and the jostling nexus of meanings within a single word more evocative—than they are since the era of the dictionary. A gradual process toward tighter control was only just beginning at the start of the seventeenth century, and was

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not fully embedded until toward the end of our period. The potential ambiguities of the terminology must therefore be taken into account. Secondly, avoiding retrospective diagnosis is taught as standard practice in the history of physical medicine. When an eighteenth-century medical textbook describes a disease— or alternatively some physical disability—whose name is familiar to us in the twenty first century, how do we know it is referring to the same condition that we ourselves recognize? It is necessary to check the context. Is the list of descriptive symptoms attached to the label the same as the list that applies today? If not, what did the label indicate at that time? The same procedure is doubly necessary with intellectual and learning disability, since we are not discussing a visible entity—the body—but an invisible and more radically contested one—the mind; a moveable feast par excellence. More can go wrong in the historical interpretation of the text. When a text mentions idiots or fools or talks of stupidity or dullness—or, indeed, of intellectual ability and intelligence—we cannot know it is referring to the same sort of person that equivalent modern terms such as intellectual ability/disability refer to, unless we also investigate what descriptors were attached to it in that context. Thirdly, even within our own contemporary context, “intellectual disability” or (in a UK context) “learning disability,” or any other collateral term, is not, despite the best efforts of psychologists, a diagnosis—certainly not in the way that, for example, “influenza” or “cerebral palsy” (that is to say, a physical illness or disability) is a diagnosis. Rather, it is a descriptor that changes according to contemporary social context, and even according to the specific medical or psychological regime (which will be one among many) that purports to be making a diagnosis. If we look at the descriptors in this cross-sectional way across the world of the present, no doubt we will find some rough-and-ready common ingredients to all of the variations, and thus an “essence” of intellectual disability. Once we add historical labels and their listed characteristics to the mix, however, any such element of family resemblance consequently starts to diminish, and in the very long term (not only in the unknowns of prehistory, but also some way into the written record) it tends to zero. Avoiding these pitfalls—which together amount to claiming that intellectual disability can be classified scientifically as a permanent item in nature, a “natural kind”—is only step one. If historical research cannot be done without a thorough process of deconstruction, it is also true that eventually it becomes necessary to reconstruct. The aim of scholarship is to remake those meanings, in the relevant form as understood by people in the period under discussion. And this can only be done by situating ourselves within the particular historical context, and supposing ourselves to be participants in that discussion, with an outlook that belongs to the period rather than our own, with the kind of contextual knowledge that was possessed or claimed by people who lived at the time, and constrained by the particular metaphysical limits that circumscribed it. That way, we might also get to find out the metaphysical limits to our own knowledge: that is to say, the things that we cannot possibly even think—not even to entertain as fantasy—but that might at some future point become reality. Historical scholarship and its procedures thus feed a direct line into the legal, political, and policy aspects of intellectual disability and impact on them.

7.1. PRECURSORS TO THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY It will be necessary to summarize, then, the roots of the process—the symptoms and characteristics attached to those labels—in the century leading up to our starting point,

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the so-called Glorious Revolution of 1689, and the publication of John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. In the late medieval era, the word “idiot” (idiota in Latin) had signified a broad sector of the population. It meant the illiterate in general, and often illiterate only in Latin rather than the vernacular. It also meant a layperson, as opposed to an expert in the professions such as medicine and law, or, in ecclesiastical terms, a novitiate (Jesus’ disciples were termed idiots) (Stock 1983; Clanchy 2013). Only in a then-esoteric corner of medieval culture was it used to denote something more modern-looking: that is, incompetence in property law—though here, too, it existed alongside a plethora of other terms indicating madness, with which it partly overlapped (Buhrer 2014). This latter sense lay dormant for a long time, and was only resuscitated in the late sixteenth century, as the accidental outcome of a legal process that the Tudor state revived and expanded in order to replenish its coffers, and those of its favored elite individuals, with fees due for the guardianship of incompetents. This led to the term taking center stage at the hands of law students at the Inns of Court, among them many poets and writers, including John Donne (Goodey 2011). It is important to realize that this was not a metaphorical reference to some distinct preexisting population with a pathological identity, but a major ingredient in its formation, more or less from scratch. Thus, when for Macbeth life becomes both “a poor player that struts and frets his hour upon the stage” and “a tale told by an idiot,” the core image is that of a bad, inexpert actor as much as a pathological type that was only just then at the very start of taking shape. Inasmuch as the tale signifies “nothing,” it points to another feature of the new “idiot” and his distinction from the madman. Expanding over the course of the seventeenth century, encouraged by the rise of Cartesianism, this was the notion of an inner or mental absence or deficiency. Donne, as a law student, had already asked in his elegy The Dream to be “mad with much heart” rather than “idiot with none” (the heart being the organ of thinking—in this case, about an absent mistress) (Donne [1633] 1986). In this sense, idiocy can often be observed overlapping with melancholia and what we might now call depression. The sharper distinction that came about in this way between madness and “idiocy from birth” becomes clearer over the next century, but only gradually. In the late seventeenth century, the word “idiot” was still entangled with those former meanings, with much of its residual fluidity still in place. Once we understand what the previous semantic situation was and take a view forwards from there rather than backwards from our own, it becomes quite possible that Locke, for example, when he mentions “idiots” in the Essay, still incorporates a substantial element of the population (unskilled workers, landless laborers, and servants, at the very least) within the definitional boundary of that term. The word “changeling” has an equally complex history. By the mid-eighteenth century, it began to develop a meaning broadly synonymous with the modern concept of intellectual disability. It had arisen at the end of the sixteenth century meaning something very different. The gentry at court in Book 1 of Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590) laugh at the Red Cross Knight when he first turns up, because he is to all appearances a peasant. After proving himself with glorious deeds, it turns out all of a sudden that he is a “changeling”—descended from St. George rather than from the ploughman he had previously thought his father (Spenser [1590] 1987). The changeling here is therefore an intelligent person masquerading as an unintelligent person. Nevertheless, by 1627, the concept of cradle-swapping is being used in the reverse sense by Michael Drayton in his poem Nymphidia (1627), which mocks popular beliefs about fairies:

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When a child haps to be got, Which after proves an idiot … Say, that the Fairy left this elf, And took away the other. (Drayton [1627] 1961: lines 73–80) The idiocy here, while remaining relevant only to a restricted class, and still confined to a poetic trope, signifies a more all-embracing kind of incompetence than a simple notion of “non-expert.” By 1689, Locke is using the word “changeling” in what seems a near-synonymous sense with the modern one, as do his eighteenth-century literary followers referred to below. Reversing out the Spenserian picture, Locke’s “changeling” is the cognitively null product of a normal human being. These changelings seem synonymous with modern ideas of the intellectually disabled person inasmuch as they are incapable of acquiring knowledge empirically in the way prescribed by Locke’s theory. In terms of causation, also attached to the cradle-swapping explanation was a burgeoning religious theory of Satanic semen-swapping. It surfaces in today’s psychiatry in the form of the bereavement analogy—you must grieve for the child you wanted but did not have (Goodey and Stainton 2001). This is an example of the emergence of modern psychiatry’s explanations, suitably secularized along the way, from developments within late seventeenth-century theology. In addition, with its first appearances in the 1590s, the word changeling was hijacked to mean someone who, although by no means cognitively impaired, changes their mind often and does not have stable “ideas.” The latter term, in that era, signified something like shared general principles: “ideas” were by definition the cognitive and moral property of the social and religious elite, and changeability the characteristic of the mob (the word is derived from the Latin mobile vulgus, the distracted crowd). Ben Jonson was already using changeling in this sense in The Alchemist (1610); in the same play “idiots” also appear, still meaning non-experts (here, those who know nothing about alchemy). Aside from these noun labels, the adjectival descriptive characteristics have their own history, with seeds in Early Modern medicine that spring up on the threshold of our period and flourish in the poetry of Dryden. The commonly used word stolid described, again, the lower classes in general, while stupid was chiefly a medical term. In a pre-Cartesian view of the world, “stupid” could refer equally, and sometimes simultaneously, to the lazy motion of muscles and to a condition of the brain (Lewis Carroll and even Joseph Conrad can still be found using the word in this quasi-physical sense). In the seventeenth century, its medical usage was starting to become more exclusively psychiatric, albeit as a description of melancholia. One of the factors in this reconstruction of psychiatric terms seems to have been literary, inasmuch as the leading medical authority on “stupidity” as melancholia, Thomas Willis, was a close friend of Dryden. Dryden’s favorite mocking term, “stupid,” picks up on satirical usages of this and other terms in the Roman drama of Plautus; it is evident from Willis’ medical texts that he was using the same, literary sources—thus building Early Modern psychiatric categories out of ancient social banter (Plautus 1950: line 1088). By the end of the century, two new factors had come into play. The Cartesian split between mind and body had fully taken hold, and the Devil was enjoying a fertile relationship with the rise of the Royal Society. This enabled melancholic stupidity to be re-read as a cognitive characteristic of the “changeling” and his putative origins in semen-swapping. The jobbing poet and religious “enthusiast” Samuel Pordage slips

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in precisely this semantic twist in his English translation of Willis’ Latin medical text (Goodey 2011: 269). “Dull” (from the Latin hebetes), similarly, applied initially to the external senses (sight, hearing, etc.), and was only now being extended to the “internal” senses (as the cognitive faculties were also known). What, then, about that ubiquitous term, “fool?” The above terms had multiple meanings that only lightly overlapped. “Fool” signifies even more things, and occurs far more frequently. It may appear that by being so freely applied as an insult, it is also metaphorical (i.e. that it refers to some other discrete and pathological population). With its etymology in theological discourse, however (the Latin word follis meant a bellows, used to power the organ in the monastery chapel—hence a windbag), it has no other referent than the insulted person as such. Their loquacity was simply in inverse proportion to the sense they made. This was particularly the insult for someone holding a rival theological opinion. Heresy automatically implied atheism. It occupied the same social position in medieval society as cognitive deficiency today, denoting someone cast out even from among outcasts. Regularly cited was the phrase from Psalm 14.1: “The fool hath said in his heart there is no God”—usually meaning that the heretic denied one particular argument (the “ontological proof”) for the existence of God (Davies 1998). Although this has a cognitive component (one understands with the heart), it is secondary to the main purpose of the insult. Others were fools in the sense of “mad” or (a contemporary term) the “distracted.” Others still were fools by adoption of a personality that served great houses and the court, absorbing the characteristics listed in the job description for a jester. By extension, this medieval term was also used in the phrase “natural fool,” yet this figure, too, is not synonymous with modern concepts. That is because that word “natural” also has to be investigated and contextualized on its own account. Unlike its role in modern biological discourse, before the mid-sixteenth century, nature did not indicate determinism. The latter role was reserved for direct action coming from God. Nor did it mean the permanence of a modern-style birth-to-death condition, since any condition was curable, from the same source (“providence”); the already existing phrase “idiot from birth” was a legal, not a psychological formulation (it held the prospect of more secure guardianship fees than mere madness). Human “nature,” and hence the nature of the “natural” fool, was what we would today more likely call “second nature”; in other words, it was dispositional. The eighteenth century edged toward a more deterministic and “scientific” account of nature, but chiefly we owe the latter to the mid-nineteenth century. We see Locke using the phrase “natural fool” to cover both his non-expert “idiots” and his preternatural “changelings” as a catchall term, alongside descriptors such as “dull” and “stupid,” on the one hand not clearly demarcating among them, but on the other hand enhancing the line of difference between certain people as a whole and the majority of the population (Locke [1689] 1975: 63). We can say, then, that the outlines of something like a unified concept are in place by 1690. Its synonymy with our own is still a matter of doubt, and it is in that light that we must read our eighteenth-century primary sources, in which any such synonymy begins to unfold only slowly.

7.2. THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY As Locke grappled with the origins of human understanding and the minds through which it was manifested, multiple meanings, explanations, and interpretations of dull, ignorant, incapacitated, limited, or even absent minds jostled for position. Inquiry into

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the nature and quality of people’s minds began to assume importance and attract a level of attention that the prevailing dichotomy of fine-minded elite versus idiotic poor could no longer satisfy. A sense of this transition can be gleaned from John Bunyan’s second book of The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678/84), published just five years before Locke’s essay. This allegorical account of the journey of Christian (and later his wife Christiana) to reach the everlasting kingdom elucidated the character—or characteristics—of the good Christian, and how he or she could overcome both themselves and the snares and wiles of the world to be saved. Bunyan brought alive in the minds of his humble readers his Calvinist creed of salvation through grace, portrayed as lived experience. A central character in the final journey of Christiana is Mr. Feeble Mind, rescued from the thieving giant Slay Good by their guide, Mr. Great Heart, and his friends. Feeble Mind describes himself as a “sickly man,” from the town of Uncertain: “I am a man of no strength at all, of Body, nor yet of Mind, but would, if I could, though I can but crawl, spend my life in the Pilgrim’s way.” His fate, and destiny, are accepted to be part of the common fate of all: “Mr. Great Heart … said, Come, Mr. Feeble Mind, pray do you go along with us. I will be your Conductor, and you shall fare as the rest.” Great Heart states that it is part of his commission “to comfort the feeble-minded, and to support the weak” (Bunyan [1678/84] 2008: 268–72). As they arrive at the fields adjoining the celestial kingdom, Great Heart assures the shepherds who greet them that, though weak in mind, Feeble Mind is true in heart, and has shown the will “not to be left behind” (286). When Mr. Feeble Mind is eventually called to the other side, he calls his friends to his deathbed to assure them that he will leave his feeble mind behind, “for that I shall have no need of it in the place whither I go.” He asks Mr. Valiant to bury it in a dunghill. And so Feeble Mind passes into the kingdom of heaven (310). Bunyan’s Feeble Mind conveys an Early Modern concept of feebleness, and is not of course the feeble-minded person that would be constructed as a category by medical men in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Trent 1995). There should be no ahistorical “discovery” of an early medical gaze in Bunyan’s work: the name is significant, but not at all modern. A feeble mind in Bunyan’s sense was a mind that lacked strength in both moral and intellectual terms, with little power of resistance. Mr. Feeble Mind represents the paramount Christian virtue of perseverance. A person’s afterlife destination has been determined by God, and no amount of good works by that person will guarantee them a place in heaven. Despite this, however, it is each individual’s duty to keep going, to “have faith” in the hope that they are one of the chosen. Any Christian, of whatever capacities, would be subject to vacillation and doubt on this score. That is why Feeble Mind’s origins lie in the town of Uncertain. In this sense, he was a symbolic type of fool— guileless, easily exploitable, slow to learn, and always struggling to grasp concepts that required some level of intellectual faculty. Yet feeble minds were also capable of holding other qualities, such as truthfulness, honesty, good-heartedness, and reliability. Though at risk of mental and moral disintegration through satanic guile, there was a route to salvation and a capacity for Christian goodness in a person with this type of slow, dull, feeble mind, given a good heart and support from those around them. Feeble Mind could not fully grasp the weighty duties required by the pilgrim seeking grace, but his heart was true enough to put him on the road to eternal salvation, even if, like a child, he had to “crawl” and be carried some of the way (Bunyan [1678/84] 2008: 269). Bunyan’s concept of the dimwitted but morally admirable faithful pilgrim would endure as a persistent trope of eighteenth-century literature, and would also appear in the sermons of Wesley

