Deformity: An Essay (review)

"When I die," writes William Hay, "I care not what becomes of the contemptible Carcass, which is the Subject of this Essay." Yet his "Carcass" —scarcely five feet tall, his back bent in the womb, has face scarred by the pox—might serve: in the last paragraphs of Deformity: An Essay Hay, a self-described hunchback, offers to be "opened and examined of eminent Surgeons" so that something might be known about another of his afflictions. If a stone should be found in his bladder, he wishes it "preserved among Sir Hans Sloane's Collection," a substantial (and famous) cabinet of curiosities that became the foundation for the British Museum (44). The Essay ends with a medical historia, entitled "My Case," of vesical calculi which, he writes, "may be of more immediate service" to fellow sufferers than his future autopsy.

Dozens of early modern texts treat the causes and consequences of human deformity, refractory curiosity, and the trade in body parts between collectors, museums, and raree shows, but Hay's Essay is among the first by a "sufferer." First published in 1754 at London and frequently reprinted until the end of the eighteenth century, Hay's Essay is a cadastral meditation on his ailing body, an erstwhile conduct manual for the deformed, and a grand if unsuccessful attempt to sweep aside ancient associations of physical beauty with moral virtue, shapeliness with rectitude. The latter were tenacious: Sir Philip Sidney insisted that "we laugh at deformed creatures, wherein we certainly cannot delight" (68), Bacon famously derided deformity as an index of odium, and, in 1697, Thomas Pope Blount wrote that it was "a received Opinion among the ancients that Outward Beauty, was an infallible Argument of inward Beauty; and so on the contrary, That a deformed Body was a true Index of a deformed Mind, or an ill Nature" (217). In his Dictionary (1755), Samuel Johnson defines "deformity" as "Ridiculousness," "the quality of something worthy to be laughed at." Contempt, "joined with the Ridicule of the Vulgar," Hay writes, is a "certain Consequence of bodily Deformity" (33). But Hay's "unapologetic self-portrait in the Essay," in Kathleen James-Cavan's view, "rejects the culture's equation of bodily deformity and character defect" (10). Born in Sussex in 1695, Hay was orphaned at five and, according to his first biographer, lost "all the natural protectors of infancy" (9). He matriculated at Christ Church, Oxford in 1712 but left for Lincoln's Inn and the Middle Temple in 1714–1715. After travels in England, Scotland, and the continent, Hay was active in the Sussex magistracy, and, in 1734, he was returned as a member of parliament for Seaford. In parliament, Hay was "committed ministerial whig" with a particular attention to poor law reform (Taylor). Although his early verse was admired by Alexander Pope, he is chiefly known for his parliamentary journal and the Essay, a rich, important text which Kathleen James-Cavan offers in the first edition since 1794.

Although there are a few typographical errors in the notes (including, I should point out, "Spender" for "Pender" when she cites my work; see, for example, notes 13, 16, 20, 23, 59), the text is deftly edited, annotated, and elegantly introduced—although quite why she consigns Hay's own footnotes to endnotes is unclear. In the introduction, James-Cavan argues that the Essay, a "memoir, literary and cultural critique, and medical testimony," redefines (she means, I think, redescribes) Hay's "alterity as a fortification of an enlightened middle class culture" (10–11). The text "refuses to align the non-deformed with either neutrality or normalcy." Instead, Hay endeavours to undermine such "binaries" as great and small, crooked and upright, normal and abnormal (12). In fact, deformity is a "Protection to a Man's Health and Person," both of which are better defended by "Feebleness" than ability (31). His target, of course, is Francis Bacon's essay "Of Deformity...