“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.

Keywords:

• literacy
• disability history
• charity
• blindness
• history of education
• history of publication

Notes

¹ Royal Commission on the Blind, Deaf and Dumb and Others of the United Kingdom, Appendix, 1889, 414. Great Exhibition Jury Report, “On the Works of Industry” (printed for the Commissioners).

² Henri‐Jacques Stiker, A History of Disability, trans. William Sayers (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2002), 92.

³ Ibid., 18.

⁴ For a review of developments in the field, see Colin Barnes, et al., eds, Exploring Disability: a Sociological Introduction (Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 1999), ch. 4.

⁵ Paul Longmore and Laurie Umanski, eds., The New Disability History: American Perspectives (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 23.

⁶ Catherine J. Kudlick, “Disability History: Why We Need Another ‘Other’”, American Historical Review June (2003): 765.

⁷ B.G. Johns, The Land of Silence and the Land of Darkness (London: Longman, Brown, Green, Longmans and Roberts, 1857), 97–98.

⁸ Michael J. Morgan, Molyneux’s Question: Vision, Touch and the Philosophy of Perception (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977).

⁹ Robert Heller, “Educating the Blind in the Age of Enlightenment: growing points of a social service,” Medical History 23, no. 4 (1979): 392–403.

¹⁰ Ibid., 109ff.

¹¹ F. Koestler, The Unseen Minority: A Social History of Blindness in America (New York: David Mckay, 1976), 397.

¹² Zina Weygand, Vivre sans voir: Les aveugles dans la société française, du Moyen Âge au siècle de Louis Braille (Paris: Creaphis, 2003).

¹³ R.H. Blair, “On a Uniform System of Printing for the Blind,” in Transactions (London: National Association for the Promotion of Social Sciences, 1869), 410.

¹⁴ Sebastien De Guillié, Essay on the Instruction and Amusement of the Blind (London: Sampson Low, Marston, 1894), reprint of an anonymous translation: privately printed for Richard Phillips, 1819, Frontispiece.

¹⁵ Weygand, Vivre sans voir, 317–20, explains the circumstances.

¹⁶ Ibid., 322.

¹⁷ Ibid., 337–38.

¹⁸ Heller, Growing points, 393–4.

¹⁹ For a summary of arguments currently advanced on the record of British voluntarist institutions, see John Oliphant, “Empowerment and debilitation in the Educational Experience of the Blind in Nineteenth‐Century England and Scotland,” History of Education 35, no.1 (2006): 47–68.

²⁰ The “Right to Read” campaign website (http://www.rnib.org.uk) offers statistics and documentation. In 2006 an estimated 96% of new publications are not soon available in large font, audio or Braille.

²¹ “Plan for affording Relief to the Indigent Blind”, 1790. Held in Thomas Bickerton Papers, Liverpool Public Library.

²² Egil Johansson, “Literacy Campaigns in Sweden,” Interchange 19, nos. 3–4 (1988): 135–62, see 140.

²³ D. Pritchard, The Education of the Handicapped, 1760–1960 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1963), 43–4.

²⁴ Robert A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity: Illiteracy and Society in Scotland and Northern England, 1600–1800 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 4.

²⁵ John Feather, A History of British Publishing (London: Routledge, 1988), 129.

²⁷ James Gall, Account of the Recent Discoveries which have been made for facilitating the Education of the Blind (Edinburgh: privately printed, 1837), 211–12.

²⁶ Edinburgh Asylum, Minute Book 1835–49, 46, “Report of the Committee on Reading,” November 23, 1835.

²⁸ Charles‐Louis Carton, The Establishments for the Blind in England: A Report to the Minister of the Interior and Foreign Affairs (Bruges, 1838/London 1895), 107.

²⁹ Great Exhibition, Jury Report, 416.

³⁰ Ibid., 417–18.

³¹ Pritchard, Education of the Handicapped, 45.

³² RCBD, Jury Report, 421.

³³ Phillips, Blind in British Society, 78–9.

