Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing by Heather Tilley (review)

Take a good look at the dust-jacket of Heather Tilley’s new book: Millais’ famous painting, The Blind Girl (1856), immediately draws you in to its themes. Millais shows the blind girl with a young companion, who is experimenting with the sensation of being deprived of sight, by looking at a rainbow through the impediment of a dark shawl. The image shows how blindness challenges, now as then, what the sighted take for granted, that is, the ability to effortlessly “read” the world. Millais also gives the blind girl a label, asking to “Pity the Blind.” The sign highlights the paradox that though excluded from literate culture, the girl is dependent upon it. Tilley’s study conjoins blindness and writing: what did it mean to be a blind author in nineteenth-century Britain, and how did sighted authors treat blindness in literature?

Tilley shapes her discussion as two inter-related but distinct parts. First, she explores how philosophical, social and medical thinking impinged on the treatment of blindness, and second, she investigates how personal experiences of impaired sight influenced its literary portrayal. Part One shows how public debates about blindness were biased by ocularcentric prejudice, and the tendency to stereotype “the blind” as deviant. Debates about whether the Roman or “arbitrary” alphabet systems were most suited to raised-print (“embossed”) books for blind readers were dominated by sighted educationalists and inventors, rather than by their intended users. Although the “arbitrary systems” which employed symbolic characters facilitated education for sightless pupils, their use was resisted by sighted theorists because the symbols were incomprehensible to them. The idea of blind people creating a literature of their own was felt to be transgressive. The cost of producing embossed books, which could be printed only on one side of the paper, also disquieted institutions. Evangelical bodies helped with funding but they restricted textual content to religious topics, since their educational objectives were secondary to their spiritual mission. Blind people’s reading and writing practices were thus shaped by wider ideas around language and communication, but Tilley shows that as the century wore on, those practices began in turn to influence and change wider cultural discourse.

In Part Two, Tilley focuses on writers whose works share attributes of the Bildungsroman and the Künstlerroman. She describes the lived, embodied experience of blindness in the work of three female writers: the short-sighted Charlotte Brontë who nursed her father during cataract operations; Elizabeth Barrett Browning who watched her close friend Hugh Stuart Boyd become blinded by trachoma; and the blind poet Frances Browne, an infant victim of smallpox. Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins and George Gissing all suffered differing levels of impaired vision, and explored the significance of sight in their fictions. The eponymous heroine of Collins’s Poor Miss Finch (1872) found greater happiness in sightlessness than through its medical cure, while Gissing in New Grub Street (1891) characterized his protagonist’s blindness as a mythic form of punishment. Dickens’s portrayal of blindness, however, emerges from a rather more complex relationship with the condition, as suggested by Tilley’s ambiguously entitled chapter six: “Writing Blindness: Dickens.”

Given that the other seven chapters bear descriptive rubrics, this stripped-down caption inverts and compresses Tilley’s main title, pointing to something more elemental. It suggests that Dickens is not simply “writing about blindness,” though he was interested in its psychological and medical aspects and in its potential as a literary device, but rather he is “writing blindness,” that is, destabilizing the whole certitude of visual authority, the absence of which “point[s] to the end of writing” (152). In Dickens’s fiction, blindness is “a device to test the limits of empirical vision” but it is also “a condition that disrupts his own formation of identity as a writer” (153). Critical to the development of Dickens’s acts of “writing blindness” was his meeting with blind, deaf and mute Laura Bridgman, at the Perkins Institution for the Blind, recounted in American...