Disability in Eighteenth-Century England

Imagining Physical Impairment

David M. Turner

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9781138107588
• eBook ISBN: 9781136304231
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is the first book-length study of physical disability in eighteenth-century England. It assesses the ways in which meanings of physical difference were formed within different cultural contexts, and examines how disabled men and women used, appropriated, or rejected these representations in making sense of their own experiences. In the process, it asks a series of related questions: what constituted 'disability' in eighteenth-century culture and society? How was impairment perceived? How did people with disabilities see themselves and relate to others? What do their stories tell us about the social and cultural contexts of disability, and in what ways were these narratives and experiences shaped by class and gender? In order to answer these questions, the book explores the languages of disability, the relationship between religious and medical discourses of disability, and analyzes depictions of people with disabilities in popular culture, art, and the media. It also uncovers the 'hidden histories' of disabled men and women themselves drawing on elite letters and autobiographies, Poor Law documents and criminal court records.

The book won the Disability History Association Outstanding Publication Prize in 2012 for the best book published worldwide in disability history and also inspired parts of the Radio 4 series, 'Disability: A New History', on which the author was historical adviser. The series gained 2.6 million listeners when it first aired in 2013.

1
Defining Disability and Deformity

On 5 January 1721 the poet Alexander Pope wrote to his friend John Dan-castle begging from him an ‘Act of Charity’ with regard to a poor girl, Betty Fletcher. He described Betty as ‘so deplorable an object, as well in regard of Sickness and Disability, as of Poverty’, and called upon Dancastle to assist in securing a place for her in the service of his sister, Mrs Moore, whose ‘Benefices of this kind’ were ‘many and great’. If ‘she would please to allow her any small matter as a weekly salary, tho’ never so little, it would help her necessities much more than any larger gifts at uncertain times’.¹ Letters written by elite patrons on behalf of poorer neighbours were not uncommon in eighteenth-century England.² But this one, written by one of Georgian England’s most famous ‘disabled’ people, is interesting on a number of levels. Pope was left severely impaired after contracting Pott’s disease—tuberculosis of the spine—at the age of fifteen, which caused spinal curvature, mobility restriction, problems maintaining personal hygiene, and, at times, chronic pain.³ His letter, on behalf of a young woman whose ‘disabilities’ were scarcely documented, and whose life otherwise leaves little trace in the historical record, may appear to modern readers as a touching example of solidarity between two people from very different social backgrounds but with a shared experience of impairment. Furthermore Pope’s description of Betty’s sufferings as proceeding from ‘Disability’ also seems strikingly modern. This is a letter whose simple appeal for support resonates across the centuries, the language of ‘disability’ providing a connection between past and present.

However, when examined more closely, such words also reveal crucial differences. Although the association of the word ‘disability’ with inability, incapacity, and weakness dates back, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, to the mid-sixteenth century, Pope’s letter is fairly rare in its use of the word ‘disability’ in this respect.⁴ Indeed, were eighteenth-century readers to approach a book which offered (as this one does) a ‘history of disability’ they might think it perverse to find it populated by the physically impaired. They might instead have expected a treatise on the two principal obsessions of the English ruling elite: property and the laws governing its inheritance. For although eighteenth-century dictionaries defined ‘disability’ as ‘a being unable [or] incapable’, the usage of the term that drew most attention was that in a ‘law-sense’ as when ‘a Man is so disabled, as to be made incapable to inherit, or to enjoy a Benefit which otherwise he might have done’, such as the impediments to inheritance imposed on people convicted of ‘Treason or felony’ and their heirs, or ‘Disability by Act of Law’ whereby foreigners were ‘disabled’ from benefitting by English law.⁵

Approaching the definition of disability from a modern perspective also reveals key differences to the past. Definitions indicative of the medical model of disability, such as that adopted by the United Nations in the late twentieth century, regard disability as ‘any restriction or lack … of ability to perform an activity in the manner or within the range considered normal for a human being’.⁶ The UN has now moved away from this definition, replacing it with one more sensitive to the social model of disability, which asserts that ‘disability’ proceeds not just from impairment but from ‘attitudinal and environmental barriers’ which restrict an individual’s ability to participate in society on an equal basis to others.⁷ For our purposes, however, neither the medical model’s assumption of a universal, biological, or medically discernible standard of function, structure, or human physical ability, nor the social model’s claim that disability resides in social factors rather than the person maps easily onto models of disability in eighteenth-century England. Although the terms ‘disabled’ and ‘able-bodied’ were used in this period, they were not yet seen as fundamental categories of identity that divided everyone according to their physical capabilities or the presence or absence of an impairment which affected their ability to participate on an equal basis with others.⁸ Although Alexander Pope and Betty Fletcher were both impaired, neither would have considered themselves part of a community of the ‘disabled’.

