Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts is an interdisciplinary collection of primary texts and images on physical and cognitive disability in the long nineteenth century (c. 1780 to 1914). Its primary goal is to immerse users in the cultures and concepts that shaped embodied experience in the nineteenth century. Currently comprising over 50 items, the reader emphasizes the technologies, institutions, and representations in literature and popular culture that shaped ideas about disability which are still current today. You can read more about the reader and how to use it here.
Featured Item
The Bertrams
Anthony Trollope's The Bertrams (1859) is a rare example of a nineteenth-century novel that depicts a one-eyed female character. Whereas male…
Recently Added Items
-
Mary Barton
References to disability abound in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life (1848): Margaret experiences progressive blindness from…
-
Printed Tactile Maps
Printed tactile, or relief, maps began to be published during the early nineteenth century and were used to teach the sighted and the blind geography.…
-
Talking Gloves
In 1873 Alexander Graham Bell was employed to teach George Sanders, a five year-old congenitally deaf boy. As part of his instruction of Sanders, Bell…
Nineteenth-Century Disability: Cultures and Contexts, 2012-2015, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 Unported License. The project, directed by Karen Bourrier, has been funded by SSHRC and launched with the help of the Research Group for Electronic Textuality and Theory at Western University.
