Table of Contents

Foreword – Karen Sayer
Introduction – Iain Hutchison, Martin Atherton and Jaipreet Virdi

Part I: Attitudes
1 Restoration to usefulness: Victorian middle-class attitudes towards the healthcare of the working poor – Amy W Farnbach Pearson
2 Imperial lives – confronting the legacies of empire, disability and the Victorians – Esme Cleall
3 Disabling the author in Mid-Victorian realist fiction: case studies of George Eliot and Harriet Martineau – Deborah M Fratz

Part II: Interventions
4 Medicalising deafness in Victorian London: the Royal Ear Hospital, 1816-1916 – Jaipreet Virdi
5 Drunkenness, degeneration, and disability in England – Joanne Woiak
6 Victorian medical awareness of childhood language disabilities – Paula Hellal and Marjorie Lorch
7 ‘Happiness and usefulness increased”: Consuming ability in the antebellum artificial limb market – Caroline Lieffers

Part III: Legacies
8 The disabled child in an industrial metropolis: Glasgow’s children’s hospital, Scottish convalescent homes ‘in the country’, and east park home for infirm children – Iain Hutchison
9 The panopticon: Towards an intimate history of special schools for the blind – Fred Reid
10 Allowed to be idle: Perpetuating Victorian attitudes to deafness and employability in United Kingdom social policy – Martin Atherton
Index

About the Author

Iain Hutchison is Research Affiliate in Economic & Social History at the University of Glasgow.

Martin Atherton is Retired Course Leader for British Sign Language and Deaf Studies at the University of Central Lancashire.

Jaipreet Virdi is Assistant Professor in History at the University of Delaware.

Reviews

'Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Interventions, Legacies is a very timely work. In the midst of a global pandemic that has left many people newly impaired, there is an increased need for scholarship that provides frameworks for coming to terms with disability as a sociocultural phenomenon and a lived identity. [...] Disability and the Victorians makes an important contribution to the history of medicine and attitudes toward disability in Victorian Britain and beyond and provides a useful resource for scholars of nineteenth-century Britain.'
Joyce L. Huff, Journal of British Studies

Disability and the Victorians certainly fulfils its editors’ desire to generate debate and spur further research: its contents encourage critical reflection on disabled people’s experiences in the present day, thus enabling us to see how monumentally important the task of exploring the history of disability is.
Caitlin Doley (University of York), British Association for Victorian Studies
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