The idea of disability in the eighteenth century

This valuable essay collection, forming part of Bucknell’s Transits: Literature, Thought and Culture 1650–1850 series, makes a significant contribution to developments in the history of disability. Essential reading for anyone concerned with the Enlightenment era, The Idea of Disability in the Eighteenth Century should also be consulted by those engaged with more modern cultural formations – not least because the eighteenth century is now widely recognised as marking a significant transition away from a pre-modern conception crudely equating physical with moral deformity to potentially more ‘enlightened’ understandings partly enabled by an emergent language of sensibility allowing greater space for personal expression.

In his informed editorial introduction, Chris Mounsey explains how the collection originated in discussions at San Antonio, TX, USA in 2010 which led to the first panels devoted to disability at The American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies in 2011. He also provides a useful critical overview of the place of disability in eighteenth-century studies, mapping key developments since the bibliography provided by Susan Burch in 2005 (Burch 2005). Mounsey begins his own discussion of methodology by recalling Henri-Jaques Stiker’s reflection, in his pioneering History of Disability, that at ‘the present time [1982] a historicist study of disability is not possible; there are too few in-depth studies’ (Stiker 1999, 1). The work represented in this new volume fully justifies Mounsey’s claim that we have now ‘reached a point in the progress of the study of the history of disability where detailed historicist readings are not only possible but also necessary’ (1). Since Stiker, the dominant approach has been one rooted in a largely Foucauldian model of the relationship between knowledge and power through which disability has been examined alongside race, class, gender and sexuality as providing a key into the wider cultural analysis of interdependent notions of the normal and the abnormal. While not wholly objecting to such approaches, Mounsey proposes ‘a new analysis of the body – Variability – that goes beyond the rhetoric of sameness and difference that concerned scholars in the twentieth century’ (1). In defining this term – which is usefully picked-up on by a number of his contributors – Mounsey draws attention to the many differences between those designated ‘disabled’, before offering ‘variability’ as ‘a concept that enshrines uniqueness’ and ‘has the patience to discover the peculiarities of each individual’, and while it may not offer much to anyone concerned with ‘power relations’ between groups, ‘it is a good way to notice people in history’ (17). By way of practical illustration, Mounsey situates his approach in relation to two recent, yet distinct, accounts of William Hay, the politician, poet and author of the 1754 autobiographical essay ‘Of Deformity’ (to date, by far the most discussed example of ‘disabled’ life-writing from the period). One of the genuine strengths of this analysis of the power and limitations of established poststructuralist approaches is Mounsey’s own recourse to autobiography: he underpins his methodological argument by drawing upon his own personal experiences. As he explains with some candour, in middle-age he has had to find the practical means and mental resilience to sustain an academic career as a literature professor with increasingly impaired vision to the point where he can now no longer read text.

The 10 essays are presented under the three useful headings ‘Methodological’, ‘Conceptual’ and ‘Experiential’. Under the first, Holly Faith Nelson and Sharon Aker write on ‘Deformity, Defect and Disease in the Natural Philosophy of Margaret Cavendish’, Jess Keiser on madness in John Locke, Paul Kelleher on ‘The Rhetoric of Deformity’ in Shaftesbury’s Characteristics and Emile Bojesen on ‘Thomas Reid: Power as First Philosophy’. The latter is of particular interest as Bojesen, by drawing upon a newly published manuscript essay, shows us the current relevance of Reid’s counter-empiricist analysis of the power of the will which ‘can act in response to a disability but is not subject its “power” as it has none’. As a consequence, ‘the agent has power over their dis/ability, rather than dis/ability, having power over them’ (91). Bojesen notes that Reid was deaf, but one wonders how much of his ideas were also shaped by his conversations with his countryman Thomas Blacklock, the blind poet (mentioned elsewhere in the volume). The two essays comprising Part Two address different types of textual evidence; the novel, periodicals and pamphlets. Here Anna K. Sagal offers a revealing analysis of how contemporary modes of politeness inform and obscure the portrayal of the character Uncle Toby as a traumatised war veteran in Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, while Dana Gliserman Kopans gives us a disturbing account of false imprisonment on the grounds of insanity. The four essays in Part Three all examine literary texts and lives: Jamie Kinsley writes on ‘Images of Disability Found in Religious Verse’; Jason S. Farr writes on ‘Attractive Deformity’ in Sarah Scott’s novel Agreeable Ugliness; while Jess Domanicho considers the neglected poetry of Priscilla Poynton who gained local fame as ‘The Blind Poet of Lichfield’ after she toured the Midlands giving recitations of her extempore verse. Finally, Mounsey himself considers ‘the language of charity’ in the work and career of another blind poet, Thomas Gills. These last two essays also address the problems facing the modern biographical scholar who, in seeking to reconstruct the ‘life’ of a historic literary, is often faced with evaluating minimal or partial evidence, older terminologies and the question of how much relative emphasis ought to be placed upon the writing itself or the subject’s self-declared disability (or deformity). The volume strikes a good balance between fresh readings of such canonical figures as Locke, Sterne and Scott while alerting us to the value of spreading the net of enquiry to hitherto neglected sources, genres, titles and writers.

David E. Shuttleton
Literature and Medical Culture, Glasgow University, Glasgow, UK
[email protected]
© 2016 David E. Shuttleton
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2016.1167365