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and Whitefield as they led the “great awakening” of the Methodist revival in mid-century. The character was often held up in contradistinction to the knowingly sinful, morally reproachable, and devious man of learning, wealth, and education. Although Bunyan saw possible redemption in the intellectually and morally feeble, the late medieval idea that the broad proportion of the population who were illiterate and poor constituted an idiotic mass persisted. It was applied particularly to the rural population of the laboring poor, who were depicted as low-brained figures of fun. In cheap popular drama aimed at mass audiences, such as Thomas Doggett’s Hob, or the country wake: a farce (1715), characters called Hob and Dick became engaged in cudgel fights with their neighbors Puzzel Pate and Roger, with a prize for the first to break the skull of another. No matter how hard their skulls were hit, they came back, still alive, for more. As Puzzel Pate put it, “I have had enough on ’en already, for he broke my Head but last week” (Doggett 1715: 26–7). The perception was that there was little of value to be damaged inside the countryman’s head. The idea that the rural poor were thick-skulled idiots with no brain to damage reached its fictional apotheosis in the churchyard battle in Fielding’s Tom Jones (1749), where the skull of a dead person and of a living yokel collide, revealing no discernible difference between them: Molly pursued her victory, and catching up a skull which lay on the side of a grave, discharged it with such fury, that having hit a taylor on the head, the two skulls sent equally forth a hollow sound at their meeting, and the taylor took presently measure of his length on the ground, where the skulls lay side by side, and it was doubtful which was the most valuable of the two. (Fielding [1749] 1966: 173) However, over the century, there was an increasing recognition that idiocy was more nuanced than this. The countryman might appear idiotic, due to lack of experience and education, but most had the capacity to learn, and could demonstrate wit and intelligence, to the surprise of the urban sophisticate. A mid-century joke in a popular jest book has Beau Nash encountering an apparently gormless country porter, whom he abuses and tells mockingly to find “a greater fool than yourself.” When the porter returns with the mayor of the town, Nash appreciates the conceit and asks him, “Being a poor Man, what Business have you with Wit?” He and the newly respected countryman agree that too much wit only brings misfortune to rich and poor, while both rich and poor fools prosper. Nash gives him a guinea, and advises him to “go Home, and study Stupidity” (“Nash” 1763: 40–2). Empathy here is predicated on shared intelligence rather than class, idiocy a changeable and corrigible phenomenon. A clear distinction began to develop between the “real” idiot and those labeled as idiotic because of their foolish and exasperating behavior. As the author of the cheap, popular “ramble novel” Tom Fool (1760) put it three years before the Nash joke: By Ideots I don’t mean those unhappy objects, whose defective Organs makes them May-games to the sounder-formed part of the World. I mean … that Society of men, who are nicknamed Ideots by their Wives, their Brothers, their Friends, their Partners, Masters and kept Mistresses. (“Fool” 1760: 72) A divide was appearing between the incorrigible born idiot and the uneducated but functioning—or potentially improvable—fool, country or otherwise, who could be lampooned but not pathologized as an idiot. This growing divergence separating pathological and mundane uses of the term idiot was underpinned by an interdependence, and common roots, between the two usages. A wife could not abuse her husband as an

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idiot without the separate pathological category to which the word refers. At the same time, the pathological category was a distillation of previous colloquial notions of general ignorance. A succession of dim but amiable characters appeared in fiction, not defective in the sense that their brains and thinking capacities were damaged or absent, but limited and slow in their thinking. Their restricted mental capacities were often compensated for by welcome extra capacities elsewhere, particularly in the arena of physical prowess. In Tom Fool, the proliferation of the Fool family is attributed to “Nature making amends for the Deficiency of Head, by a Superabundancy in other parts” (“Fool” 1760: 3). Tom Fool is intellectually simple but physically handsome and attractive. As a lady’s maid comments, after catching him “unlaced” one day, he’s such an ignoramus, and so bashful … he looked so simple, and so innocent, that if I had been to be ravished by him, I must have forgiven him. (“Fool” 1760: 26) In Cleland’s Memoirs of a woman of pleasure, also known as Fanny Hill (1748/9), the eponymous heroine seduces a servant named Will, fresh from the country. As well as being a “very handsome young lad … fresh as a rose, well shaped and clean limbed,” he is also a “modest, innocent … blushing simpleton … in a strain of perfect nature” ([1748/9] 1994: 92–3). When Fanny unbuttons Will’s breeches, his fore-flap flies open, and she sees emerge with wonder and surprise … not the plaything of a boy, not the weapon of a man, but a maypole of so enormous a standard that, had proportions been observed, it must have belonged to a young giant. ([1748/49] 1994: 94) The simpleton Will is prodigiously endowed, and an excellent lover. Cleland emphasizes the association of sexual endowment with limited mental capacity, referring to the popular saying “a fool’s bauble is a Lady’s play fellow” (192), with bauble being, as slang dictionaries recorded, a street word for testicle (Grose 1788). The reason for the belief in an idiot’s exceptionally sized genitalia was the trope of the compensatory faculty, where nature … made him amends, in her best bodily gifts, for her denial of the sublime intellectual ones … in short had done so much for him in these parts that she perhaps held herself acquitted in doing so little for his head. (Cleland [1748/49] 1994: 191–2) There was a place in Georgian society for the intellectually limited but physically capable simple man, and their differentiation from “real” idiots was becoming clear. “Real idiots” were characterized in a number of ways. The most extreme and enduring image of the idiot body and its incontinence was the gaping, driveling mouth. The open mouth signified not only poor control over facial features and expression, but also a dull puzzlement at what was going on. Robert Nixon, the protagonist of the immensely popular 1715 almanac Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy, was a “sort of an idiot” from the reign of Charles II, widely believed to have the power to foresee momentous political events. Nixon was able to deliver prophecy with “gravity and solemnity … speaking plainly and sensibly,” despite being a “Drivler [who] could not speak common sense when he was uninspired” (Nixon 1715: 3–5). As a typical driveling idiot, Nixon displayed unrestrained verbosity and greedy, uncontrolled appetite, notorious for “licking and picking the meat” in the royal kitchens (Nixon 1715: 14–15). His supposedly lucid prophecies were explained as random divinely inspired glimmers that would enable him occasionally to speak deep truths among the mass of meaningless “drivel” he would usually express.

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The idiot body, in this formation, consumed greedily, and produced copiously, with no controls. The idea of the idiot having a lucky, random, lucid thought (used as an explanation of why irrational idiots sometimes appeared to speak sense) would take hold: “Well Mr. Random, a lucky thought may come into a fool’s head sometimes,” Smollet’s eponymous hero was told half a century later (Smollett [1748] 1975: 253). Unrestrained and meaningless verbosity, combined with physical drooling, were signifiers of idiocy even if deceptively framed within a handsome beauty. In a distinctly unmerry poem in the Merry Fellow jestbook in 1757 called “The Handsome Idiot,” the poet’s heart is taken the moment he casts his eye on the young woman “so heavenly fair, with eyes so bright,” but: … soon as e’er the beauteous idiot spoke, Forth from her coral lips such folly broke; Like balm the trickling nonsense heal’d my wound, And what her eyes enthralled, her tongue unbound. (“Lively” 1757: 29) This characterization resurfaced at the end of the century in Fanny Burney’s Camilla (1796). The father of the physically disabled and facially disfigured Eugenia arranges for her to encounter “accidentally” a young woman who is “a beautiful creature … fair, of a tall and striking figure, with features delicately regular” (Burney [1796] 1972: 306–8). Eugenia, devastated by what she perceives as her own ugliness, is then astonished to see the beautiful stranger break into nonsensical chatter. On being asked if she is well, she responds, “Give me a shilling!” while “the slaver dribbled unrestrained from her mouth, rendering utterly disgusting a chin that a statuary might have wished to model.” Eugenia understands immediately the moral message her father has arranged: “beauty, without mind, is more dreadful than any deformity” (Burney [1796] 1972: 309–11). Idiocy could be deceptive, but it would always become apparent, breaking out from any bodily disguise, the body unable to hold back its symbolic fluids, the mind unable to control its chuntering thoughtlessness. A gendered difference is evident: the beautiful-looking but slavering idiot woman irredeemably repulsive, the handsome male idiot an object of curious attraction. Just as the intellectually limited Tom Fool and Will were in part compensated for their intellectual deficiencies through excessive physical endowment, so a full-blown “real idiot” would be physically compensated to an even greater extent. Fanny Hill, after her escapades with Will, later encounters a youth named Good Natured Dick (Cleland [1748/49] 1994: 190). This “perfect changeling or idiot” stammering out “the sounds that his half-dozen animal ideas prompted him to utter,” though ragged, is “well made, stout, clean limbed.” Fanny and her friend seduce him, and find him: rich in personal treasures … of so tremendous a size that, prepared as we were to see something extraordinary, it still, out of measure, surpassed our expectation and astonished even me, who had not been used to trade in trifles. (190–1) Dick’s mental faculties are considerably more impaired than Will’s, so his physical compensation is proportionately greater. The idiot could hold irresistible sexual appeal. Notably absent from this discourse was any sense of dangerousness, disgust, or loathing directed toward the idiot body, and nor was the thought of sexual liaison with a certain type of idiot taboo. In contrast to the brainless but sexually well-endowed simpleton or idiot, the idiot could also be conceived as an emasculated and browbeaten victim, struggling

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to hold their  place in the social hierarchy, a comic figure, still a part of daily life, but consigned to its margins. This was most evident in the character of Simple Simon, a perennial antihero in the burgeoning popular chapbook literature. His story circulated as a ballad from at least the sixteenth century, and in print as a chapbook from 1764. Simple Simon characters were portrayed in various guises in chapbook literature, but were consistently distinguished as hilariously unable to achieve masculinity, condemned therefore to live inappropriately under the guiding hand of a kind mother or facing the blows of a shrewish, hectoring, permanently exasperated wife. In this sense, the idiot, by unconsciously subverting the gender order, threatened the social order, which was simultaneously amusing and alarming. A chapbook song about “Poor Simon,” a hapless simpleton living with his violent, hard-drinking wife Margery, shows him subjected to unremitting violence (Anon. 1775a: 21–4). Margery successively lugs his ears, rings his nose, “beat him till tears ran down to his hose,” and belabors him with a large cudgel. Each act of violence is in response to Simon’s acts of hopeless incapacity while trying to perform simple tasks (Anon 1775a: 21–2). Violence against Simple Simon was always extreme. In a later version, Margery hits him with a staff, “such a clank on the noddle, as made the blood spin,” ties him up and hauls him in a basket over a fire where he is smoked for the night, “let fly an earthen pot at his head, which caused the blood to run about his ears,” and whips him with a dog whip (Anon. 1775b: 4–6). He, meanwhile, stands passively by “like one who had neither sense nor reason,” gormless and insensible in the face of events “like one half-affronted out of his wits” (Anon. 1775b: 4–6). Unable to perform the tasks of a man, Simon’s stupidity threatens the livelihood and survival of the family and economic unit, to which he clings so precariously and ambivalently. However, each story ends with the intervention of neighbors: They sent for his wife, who came without fail Their peace was made o’er a jug of ale. After this drunken negotiation: The neighbours in merriment got him to bed That night no doubt he pleased his wife, For now he leads a happy life. (Anon. 1775a: 24) In another version: She … carries on beating him until neighbours came in, persuading Margery to be pacified … “A rascal,” said she, “I can set him about nothing, but thus he serves me.” Yet still they interceded for Simon, until she excused him. (Anon 1775b: 17) Neighbors impose themselves, but also assert Simon’s masculine sexual duty to satisfy his wife and claim his “proper” place. The idiot threat to the social order is thus averted, and happiness, order, prosperity, and stability are restored. These characterizations portrayed the simple idiot as a fool (and a hapless, annoying, useless fool at that), and yet situated him as the responsibility of the community. He must stay within it, be accorded some sort of status, the cruelty must stop, and he must be protected from himself and others. “Real” idiots, then, could be of the driveling, hopelessly mentally absent type; they could be good-natured, well-endowed sexual athletes (if unconsciously so); or they could be emasculated victims clinging precariously to community life, a nagging threat to social

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order through their haplessness. They could also be simple figures of fun, bit-part players in daily life whose eccentricities and absurdities fed the voracious appetite for amusement of the eighteenth-century observer. In Smollett’s 1748 novel Roderick Random, an incident occurs in which Random and his faithful—if dense—sidekick Strap are terrified one night by a monstrous raven, followed by a very old white-bearded man who cries “where is Ralpho? where is Ralpho?” Convinced they have seen ghosts, they find the next morning that the old man is an idiot who lives at the inn and was trying to reclaim his pet raven Ralpho (Smollett [1748] 1975: 66–8). The episode has no real point other than to ridicule all involved—Random, Strap, the idiot, and the raven. The character bears no narrative prosthetic other than as an object of laughter and a part of daily life, laughed at but not despised or loathed, bathed in a form of tolerant insouciance. There was therefore an emerging understanding throughout the century, in a number of guises, of a “real” or “true” idiot, defined not so much by class or standard of education but by an inability, through absence or deficiency of mind, to grasp the complexity of life as understood by others. These understandings were the seeds, if not the substance, of a pathology, although each of them characterized the idiot as harmless, and often amusing, and placed them, if precariously, within the social sphere rather than outside it. These characters were, however, in the Lockean sense, incapable of acquiring knowledge. This was part of a branching of thought about dullness of mind, which separated the lifelong true idiot from the dull-witted fool or simple person, who might improve through education or other forms of mental enrichment and who, whether they improved or not, could occupy a rung of the ladder of the social hierarchy. This “lesser fool’s” lack of mental acuity, as had been the case with Bunyan’s Feeble Mind, could be an indicator of simple moral goodness, just as genius and learning could be signs of moral reprobation and deviance. John Gay, Jonathan Swift, and Alexander Pope all published work meditating on mental dullness in 1726–7. Gay’s Fables (1727) recited the seminal (and disingenuously faux-modest) literary mantra that book learning renders the intellectual susceptible to vice, while the simple, unlettered man is a repository of virtue, in his fable of “The Shepherd and the Philosopher.” The shepherd modestly replies to the philosopher’s query that the little knowledge he has acquired has all been “from simple nature drained,” but such knowledge is sufficient “to make men moral, good and wise.” All of this can be achieved “without our schools” (Gay 1727a: 26–8). The claim was that the uneducated simple mind, if rooted and, more importantly, fixed at the lowest end of the social chain, offered a model of natural social virtue. Gay intervened in the changeling debate, mocking supernatural and superstitious explanations of the idiot mind. When a simple, lower-order nurse claims to her mistress that “evil sprites” have replaced her baby with an idiot changeling who has “a squinting leer,” a “pygmy sprite” then appears, to argue that it is absurd and irrational to countenance that the spirit world would give away its own babies “that we the world with fools supply” (Gay 1727b). Humankind is quite capable of breeding its own idiots without intervention from the supernatural world: What! Give our sprightly race away For the dull, helpless sons of day! (lines 27–8) Gay’s deliberately secular argument mocks supernatural and superstitious explanations, targeting them with the barbs of rationality. Idiocy and dullness are human matters for human investigation and reasoned explanation.

