Deformity: An Essay (review)

What was it like to be visibly deformed or disabled in eighteenth-century Britain? William Hay's Deformity (1754) provides a unique glimpse into this lived experience, at a time when cultural attitudes were rapidly changing. Older superstitions about physical anomalies (as divine punishments or signs of evil) were by the mid-eighteenth century giving way to modern scientific explanations. At the same time, an increasingly humanitarian sensibility was making it problematic to laugh at the deformed and disabled. Hay's memoir offers by far the most detailed record of these changing beliefs and practices as they affected an individual life. Born into the Sussex gentry, Hay (1695–1755) was well educated and led an energetic life as Whig politician and topical author; he was also a self-described hunchback and stood less than five feet high. Deformity is the product of his old age and records, with striking candour, a lifelong struggle to deal with and make sense of these physical misfortunes. Kathleen James-Cavan's new edition, scrupulously edited and accompanied by exhaustive explanatory notes, now makes this invaluable text available to modern readers. Her introduction provides the important biographical and cultural contexts and refers the reader to relevant work in the new field of Disability Studies.

James-Cavan rightly distances herself from one common tendency among historically oriented disability scholars – the tendency to fault Hay and others for not going far enough, for perpetuating the ideologies that condemned them. In distinction, she stresses Hay's determination to prove that a deformed body did not suggest an evil mind, to demonstrate that he, at least, possessed an honest heart. James-Cavan may overstate the 'boldness' and confidence of this argument (above all when she claims that Hay not only refutes contemporary perceptions about deformity but successfully establishes its advantages or 'virtues,' both to the individual and society). Deformity is surely a record of exertion more than one of triumph: a testament to the wretched, unceasing struggles that Hay must have shared with countless contemporaries forced 'to attone,' as he puts it, 'for an ill-turned Person.'

Thus the jarring tonal shifts at every point in this text. At times Hay is capable of jokes at his own expense: maybe he should have called it Beauty: An Essay, he quips in a postscript to the second edition, now that Hogarth had demonstrated the beauty of curving lines. He seems buoyant enough when listing the 'Advantages arising from Deformity' (deformity made people careful with their health and prolonged their lives; it forced them to improve their minds and so on). But even these passages are streaked with painful resignation. Deformity helped one live a virtuous life, he argues, and certainly made it easy to avoid sexual sins. But then the deformed really had no choice: their appearance excluded them from the mainstream sexual economy, and any immoral conduct would only confirm inherited prejudices.

And so it goes on: confident assertions alternate with melancholy doubts; righteous anger is followed by resignation. Bacon was wrong to argue that the deformed developed vicious or defiant personalities. But then again, this might often be the case; all Hay can do is return to his own sentiments and show that it was 'not universally true.' At times the consolations are clearly hard to maintain: the mob did laugh at a hunchback more than any other deformity, he tells us, but at least he wasn't blind or deaf and could still move about. He scorns his tormentors ('Shall I be angry if an Ass kick at me? It is his Nature so to do') but then admits that their laughter is a 'natural' response. Finally, Hay is stern: as ridicule was a 'certain Consequence' of deformity, one must learn to 'bear it like a Man; forgive it as a Christian, and consider it as a Philosopher.' This cannot have been easy to achieve.