Embodying Affliction in Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Abstract

Physical and mental disabilities are everywhere in nineteenth-century literature. The long nineteenth century (1789–1914) generated iconic characters who still contribute to the ways we think, talk, and feel about disability in the twenty-first century, such as Charles Dickens's “crippled” boy Tiny Tim Cratchit from A Christmas Carol (1843) and “madwoman” Bertha Mason from Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre (1847). Along with characters readily identifiable as disabled, many other familiar figures are worth considering in terms of disability: the outsize, visually extraordinary creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818); the mysteriously embodied Geraldine of Coleridge's narrative poem Christabel (1816); consumptive and angelic Little Nell, of Dickens's The Old Curiosity Shop (1840–41); Edward Hyde, whose “imprint of deformity and decay” haunts Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886); or Count Dracula, chronically disabled by the physical and social distinctions of his vampirism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). Dickens, the Bronte sisters, George Eliot, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Thomas Hardy all engage disability in multiple fictional works, as do many less canonical writers including Wilkie Collins, Dinah Mulock Craik, Charlotte Mary Yonge, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Ellen Price Wood. Why are there so many disabled characters in nineteenth-century fiction? One answer is the fact that their real-life referents peopled London's streets and workhouses, “special” schools and institutions, and the homes of every socioeconomic class. There were many ways of becoming disabled, and most disabilities were acquired in the course of a lifetime rather than recognized or diagnosed at birth. The rise of industrialization and the factory system created new types of disabilities through nonfatal accidents and injuries. Medical interventions that transformed acute, formerly fatal, conditions into chronic ones presented additional modes of “making disability.” These factors increased disability's overall incidence in nineteenth-century British life. The presence of disabilities, however, includes not just how many people experience them but also a broader range of issues including where disabled people live, who sees them and in what context, how and where they are written and spoken about by others, and how disabled people represent themselves.