“Touching the light”: the invention of literacy for the blind

Abstract

Philosophers, physicians and oculists had long investigated the capacities and consciousness of the blind, particularly in the context of debates on perception and understanding, but certain less “scientific” associations pertaining to blindness, derived from the Old Testament and Greek legend, shaped assumptions on the blind person’s educability. Hence, the first attempts in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to devise methods for the blind to read and write remained isolated experiments and aroused limited interest. Diderot’s 1749 essay, Lettres sur les aveugles a l’usage de de ceux qui voient, did much to demystify blindness and inspired interest in engaging the blind in intellectual, artistic and professional life. Tutors to blind members of the elite first developed methods of reading and writing for the blind, as they had done for the sighted, but Valentin Haüy, a linguist in Paris, is credited with the first book in relief. He obtained sufficient support to establish the Institut des Jeunes Aveugles in 1784, and there strove to open a new realm of learning, offering a broad literary and musical culture to the blind of all classes. However, later attempts to provide the blind with autonomous access to knowledge through reading were often clouded by a utilitarian spirit and driven by rivalry and hunger for individual prestige. Both European and American innovators held discordant views on the purpose and uses of literacy and had little interest in cooperation, prolonging a wasteful “Battle of the Types”. Contemporaneous notions of the needs of blind persons and prevailing cultural canons are reflected in this study. In Paris, Haüy evidently wished to offer access to an enlightening range of texts, while religious subjects were still well represented, even after the Revolution. British relief printing began in the 1830s owing much to the Scottish Calvinist impulse to provide direct access to God’s word through print. Institutions, regarding literacy as spiritually consoling for the “unfortunate creatures” in their charge, shifted only slowly away from an oral religious culture of singing; collective readings and rote learning predominated. Many pioneers in publishing were churchmen, wanting the light of God’s word to reach the sightless, and religious texts predominated in Britain until the 1890s. Although a wider range of secular literature was made available much sooner in the USA, France and Belgium, biblical works remained the most frequently published even there for most of the nineteenth century. No evidence suggests that enabling the blind to read and write had a significant role in directly instilling an industrial ethic in a potentially burdensome element in the community. In Britain, the State was resolute in leaving publication in the hands of voluntarist organisations, in contrast to France, Saxony and the USA. Consequently, such was the waste and duplication in this “Battle of the Types”, exemplifying inefficiency in charity, that the British and Foreign Blind Society in 1878 made its resolution its first aim. With institutional publications focused on spiritually and morally uplifting material, the blind were excluded from the great democratisation of literature in mid‐Victorian Britain where reading came to be accepted as a source of intrinsic pleasure. Recreational reading had no part in publishing for the blind. Visiting Societies, which flourished from the mid‐1850s, persisted with Moon type, a bulky Roman system where the sighted helper “shared” the experience of the blind person in reading pre‐selected, edifying texts. This prejudice against recreational literature precluded the blind adult from participating in the Age of the Novel, and the unprivileged blind child from encountering the new treasures of children’s literature, available to his or her sighted counterparts in School Board and public libraries. The insistence that priority in publishing be given to the “worthwhile” and “informative” has remained and still affects the selection of publications. Yet, while the institutions’ predominantly religious publications tended to foster passivity and conformism, some blind persons discovered the power of the printed word as a vehicle of protest. The Blind Advocate, founded in 1898 by Ben Purse, a young, blind Manchester piano tuner, became the voice of the discontented blind, deploring the stranglehold of voluntarist control over their educational and working life, and calling upon the state to intervene. In 1898 the Advocate openly challenged the Edinburgh Asylum over a scandal involving an administrator in the pregnancy of female inmates there – the Directors responding in the Institute’s own Braille publication, “Hora Jocunda” – in an episode which reminds us of the unpredictable, liberating force of literacy.