Abstract
At the core of much of the historiography of disability in so far as it relates to nineteenth century England is a belief that the support offered to those with physical and mental impairments was threadbare and that such people could be and were pushed to the social margins of their communities. The current article uses poor law records, letters, newspapers and coronial inquests to suggest that officials in fact had a sophisticated sense of degrees of mental and physical impairment and relief/support systems were tailored accordingly. Like many of the pauper families who wrote to them about children with impairments I argue that officials tended to construct hierarchies of ability rather than disability and that doing so took them deeply into areas like labour market subsidy and the avoidance of institutional confinement. On the subject of children with mental and physical impairments, officials and pauper shared a common rhetorical register and strategic approach to classification and treatment.
Highlights
For many historians, the everyday nineteenth-century experience of those with physical or mental impairments makes for grim reading
The nineteenth century witnessed a rapid rise in the number of institutional spaces for the incarceration, control and treatment of mental and physical impairments
Public and private asylums for the insane were supplemented with institutions for the blind, deaf, dumb, idiots and unruly, while the workhouses of the Old and New Poor Law served as a backbone of institutional provision at the most local level (Carpenter, 2000; King, 2013)
Summary
At the core of much of the historiography of disability in so far as it relates to nineteenth century England is a belief that the support offered to those with physical and mental impairments was threadbare and that such people could be and were pushed to the social margins of their communities. The current article uses poor law records, letters, newspapers and coronial inquests to suggest that officials had a sophisticated sense of degrees of mental and physical impairment and relief/support systems were tailored . On the subject of children with mental and physical impairments, officials and pauper shared a common rhetorical register and strategic approach to classification and treatment
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