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Pope’s Dunciad ([1726] 1966) satirized dull Grub Street writers and the philistine minds of the Hanoverian monarchs, but it is also a musing on dullness of mind, seen as the natural inheritance of humankind from the creation: In eldest time, e’er mortals writ or read, … Dulness o’er all possessed her ancient right, Daughter of Chaos and eternal night Fate in their dotage this fair Ideot gave … Laborious, heavy, busy, bold, and blind She rul’d, in native Anarchy, the mind. (lines 1.9–16) For Pope the majority of humans were irretrievably dull-witted. To preserve the social order, however envious they might be, they needed to accept their mutual dullness and their allotted place with their own kind: Blockheads with reason wicked wits abhor But fool with fool is barb’rous civil war. (2.175–6) Blockheads and fools, in Pope’s view, took their allotted part in human society that was, and always would be, prey to the folly and stupidity of the human race. Underlying this was the conservative Optimist philosophy that each person was as they were through divine will, whatever their imperfections, and occupied their place in an unchanging and divinely fixed social hierarchy. They had the capacity for moral virtue if not intellectual advancement. Swift’s Travels (1726/35), in the same year, conveyed a similar message (also see Gabbard 2018). Gulliver admired the political system of the Kingdom of Lilliput, where moral virtue carried far greater import than ability: In choosing persons for all employments, they have more regard to good morals than to great abilities; for … they believe that the common size of human understandings is fitted to some station or other. (Swift [1726/35] 1960: 70) Swift portrays the amoral person of learning as far more reprehensible than the ignorant but well-intentioned person who commits a mistake through their ignorance. He also satirized the emerging Enlightenment discourse of the perfectibility of “Man” through the foolish abstract reasoners of Laputa, lost in their futile intellectual experiments, a point at which high-level intellect acquired the characteristics of stupidity ([1726/35] 1960: 179, 191). The coldly rational Houyhnhnm horses are a further indicator that perfect intellectual faculty, and a world divided into a binary opposition of rational Houyhnhnm and brutal Yahoo minds, is a dystopian fallacy. The idea of the virtuous, well-meaning simpleton, lacking the capacity even to comprehend the nature of evil or immorality, was epitomized in Sarah Fielding’s eponymous hero David Simple—lacking intellectual gifts, a stranger to guile and deception, easily imposed upon, but preternaturally virtuous and good. The wealthy Simple lay somewhere in between the true idiot and the socially dull, his role in the novel a satirical cipher reflecting the intellectual and moral limitations of others. He represents an intermediate type who struggled with the mental demands of his station in life, but who was also morally virtuous and needed to remain there to protect the social hierarchy. In Burney’s Camilla

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(1796), the intellectually challenged but good-natured Sir Hugh, with his “poor capacity” and “poor weak head” ([1796] 1972: 184, 534), is referred to by his exploitative nephews as “blockhead,” “old gull,” “ninny,” and “numps” (212, 225, 500, 505), all slang terms to denote a vulnerable simpleton. Sir Hugh laments that however much he tries all this “jingle jangle” (learning), “I find myself turning out as sheer a blockhead as ever” (39). Despite his intellectual limitations leading to some catastrophic situations, including the exposure of his niece Eugenia to the disease that disables and deforms her and the attempted appropriation of his fortune by his nephew, he is the elder brother and must therefore retain his superior station and his inheritance. He is supported to do this by his more intellectually able but younger brother, Augustus.

7.3. NEW DIRECTIONS IN THOUGHT AFTER THE FRENCH REVOLUTION Radical new directions in thought, embracing Enlightenment principles and challenging the fixity of the Optimist creed, opened up in the wake of the French Revolution. The 1790s and 1800s saw a tumult of radical progressive thought that proclaimed a new age of universalism, and a future in which the common man would transform into a gifted, morally advanced, active citizen. There was also an antithetical conservative response to these new strains of social radicalism in the form of a renewed evangelical moral drive, the so-called “second awakening,” led from the 1780s by a proliferation of evangelical and messianic societies and patriarchal reformers such as William Wilberforce. Radical progressivism and the call for universal citizenship did not augur well for those perceived to lack the intellectual capacity to be a part of it. William Godwin’s vision of the progressive perfectibility of the human race, his Enquiry concerning political justice, envisaged a world in which the human mind would make “perpetual progress” because of its Lockean facility to assimilate, store, and combine impressions into ideas, thus transforming experience and ideas into knowledge and wisdom (1798: 94–5). It was this process that would transform the poor person—or, as Godwin put it, “a clod of the valley” (95)—into advancing, educated, civilized Man. This referenced the dull, idiotic, brainless peasant of the eighteenth-century demotic, recorded by Grose in his slang dictionary as the clod hopper, clod pate, or clod pole (Grose 1788). Godwin’s astonishing Utopian, anarchistic depiction of a world in which “men” would live forever, and where there would be no war or crime, no need for justice, and no disease or sadness (1793: 528), would not be achieved easily. It required an educational process that would produce “a man of perseverance and enterprise” from “a stupid and inanimate dolt.” Intelligent Man could be coaxed from the “valley clod” only once he had achieved the soundness of understanding that would enable him to fulfil his citizenship duties (preface, xxvii). All of this could only be achieved because of Man’s capacity to reason and cultivate knowledge: “it is to the improvement of reason … that we are to look for the improvement of our social condition” (xxvi). Godwin defined a citizen’s duty as “the application of capacity in an intelligent being” (157). It followed that, if citizenship was a matter of capacity, then it could not quite be universal, and nor could the march to perfection be. Godwin acknowledged this: Every perfection or excellence that human beings are competent to conceive, human beings, unless in cases that are palpably and unequivocally excluded by the structure of their frame, are competent to attain. (93)

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What was to become of those who were “palpably and unequivocally excluded” from this progressive world, built on reason and sound understanding? On their fate Godwin was silent, but his use of the word “excluded” was prescient. The young William Wordsworth, like Godwin, was fired by the events and ideals of the French Revolution. He introduced a new form of romantic idiot to the cultural realm with his lyrical poem “The Idiot Boy” in 1798. Wordsworth turned his back firmly on the amusing, thick-headed, eighteenth-century fool, and introduced an altogether more serious character for public reflection. The severely idiotic and deeply rural Johnny Foy is sent by his mother on a hopeless night-time mission from their isolated rural home to fetch a doctor for an ailing neighbor. His idiocy and lack of mind make him completely unequal to the task, in which the horse on which he rides, Houyhnhnm-like, shows more intelligence than he does. Johnny Foy can make only strange burring sounds, and he laughs for no reason; he is not a human type that can think, feel, or do (Wordsworth [1798] 1998). The poem provoked strong reactions, even from Coleridge, Wordsworth’s collaborator on the Lyrical Ballads, in which “The Idiot Boy” was included. Coleridge denounced its “disgusting images of ordinary, morbid idiocy” (Coleridge 1827: 166). Here was an irony: Coleridge and Wordsworth, fired by the sentiments of the French Revolution, wanted to bring a new romantic sympathy to the cultural representation of the common man and woman, to find feeling and authenticity in the lives and personalities of the rural poor. Yet when the romantic gaze was projected onto the idiot, it found only the empty shell that was Johnny Foy, slumped listlessly on his horse and carried haplessly in whatever direction the horse happened to go. The unimprovable idiot was to be sacrificed on the altar of radical modernity. He could not feel, and the only feeling worthy to project onto him was an unreciprocated pity; or, given that this being lacked the necessary capacity for internal sentiment that defined the human, loathing of his unnaturalness. As the idea of romantic sensibility took shape, the idiot began to be defined by a new focus, and was ceasing to amuse. Progressive revolutionaries and romantics struggled to find any place for the inconvenient and unimprovable idiotic mind in the utopias they envisaged. Yet the countervailing reactionary thinkers, who demanded order, morality, and stability after what they saw as the horrors unleashed by Revolution, proved equally impervious to any idea that disorderly idiots could be a part of the new godly society that they foresaw. A radical sanitizing and remoralization mission across British society was launched, aimed at restoring and maintaining godliness, social order, and clean living among the lower classes. This demanded an active commitment to self-improvement and social participation, and left little room for those whose minds resisted—or were impervious to—moral or intellectual betterment. All of this put the idiot, and indeed the intellectually dull, at risk of problematization, irrelevance, and, most of all, exclusion. Those unable to speak for themselves risked being pushed to the margins, the passive objects of the social cleansing campaign of the moral evangelists, and culpable if they did not meet its expectations. The moral reformer Hannah More produced between 1795 and 1798 her Cheap Repository Tracts, a series of evangelical chapbooks. Hundreds of thousands of these texts were sold from 1790 through to the 1850s. They were counter-revolutionary, socially conservative, and loyalist in tone, reflecting the establishment paranoia of the 1790s and early 1800s. They were also moralizing religious tomes aimed at a plebeian audience, “part of a continuing upper-class endeavour to reform and moralize the poor” (Pedersen 1986: 107). Literacy, for More, was not a matter of social advancement in the radical sense, but had become both a necessity and a personal responsibility. It was

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to be applied only to the Bible and the narrowest range of morally improving texts, and its purpose was religious salvation, not social betterment. It was, nevertheless, a requirement. More stressed this message of personal responsibility for learning and selfimprovement constantly and consistently, and it linked closely to the teaching work of her Sunday schools. The dull had a personal responsibility for self-improvement, and to carry a disproportionate amount of natural imperfection was no excuse. In More’s world, no tolerance or leeway were to be afforded Mr. Feeble Mind. This more hostile, less tolerant climate for the dull and stupid was best exemplified in More’s allegorical tale of Parley the Porter, where the dim-witted, gullible Parley works as the porter to the well-fortified castle and grounds of a great master, an allegorical representation of God. Parley allows himself to be fooled into allowing robbers from the surrounding wilderness into the castle with catastrophic consequences: a hundred accomplices storm the castle, carrying out “rapine, murder and conflagration,” and murdering Parley before any other (More 1870). The dull-witted man is no longer the good-hearted, ever-struggling, valiant Feeble Mind of Bunyan’s imagining, surrounded by supportive comrades with stronger understanding, dedicated to his salvation. Parley stands alone, and his weak mind is the undefended point through which sin can destroy mankind. He is a willful actor in his ignorance rather than an uncomprehending dolt, a degenerate threat at the heart of the moral universe, a conduit through which sin, destruction, and blasphemy can undermine the Christian faith. In the moral world that More and her fellow evangelists were framing for the dull and the poor, “the most dimsighted might see” (More 1834: 148)—and there were consequences for them, and others, if they failed to do so. In this new atmosphere of turn-of-the-century indictment, George Crabbe, the clergyman and poet, portrayed the idiot as leading a blighted, useless life. In his 1810 collection The Borough, the local school dame lives with her idiot son: With her a harmless idiot we behold Who hoards up silver shells for gold. (Crabbe 1810, letter 18: lines 40–1) His repetitive and purposeless actions occupy the days as he lives out a meaningless, thoughtless life. Another widow, the blind Ellen Orford, looks back on a life where she had a child out of wedlock, her punishment a daughter who, “though her face was fair / but no expression ever brighten’d there” (letter 20: lines 212–3). This beautiful “idiot-maid” fills Ellen with dread, and her foreboding is justified when the daughter is raped and dies in childbirth (letter 20: lines 288–98). The idiot, in Crabbe’s vision, is either harmless and useless or a punishment from God destined only for pain, misery, and death; in either case, they lead blighted lives, and blight the lives of those around them. This was a retributive, exclusory framing of the idiot, reflecting the ideas of culpability and insidious moral degeneracy detectable in More’s tracts. By the early nineteenth century, tolerance and leniency were beginning to submit to a hardening, harsher discourse. To be accepted as a member of society, it was necessary to understand—and abide by—its rules and morals. Those without the capacity to do so did not belong. If they chose, however, to remain, then they must accept the punishment for their so-called “involuntary” transgressions. This radical and discernible change in social attitude bears the seeds of the exclusions of the asylum system that were to acquire momentum in the 1850s. Society could live without its increasingly pathologized idiots who could make no contribution to its demands.

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7.4. THE LEGACY OF THE LONG EIGHTEENTH CENTURY On the eve of this transformation, the strictly pathological connotations of the idiot had become well established. The word had acquired, from the mid-eighteenth century onwards, both a strong medical profile and a legal profile that was now relevant to the population as a whole rather than just a small elite sector. Yet even at this point the term retains some ambiguity, at least in its literary manifestations. The Brontë sisters are a case in point. Hareton Earnshaw in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (1847) is perceived as an idiot by the younger Linton. Why? Because of his illiteracy and his monosyllabic and “frightful Yorkshire accent” (Brontë [1847] 1965: 54). He should behave as a gentleman because that is legally his social status—but he does not. Idiocy in this sense can be overcome, not by Providence, but by learning to read and to speak articulately, as Hareton eventually does. At the same time, lack of such skills overlaps now—as it did not before the mid-eighteenth century, and certainly not before 1689—with the previously quite separate notion of reprobation and religious deficit. The story is saturated with this latter connotation, and it is overcome in the same way as the first kind of deficit. Both social and religious grace are acquired by pulling on one’s own intellectual bootstraps, according to Emily. The new importance of literacy not only in a social context, but also in a religious one is one of the processes by which the Bunyanesque overtones of the “feeble-minded,” which originally had little overlap with cognitive deficit, came to reside within or alongside idiocy. The word idiot is also used by Brontë in a clearly medical/psychiatric sense, when Hindley Earnshaw threatens to smash in Hareton’s skull and Nelly, the servant, prevents him: “If he’s not killed, he’ll be an idiot!” (Brontë [1847] 1965: 115). Likewise, when the fey Linton has taken to his bed and succumbed to the “Slough of Despond” because he is banned from seeing the younger Catherine, Heathcliff proposes “attempt[ing] to frighten him out of his idiocy” (266). Be that as it may, the most familiar modern sense of the medical usage arises from the several occasions in Wuthering Heights where Emily’s characters use “idiot” metaphorically, and in full consciousness that this is what they are doing, as part of an insult of the utmost casualness toward a person they assume to be (as it were) cognitively normal (Brontë [1847] 1965: 141, 151, 217, 311). Heathcliff explicitly contrasts his doing so with “genuine” idiocy (188). Throughout the novel, archaic and modern usages leak into each other. Nelly calls Linton a “pitiful changeling!” for wanting the younger Catherine as his wife (304). The narrator, Lockwood, says of Catherine’s famous bloodstained scrabbling at his bedroom window that “she must have been a changeling,” while Heathcliff is described as a changeling-style “cuckoo” and “imp of Satan” (80). In the same year, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) has Rochester call the eponymous heroine “fairy-born,” a “changeling” ([1847] 1975: 276). Defunct by the beginning of the nineteenth century in its Lockean sense, changeling has a new career in romanticism and the fairy tale, though it maintains a direct link through to modern psychiatry as mentioned above. Jane is a changeling in the sense that she overcomes her “monstrous” animal identity, a reversion to the Early Modern notion of changeling posited in Spenser’s Faerie Queene (see Heinger 2016). The transformation of the language of intellectual deficit that took place over the long eighteenth century can be seen at work in the great canon of mid-nineteenth-century literature. The changeling lingered on, for the most part no longer a person of breeding masquerading as an idiot peasant. The changeling’s religious origins as a satanic implant

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were now becoming concealed, transmuted into just one more element of the newly scientized—and secular—doctrines of intellectual deficiency, an animalistic form of human. A sharp distinction gradually arose between the use of the word idiot to describe the born, useless human condemned to a life without mind and its use as a casual insult to those deemed to have behaved foolishly or haplessly. This gave rise to a division between the pathological understanding of the term in medical/psychiatric discourse and its demotic use as an increasingly mild form of social banter. The pathologized, scientized idiot was destined for the burgeoning new asylum system. Those considered simply foolish would now find themselves precariously placed at the bottom of the new idiot-free society outside.

