Towards the end of the second volume of his study of sensory impairment, The Lost Senses (1845), the deaf author and traveller John Kitto published responses by an unnamed ‘intelligent blind man’ to some questions he had put to him about his life. Kitto’s correspondent, a piano tuner from Plymouth, stressed that the ‘most painful of the disadvantages’ he had experienced as a visually impaired person were not due to the ‘absence of sight’, but rather to the prejudices and ignorance of sighted persons. It was a common occurrence, he complained, for him to be shouted at as if deaf, or to be grabbed by ‘some officious passer-by’ to prevent him colliding with some obstacle which ‘if left to his own resources, he would have passed with the greatest of ease’. In themselves, such ‘trifles’ were everyday annoyances that blind people had to endure, but what made them more serious was the way they created a more general impression that a ‘blind person is less competent than a sighted one’. Consequently, blind people struggled to find employment, and those lucky enough to do so were put under constant pressure to prove themselves in ways unknown to the sighted majority. They went through life ‘continually working against the prejudice’ which their condition created, ‘and thus it ever will be till people generally take the trouble to inform themselves better on the subject and know fully how to estimate such a being as a man without sight’.
Though written over 150 years ago, these comments have a decidedly modern ring to them. The problem of unsolicited touching has been highlighted in Amy Kavanagh’s #JustAskDon’tGrab social media campaign, which has revealed the frequent and frightening ways in which sight impaired and other disabled people have their bodily autonomy violated by supposedly well-meaning strangers. Negotiating negative social attitudes, having one’s abilities doubted and continually having to ‘prove’ competence, are still all too familiar experiences for disabled people today. Finding them articulated so clearly in the past reminds us not just that these struggles are not new, but also that long before the modern disabled people’s movement – even before ‘disability’ itself was a meaningful social category – people with impairments have pushed back against attempts to frame their existence through able-bodied norms.
During the nineteenth century, experiences of impairment began to shape political outlook and galvanise political actions in new ways. While the Victorian period, bookended by the intensification of industrial capitalism and the rise of eugenics, was an age of increased oppression of people with non-standard minds and bodies, it also witnessed the flourishing of deaf and disabled people’s cultural and political expression. As Jennifer Esmail observes, at a time when a range of marginalized groups began to advocate for their human rights, from anti-slavery campaigns to Catholic Emancipation, Irish Home Rule, and Trade Unionism, people with physical and sensory impairments were increasingly involved in battles for better understanding of their lives and cultural identities and for better treatment by others.
The politics of disability was bound up with the politics of labour. The spectacle of the suffering maimed body was deployed during the early decades of the nineteenth century by campaigners seeking the abolition of slavery in Britain’s colonies and the end of what was termed the ‘white slavery’ endured by British factory workers. As Daniel Blackie and I have argued, the campaign to reduce and standardise hours of work in textile factories during the 1830s and 1840s politicised ‘disability’ in new ways through the image of the ‘factory cripple’, a worker stunted in growth, ‘deformed’ in their limbs or ‘worn out’ by being exposed to long hours of labour from an early age. The term ‘factory cripple’ deliberately invoked a model of physical impairment that presented ‘deformed’ factory workers as objects of pity that was exploited by reformers to evoke the same humanitarian sympathies that won support for abolitionism. But some disabled workers sought to reclaim the label as a mark of identity.
The most notable of these was William Dodd, an amputee former factory operative who toured the manufacturing districts of northern England in the autumn of 1841 to gather evidence of the evils of the ‘factory system’ to support attempts to bring legislation to Parliament. Dodd’s dispatches from the frontline of industrial disablement, was published as The Factory System Illustrated in 1842. It shifted the focus away from the depictions of ‘factory cripples’ as passive illustrations of the effects of overwork towards considering them as individuals struggling with the long-term effects of industrial disablement. He spoke to impaired workers on the street, visited them in their homes, and narrated their struggles to eke out a living in precarious employment or on poor relief. Highlighting their poor job prospects, absence of financial support, and the added expenses of living with impairment, such as medical costs, he presented disability first and foremost as a material issue and called for employers to better compensate their maimed operatives rather than leaving them to the vicissitudes of the Poor Law.
Labour rights were central to other forms of disabled people’s political mobilisation during the nineteenth century. The career of trade unionist Edward Rymer, whose 1898 autobiography was reprinted in the first issue of History Workshop, provides vivid testimony of how experiences of impairment motivated political activism. Rymer, whose body was badly burned as a child causing lifelong physical and visual impairment, worked as a miner before travelling the country helping to establish unions in the coalfields. While working at Spennymoor as young man, he had received some ‘brutal remarks’ about his ‘lameness’ from the colliery overman who subsequently tried to force him out of the pit ‘by assault’. This discrimination hardened his resolve to undertake ‘missionary work’, as he called it, to spread trade unionism as a protection against individual oppression. Problems of finding work, and lack of opportunity also motivated individuals and organisations to advocate for education and training of blind and deaf people. For example, the struggles of adult blind people, neglected by the charities that had developed from the end of the eighteenth century to provide education for children, inspired the visually impaired philanthropist Elizabeth Gilbert to establish the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind in 1854.
While these currents of activism had different trajectories, and sometimes had competing aims, they had several common elements which, like the comments of Kitto’s unnamed piano tuner, seem strikingly modern. The first was a conviction that people with lived experiences of impairments or chronic illness had unique expertise that authorised them to speak up for what was commonly termed their ‘fellow sufferers’. The second was an increasing recognition that the disadvantages faced by ‘disabled’ people were the product of social factors – prejudice, discrimination, or absence of adequate material support for instance – rather than of impairment alone. Gilbert recorded in her commonplace book a conversation she had had with William Hanks Levy, the manager of the Association for Promoting the General Welfare of the Blind’s workshop in London’s Euston Road, in which he had sought to explain the origins of blind people’s social disadvantages. Whereas Gilbert, the daughter of the Principal of an Oxford college, had been brought up surrounded by supportive sighted friends and relatives, Levy had been raised with other blind people in an institution which had taught him, in the words of Gilbert’s nineteenth-century biographer, to ‘look upon himself more as a member of an oppressed and persecuted race than as an afflicted man’. One day, Levy had asked Gilbert if she had ever considered that it was an ‘additional hindrance to the blind’ that ‘so much in the way of communication between human beings was carried on by means of sight’ and that ‘so much, in short, in the world was adapted to the sense of sight’ to the detriment of the senses used by visually impaired people – touch, hearing and smell. In Levy’s view, the ocular-centric norms of Victorian England epitomised a society that was organized to exclude blind people.
The emergence of the social model of disability – the idea that ‘disability’ is caused by social barriers rather than just the bodily consequences of a particular impairment – in the disabled people’s movement that developed during the 1970s and 1980s is often seen as marking a radical discontinuity with the past. But the idea that the oppression of people with sensory or physical impairments resulted from what one late Victorian writer termed ‘social disabilities’ is not new. The significance of the modern social model in uniting people with disparate impairments in a common political cause cannot be underestimated. While Victorian activists understood that social factors created disabilities, this analysis did not translate into the cross-impairment alliances calling for change that characterise modern disability activism. But the social model gave a name to something disabled people have long known and discussed, the recognition that social exclusion is not the product of bodily or cognitive difference alone. Understanding better the development of disabled people’s political activism over the longue durée will help us to put the struggles of recent decades into perspective, while reminding us that there are many battles still to be won.