³⁴ For a discussion of Walter Ong’s theories on “the presence of the Word” see W. Ross Winterowd, The Culture and Politics of Literacy (New York: Oxford University press, 1989). See also Ramona Fernandez Imagining Literacy: Rhizomes of Knowledge in American Culture and Literature (Austin: University of Texas, 2001) for a discussion of new perspectives on the acquisition of literacy.

³⁵ Carton, The Establishments, 37.

³⁶ RCBD Jury Table.

³⁷ R. Turner and H. Dannett, Hymns and Anthems used in St. Mary’s Chapel attached to the School for the Blind, Liverpool (Liverpool: privately printed, 1870).

³⁸ Paolo Freire, The Politics of Education: Culture, Power and Liberation. (Hadley, MA: Bergin & Garvey, 1985), 8.

³⁹ B.G. Johns, “The Blind”, Edinburgh Review 201 (1854): 61.

⁴⁰ Id., Blind People: Their Works and Ways (London: John Murray, 1867), 6–7.

⁴¹ E.C. Johnson, The Blind of London (London, 1860).

⁴⁴ Blair, Transactions, 418.

⁴² Blair, Transactions, 411–12.

⁴³ British and Foreign Blind Association, First Annual Report (London, 1970).

⁴⁸ Worcester College, Annual Report (1879): 12.

⁴⁵ W. Taylor, On the Education of the Blind, especially those in the Opulent classes and on the Establishment of a College for them (London: privately printed 1859).

⁴⁶ H.J.R. Marston, “The Mental Culture or Higher Education of the Blind”, in Westminster Conference Report 1902, 14–29, here 14. Marston was at Eton when he lost his sight. He completed his education at Worcester and Durham University.

⁴⁷ D. Bell, An Experiment in Education: The History of Worcester College 1866–1966 (London: Hutchinson, 1967).

⁴⁹ British and Foreign Blind Association, Report (London: Morton, 1871).

⁵⁰ Ibid.

⁵¹ Turner and Harris, Institutions and Charities for the Blind, 1884, xxx–xxxi.

⁵² RCBD, Report, §171.

⁵⁴ Ibid., 237

⁵³ RCBD, Appendix 17, 236.

⁵⁵ Eunice Lovejoy, “History and Standards,” in That all may read: National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1983), 2.

⁵⁶ RCBD, Report, §208.

⁵⁷ Ibid., §180.

⁵⁸ Richard Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public, 1800–1900 (Ohio: Ohio University Press, 1998), 35–6.

⁵⁹ Ibid, 5.

⁶⁰ BFBA, Twelfth Report, 1893.

⁶¹ Patrick Brantlinger, The Reading Lesson: The Threat of Mass Literacy in Nineteenth Century British fiction (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998).

⁶² Alfred Hirst, “The Need for more and Cheaper Literature in Braille Type,” Westminster Conference 1902 Report (London: Gardner’s Trust, 1902), 118–25.

⁶³ Ibid.

⁶⁴ R. Moon, “The Need for More and Cheaper Literature in Moon Type,” in Westminster Conference 1902 Report, 130–44.

⁶⁵ Phillips, Blind in British Society, 227.

⁶⁷ Blind Advocate (1903).

⁶⁶ Ibid., 228.

⁶⁸ The Blind (1903).

⁶⁹ Catherine J. Kudlick, “The Outlook of The Problem and the Problem with The Outlook,” in Longmore and Umanski, The New Disability History, 187–283.

⁷⁰ Edinburgh Asylum, Minute Book, 1898, §1356; “A Private and Confidential report,” Blind Advocate 1, no. 4 (1898).

⁷¹ Koestler. Unseen minority, ch. 10.

⁷² David Finkelstein, An Introduction to Book History (New York: Routledge, 2005), 115.

⁷³ A. Farnworth, “A history of the School libraries of the London School Board, 1870–1914,” (MA thesis, Loughborough University, 1977).

⁷⁴ This notion is discussed in Radhika Viruru’s essay “Post colonial perspectives’ in Handbook of Early Childhood Literacy, eds Nigel Hall and Larson Joanne (London and Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2002), 15–16.