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Mental Health Issues Listening for Ghosts: Mad People in the Eighteenth Century ALLISON P. HOBGOOD

As recently as 2016, Andrew Solomon’s New York Times opinion piece described a new “virtual-reality attraction” planned for Knott’s Berry Farm, an amusement park in Buena Park, California. The attraction was named “Fear VR 5150,” the California psychiatric involuntary commitment code applied to mentally ill persons considered a danger to themselves or others. Solomon explains: Upon arrival in an ersatz “psychiatric hospital exam room,” VR 5150 visitors would be strapped into a wheelchair and fitted with headphones. “The VR headset puts you in the middle of the action inside the hospital,” an article in The Orange Cvounty Register explained. “One patient seems agitated and attempts to get up from a bed. Security officers try to subdue him. A nurse gives you a shot (which you will feel), knocking you out. When you wake up in the next scene, all hell has broken loose. Look left, right and down, bloody bodies lie on the floor. You hear people whimpering in pain.” (Solomon 2016) It turns out that two similar attractions were planned concurrently at other US adventure parks, touting haunted houses that would bring entertainment-seekers “face-to-face with the world’s worst psychiatric patients. … Maniacal inmates yell out from their bloodstained rooms and deranged guards wander the corridors in search of those who have escaped” (Solomon 2016). Needless to say, disability activists from the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI) and beyond responded with such vehement resistance to the opening of these modern-day “freak shows” that the attractions were closed or, at the very least, modified to be less discriminating against mental difference. The critique posited by disability rights activists was, of course, that the attractions epitomized blatant and unapologetic sanism, or what Brenda A. LeFrancois, Robert Menzies, and Geoffrey Reaume define as “the systemic subjugation of people who have received mental health diagnoses or treatment … [that] may result in various forms of stigma, blatant discrimination, and a host of microaggressions” (LeFrancois et al. 2013: 339). Myriad phone calls, petitions, and emails later—and after what Solomon calls “some heated backand-forth” from mental health advocates—Fear VR 5150 was shelved, and “Six Flags changed the mental patients in its maze into zombies” (Solomon 2016).

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There are a number of significant problems with attractions like Fear VR 5150. Among others, the highly problematic assumption that mentally ill people are dangerous is a fundamental cultural narrative structuring our contemporary moment. Like Solomon, I am “saddened to see painful lived experiences transmogrified into spooky entertainment” (2016). More crucially for the work of this chapter, however, I look back to the long eighteenth century to consider why the Six Flags and Cedar Fair corporations would consider such attractions in the first place. As Solomon keenly points out, “sanity and mental illness lie on a spectrum, and most people occasionally cross over from one side to the other. It’s the proximity of mental illness rather than its obscurity that makes it so scary” (2016). Is this, indeed, why madness is imagined as so terrifying? Why is it simultaneously of such cultural interest, both then and now? How might the history of mad people and their experiences help us understand sanism as it is constructed in the twenty-first century? The discomfiting proximity of mental health to illness that Solomon articulates exposes the general tenuousness of “sane” as a categorization mechanism, and hence the malleability of its oppositional term, “insane.” In examining eighteenth-century conceptions of madness, we will understand more fully how mental capacity can be constructed as one thing or another. In short, to be in one’s right mind, so to speak, is a complex, fluid, and context-specific notion. Though surely madness is not conceptualized in the same ways now as it was 300 years ago, the basic fact of its social construction remains stable across time. Historian Roy Porter explains: madness is “protean, in that the idea itself encompasses no end of meanings” (1987b: 17). Moreover, madness’s meanings are developed out of—and in the name of—collective assumptions about social reality and assumed shared experiences of the world. In James Boswell’s biography of the famous English author Samuel Johnson, Johnson attests to this fact, but explicitly in an eighteenth-century context. “Many a man is mad in certain instances,” proclaims Dr. Johnson, “and goes through life without having it perceived;—for example, a madness has seized a person, of supposing himself obliged literally to pray continually; had the madness turned the opposite way, and the person thought it a crime to pray, it might not improbably have continued unobserved” (quoted in Porter 1987b: 31). For Johnson, eighteenth-century madness is situational and contextual (“a man is mad in certain instances”); and its meanings, as Porter offers, are “matters for continuous renegotiation” (16–17). Porter further illuminates that eighteenth-century “attitudes towards madness were never an island; they complemented wider images of self, rationality and social health, and they interacted with changing evaluations of such comparable groups of threateningly marginal individuals as slaves, witches and foreigners” (31). Thus, mental soundness is part of the opaque, unstable cultural frameworks that use the notion of madness to privilege ability and marginalize all kinds of difference. This is as true now as it was in the eighteenth century. For instance, contemporary disability scholar and activist Bradley Lewis explains that mental illness is not an objective medical reality but, among other things, a negative label or, conversely, a strategy for coping in a mad world (Lewis 2013).1 Sanism involves a refusal of corporeal neurodiversity that, per Ato Quayson, “undergird[s] a perceived hierarchy of bodily traits determining the distribution of privilege, status, and power” (2007: 17). In other words, the denial of human difference—in this case mental atypicality— is “part of a structure of power, and its meanings are governed by the unmarked

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regularities of the normate” (17).2 However, Quayson usefully clarifies that “there are various elements of this complex relationship that do not disclose themselves as elements of power as such, but rather as forms of anxiety, dissonance, and disorder” (17). Fear VR 5150 is a perfect example of how such latent, undisclosed power makes itself manifest: in this case, mental illness is a profound cultural anxiety expressed as titillating capitalist entertainment. When I make a claim for madness as socially constructed and thus with its own cultural and place-based conceptions, I am not denying that certain symptomatic similarities in mental states appear consistently over time. Sure enough, we hear writers’ descriptions of acedia (slothfulness; apathy; lethargy) in the fourth century3 and melancholy in the 1750s distinctly echoed in, for instance, contemporary narratives about depression. Nor would I want to diminish in any way the material realities of mental disability, both somatic and systemic. Pain and chronic fatigue, for example, often accompany mental illnesses and so, even as we consider how cultures shape and reshape disability, we need to remember these somatic stakes. As Liz Crow attests, to expose disability as socially constructed is not to suggest that those with impairment are “experiencing a kind of ‘false consciousness’—that if all the external disabling barriers were removed they would no longer feel like this. We need to ensure the availability of all the support and resources that an individual might need, whilst acknowledging that impairment can still be intolerable” (1996: 217). This said, context really matters. Social meanings get written onto atypical bodies, minds, and behaviors, and those social meanings transform in specific ways over time; madness is a “personal disorder” that is inevitably “articulated within a system of sociolinguistic signs and meanings” (Porter 1987b: 16). In fact, German E. Barrios and Ivana S. Markovà argue that the disenchantment of madness will never be complete because “written into the deep consciousness of man, madness remains first and foremost a cultural object”; although madness is always deeply embodied, Markovà and Barrios suggest that it will never become just a “natural kind” (2017: 115). Porter puts it thusly: “the history of madness stands between subjects such as plague or death and (on the other hand) histories of witchcraft. It must treat insanity, like heart-failure, or buboes, as a physical fact; but it needs to interpret it, like witchcraft or possession, principally as a socially-constructed fact” (1987b: 15). Mental illness, while a somatic reality, “presents society with a message, something that carries with it some meaning or set of meanings that must be decoded” (Eghigian 2017: 4). In short, we want so badly to “make sense” of madness. More than that, myriad narratives making sense of mental disability get employed to do other things in the world (see Pietikäinen 2015). Madness as disability stigma enables, for example, the gendered oppression of women, the systematic incarceration of people of color, and, as we saw just above, an exploitative capitalist entertainment system (see Ben-Moshe 2013; Lukin 2013). Notably, in all of these varied instances, madness serves as a fundamental social tool that establishes what counts as human. Disability scholar Lennard J. Davis concurs, arguing that eighteenth-century philosophers especially were “obsessed with trying to define what made humans human” (1995: 55). Moral philosophy of the period engaged in this intense debate, asking fundamental questions about what makes a life well lived (Kelleher 2014: 72). For Paul Kelleher, the rhetoric of deformity, in particular, “makes possible the articulation of moral systems as such” (72). Human

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variation in the form of deformity enabled ground-laying, ableist sensibilities about what it meant to live a proper, moral life.4 So, too, with mental illness. Mental health served—and still does serve—as a kind of limit case determining what lives are worth living. To be mentally ill is to test the bounds of “a life well lived” and to disturb tightly managed boundaries between the human and subhuman. In his Observations on Maniacal Disorders (1792), English physician William Pargeter illuminates this sanist logic. He describes mad people as “destitute of the guidance of that governing principle, reason—which chiefly distinguishes us from the inferior animals around us. … [The mad man] retains indeed the outward figure of the human species … Within, all is confused and deranged, every look and expression testifies internal anarchy and disorder” (1792: 2–3). According to Pargeter, the “mad man” only looks human, but in truth he is much more akin to “inferior animals.” Mad people are but beasts. Before going any further, I would like to consider terminology. As Geoffrey Reaume suggests, “no term in the history of madness is neutral” (2006: 182), and the stakes of language are very important insofar as our social realities inevitably are constructed through discourse. The burgeoning field of Mad Studies and its scholar–activists have done much to make these stakes apparent (see Costa 2014; McWade et al. 2015). “The problem of naming has always preoccupied DS [Disability Studies] scholars,” explains Margaret Price, “but acquires a particular urgency when considered in the context of disabilities of the mind, for often the very terms used to name persons with mental disability have explicitly foreclosed our status as persons” (2013: 298). We call upon an array of terms when discussing contemporary mental health: neurodiversity, crazy, psychiatric disability, obsession, mentally ill, lunacy, insanity, nervousness, mental disability, psychosocial disability, spiritual affliction, psychiatric system survivor, madness (see Price 2013). Obviously, some of these terms are more sanist than others. Many are colloquial, some newer to our vernacular, and others gesture back at least to the eighteenth century. I use the term mad (and madness) most frequently in this chapter for two major reasons. First, mad “has a long history of positive and person-centered discourses” beginning in the Mad Movement of the early 1970s. The term is inclusive in its transnational sweep, connoting Mad Pride activism across the globe (Price 2013: 298; see also Lewis 2013). Likewise, it explicitly recalls the field of Mad Studies and participates in scholar–activist work that confronts and deconstructs sanism. Following Tanja Aho, Liat Ben-Moshe, and Leon J. Hilton, to discuss madness is to examine “how psychiatric disabilities or differences must be understood not only as medical conditions but also as historical formations that have justified all manner of ill-treatment and disenfranchisement—even as they have also formed the basis for political identities, social movements, and cultural practices of resistance” (2017: 293). The term mad thus does important, mad work. Second, mad offers a discursive breadth that is extremely useful to the cultural historian. Since at least the fourteenth century, madness has been used multi-vocally to connote all kinds of difference, from seemingly devious, anomalous behaviors to extraordinary or ridiculous situations or objects (Barrios and Markovà 2017: 115). I agree with Barrios and Markovà that “madness has survived as a recognizable cultural object on account of the fact that within each historical period similar social and semantic demands have acted as veritable shaping ‘invariants’” (115). While certainly the term “madness” is not utterly perfect over time, it does have significant historiographical utility, broadly describing mental states and behaviors that run against the neurotypical grain.

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8.1. MAD IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY When we speak of madness in the long eighteenth century, what do we mean? Scholarly consensus finds that the period is transitional in its general conceptions of disability: we see a shift from understanding human difference as part of God’s divine plan to difference as deviance, pathology, and error. “Enlightenment thinking,” explain David L. Braddock and Susan L. Parish, “transformed fundamental concepts about the essential relationships between humans, nature, and God” (2001: 13). As the Renaissance (1550–1700) comes to a close in the West, so-called insanity and its attendant signs are read through more secular lenses, and medical intervention for mental disorder becomes more status quo. Philosophers like René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Thomas Hobbes are promoting rationalist, empiricist, materialist ideas about the world, and this emphasis on reason, skepticism, and secularism influences how madness is perceived in subsequent centuries (Gabbard 2011: 84; Pietikäinen 2015: 57). Thinkers like Francis Bacon, Isaac Newton, and John Locke forward sensationalist theories that identify experience and reason, not innateness and divinity, as the sources of knowledge. Concordantly, the rise of natural science offers new explanations about the human species and its advancement (Braddock and Parish 2001: 24). By the close of the eighteenth century, physicians, caretakers, and educators play a more significant role in disabled people’s lives than ever before, and mental health has become fodder for an entire medical industry: entrepreneurs create private, specialized institutions to manage mad people, while municipal officials established public madhouses to care for the “insane” (MacDonald 1981: 2; Braddock and Parish 2001; see also Stiker 1999). In his illuminating work on “idiots” and “fools” in the British Enlightenment, intellectual historian C. F. Goodey argues that the period instantiates notions about mental difference that seem more contiguous to our contemporary sensibilities. The rationalist and empiricist approaches I note just above begin to codify ideas about “normal” cognitive function, privileging the fully autonomous individual who can think clearly, be “reasonable,” and advocate for her own self-interest (see Goodey 1994, 2001). D. Christopher Gabbard further explains: “the Enlightenment enshrined the opposites of idiocy (the era’s appropriate term)—wit, judgment, intelligence—as privileged human qualities. Just as the ‘hegemony of normalcy’ distinguishes the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, so the ascent of quick mental capability as an essential feature for characterizing the modern liberal subject distinguishes the long eighteenth century” (2011: 90). Diminished mental capacity often entailed, as Roy Porter suggests, being “impassioned beyond moderation or ‘reason’” (1987b: 24). More specifically, it denoted not just “volcanic passions of the heart but also incongruity and error of the mind—all that defied norms or expectations, whatever lacked or transgressed good sense” (26). Indeed, the work of English philosopher and physician John Locke suggests that Enlightenment scholars were intent on identifying “good sense” and mental soundness as intrinsic to humanity. Widely regarded as one of the most influential of thinkers of the period, Locke composed An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689), in which he made key claims about mental capacity that shape how we conceive of modern subjectivity, rights, and citizenship (see Hirshmann 2013). In one chapter, Locke outlines what he calls the “Difference between Idiots and Madmen.” He argues that “the defect in naturals seems to proceed from want of quickness, activity, and motion in the intellectual faculties, whereby they are deprived of reason; whereas madmen, on the other side, seem to suffer by the other extreme” (Locke [1689] 1975: bk. 2, ch. 11, sec. 13). He goes on:

