Representations of Disability and Illness (2023 Victorian Reading Project)

This was the second theme on my Great Nineteenth-Century Reading Project list, in part because I was thinking about a new research project that was related. As with the first theme, Race and Empire, there is a mix of poetry, fiction and non-fiction in this list.

I’m indebted to Jill Ehnenn for some critical pointers on this theme, and to the Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts project for its helpful (and chronological!) selection of annotated items.

Reading plan (chronological)

1. Olive, Dinah Craik (1850)
2. Hide and Seek, Wilkie Collins (1854, but the 1861 edition)
3. Little Dorrit, Charles Dickens (1855-57)
4. Seven Months in the Kingston Lunatic Asylum, and what I saw there, Ann Pratt (1860), and Official Documents regarding it (1860)
5. On Obscure Diseases of the Brain, Forbes Winslow (1861)
6. Our Mutual Friend, Charles Dickens (1864-5)
7. The Pillars of the House, Charlotte Yonge (1873)
8. The Blind Beggar, Arthur Symons (1892)
9. Sonnets of the Wingless Hours, Eugene Lee-Hamilton (1894)
10. Children of the Sea, Joseph Conrad (1897)
11. The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann (1924)

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There are a lot of novels here that are something of a piece (inevitably, for a list that includes two Dickens novels!): lengthy tales of families and their rises and falls. I chose texts for this list in part where I had not read them (recently or at all), but also for some of their crossovers with the previous theme, in particular with colonial activity in North America and the Caribbean (Hide and Seek, Seven Months, Pillars).

Thematically, there are lots of common threads, such as:

• the pressure on parents (especially of larger families) to marry off their female children or place their male ones in reliable professions as a way of securing their livelihoods;
• religions’ approach to disability, from Anglo-Catholicism’s attitude of physical ailments leading to spiritual sanctity (Pillars) to debates of faith in Olive;
• creative dreams squeezed, but taken up and maintained against the odds (Pillars, Olive, Hide and Seek), which parallel the experiences of painters of the period (Wilkie Collins’ Valentine Blyth “potboils” for money in much the same way as painters like Dante Gabriel Rossetti); and
• the small tragedies of children, too, especially in Olive and Pillars, not dissimilar to those that arise in the early sections of Story of an African Farm.

The economic conditions of the disabled or ill are, of course, perilous, as they are so often today. Symons’ poem The Blind Beggar illustrates this most forcefully, but Dickens’ Little Dorrit and its central focus on life in (and the consequences of) debtors’ prison also explores this, playing out across dramatic changes in economic circumstances similar to those in Our Mutual Friend. (Dickens repeats.)

These novels explore disability and the care of/for others largely in domestic settings, and often in settings of limited financial means. Conrad’s Children of the Sea has a different aspect to it, exploring how disability and illness are experienced and managed in an all-male professional environment that has plenty of inherent dangers. Similarly, Sonnets approaches disability quite differently, as a personal experience of the author’s. The sonnet sequence explores in particular Lee-Hamilton’s experience of a debilitating condition that left him in pain and immobile for a large section of his life, in the “wheeled bed” for which the first section is named. (Although he did subsequently recover through the intervention and encouragement of his sister (Vernon Lee).) Composing poetry was one of his stays during his period of debilitation, although he struggled to read and write himself. The Magic Mountain explores some of these same themes, albeit as a fictional account of the descent into illness and medicalisation.

The non-fiction pieces here focus on mental illness, whereas much of the fiction and poetry focus on physical disability and illness, although do not entirely exclude what we today think of as mental illness (e.g. Mr Dolls’ alcoholism in Our Mutual Friend). The story of Ann Pratt lays bare some of the physical and mental abuses perpetrated against those held in mental institutions, especially in British colonies. Her persistence in telling her story led in turn to an empire-wide investigation into the state of asylums (in 1863). Obscure Diseases operates at the very other end of the spectrum in terms of mental-health literature, a medical text by Forbes Winslow who had spent his childhood in asylums as the son of an asylum owner. I chose Obscure Diseases less for the interest/value of the specific text and more for what it (and its author’s history) can tell us about how mental illness was thought of and studied. Winslow was essentially a celebrity witness in criminal cases, including those of baby farmers and Jack the Ripper, as well as being involved in trials for the commitment of women whose husbands wanted them out of the way (a topic that interested Wilkie Collins greatly!). The medicine is now, of course, thoroughly outdated, but it’s an interesting historical piece in part because of its author’s notoriety.

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Other possible readings

There are lots of other writings from the period that touch on similar themes. Other suggestions are very welcome in comments, but these are a few:

• A great deal of Wilkie Collins, e.g. Poor Miss Finch
• The History of Sir Richard Calmady, Lucas Malet
• The Angel of the Revolution, George Chetwynd Griffith