Disability language is ‘rooted in history, nationality, culture and ideology’, and in order to make sense of the cultural meanings of disability in eighteenth-century England we first need to understand the words that people at the time used to describe it.⁹ How did people in the past define disability? What words did people use to describe physical difference, and how far was physical impairment viewed as distinct from other forms of bodily aberration? This chapter examines the social vocabulary used to make sense of physical impairment and bodily anomaly and the cultural values that underpinned these definitions. Its focus is not on the language of diagnosis or the aetiology of impairment. Evolving medical perspectives on disability are examined in more detail in the following chapter. Instead, this chapter examines the range of words in popular usage that described impairment and how bodily difference was conceptualised. This investigation necessarily involves discussing not just the language of disability, but also the bodily ideals against which the ‘anomalous’ was defined. The chapter starts by examining the meanings of ‘able-bodied’ and ‘disabled’ in this period. It goes on to explore the uses of other common words to describe the disabled, such as ‘lame’ and ‘cripple’, and analyses a wide variety of slang words for physical difference. Many of the terms used to describe physical impairment in eighteenth-century England are regarded as offensive today.¹⁰ Although it is important to respect the sensitivity surrounding the use of such words in the present, the analysis of this language and its nuance is important to understanding of mentalities regarding disability in the past.

Although people in eighteenth-century England had a distinctive vocabulary to describe impaired or ‘defective’ bodies, physical disability was often subsumed into wider discourses of ‘deformity’ or ‘monstrosity’.¹¹ For instance, in the case of Alexander Pope, although the poet experienced a variety of physical restrictions as a result of his disability, it was the aberrant appearance of his ‘crooked’ body that drew most attention—especially from satirists.¹² ‘Disability’ (or ‘defect’), ‘monstrosity’, and ‘deformity’ shared the common denominator of physical difference, but, as we will see, they were not entirely synonymous with each other. Understanding these complexities of definition is the starting point for any discussion of the body and physical anomaly in the eighteenth-century past.

‘ABLE-BODIED’ AND ‘DISABLED’

Distinctions between ‘able-bodied’ and ‘disabled’ have not applied equally in all societies or in all historical periods.¹³ The Oxford English Dictionary defines ‘able-bodied’ as being ‘fit and healthy; physically robust; capable of work; free from physical disability’, and dates the first usage of the term in this respect to 1600.¹⁴ ‘Able-bodied’ appears in dictionaries from the mid-eighteenth century and was defined simply as being ‘strong of body’.¹⁵ Although this suggests, on the face of it, a universal quality or ideal, the term ‘able-bodied’ was in practice used more selectively and was as much a social as a physical category.

In the first place, ‘able-bodiedness’ was distinctly gendered. The definition of the ‘able-bodied’ as being physically strong meant that it was applied most frequently to male rather than female bodies, because men were deemed by nature to be the stronger sex. This gendering of the term is apparent in Samuel Johnson’s example of the usage of the word in his 1755 Dictionary, quoting Joseph Addison’s Freeholder periodical to the effect that ‘It lies in the power of every fine woman, to secure at least half a dozen able-bodied men to his Majesty’s service’.¹⁶ The contrast between ‘fine women’ and ‘able-bodied men’ drew a sharp distinction between feminine delicacy and masculine robustness. When the use of the term is examined further, it becomes apparent that the term ‘able-bodied’ was often applied to certain classes of men rather than the sex in general. ‘Able-bodiedness’ primarily referred to men’s capacity for manual labour or their fitness for service in employment where a degree of physical strength or agility was required. For example, the Sun insurance company advertised a free fire-fighting service to its London policy holders in 1710 comprising ‘thirty lusty, honest, able-bodied Fire-men, who are cloathed in Blue Liveries, with Silver-Badges, with the Sun-Mark upon their arms’.¹⁷ A mid-eighteenth-century book of queries used the term ‘able-bodied’ to refer to a man’s capacity for agricultural labour, asking ‘could not one able-bodied man delve one acre of middling soil ten inches deep if needful with ease in twenty-four days’, whether the same ‘able-bodied man’ could, by this method ‘sow and rake two thirds of a prepared acre with ease in one day’ and ‘raise five acres of corn … with ease by the year’.¹⁸ This example cast ‘able-bodiedness’ as a measurable quality in terms of performance, but as a category it clearly referred to those men who worked the land through their physical labour rather than those who owned it.