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For they [madmen] do not appear to me to have lost the faculty of reasoning, but having joined together some ideas very wrongly, they mistake them for truths; and they err as men do that argue right from wrong principles. For, by the violence of their imaginations, having taken their fancies for realities, they make right deductions from them. … Hence it comes to pass that a man who is very sober, and of a right understanding in all other things, may in one particular be as frantic as any in Bedlam; if either by any sudden very strong impression, or long fixing his fancy upon one sort of thoughts, incoherent ideas have been cemented together so powerfully, as to remain united. (Locke [1689] 1975: bk. 2, ch. 11, sec. 13) Locke’s assessment is particularly notable in two ways. First, he seems to argue, albeit loosely, for the “democratization of madness,” a concept Davis coins in his work on obsessive behaviors (2008). Madness becomes democratic in the eighteenth century, Davis posits, insofar as everyone has the potential to be mad. Mental illness increasingly is understood as a partial, impermanent state that can come, go, and impact anyone. As Locke suggests, a strong impression or fixing of fancy can precipitate madness; even the “sober” man who is “of a right understanding in all other things” can find himself “as frantic as any in Bedlam.” This democratization also recalls Solomon’s suggestion at the start of this chapter that sanity and mental illness lie on a fluid spectrum, and that many people will find themselves sliding back and forth along that spectrum over the course of their lives. Locke’s assessment thus points to the inherent instability of madness as a social and conceptual category. In Locke, madness has a universality such that, even as he attempts to delineate madness from sanity, this supposed difference feels at the very least contrived, and at most obsolete. Second, Locke argues that to be mad is not to have abandoned utterly one’s “faculty of reasoning,” but rather to experience “the disorderly jumbling [of] ideas together,” to greater and lesser degrees. “Madmen put wrong ideas together, and so make wrong propositions, but argue and reason right from them,” he avers, “but idiots make very few or no propositions, and reason scarce at all” (Locke [1689] 1975: bk. 2, ch. 11, sec. 13). In other words, madness for Locke, though somewhat enigmatic, is what Petteri Pietikäinen terms “false consciousness.” Locke espouses a rationalist approach wherein “if mental illness denotes a wrong kind of thinking, the afflicted can be cured by teaching them to think right” (2015: 71). In short, madness, while strange and perplexing, is both knowable and treatable. While Pietikäinen finds Locke’s approach “optimistic” (2015: 71), I find it to be simultaneously in line with a contemporary medical model of disability that assumes disability can and must be cured, and that disabled individuals desire the normativity that medicine might provide them. The medical model, while instrumental in preventing disease and enabling human vitality, has been heavily critiqued for its pathologizing of difference. Under the medical model, individual impairment remains a personal matter that reduces disabled people to objects of medical scrutiny who are responsible for their impairments as well as for fixing those impairments. Locke’s logic evinces this “optimistic” demand for cure and likewise conceives of madness as a kind of “erroneous thinking, irrationality or disturbance in the mental machinery” (2015: 74). His language also, even inadvertently, indicts mad people for “mistaking [ideas] for truths” and for erring via logical argument from “wrong principles.” While universalizing and thus democratic in its own right, Locke in the same breath offers a moralizing philosophical–medical paradigm that understands madness as an individual problem of unreasonable reasoning that needs to be fixed.

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Locke’s argument in An Essay participates in a larger cultural investment in the eighteenth century in comprehending madness via taxonomy. Developments in natural science generally entailed properly describing, identifying, and classifying organisms. Madness was no exception. While diagnostic classification was still somewhat rudimentary in the eighteenth century—for instance, fools, the deranged, maniacs, and lunatics are interchangeable terms for mad people (Pietikäinen 2015: 74)—philosophers and physicians begin codifying mental illness and its causes into types. For example, Carl Linnaeus, one of the first taxonomists of mental illness, divided morbi mentales into three orders: diseases of reason (dementia); diseases of the imagination (sense disorders); and diseases of the will characterized by diminished capacity and desire (Pietikäinen 2015: 160). Further, Davis argues that general catchall categories of madness like “lunacy” and “idiocy” became nuanced in the period through taxonomies that favored partial, temporary states of mental disturbance that might impact anyone. In short, “partial insanity” comes to be widely recognized in the eighteenth century and gets typed via a series of four categories as hysteria, vapors, hypochondria, and the spleen (Davis 2008: 38–40). In his work on medical testimony in British insanity trials, Joel Peter Eigen finds that, by the end of the eighteenth century, there were four fairly conventional ways to classify madness. The first was associationism, which connotes a kind of “intellectual delirium” causing “faulty reasoning, loose connections between ideas, [or] the ruling sway of a ‘predominant idea.” The second type stands in direct contrast to associationism and purports that anyone could experience mental illness; it is instead particularity of character and physical difference that produce madness. The third conception asserted “the existence of a type of insanity that was unaccompanied by mental confusion,” while the fourth category of “moral insanity” suggested that “the afflicted person’s moral sensibilities, not idea per se, were altered” (Eigen 1995: 60). This taxonomizing was part and parcel of the increased medicalization of mental health during the Enlightenment. Tracts on mental disorder, like Dr. William Battie’s Treatise on Madness (1758), proliferated in the period as doctors diagnosed madness as, among other things, “Lunacy, Spleen, Melancholy [and] Hurry of the Spirits” (quoted in Pietikäinen 2015: 72). People could be “senseless” or “out of their wits” because of humoral disequilibrium or excessive passions, divine inspiration that thrusted one out of oneself (e.g. melancholy genius), moral and character defects, organic diseases, head wounds, brain or belly disorders, and/or heredity (Porter 1987b: 21–34). Behaviors like speaking in tongues, convulsing, weeping, hallucinating, and moaning that had been considered part of spiritual madness become secular symptoms in the Enlightenment. As Pietikäinen notes: “Thomas Willis (1621–75), an English pioneer of neurology, excluded the devil from the list of the possible causes of madness and explained possession as a lesion or defect of the nerves and the brain” (2015: 58). Similarly, the French physician Philippe Pinel, of whom I will say more later, defined mental illness in A Treatise on Insanity (1806) as: “lesions of the function of the understanding” (quoted in Pietikäinen 2015: 109). Even as Pinel respected folk-healing traditions in mental health care and focused on uncontrolled passions and disorganized imagination as central catalysts of madness, he conceptualized these principles—diagnoses and cures—in explicitly medical terms. In addition, mad-doctors appeared over the course of the long eighteenth century in increasing numbers at trials of the so-called insane, and they imparted their specialist knowledge in mental medicine via a scientific discourse bent on identification and classification (Eigen 1995: 7).

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8.2. THE NOT-SO-GREAT CONFINEMENT The identification and classification of mental “deviance” is a topic much broached by the French philosopher and historian of ideas, Michel Foucault. Foucault famously argued for an equation of Western Enlightenment with the state-sanctioned incarceration of mad people on a mass scale (1965). His argument goes that, after the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) in Europe, people with mental illness began to be warehoused in large numbers in prisons, mental asylums, and hospitals; madness was seen as utterly unreasonable and thus demanded isolation and disciplining by the state apparatus. Foucault claims that, prior to the eighteenth century, mad people had some freedom, even cachet. During the Enlightenment, however, madness becomes an explicit threat to the social order, and it is increasingly managed through silencing mechanisms like large-scale institutionalization and imprisonment as a means of social control. Foucault calls this movement “La grand renfermement” (The Great Confinement), an internment of people from beggars to prostitutes to the “lame” and “mad” starting in the mid-seventeenth century and sanctioned in the name of political absolutism and Enlightenment rationality. Certainly, as Braddock and Parish note, “changing social and political perspectives on poverty during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, coupled with the development of increasingly medicalized interpretations of disability during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, contributed to increasing segregation and stigmatization of persons with disabilities” (2001: 11). We also see clearly as early as the Renaissance era the formal incarceration of individuals with mental illness. That said, cultural historians since Foucault have shown that the notion of The Great Confinement is inaccurate. Indeed, there was an uptick in institutionalization and the use of state welfare between 1650 and 1850, but families were still the main source of support for disabled people during the Enlightenment (23). For example, throughout the eighteenth century, there existed just two charitable hospitals exclusively for the mentally ill in England—Bethlem and St. Luke’s in London. In 1800, all the “madhouse” establishments across England totaled no more than 2,500 patients (Scull 2017: 104). The number of individuals confined in asylums indeed was relatively small before the nineteenth century (see also Eghigian 2017).5 It turns out that Foucault was incorrect not just in terms of scale, but also quality. Foucault suggests that incarcerated mad persons were imagined as nothing more than diagnostic objects to be scrutinized under a disciplining medical gaze. While the diagnosis and psychiatrization of madness indeed begins to dominate the eighteenth century, people from gentry to peasant were diagnosing themselves to physicians and helping determine courses of treatment even from inside the medical establishment (Pietikäinen 2015: 85). In France, hospitals were envisioned as charitable “healing machines” staffed by compassionate doctors who employed science and rational health policy for the good of their patients (85). As Andrew Scull explains, eighteenth-century madhouses had acquired the reputation of being human zoos where the sane came to taunt and tease the inmates—recall William Hogarth’s canonical image of the naked Tom Rakewell’s confinement in Bedlam, being stared at by tittering society ladies amused by the sights of the crazed—or else as “moral lazar houses” where the deranged were hidden and hope and humanity abandoned. (2017: 104) Scull and other scholars have shown that this representation did not always reflect reality, however; or, as Porter clarifies, associating madhouses exclusively with “mere degradation, punitiveness, and social control” is to overlook the possibility that they

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functioned as viable support systems for both patients and their families (1987b: 11). Furthermore, while Foucault would have it that incarcerated individuals were most often poor, idle, unsightly, and deviant, affluent mad individuals—bourgeois, nobility, and gentry—are a significant part of what W. L. Parry-Jones calls the entrepreneurial “trade in lunacy.” Private madhouses were “privately owned establishment[s] for the reception and care of insane persons, conducted as a business proposition for the benefit of the proprietor or proprietors” (Parry-Jones 1972: 1). By 1815, in London alone there were seventy-two private madhouses in operation, testifying to the powerful presence of a forprofit, niche market economy built around the medical treatment of wealthy, mad folks (Pietikäinen 2015: 88). As we can see, cultural and intellectual historians have offered quite useful correctives to Foucault’s story of The Great Confinement. New scholarship has unraveled an imperfect historical narrative of eighteenth-century madness as heavily policed by the state in the name of social control, a policing that resulted in the mass incarceration of numerous people in abusive, inhumane conditions.6 But while these correctives are invaluable, if we let the narrative pendulum swing too far in the other direction, we risk losing sight of the ways that eighteenth-century mad people were still highly stigmatized and their lives made difficult because of cultural resistance to atypical mental qualities, behavior, and functioning. We risk silencing the story of disability as inevitably on the margins of normate culture and fall prey to what I have come to understand as a kind of historical nostalgia that often sees premodern cultures as structured around more egalitarian networks of care in which disabled people were “more integrated into the community … than they are today” (Marcus 2014: 228; see also Stiker 1999; Wheatley 2010: ch. 1). This limited sensibility ironically grows, I would argue, from a post-Foucauldian narrative that too precisely marks the moment in which disciplined, regulated, institutionalized subjects were born and thus fetishizes earlier historical epochs and cultures as “inclusive” and “diverse” in ways that our own neoliberal moment so regularly fails to be (see McRuer 2012). The sensibility is also a product of an intellectual and affective sleight-of-hand that refuses to fully engage with disability because, as seminal disability scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson points out, “seeing disability reminds us of what Bryan S. Turner … calls ‘ontological contingency,’ the truth of our body’s vulnerability to the randomness of fate” (2009: 19). Put more simply, disability reminds us of our inevitable mortality and, therefore, we refuse to acknowledge it. Take as one example of disability stigma in the eighteenth century the simple historical fact that, in 1714, the English Parliament enacts a law sanctioning the confinement of supposed “furiously mad” people, but does not provide any treatment for those individuals (Braddock and Parish 2001: 25). In other words, madhouses indeed functioned in many regards as criminal prisons in Europe and England, storing mad people away out of the public eye and refusing to address their unique experiences of the world. In the case of private madhouses especially, the status and power of madhouse keepers was undefined by law. Entrepreneurs could convert their houses into asylums quite easily; “there was money in madness,” writes Dale Peterson, “and the managers of these institutions presented themselves and their houses with no little flamboyance” (1982: 40). Because there was no provision for licensing or inspection of these private establishments, there was very little control over what was happening inside their walls for at least three quarters of the eighteenth century. Private madhouse clients thus were particularly open to abuse and malpractice, even in the face of 1774 Parliamentary legislation addressing the rights of people accused of being mad. Peterson explains that while the law insisted that a medical

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certificate had to be filled out by a physician, surgeon, or apothecary before non-pauper patients could be admitted to asylums, these legal precedents offered inconsistent patient protection, as one could easily forge or makeshift the obligatory official documentation (41–2). Note further the public terror of madness that structures the following excerpt from a 1751 petition to the Pennsylvania Provisional Assembly arguing for the establishment of America’s first chartered hospital, the Pennsylvania Hospital in Philadelphia. While the petition aims to provide suitable accommodations for the poor and sick of the colony who cannot afford private care, its argument is primarily mobilized by mental illness stigma. I quote the document here at some length: The Petition of sundry Inhabitants of the said Province, Humbly showeth: THAT with the Numbers of People, the number of Lunaticks or Persons distempered in Mind and deprived of their rational Faculties, hath greatly encreased in this province. That some of them going at large are a Terror to their Neighbours, who are daily apprehensive of the Violences they may commit; And others are continually wasting their Substance, to the great Injury of themselves and Families, ill disposed Persons wickedly taking Advantage of their unhappy Condition, and drawing them into unreasonable Bargains, &c. That few or none of them are so sensible of their Condition, as to submit voluntarily to the Treatment their respective Cases requires, and therefore continue in the same deplorable State during their Lives’ whereas it has been found, by the Experience of many Years, that above two Thirds of the Mad People received into Bethlehem Hospital, and there treated properly have been perfectly cured. (Morton 1897: 8) The petition frames mad people as in an inevitably “unhappy Condition” and “deplorable State.” They are a “Terror to their Neighbours,” a drain on their families, and inherently violent. They likewise are pitiable and naive, drawn “into unreasonable Bargains” by “Persons wickedly taking Advantage” of them. Mentally ill individuals refuse sound medical treatment, and yet could be “perfectly cured.” As one can see, this ostensibly progressive colonial plea for state-sanctioned support masks a dark indictment of madness rife with a sanist rhetoric of cure. It likewise promotes the assumption that disability is pitiable, and expresses the same ableist anxieties that underpin the contemporary “Fear VR 5150” attraction I described at this chapter’s start. The deliberate internment of supposed mad folks in establishments like the Pennsylvania Hospital illustrates eighteenth-century cultural fears about mental illness. It simultaneously illuminates—and this is particularly evident in the richly descriptive language of the 1751 petition—how madness is perversely entertaining: one desires not to become mad oneself, but to be titillatingly proximate to madness that is safely contained. The Fear VR 5150 “attraction” of our postmodern moment speaks backwards to a similar sense in the Enlightenment that madness was strangely compelling. Porter explains that the situation of mad folks in the long eighteenth century “was heterogeneous; they formed part of civil society, but they hardly fell under the state or under systematic medical savior-pouvior [power-knowledge]” (1987b: 14). “Yet that is not to deny that they were visible,” Porter continues; “they were sights. London’s crowds thronged to quiz Bethlem’s ‘scholars’—evidence that Pepys’s or Dr. Johnson’s contemporaries did not … feel that lunacy was something to quarantine but rather to experience” (14). In fact, Johnson deemed seeing the mad as instructive as attending

