Abstract
Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing (2018) begins provocatively with an image: John Thomas Smith’s 1816 etching A Blind Beggar, which presents a male mendicant who is standing upright, with eyes closed and his head slightly bowed, holding a hat at his waist – a posture that signifies the man’s attempt to elicit alms. 1 Other visual cues that reveal the man’s status, occupation and apparent vision impairment include a long stick that is tucked under his right arm and, as Heather Tilley’s adroit analysis points out, a printed sign hanging from the man’s neck. Interrogating the extent to which depictions like Smith’s perpetuated ‘an image of the blind person as helpless and dependent’, Tilley asks, ‘in what ways does this man’s exclusion from a literate culture – on which he seemingly depends above an oral culture to elicit alms and income – disable him beyond his blindness?’ (pp. 1–3).
This case study proves an apt departure point for Tilley’s compelling monograph, which breaks new ground by drawing needed attention to the ways in which ‘attitudes towards literacy, and the written word, began to shape the status of blindness in Victorian Britain’ (p. 3). As Tilley argues, ‘Blindness revealed the arbitrary relationship between the phenomenal creation and appearance of the literary sign and its apprehension by an embodied reader. It thus functioned as a key device through which writers explored the material constraints of text’ (p. 3). In constructing this argument, Tilley utilises a novel interdisciplinary methodology, which combines interpretative frameworks from phenomenology and cultural and literary disability studies. Her nuanced approach to the subject of nineteenth-century disability complements a growing body of work in this area, punctuated by recent important books by Jennifer Esmail and Karen Bourrier. 2 However, Tilley stakes out the distinctiveness of her approach clearly in her Introduction, noting how her work, which centres on debates surrounding what was believed to constitute ‘natural’ as opposed to ‘arbitrary’ communication, differs from previous studies of Victorian blindness by Kate Flint, Martha Stoddard Holmes and Mary Klages. 3 Blindness and Writing in fact provides a timely extension to the arguments raised by Esmail’s Reading Victorian Deafness: Signs and Sounds in Victorian Literature and Culture (2013). While Esmail investigates the ways in which speech was often privileged in nineteenth-century considerations of sign languages, Tilley interrogates the suspicion that surrounded accessing textual materials through non-visual means (p. 4).
As the book progresses, Tilley analyses a wide range of sources, including illustrations and literary texts (novels, poems and literary biographies) as well as scientific and philosophical texts, medical documents, paintings, autobiographies, education reports and even material artefacts such as embossed-print reading technologies created by the likes of William Moon and Louis Braille. In terms of structure, Blindness and Writing features eight chapters in addition to a detailed Introduction and a short Epilogue. The book is divided into two parts, with the first addressing ‘Blind People’s Writing Practices’ (pp. 19–120) and the second investigating ‘Literary Blindness’ (pp. 121–214). Part I includes chapters on blindness in William Wordsworth’s imagination, the development of raised print systems and blind biographical writing. It begins with a methodological chapter that sets out the significance of the book’s use of a phenomenological apparatus. Here Tilley asserts that ‘Phenomenology helps illuminate the slippage between blindness and sight, and invites us to assess the manifold ways in which textual meaning is shaped by the embodied and material act of reading and writing’ (p. 32). Part II features a further four chapters structured chronologically, which roughly trace the development of the trope of ‘literary blindness’ from the 1840s through to the fin de siècle. Chapter Five analyses blindness, gender and autobiography, featuring close readings of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1857) and Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857); Chapter Six focusses on Charles Dickens’s treatments of blindness (literally and metaphorically), arguing that the author’s encounter with blind, deaf and mute Laura Bridgman, recounted in American Notes for General Circulation (1842), informed his later invocations of blindness in David Copperfield (1849–50) and Bleak House (1853); Chapter Seven comparatively analyses the depictions of blind female protagonists in Frances Browne’s My Share of the World (1861) and Wilkie Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872), noting how reading such texts together ‘invites reflection on the ways in which the nineteenth-century novel variously accommodates visual impairment’ (p. 183); and Chapter Eight explores how George Gissing’s 1891 novel New Grub Street ‘offers a detailed meditation on the way in which blindness both opens and closes the imagination posited at the origin of writing’ (p. 208). Tilley’s book ends with an Epilogue, which she describes as a ‘riposte to … cultural forgetting’ (p. 215). Here Tilley emphatically reasserts how Blindness and Writing ‘reanimate[s] the cultural record’, challenging the suppression of vision-impaired people’s role within nineteenth-century public discourse (p. 216).
Overall, Blindness and Writing is a stellar contribution to the field. It will be an important text for specialists working on nineteenth-century disability as well as humanities researchers with interests in the history of the senses, life writing, communication technologies and literature and medicine. It is a great coup for cultural and literary disability studies to finally see a monograph on disability appear in Cambridge University Press’s illustrious Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture book series – Blindness and Writing is the first disability-centred book to appear in this list of 109 titles. Hopefully it will be the first of many. Among the greatest strengths of Blindness and Writing are its deft and subtle integration of theoretical methods in addition to its attentiveness to the voices and lived experiences of vision-impaired people. A key mantra within disability studies is ‘nothing about us without us’ and this is clearly a phrase that the author was mindful of when selecting her source materials.
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The wider impact of Blindness and Writing’s approach is best summarised by Tilley’s own concluding remarks: Perhaps, then, the imperative now is that critical readings of nineteenth-century disability representations must be grounded in their material and embodied contexts, which help impress and recall – rather than illuminate – the competing experiences and claims of bodily and sensory experience replete in the cultural record. Such a critical practice, it is hoped, may help challenge our own cultural assumptions about bodies and ability. (p. 219)