English 9207
Victorian Fictions of Disability
Instructor: Professor Jo Devereux.
Winter Half Course.
What did disability mean to the Victorians? When exactly did the notion of disability come into being? How was disability linked to industrialization? What role did sentimentality play in Victorian fictional representations of disability and how do those representations contrast with non-fictional writings on this pressing social concern during the nineteenth century? In the twenty-first century, how has the field of disability studies affected critical approaches to the history of Victorian disability? In this course, students will consider these and other questions as we examine the representation of physical and mental disability in three Victorian novels of the mid-nineteenth century: Anthony Trollope’s Barchester Towers (1857), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), and Wilkie Collins’ Poor Miss Finch (1872). Alongside these novels, we will also explore non-fictional Victorian writing on disability, especially in Henry Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor (1861-1862).