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public executions (14), and “madhouses” obliged this didactic desire. Visitors to Bedlam could pay a fee to gawk at patients; and this practice continued at the Pennsylvania Hospital, for example, until the 1830s. Eigen further explains that between 1760 and 1843, the English courtroom tried a number of famous insanity cases, as well as the crimes of over 300 more mundane offenders. These trials “became the occasion for the display and negotiation of mental derangement … in more than half the trials, prisoners themselves addressed the court and offered jury and spectators a glimpse of madness from the ‘inside’” (Eigen 1995: 7). This cultural desire to glimpse madness “from the inside” likewise motivated less real-life encounters with mad people. For instance, eighteenth-century drama revels in madness. Take Sir John Vanbrugh’s adaption of John Fletcher’s The Pilgrim (1700), performed consistently between 1700 and 1800. This conventional comedy about lostand-found love rampant with disguise and trickery is set, in large part, in “A Mad-House” in the city of “Segovia.” Acts 3 and 4 focus on this institution and its inhabitants; some of the drama’s mad persons are main characters feigning lunacy, while others function as stock mad types. In Act 3, Scene 2, a “Gentleman” of Segovia describes to Pedro, the play’s pilgrim protagonist, “a place were worth your view” (Vanbrugh [1700] 1927: 116). When Pedro expresses interest in seeing said place, the Gentleman guarantees him a “promising diversion”: “’Tis a House here, where People of all sorts, that have been visited with Lunacies, and Follies, wait their Cures. There’s fancies of a thousand stamps and fashions: Some of Pity, that it would make you melt to see their Passions: And some again as light that wou’d divert you” (116). The Pilgrim delivers on this lurid promise of mad entertainment throughout scenes that stigmatizingly describe or stereotypically depict all kinds of atypical mental states. In Act 3, Scene 3, spectators hear tell of or meet “mad Bess” who “roars like Thunder”; a Parson who when “the Moon’s i’ th’ full, … has a thousand pigs in’s Brain”; a “Prentice” who must be kept from women as “he thinks he has lost his Mistress”; a “Justice” possessed by the Devil; and a “Scholar” whose “Head’s too full of other People’s Wits, to leave room for his own” (Vanbrugh [1700] 1927: 116–17). Before Pedro and a witting audience, the “Master” of the institution diagnoses the Scholar’s dysfunction and proves even the most elusive kind of madness: “Many have sworn him right, and I have thought so; yet on a sudden, from some word or the other, when no Man could expect a fit, thus he has flown out” (119–20). In Act 4, Scene 1, Alinda, Pedro’s secret lover, acts “as a Fool” who “dwell[s] in Heaven” in a “fine little House made of Marmalad” with “a hundred little children” who “sing Psalms” with her (Vanbrugh [1700] 1927: 121). In the next scene, Alphonso, an “Angry Old Gentleman” who is father to Alinda, visits the Segovia madhouse as he searches for his disguised daughter. Desirous, like Pedro, to “see ’em, to see ’em all” (126), his character encounters a group of mad folk who “like Bells rung backwards … are nothing but confusion, meer Noise” (126). Among this particular group, The Pilgrim stages an “English Madman,” the aforementioned Scholar, a mad priest, and a Welshman who “ran mad, because a Rat eat up his Cheese” (129). Taken by the Welshman, Alphonso asks to “see him in’s Lodging,” but then, as one might anticipate of a premodern stage comedy, finds himself pranked by Alinda’s witty maid, Juletta, who convinces the madhouse Master that the mean, old gentleman himself “is a Lunatik” (130). “You are a little mad, which ye don’t perceive,” the Master informs Alphonso as he orders him “fifty slaps o’ th’ back presently” and carts him off to a chamber until the play resolves the matter near its close (131).

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Vanbrugh’s adaptation of The Pilgrim, especially as it mimicked the allure of reallife institutional freak shows and state-sanctioned insanity trials, offers but one example of eighteenth-century culture working through its own social attitudes toward mental illness. But, recalling Dr. Johnson, we should ask what specifically might have been so “instructive” about witnessing displays and negotiations of madness? Why were (and are) mad people imagined as such spectacular entertainment? In her work on early American freak shows, Garland-Thomson argues that “the exceptional [physical] body seems to compel explanation, inspire representation, and incite regulation” (1996: 1). Following her logic, I would argue that madness functions similarly—especially since, as I discussed above, the line between sane and not is so precarious, and thus must be marked artificially as precise. To make madness spectacular is to concretely identify impairment, denote it as different, and then incorporate that difference back into constructions of normativity. In other words, we find inherent in a visitor’s gawk at a Bedlamite the nervous insistence that embodied difference be readable, knowable, and hence repressible. Madness as bounded, closely managed spectacle aims to compensate for the fact that “the causes of impairment can never be fully anticipated or indeed prepared for” and that “every/body is subject to chance and contingent events” (Quayson 2007: 17). In order to counter disability’s “radical contingency” (17), as Quayson might put it, spectacle desperately works to define madness’s parameters. In a visit to Bedlam, I am sane, you are not. In legal proceedings, you are found mad, I am not. In a performance of The Pilgrim, madness is real (for about two hours’ traffic), and then it is not. In each of these instances, we see an attempt to grasp mental difference, and yet a simultaneous, outright denial of the same. Rendered more “comfortably common and safely standard” (GarlandThomson 1996: 5) through culturally sanctioned exchange, sanist theatrical device, or punitive legal precedent, understanding madness from the inside in these ways actually facilitates its erasure.

8.3. MADNESS FROM THE INSIDE As the examples above attest, the exclusion and elimination of mad people from their own histories has been part of the systematic work of ableist cultures that imagine disabled people as unable to speak from (and to) their own experiences (see Reaume 2006). Bearing in mind the strategic erasure of lived madness, the remainder of this chapter employs even more deliberately a mad methodology that places mad voices and experiences at the heart of inquiry. A mad methodology, as La Marr Jurelle Bruce beautifully frames it, resists rote positivism and defies the cult of objectivity; it listens for ghosts, madpeople, outcasts, and disembodied voices that trespass, like stowaways, in modernity; it perceives the expressive potential in the so-called rants and raves of madpeople; it is poised to find message within messiness and philosophy within “pathology”; and it respects the peculiar vantage points of those who are askew. Whereas rationalists tend to discredit and depoliticize the madperson, a mad methodology centers that madperson within projects of critique and liberation. (2017: 306) The historical sources that follow contain the “rants and raves of madpeople.” Insofar as these voices are usefully “askew,” they give us a keener sense of what it might have meant to be—and felt like to be—mad in the long eighteenth century. Furthermore, a mad methodology such as Bruce describes that eschews “positivism” and “objectivity”

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seems particularly apt for study of the so-called Enlightenment, a period deeply invested in precisely the kind of rationalist thinking Bruce challenges us to interrogate. While Bruce provides reconsideration of the ethical and political stakes of incorporating mad people into their own histories, Reaume points out the particular scholarly utility of such an approach. “By trying to understand what a person deemed mad thinks of why they have been described as such,” he explains, “historical researchers fortunate enough to locate such evidence can hope to obtain a greater understanding about why a person has been so described from the individual who is the focus of this term within the context of the society in which they live” (2017: 293). Porter puts it this way: we need to listen to the testimonies of mad individuals to “‘defamiliarize’ ourselves with the assumptions of modern physician-focused history and sociology of medicine, and hack our way into the empirical forests of the past in all their strangeness and diversity” (1985: 176). This final section of my chapter responds to these methodological incitements and, further, to Gabbard’s radical reframe of historical Disability Studies. “What would it look like,” Gabbard asks, to inquire into the era’s presumption of perfect mental function by looking not at deviations from it, but rather, at the presumption itself? Investigating the presumption differs from questioning reason per se—hardly an ignored topic in the criticism discussing the Age of Reason. Rather, the central questions for such an inquiry would be these: can and should the tables be turned to scrutinize the dominant matrix of intelligence? (2011: 92) The testimonies from mad people that follow help us begin, per Gabbard, to turn the tables. Authors remark upon a wide range of encounters with mental illness. Some indeed are as terrifying to the mad person as ableist cultural stereotypes, then and now, find madness to be. Others, however, ask that we scrutinize the dominant disability matrix more closely and acknowledge how mad voices speaking from embodied experience fundamentally change sanist ideologies and false assumptions about what it means to be mad. English poet and hymnodist William Cowper serves as a famous Enlightenment voice speaking to lived madness. In the posthumously published William Cowper, Memoir of the Early Life of William Cowper (1816), Cowper articulates the horror of his own experience: “My ears rang with the sound of torments, that seems to await me. Then did the pains of hell get hold on me, and, before day break, the very sorrows of death encompassed me” (quoted in Peterson 1982: 68). “[Madness’s] recurrences, actual and anticipated,” Roy Porter writes of Cowper, “were omens of the eternal perdition facing him, a doom not a dawn” (1987a: 274). Madness—both the prospect and reality—is singularly terrifying for Cowper, and his spiritual autobiography outlines how depression was nothing but bleakness and pain, and suicide a possible way out. As he writes in his poem “Hatred and Vengeance, My Eternal Portion,” God had punished his unfit soul with madness: “Him the vindictive rod of angry justice / Sent quick and howling to the centre headlong; / I, fed with judgment, in a fleshly tomb, am / Buried above ground” (Cowper 1980: vol. 1). London publisher and biblical scholar Alexander Cruden also broaches the torment of madness; however, he addresses being “buried above ground” not metaphorically but literally. In his autobiographical protest work, The London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured (1739), Cruden describes in detail his experience combatting accusations of mental illness, as well as what he understood to be false imprisonment in a private madhouse in

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Bethnal Green (see Peterson 1982). Cruden intimates that people deemed him mad for various reasons—he accidentally set fire to a house, expressed paranoid thoughts, and consistently provoked his neighbors. Cruden further explains that once institutionalized under the care of the merchant Robert Whiteman and the physician Dr. Monro, he was handcuffed, straightjacketed, and “most unjustly imprisoned … in that dismal place [a private madhouse]” (quoted in Peterson 1982: 49). He describes himself (Mr. C.) as having therein withstood “horrid sufferings” (49) like being “chained night and day to his bedstead in this hot season” (53). Samuel Bruckshaw, an English wool merchant, attests to a similar experience during his imprisonment (via a warrant from the mayor) in a private madhouse in Yorkshire. He also explains how, after his release from the madhouse, he was so stigmatized for mental illness that he could never reestablish his business. Bruckshaw writes of being abused in all kinds of ways during his incarceration: robbed, refused medical treatment, threatened with violence, and, like Cruden, chained to a bed (57). “When Wilson shewed me to bed,” Bruckshaw details in One More Proof of the Iniquitous Abuse of Private Madhouses (1774), “he carried me up into a dark and dirty garret, there stripped me, and carried my cloathes out of the room, which I saw no more, for upwards of a month, but lay chained to this bad bed, all that time” (60). He describes his chamber as always dark even in the daytime, and all “common necessaries denied” him (60); “they gave me bad victuals, short allowance, … no attendance, but what was contradictory and provoking as they could possibly invent, and frequently the most barbarous stripes” (60).7 Certainly all madhouse conditions and treatments were not as cruel as Bruckshaw and Cruden describe; and further, because legal cases involving allegations of wrongful confinement received dramatic treatment in the eighteenth-century popular press, literature over-represented the actual threat that wrongful confinement posed (see Kopans 2014). Nonetheless, Bruckshaw and Cruden’s protest texts do important activist work in not just giving supposed mad people a voice, but in likewise exposing the conditions to which they were sometimes subjected in the eighteenth century. Cruden and Bruckshaw formulate their narratives from the vantage point of what we might now term a “psychiatric system survivor”—a broad conception that incorporates not just individuals who have experienced violations at the hands of the mental health system, but also people who have worked within those systems through negotiation and resistance (Price 2013). In the Enlightenment era, Cruden and Bruckshaw’s testimonies provoked attention to the quality and kind of care available to mad people. In fact, we accordingly see in the period the advent of what is deemed “Moral Treatment,” a non-somatic approach to mental illness spawned by Pinel that anticipates contemporary cognitive–behavioral therapy (see Pinel 1806) and was key in post-Enlightenment madhouse reform movements. Perhaps more critically, however, Cruden and Bruckshaw’s stories are part of a historical archive of mad voices that ask us to continually scrutinize whether treatment paradigms like Pinel’s moral therapy—which still deemed madness “always pervert[ing]; sometimes annihilat[ing]” (1806: xv)—are indeed as patient-centered, just, and humane as they purport themselves to be. While the aforementioned texts voice madness from the inside, they do so primarily with trepidation and torment. Other eighteenth-century mad people articulate their experiences with mental disability in quite the opposite manner, however; in these texts, we recognize voices that, as Allen Thiher puts it, “are not afraid to speak madness and demand recognition of its human singularity” (1999: 131). We find in James Carkesse, George Trosse, and Kit Smart’s writings, for example, what Gabbard might describe as

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a celebration of “human mental imperfection … [that] forcefully contests both [John] Locke’s valorizing of reason and language and the presumption of a normative essence underlying his theory of mind” (2011: 91). In Trosse’s spiritual autobiography The Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse (1714), unreason is the rocky but necessary path to salvation. Among other things, Trosse narrates an encounter wherein he mistakes the Devil for God: While I was thus walking up and down, hurried with these worldly disquieting Thoughts, I perceiv’d a Voice, (I heard it plainly) saying unto me, Who art thou? Which, knowing it could be the Voice of no Mortal, I concluded was the voice of God, and … [I] betook myself to a very proper and seasonable Duty, namely Secret Prayer; performing it with some kind of Conscience towards God, and with hopes to receive some Good at his hands. (Quoted in Peterson 1982: 29) Albeit in the context of a struggle where he is duped into sin and false worship, Trosse embraces what he calls “Delusions of the Devil” and undertakes a journey that, ultimately, enables his religious awakening and communion with God (30). In contrast to Cowper, Trosse conceives of hearing voices and madness as a constructive, purgative experience that brings him closer to divinity (see also Porter 1987a). By way of closing, I will offer just two more mad voices that, I would argue, upend sanist cultural assumptions about what madness is and means in the eighteenth century. They likewise might help us reconceive what madness means now. These examples from Carkesse and Smart provide unique access to what Thiher calls “a principle, a self, or form of consciousness, that can listen to its own madness” (1999: 131). In short, these mad authors offer strategic defenses of madness. They employ disability as epistemology— celebrating mental difference as a unique paradigm for knowing the world—to reveal what kind of good madness can do. For Smart, madness produces a unique disability aesthetic that, per disability theorist Tobin Siebers, “foregrounds the extent to which the body becomes thinkable when its totality can no longer be taken for granted, when the social meanings attached to sensory and cognitive values cannot be assumed” (2010: 4; see also Davidson 2008). Take an excerpt from Smart’s greatest poem, Jubilate Agno, composed between 1759 and 1763 while he was confined in St. Luke’s Hospital, London: For I will consider my Cat Jeoffry. For he is the servant of the Living God duly and daily serving him. For at the first glance of the glory of God in the East he worships in his way. For this is done by wreathing his body seven times round with elegant quickness. For then he leaps up to catch the musk, which is the blessing of God upon his prayer. For he rolls upon prank to work it in. For having done duty and received blessing he begins to consider himself. For this he performs in ten degrees. For first he looks upon his forepaws to see if they are clean. For secondly he kicks up behind to clear away there. For thirdly he works it upon stretch with the forepaws extended. For fourthly he sharpens his paws by wood. For fifthly he washes himself. For sixthly he rolls upon wash. For seventhly he fleas himself, that he may not be interrupted upon the beat.

