Event Title
Disabling the Stigma: Charles Dickens and Disability in Victorian London
Location
Parker-Reed, SSWAC
Start Date
1-5-2014 2:00 PM
End Date
1-5-2014 3:00 PM
Project Type
Poster- Restricted to Campus Access
Description
The Victorian era was an age obsessed with classification and with demarcating the boundaries of ability through the likes of workhouse laws, statistics, and eugenics. Against this ethos, Charles Dickens and his friend and benefactor, The Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, worked to raise awareness about the meaning of disability and to right the dominant tendency to either overlook those with deformities or to mark them as poor or morally corrupt. This project contextualizes Dickens and Coutts collaborative philanthropic efforts and explains ways in which their disability-friendly initiatives were remarkably progressive, but also complementary to and symptomatic of nineteenth-century discourses of self-help and middle-class domesticity. The latter portion of the project explores the impacts of the others within their social networksuch as John Groom, Louisa Twining, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and Wilkie Collinsupon the discourse of disability throughout the nineteenth century, so as to position all of these individuals contributions as particularly noteworthy for the way in which they established alternative and more accommodating relationships between industry and the disabled community.
Sponsoring Department
Colby College. English Dept.
CLAS Field of Study
Humanities
Event Website
http://www.colby.edu/clas
ID
35
Disabling the Stigma: Charles Dickens and Disability in Victorian London
Parker-Reed, SSWAC
The Victorian era was an age obsessed with classification and with demarcating the boundaries of ability through the likes of workhouse laws, statistics, and eugenics. Against this ethos, Charles Dickens and his friend and benefactor, The Baroness Angela Burdett Coutts, worked to raise awareness about the meaning of disability and to right the dominant tendency to either overlook those with deformities or to mark them as poor or morally corrupt. This project contextualizes Dickens and Coutts collaborative philanthropic efforts and explains ways in which their disability-friendly initiatives were remarkably progressive, but also complementary to and symptomatic of nineteenth-century discourses of self-help and middle-class domesticity. The latter portion of the project explores the impacts of the others within their social networksuch as John Groom, Louisa Twining, Edward Bulwer Lytton, and Wilkie Collinsupon the discourse of disability throughout the nineteenth century, so as to position all of these individuals contributions as particularly noteworthy for the way in which they established alternative and more accommodating relationships between industry and the disabled community.
https://digitalcommons.colby.edu/clas/2014/program/232