One in six people in the UK during their lifetime experience some form of hearing loss—a figure that apparently remains stable over time and is mirrored worldwide. 1 This book is about the adult population of the United Kingdom who experienced this kind of loss before the advent of the National Health Service (NHS) in 1948. Specifically, it is about those who started life with some hearing and continued to self-identify with ‘hearing’ culture 2 well after experiencing their loss: rather than identifying themselves as ‘Deaf’, many sought to ‘pass’ as hearing, often in the face of ever greater challenges to quality of life from chronically decreasing hearing capacity (often due to more than one cause) during their lives. The different reasons for experiencing hearing loss included: injury, illness, ageing with or without inheritance factors, and some such as tinnitus (‘ringing in the ears’) with as yet undetermined causes. Not all forms of hearing loss were treated with equal sympathy, and this, intersecting with social class, gender and other factors, had differentiated material effects upon employability, economic security, and access to social, cultural and (pro)creative choices. For example, survivors of the Great War trenches who were deafened by exploding shells experienced hearing loss rather more traumatically than those for whom early onset acquired deafness was a characteristic inherited family trait. We show how their loss of hearing led the war-deafened to receive more sympathetic treatment than those who were deafened by illness or non-combat injuries.
In writing about the history of hearing loss our aim is to recapture how adults managing a fading or vanished capacity for conversation had to deal with others who aimed to mitigate and or profit from what was often their feeling of sensory bereavement . As illustrated by the epigraph of the Reverend Hammond in 1911, the predominant emotions were of isolation and desolation, especially when those who remained hearing responded to them with irritation. Not all ‘deaf people’ lost their hearing as extensively as Rev. Hammond, and their experience of loss was accordingly less acute. While some adjusted to this new mode of life by lip-reading or using hearing aids to enhance residual hearing, these techniques did not fully restore the prior experience of hearing. For those who identified as hearing, verbal communication was rarely returned to its previous condition, and considerable effort was thus generally required to sustain everyday life in the hearing world.
As the old term would have it, these people were ‘hard of hearing’: the qualifier ‘hard of’ meant ‘not easily able to’. In pre-modern times this locution referred much more broadly to a whole spectrum of challenging conditions such as being ‘hard of understanding’, ‘hard of believing’ and ‘hard of knowing’. These are now obsolete, and this form of language is only otherwise used by extension satirically to the ‘hard of listening’ signalling those who decline to make the ‘effort’ to listen. And except in a satirical sense those who are partially sighted are not conventionally described as ‘hard of seeing’. 3 The difference perhaps consists in the labour involved: the use of hearing aids has generally required far more skill, patience and effort than the successful wearing of glasses. Indeed, eye spectacles are rarely abandoned into a drawer as unusable after just one day of use, as was so often the fate of many an early electronic hearing aid in the NHS system. 4 Hearing and listening, once hearing had been ‘lost’, could be exhausting, and the assistive technology not worth the effort.
Yet if we want to understand how hearing loss became more greatly stigmatised than loss of vision, we should not look to the amount of compensating labour involved. As we shall see in this book, the differences of status stem more from the much closer cultural associations between deafness and genetic/intellectual ‘deficiency’ than for short-sightedness. If anything the wearing of spectacles has been more associated with elite literary cultures that were far from being marginalised or stigmatised, unless linked to the comedy of tripping and falling: class and the need/otherwise for physical over literary accomplishment was then the deciding factor. This contrast between the status of sight loss and hearing loss will be a touchstone of our book as we explore the resiliently greater sympathy for lost sight than lost hearing, despite the fact that both those with sight loss and those with hearing loss were subject to new forms of testing and technocratic ‘correction’ in the West during the nineteenth century. 5 Tellingly, there has only been occasional recognition that hearing loss has the potentially much more alienating and isolating effects outlined in the epigraph, an experience exacerbated by the comedy commonly extracted from the communicational mishaps of acquired deafness. 6 While the comparison of blindness and deafness is a common trope throughout the period we study, notably for Helen Keller who experienced both, and even before, 7 it is a different binary relationship that underpins the stories in this book. For the older adults that feature in our book, sight loss and hearing loss were part of the mutually entangled processes of aging.
1 Hearing Loss History vs. Deaf History
A further key historical entanglement we contend with in writing this book is that in the nineteenth century both acoustic ‘loss of hearing’ and Deafness as expressed through sign language usage were commonly covered under the rubric of ‘deafness’, and arguably so up to the mid-twentieth century. The term ‘deafness’ referred broadly to many kinds of experience, ranging from those who encountered hearing loss only in later life to those born deaf, each of these in varying type (mild to profound, differing by pitch and decibel, unilateral and bilateral): from the point of view of nineteenth century hearing culture, this was construed as a continuous spectrum of hearing. In 1889 the Royal Commission on the ‘blind, the deaf and dumb’ concluded that ‘if we could classify the deafness of the whole population we should find a complete gradation from perfect hearing down to no hearing at all.’ 8 This reflected the Commission’s view of full hearing capacity as the norm from which deviation occurred by ageing, disease or injury. From the point of view of twenty first century Deaf culture , however, the normalised reference point is not auditory, but the capacity for using sign language, in which only a small minority of the population has ever been proficient. 9
Our work owes much to historians of Deaf culture, whose work on
sign language establishes a baseline of culturally stable ‘Deaf’ identity. By contrast, we narrate the shifting diachronic process of hearing loss.
10 And our work intersects with Deaf
history where we look at past heterogeneous communities broadly identified in the nineteenth century sense as ‘deaf’, with alliances between partially hearing people and sign-language users that have recently been recaptured in pluralist interpretations of multiple (and often intersecting) ‘Deaf Identities’.
11 Amongst the variety of deaf identities that historians can now recover, one visual clue for our study stands out as an element of ordinary, everyday life. Hard of hearing people often used the ‘cupped’ hand both as a form of manual hearing assistance, and as a visible invitation for interlocutors to adapt their
communications accordingly. Thus at the front of Martineau’s posthumous autobiography of 1877 there is an unsigned portrait of her, dating 1833, in which a very youthful Martineau cups her right hand to her right ear and awaits conversation
12 (insert illustration here from Maria Chapman Weston,
Harriet Martineau ’s Autobiography vol. 1 1877—from Graeme Gooday’s personal collection) (Fig.
1).
But, the legacy of the cupped hand as a signal of hearing loss is now visible only as an artistic trope of hearing loss in past visual depictions of eminent deafened subjects such as Thomas Edison , William Gladstone , 13 Harriet Martineau and Joshua Reynolds . 14 As the evidence of the cupped hand falls away, so we ar...