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For eighthly he rubs himself against a post. For ninthly he looks up for his instructions. For tenthly he goes in quest of food. For having consider’d God and himself he will consider his neighbour. For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness. For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance. For one mouse in seven escapes by his dallying. For when his day’s work is done his business more properly begins. For he keeps the Lord’s watch in the night against the adversary. For he counteracts the powers of darkness by his electrical skin and glaring eyes. For he counteracts the Devil, who is death, by brisking about the life. For in his morning orisons he loves the sun and the sun loves him. For he is of the tribe of Tiger. (Smart 1980: vol. 1) Recalling Bruce’s incitement to “[perceive] the expressive potential in the so-called rants and raves of madpeople,” Smart’s poem offers readers a vast hymn of praise to God that is beautifully “askew.” In this excerpt, line-upon-line repetition of the word “For” and precise numerical enumeration are reminiscent simultaneously of compulsive thoughts, obsessive fixation, and the hymnodic rhythms of prayer ritual. The poem feels at once disorientingly fragmentary and surprisingly whole—incomplete yet complete—in its accrual of the speaker’s impressions of Jeoffry’s godliness. Smart’s heavenly tribute to/ via his cat might be read as weird, whimsical, witty, even cheeky, but it is also deeply earnest and morally instructive: “For if he meets another cat he will kiss her in kindness. / For when he takes his prey he plays with it to give it a chance.” Both the poem’s formal qualities and its content push readers into a productive aesthetic domain in which “the sensation of otherness is felt at its most powerful, strange, and frightening” (Siebers 2010: 25). Mental impairment is a condition of possibility for Smart’s abandonment of traditional poetic structures and his “insane” glorification of God (see also Natali 2016a). Like Smart’s mad hymning, Carkesse writes in defense of madness in a series of fiftythree poems published under the title Lucida Intervalla (1679).8 This collection is, in fact, the first “documented testimony of poetry written during internment,” and Carkesse produces the work in roughly a six-month period while hospitalized in Bethlem and Finsbury (Natali 2016b: 45). Ilaria Natali notes that the collection as a whole “tackles questions of feigned madness, discusses the theatricality of mental disease, and describes the treatments adopted to ‘cure’ insanity in Bethlem” (45; see also Ingram et al. 2005). Although Carkesse claims throughout the volume to be “sane” and feigning madness only temporarily, his status as an imputed madman who has been incarcerated as such makes his poetry an account of madness from the inside. Indeed, Lucida Intervalla, according to Natali, “reminds us of a sort of odyssey of the lunatic-hero in the world of madhouses” (2016b: 49). I will conclude now by focusing on but eight lines from Carkesse that, in many ways, take us back to the start of this chapter, as they ask readers to consider how and why madness gets constructed as it does. Anticipating Samuel Johnson’s suggestion that “many a man is mad in certain instances,” Carkesse pens “The Riddle”: Doctor, this Pusling Riddle pray explain: Others your Physick cures, but I complain It works with me the clean contrary way,

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And makes me Poet, who are Mad they say. The truth on’t is, my Brains well fixt condition Apollo better knows, than his Physitian: ’Tis Quacks disease, not mine, my poetry By the blind Moon-Calf, took for Lunacy. (1679) From the poem’s outset, Carkesse indicts the supposedly all-knowing “Doctor” who, in an age of enlightened objectivity and empiricism, should have a ready answer to this “Pusling” riddle. Why, Carkesse wryly probes, does a physician’s cure instead make him the consummate mad poet? Carkesse’s poem not only proves the doctor is a fake, but it questions the doctor’s own mental health insofar as he is unable to see that the poet speaker’s brain is in fine “condition.” Perhaps most crucially, then, Carkesse destabilizes an always insecure sane/ insane binary wherein patients are presumed mad and their doctors mentally sound. “The truth on’t,” the poet speaker explains, is that the doctor’s own “Moon-Calf” blindness makes him take exquisite poetic logic for “Lunacy.” Carkesse’s “Riddle” celebrates the ingenious writer moved by impairment, and then makes that madness the paradigm for a whole new “normal.” Voicing a sort of proto Mad Pride, Carkesse diagnoses Enlightenment rationality as “Quacks disease” and conceptualizes a radical future in which poets are “well fixt” mad folk in an even madder eighteenth-century world.

NOTES

INTRODUCTION 1. The economist Adam Smith, Hutcheson’s pupil, contends in The Theory of Moral Sentiments that while sympathy exists, it results from socialization rather than being embedded in the nervous system. “Though our brother is upon the rack,” Smith writes, “as long as we ourselves are at our ease, our senses will never inform us of what he suffers” ([1759] 1976: 1.1.2). 2. Extreme manifestations of sensitivity were commonly interpreted as maladies. In other words, sometimes the “sixth sense” did not work properly. One’s nerves could be too tightly strung, and doctors such as George Cheyne popularized the notion that too much emotionality could signal a nervous disorder—a case of “the nerves.” Excesses of sensibility divided down the lines of gender. A male patient might experience “hypochondria,” but in his case the capacity to reason usually remained strong, whereas a female “suffering” from “spleen,” later “hysteria,” became mentally unstable and irrational.

CHAPTER 2 1. The Petition of Samuel North, Middlesex Sessions: Sessions Papers—Justices’ Working Documents, July 1773, London Lives, 1690–1800, LMSMPS506310055 (www.londonlives. org, accessed March 2, 2018), London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1773. 2. Old Bailey Proceedings Online (www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 7.2, accessed March 2, 2018) (hereafter OBP), October 1761, trial of Tousant Felix Urvoy (t17611021-36). 3. OBP, June 1739, trial of Owen Darby (t17390607-9); OBP, December 1788, trial of William England (t17881210-93); OBP, December 1800, trial of John Roberts (t18001203-11). 4. The Petition of William Platt, Middlesex Sessions, Sessions Papers—Justices’ Working Documents, July 2, 1716, London Lives, 1690–1800, LMSMPS501540055, (www. londonlives.org, accessed March 2, 2018), London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1716. 5. OBP, Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, November 1726 (OA17261103). 6. OBP, July 1784, trial of William Marney (t17840707-55). 7. OBP, June 1780, trial of William MacDonald (t17800628-38). 8. OBP, January 1780, trial of John Frank otherwise Franks (t17800112-2). 9. OBP, Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, August 1740 (OA17400806). 10. OBP, February 1786, trial of William Lycett and John Jenkins (t17860222-102). 11. OBP, June 1794, trial of James Rayne and David Watkins (t17940604-39). 12. OBP, April 1758, trial of James Cotes (t17580405-37).

CHAPTER 3 1. Martha Holmes pushes back against Scarry’s idea of pain as destroying language (Holmes and Chambers 2005: 129). Susannah B. Mintz also argues, contra Scarry, that “physical pain can be uttered” (2013: 4). See also Jeremy Davies (2014: 10–18) for a discussion of

NOTES

2.

3.

4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

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“exceptionalist” theories of pain like Scarry’s (which argue that pain resists representation) in contrast with “culturalist” theories that look at pain in a more social and relational way. Joanna Bourke provides one of these more culturalist arguments, contending that pain is “inherently social” (2014: 17). Rey points out that “the day-to-day practice of medicine involved the infliction of pain,” and that “an evaluation of the price of life by comparison with the extent of suffering” often took place (1993: 94). “[M]edical writing of the time … explored the ways in which humoral, environmental, and occupational factors contributed to the development of disabilities and chronic conditions in children and adults” (Turner 2012a: 48). Thomas De Quincey’s “Confessions of an Opium Eater” was published in 1821. J. Davies argues of the Romantic era in particular that “[t]hese years saw an increasingly visible concern with pain relief in chronic cases, discernible in rising levels of opium consumption” (2014: 8). Cave Winscom’s “The Head-Ach” also boldly disputes the physician’s power to alleviate her pain, arguing that lances, leeches, and cupping have proved “useless efforts, which but gave me pain” (1793: ll. 43–4). Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarianism was a rejection of moral sense philosophy; see Wandless (2005: 67). As J. Davies argues: “Bodily pain … seemed to pose a special problem for the aesthetics of sensibility. … Physical pain is outstandingly resistant to the sympathetic engagement of Smith’s impartial spectator” (2014: 6). J. Davies argues that “both Coleridge and Shelley were chronic pain sufferers who found in pain a way of modeling the relationship between the creative individual and the external world” (2014: 138), adding that “for writers of the Romantic period, physical pain could become an opportunity for creative activity rather than a sensation to be endured” (160).

CHAPTER 4 1. There is no published English translation. 2. This anecdotal detail seems itself to have caused some unease in later readers. Fear of black skin is, for instance, key to the plot of Wilkie Collins’s 1872 novel, Poor Miss Finch, which draws extensively on Cheselden’s narrative. On being cured of her blindness and manifesting a “horror of dark shades of colour whether seen in men, women or things,” the eponymous heroine is sheltered from discovering that the man with whom she had fallen in love when blind has black skin (Collins [1872] 2008: 74). However, he is not black; he is a white man who has epilepsy, the cure for which involves the ingestion of a silver compound that darkens the skin. So, if black skin is here the sign of having been cured of epilepsy, the only cure for blackness is blindness, a state to which Miss Finch happily returns. The heroine’s horror at black skin is presented as a noble English sentiment, distinguishing her from the bawdy French widow narrator, Madame Pratolungo, whose “South American” (Collins [1872] 2008: 1) husband was, by contrast, she tells us, “a fine mahogany brown all over” (Collins [1872] 2008: 74). 3. Such a remark sounds to any reader of Le neveu de Rameau (Rameau’s Nephew) like the philosopher’s response to a remark by the Nephew, “Cela est même infiniment plus vrai que vous ne le sentez” (“That’s infinitely more true than you could ever realize”) (Diderot 2016: 22, 105). The Nephew stingingly replies: “Oh! vous voilà, vous autres! Si nous disons quelque chose de bien, c’est comme des fous ou des inspirés, par hasard. Il n’y a que

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vous autres qui vous entendiez” (“Oh there you go again, you lot! If ever we say anything worthwhile, it’s got to be by accident, like madmen or fantasists. You think you’re the only ones to understand yourselves”) (Diderot 2016: 22, 105). 4. It was not only optics that was considered in such an abstract manner in the eighteenth century. As Singy (2006) has shown, the same was true for observation, which produced a figure that seems bizarre to us today, namely the blind natural scientist. 5. For a similar suggestion about Jane Eyre, see Gabbard (2012).

CHAPTER 5 1. I will sometimes use the eighteenth-century terminology “deaf-mute” and “deaf and dumb,” but both the terms and the conception of non-speaking deaf people that they represent are anachronistic. Today, we understand signing Deaf people to be members of a vibrant and distinct linguistic and cultural group. 2. William Stokoe (1960) did pioneering work in the study of sign language. Basing his work on structural linguistics, Stokoe demonstrated that signs, like spoken words, can be broken down into smaller units and that the combination of these units is rule governed. Subsequent studies by linguists, anthropologists, cognitive scientists, and others have explained the grammar and syntax of sign languages and shown the structural similarities between sign languages and spoken languages. 3. Nicholas Mirzoeff (1995) argues that visual art served a similar purpose; he claims that deaf visual artists “used the cachet of high art to resist being categorized as ‘primitive’ and as a means of demonstrating their intellectual capacities to a skeptical hearing majority” (3). See Mirzoeff (1995) for an account of deaf visual artists from the time of Louis XIV to the twentieth century. 4. This book is among the titles whose attribution to Defoe is challenged by Furbank and Owens’ (1998) reassessment of the Defoe canon. Rodney Baine (1968) argues for William Bond as the likely author. 5. See Christopher Krentz (2007) for an extended discussion of various authors’ assumptions about Campbell’s deafness and the ultimate unknowability of whether Campbell was actually deaf and whether he communicated using sign language. 6. See Padden and Humphries (1988) on the misattribution of the invention of sign language to Epée. They argue that the tale of Epée inventing sign language, which circulated in Deaf communities and they were told of repeatedly while visiting Deaf clubs in France, functions as a “folktale about the origins of a people and their language” (29). As such, it plays an important role in consolidating cultural identity, even though it is based on a false understanding of how a sign language—or any natural language—develops. 7. This claim was disputed by Saboureux de Fontenay, a deaf pupil of Jacob Pereire, who cites his earlier autobiography as well as published letters and sketches (see Lane 1984b). For a discussion of a fifteenth-century treatise written by Teresa de Cartagena, a Castilian converso nun who was deaf, see Brueggemann (2004). 8. Desloges’ powerful defense of sign language, written in the language of the dominant culture, is an exemplary instance of what Mary Louise Pratt calls “autoethnography”, a text “in which people undertake to describe themselves in ways that engage with representations others have made of them” and that constitutes “a marginalized group’s point of entry into the dominant circuits of print culture” (1991: 64). 9. See Lane (1984b) for a discussion of the debate not only between Deschamps and Desloges, but also, more generally, between proponents of oral and manual education of deaf people in

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eighteenth-century France, England, and Germany. I am indebted to Lane’s comprehensive history for many of the details in this chapter and for my understanding of the origins of deaf education.

CHAPTER 6 1. See Nussbaum (2003: 42–4). 2. See also the discussion of the materiality of the tongue in Cohen (1996: 1–10). 3. For Ferrein, “the human voice combines the characteristics of a wind and a stringed instrument” (quoted in MacNamee 1984: 410). 4. Spoken language, sometimes referred to as oratory, etymologically derives from orare, meaning “to plead” or “to pray.” During the Enlightenment, the term oratory, which also refers to the place where prayer takes place (i.e. a chapel or pulpit), gave rise to the term “oratorio,” or a piece of music based upon scripture. 5. Exemplary of texts that make use of musical notation, prosodic markers, and the discourse of music to understand the nature of speech are Herries’ Elements of Speech (1773) and Steele’s An essay towards establishing the melody and measure of speech … by peculiar symbols (1775). 6. Though certainly related in nineteenth-century medical discourses, communication disorders such as muteness, dumbness, and aphasia were classed differently during the Early Modern period. If they were discussed, they often appeared as part of treatises on deafness and hearing impairment. See, for example, John Bulwer’s Philocophus: or, The deafe and dumbe mans Friend (1648) and Chirologia: the naturall language of the hand (1644) and William Holder’s Elements of Speech: an essay of inquiry in to the natural production of letters (1669), which explicitly links the production of speech to hearing. 7. See Deutsch (2005: 91), Murray (1979: 1610–14), and McHenry Jr. (1985: 485–91). 8. Mason uses Demosthenes as an example of what he calls “defects in speech”: “three natural impediments in Pronunciation; all which he conquered by invincible Labour and Perseverance. One was Weakness of Voice; which he cured by frequently declaiming on the Sea-Shore, amidst the Noise of the Waves. Another was a Shortness of Breath; which he mended by repeating his Orations as he walked up a Hill. And the other was the Fault I am speaking of; a thick mumbling Way of speaking; which he broke himself of by declaiming with pebbles in his Mouth” (1748: 10–11). Here, Mason suggests that the correction of speech impediments may be achieved by sheer will and corporeal governance. 9. On Pope’s physical deformity and conceptions of medical and social disability, see Deutsch (1996: 13–16, 27–8, 33–5). 10. For a more sustained consideration of the relationship between disability, stuttering, and sensibility, see Codr (2009). 11. For more on Thelwall’s theory and practice of speech pathology, see Stanback (2011) and Richman (2018).

CHAPTER 8 1. Sander L. Gilman further explains that, by as early as the sixteenth century, madness functioned as a conceit for the view that mad actions were a sign of sanity in a world gone mad (2014: 443). 2. On the normate, see Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (1997: 8).