The Sun insurers were proud of their ‘lusty, honest, able-bodied’ fire crew, but it is evident from some of the most common uses of the term that the attribute of ‘able-bodiedness’ did not necessarily confer status. ‘Able-bodied’ was used in the context of classification of the poor to describe those who were thought capable of labouring but, either through unemployment or their own idleness, did not do so. For instance, a mid-eighteenth-century law manual advised parish officers that vagrants included ‘able-bodied Persons who run away and leave their Wives and Children to the Parish, Persons refusing to work for common wages, not having otherwise [means] to maintain themselves, and other idle Persons wand[e]ring abroad and begging’.¹⁹ Similarly, those targeted for enlistment to the armed forces under the Press Acts, enforced in 1704–12, 1745–46, 1755–57, and 1778–79, were identified as ‘able-bodied, idle, and disorderly persons, who did not … industriously follow some lawful trade or employment, or had not the subsistence sufficient for their support and maintenance’.²⁰ Indeed, it was in the context of fitness for military or naval service that the term ‘able-bodied’ was most often applied in eighteenth-century England. ‘Able-bodied’ men were those liable to be recruited—voluntarily or not—to man ships or comprise the rank and file of army regiments.²¹ According to the Impress Act in force in 1757 during the Seven Years’ War the rules concerning those men ‘to be deemed fit for his Majesty’s Service’ stipulated:

that he should be an able-bodied man, free from ruptures, and every other distemper, or bodily infirmity, that might render him unfit to perform the duty of a Soldier; that he should not be a known papist, nor under the size of five feet four inches; that he should appear, in the opinion of the commissioners or officers attending, not to be under the age of 17, or above 45; and that he should not be one who could make it appear, that he had a vote in the election of a member to serve in Parliament, for any place in Great Britain.²²

‘Able-bodied’ was defined in this context as being free from impairment (whether ‘ruptures’ or ‘bodily infirmity’) and possessing physical strength (implied by the height and age restrictions), but was also allied to certain social, religious, and political criteria, referring principally to members of the Protestant working class. In practice, during times of conflict it was the quantity rather than quality of recruits that mattered, and in spite of the requirement after 1745 that all recruits should be screened for ailments and disabilities, the definition of ‘able-bodied’ was often stretched. Evidence suggests that such poor recruits were often malnourished, subject to congenital weakness, and ill-suited to the harsh physical rigours of military life, which included marching, building roads, digging ditches, and repairing fortifications.²³

Just as ‘disability’ was not defined primarily or exclusively in relation to bodily or sensory impairment in eighteenth-century England, so the adjective ‘disabled’ itself had a variety of applications. It might be used to mean ‘disarmed’, in the context of a violent struggle, or to be rendered incapable in a broader sense: James Ashton, defendant in a criminal trial at London’s Old Bailey, complained in 1757 that poverty had rendered him ‘quite disabled from having an attorney at law to act as my counsellor’, and John Bassett, who was assaulted and robbed in a bawdy house, told the court that he was ‘so disabled with Drinking’ that he ‘could not defend’ himself.²⁴ A survey of the term’s use in eighteenth-century newspapers shows that the word could be used to refer to having an impediment of some kind which prevented someone from performing an activity, or to injury. For example, The World newspaper reported in July 1787 that a competitor in a running race from Fetcham (Surrey) to Twickenham had been ‘disabled, by forcing himself too much in the first tw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Abbreviations
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 Defining Disability and Deformity
• 2 Religious and Medical Perspectives on Disability
• 3 Stereotypes and Cultural Representation
• 4 Visibility and Visualisation: Seeing the Disabled
• 5 Disabled Lives and Letters
• 6 Narratives of the Disabled Poor
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Selected Bibliography
• Index