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3. More precisely, acedia is a form of spiritual crisis described as “carelessness” and “weariness or distress of heart” (Cvetkovich 2012). 4. Greg Eghigian similarly argues that “one could write the history of madness not as a chronicle of efforts aimed at understanding and treating disorders, but as a story of humanity’s attempt to find and promote the good life” (2017: 10). 5. The English had fewer than 3,000 people confined in asylums in 1800 and over 100,000 one century later (Scull 2017: 104). 6. For example, Parry-Jones explains that several key eighteenth- and nineteenth-century reports about abusive, unethical, and inhumane treatment of patients in private madhouses have negatively colored our understanding of those care facilities (1972: Introduction). 7. On unjust incarceration in madhouses in the Enlightenment, see Dana Gliserman Kopans (2014). 8. The title refers to the Enlightenment belief that mad people experienced brief periods of lucidity; see Natali (2016b: 45–6).

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INDEX

Additions sur la Lettre sur les aveugles (Diderot) 73, 74, 82–5 Æsop 2 aesthetics 5–6 African slaves 8–9 aging 39 Alchemist, The (Jonson) 124 All Slavekeepers … Apostates (Lay) 25–6 American Asylum for the Deaf 97–8 Amman, Johann Conrad 96 anatomical studies 8 Andry, Nicolas 21, 43 Angier, Samuel 109–10 animist theory 59 Aristotle 7, 113 artifical limbs 21, 50 assistive devices 21, 43, 49–50 asylums 61 atypical bodies 3, 19–37 Augustine of Hippo 3 autoethnography 158n 8 autonomy 8 Babbler, The (Kelly) 106 Bacon, Francis 1, 24 Badcock, John 54 Badham, Samuel 49 Bannerman, Anne 66 Bartholomew Fair 9 Battie, William 145 beauty 5 beggars 11, 53–4 biblical texts 27, 30–1, 125 biological models 4, 6 birth defects 3–4 Blacklock, Thomas 11 Blanchard, Anne 66 Blanchard, Isaac 44 blind schools 78, 95 blindness 15, 73–85 bodies, atypical 3, 19–37 Bonaparte, Napoleon 34–5

Bonet, Juan Pablo 96 Borough, The (Crabbe) 135 Boruwlaski, Josef 27–30, 36 Bouilly, Jean-Nicolas 102–3 Boyle, Robert 113 Braidwood, Thomas 96 brain 8, 10, 145 breast cancer surgery 61 Brontë, Charlotte 136 Brontë, Emily 136 Bruckshaw, Samuel 152 Buchan, Dr. William 41 Buchinger, Matthew 30–1 Bunyan, John 126–7 Burke, Edmund 11, 64–5 burlesque 20 Burnett, James, Lord Monboddo 106 Burney, Frances (Fanny) 13, 61, 129, 132–3 Buzaglo, Abraham 42 Byrne, Charles 35 Cajanus, Daniel 35 Camilla (Burney) 13, 129, 132–3 Campbell, Duncan 90–5 canes 49–50 Carkesse, James 154–5 Cartesian dualism 4 cataract surgery 76, 77 Cave Winscom, Jane 62 changelings 8, 123–4, 136–7 chapbooks 130, 134–5 Charles II 10 Cheap Repository Tracts (More) 134–5 Cheselden, William 76 Cheyne, George 41, 59–60, 115 Christianity 3, 7, 73, 126 Clarissa (Richardson) 67–70 classification 145 Cleland, John 116–17, 128, 129 Clerc, Laurent 15, 97–8 cognitive ableism 8 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 134

INDEX

Collins, Wilkie 157 n 2 Colman, George the Elder 26–7 Combe, Andrew 115 compassion 13, 53, 64, 74, 84–5 Comstock, Andrew 111 conduct books 12, 39, 50, 61 confinement 21, 146–50, 151–2 congenital birth defects 3–4 conjoined twins 20 Copineau, abbé 100 Cotter O’Brien, Patrick 35 court dwarfs 19–20, 27, 31 Cowper, William 151 Crabbe, George 135 cradle-swapping 123, 124 cripple 53–4, 55 Cruden, Alexander 151–2 crutches 43 cure 74, 77, 144 Cuvilliés, François 31 Davies, John 46 Deaf and Dumb (Bouilly) 102 deaf schools 15, 95, 97 deafness 15, 87–103 Defoe, Daniel 6, 108 Deformity: An Essay (Hay) 1–2, 19, 24–5, 62 Demosthenes 113–14 Descartes, René 4, 7 Deschamps, abbé 98, 101 Desloges, Pierre 98–102 Devil 121, 124, 153 Dictionary of the English Language (Johnson) 112 Diderot, Denis Additions sur la Lettre sur les aveugles 73, 74, 82–5 Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient 15, 73, 74, 77–8, 79–81, 88 diet 60 Dodsley, Robert 66–7 Doggett, Thomas 127 Donne, John 123 Drayton, Michael 123–4 Dream, The (Donne) 123 Dryden, John 124 Dubois-Fontanelle, Joseph-Gaspard 115 Dunciad (Pope) 132 dwarfs 19–20, 23, 25–35 education 15, 78, 88, 89, 93, 95–8 Elements of Orthoepy (Nares) 112

179

Elements of Speech (Holder) 105 elocution 114, 117 English Malady, The (Cheyne) 59–60 Enlightenment 2, 4, 5, 6, 15, 21, 40, 58, 87, 88, 108, 133, 143, 145, 152 Enquiry concerning political justice (Godwin) 133–4 Equiano, Olaudah 9 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, A (Locke) 7–8, 75, 123, 124, 125, 143–4 Essay for Sensationalism (Locke) 10 Essay on Crookedness, An (Jones) 43–4 Essay upon the Action of an Orator, An (Faucheur) 105 Essays on Physiognomy (Lavater) 12 exercise 42–3 Fables (Gay) 131 Faerie Queene, The (Spenser) 123 faked disability 53–4 Fanny Hill (Cleland) 116–17, 128 129 Faucheur, Michel Le 105 Faulkner, George 47 Fear VR 5150 139–40 feeble mind 126 feral children 6, 87 Ferrein, Antoine 109 Fielding, Henry 127 Fielding, Sarah 132 Finch, Anne, Countess of Winchilsea 65–6 Fletcher, John 149–50 fools 125 footwear 41–2 Foucault, Michel 21, 78, 119, 146 Frank(s), John 49 freak shows 9–10, 139–40 “From This Dark Prison of My Pain” (StuartWortley) 66 Gallaudet, Edward Miner 98 Gallaudet, Thomas Hopkins 15, 97–8 Gallaudet University 98 Gay, John 47, 54, 131 Gearing, William 107–8 General Dictionary of the English Language (Sheridan) 114 gesture 88 giants 20, 35 Godwin, William 133–4 gout 61–2, 68 Graves, Richard 116

180

Great Confinement 21, 146–50 Grose, Francis 54 Hall, Thomas 20 “Handsome Idiot, The” 129 Haüy, Valentin 78, 95 Hay, William 1–2, 19, 24–5, 62 Hell upon Earth 53 Herder, Johann Gottfried 116 Herries, John 109 Hillmer, Josef 77 Hippocrates 41 Hob, or the country wake: a farce (Doggett) 127 Hobbes, Thomas 10 Holder, William 105 hospitals 14, 45, 60–1, 146, 148, 149 human rights 2 Hume, David 63 humoral theory 4, 59, 111 Hunter, John and William 21 Hutcheson, Francis 11 “Idiot Boy, The” (Wordsworth) 134 idiots 123, 128–31, 136 institutionalization 14–15, 21, 146 intellectual disability 6–9, 121–37 Interesting Narrative, The (Equiano) 9 Itard, Jean-Marc 87 Jane Eyre (Brontë) 136 Jews 7 Johnson, Samuel 62, 112, 140 Jones, Phillip 43–4 Jonson, Ben 124 Jubilate Agno (Smart) 153–4 Kant, Immanuel 2, 8, 15 Kelly, Hugh 106 L’Abbé de l’Epée (Bouilly) 102–3 Lambert, Daniel 20, 35–6 lameness 45–7, 55 language 15 laudanum 60 laughing at disability 10, 11, 116–17 Lavater, Johann Caspar 12 Lay, Benjamin 25–6 learning difficulties 6–9, 121–37 l’Epée, l’Abbe Charles-Michel de 15, 95–7, 101 Lettre sur les aveugles à l’usage de ceux qui voient (Diderot) 15, 73, 74, 77–8, 79–81, 88

INDEX

Leviathan (Hobbes) 10 Life of Samuel Johnson (Macaulay) 13 Life of the Reverend Mr. George Trosse, The (Trosse) 153 Linnaeus, Carl 4, 145 lisping 110, 114–15 Lives of the Poets (Pope) 62 Locke, John 7–8, 10, 75, 123, 124, 125, 143–4 London-Citizen Exceedingly Injured, The (Cruden) 151–2 Lucida Intervalla (Carkesse) 154–5 Lycett, William 49 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 13 Mackenzie, Henry 13 mad/madness 142, 143–55 madhouses 146–7, 151–2 Magennis, Joanna 47–8 malevolence 1, 11 man 7–8 Man of Feeling, The (Mackenzie) 13 Mapp, Sally 43 Maria Teresia 32–5 Marriage of Figaro, The 117 Martin, Matthew 54 Mason, John 114, 159n 8 mastectomy 61 mechanistic theory 59 medical model 13–14, 21, 144 medicine 41–4, 58–61, 74, 118–19 memory 88 mental dullness 131 mental health 139–55 Mere Nature Delineated (Defoe) 6 Merry Fellow 129 metaphor 15, 73–4, 109, 136 metaphysics 3, 58, 122 micrographia 30–1 Millenium Hall (Scott) 13 Milton, John 113 mind –body dualism 4 soul and 7 miniature writing and painting 30–1 mobility aids 21, 43, 49–50 mobility impairment 39–56 mocking disability 10, 11, 116–17 Molyneux, William (Molyneux’s Problem) 15, 74, 75–8 monstrous births 3 Montagu, Lady Mary Wortley 19–20, 23–4 Moral Treatment 152

INDEX

181

morality 1, 11–12, 58, 67, 70, 106, 141–2 More, Hannah 134–5 mothers 3–4 “Mr. Stammer” 106 Murphy, Thomas 47–8 music 109–10 muteness 87–8 Myers, Henry 49

Potsdam Giants 35 print culture 88–9, 105, 112, 116 progeria 20 Prösch, Peter 20 prostheses 21, 50 Protestant Reformation 7 Pugh, John 43 punishment 3, 68, 69, 70, 135

Nares, Robert 112 Nash, Beau 127 natural fool 125 nature/natural 1, 3–4, 5, 58, 59, 113, 122 Newton, Isaac 4 Nixon’s Cheshire Prophecy (Nixon) 128 Noble, Eustache Le 109, 110 normality 16, 107, 110, 113, 114 North, Samuel 43 Nymphidia (Drayton) 123–4

race 9, 76, 89 radical progressivism 133 reading 83, 88–9, 95 Religio Philosophi (Hay) 25 religion 3, 7, 58–61 Remarks on the Laws relating to the Poor (Hay) 25 rhetoric 12, 20, 87, 111–12 Richard the Third (Shakespeare) 1 Richardson, Samuel 67–70 ridiculing disability 10, 11, 116–17 Robinson, Nicholas 60 Roderick Random (Smollett) 131 Romantic poetry 64, 67, 134 Royal Society 10

obesity 20, 35–6 O’Brien, Patrick Cotter 35 Observations on Maniacal Disorders (Pargeter) 142 Olio, The (Grose) 54 “On Affliction” (Finch) 66 opium 60 oratory 109, 110, 113–14, 159 n 4 Orthopaedia (Andry) 21, 43 pain 57–71 “Pain and Patience” (Dodsley) 66–7 Paradise Lost (Milton) 113 Pargeter, William 142 Parkes, Mrs. 43 Parley the Porter (More) 135 Pennsylvania Hospital 148, 149 Pereire, Jacob Rodrigues 96, 98 person 7–8 Peter of Hanover (Peter the Wild Boy) 6 philosophers 6, 7, 8, 10, 15, 40, 63–4, 75, 88, 141, 143, 145 Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, A (Burke) 64–5 physiognomy 12 Pilgrim, The (Fletcher) 149–50 Pilgrim’s Progress, The (Bunyan) 126–7 Pinel, Philippe 145, 152 Ponce de León, Pedro 96 Poor Miss Finch (Collins) 157 n 2 Pope, Alexander 23–4, 62, 114–15, 132 Pordage, Samuel 124–5

Salignac, Mélanie de 82–5 sanism 139, 140–1, 142 Saunderson, Nicholas 80–1 scientific method 3 Scott, Sarah 13 sedentary lifestyle 41–2 semen-swapping 124 sensibility 10–11, 12–13, 64, 67, 115–16, 117 Serious Reflections of Robinson Crusoe (Defoe) 108 servicemen 45, 54 sexual endowment 128, 129 Shakespeare, William 1 Sheridan, Thomas 109, 114 shoes 41–2 Sicard, abbé 89, 96 sign language 88, 93, 95–6, 98–102 Simple, David 132 Simple Simon 130 Sinott, Ethan 103 slaves 8–9 Smart, Kit 153–4 Smith, Adam 12, 63, 156 n 1 Smollett, Tobias 131 social attitudes 6, 8, 21, 40, 62 social construction 140–1 soldiers 45, 54 Solomon, Andrew 139–40

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soul 7, 59, 108 speech 105–119 speech therapy 110, 118 Spenser, Edmund 123 Spiritual Quixote, The (Graves) 116 spirituality 12, 67, 69 “Spleen, The” (Finch) 65–6 stereotyping 53–4, 149 stigma 16, 139, 141, 146, 147–8, 149, 152 Stoicism 10 Street, Samuel 21 Stuart-Wortley, Lady Emmeline 65, 66 stupidity 124 stuttering/stammering 106, 110, 111, 113–14, 115–16, 117 sublime 64–6 supernatural 3–4 surgery 61, 76, 77 Swift, Jonathan 132 symbolic model 3 sympathy 11, 13, 60, 63–5 taxonomy 145 Thelwall, John 117–19 Theory of Moral Sentiments (Smith) 12 thought experiments 5, 75 Tissot, Samuel 41 “To Pain” (Stuart-Wortley) 65, 66 Tom Fool 127, 128 Tom Jones (Fielding) 127 tongue 107–8 Travels (Swift) 132 Treatise on Insanity, A (Pinel) 145 Treatise on Madness (Battie) 145

INDEX

Treatise on the Science of Muscular Action (Pugh) 43 Trivia: Or the Art of Walking the Streets of London (Gay) 47, 54 Trosse, George 153 universality 111, 133 universe 4, 5 unnatural 5 urban odyssey 47 Urvoy, Tousant Felix 44 Vanbrugh, Sir John 149 virtue 2, 10, 13, 17, 24, 62, 69, 131, 132 vitalism 59 Voltaire 77 von Archenolz, Johann Wilhelm 53 walking 39–40, 41, 42–3 walking sticks 49–50 Wallis, John 93, 96 Walpole, Horace 61 Ward, Ned 53 Warren, Edward 115 What Is Enlightenment (Kant) 2 Whyte, Samuel 110 Willis, Thomas 10, 124, 145 women 8, 47, 62, 65–6 Wordsworth, William 110, 134 work participation 45 writing skills 30–1, 88–9, 90, 97 Wuthering Heights (Brontë) 136 Yard, Francis Buller 49



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