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

In the nineteenth century, blindness assumed new meanings as the number of people with visual impairments increased, and new technologies, especially those in book printing, arose to meet this need. Almost twenty years after Mary Klages's Woeful Afflictions: Disability and Sentimentality in Victorian America (1999), which examined blindness in nineteenth-century American literature and culture, Heather Tilley's Blindness and Writing: From Wordsworth to Gissing examines both the material and metaphorical implications of blindness on the other side of the Atlantic. Her analysis is set against the backdrop of an increase in the number of blind people in the nineteenth century, only one in twelve of whom were born blind, through causes varying from industrial accident and poor working conditions, to smallpox, scarlet fever, and ophthalmia, an infectious disease that travelled to England from Egypt via the Napoleonic Wars. Tilley's careful analysis undermines common misconceptions about blindness as a disability, including the idea that blindness means a lifetime of complete darkness; instead, she demonstrates a continuum of visual impairment in the nineteenth century, from myopia to cataracts, and shows the ebb and flow of vision throughout individual lifetimes. In response to the increasing number of people with visual impairments, nineteenth-century inventors developed new technologies aimed at increasing literacy, from William Moon's embossed type to braille.

Tilley analyzes visual impairment in the nineteenth century through what she calls a phenomenological approach, which shifts our attention from an idealized, metaphorical understanding of blindness to one that is attentive to the material circumstances of disability. She proceeds to analyze blindness and writing in two parts, which are organized roughly chronologically. Part 1, "Blind People's Writing Practices," traces the intertwined narratives of visual impairment and writing, including chapters on William Wordsworth, the development of raised print systems, and memoirs by the blind. In her work on blind memoir, Tilley uncovers a networked community of visually impaired writers, including William Hanks Levy, John Bird, and Hippolyte van Landeghem, who used writing to make money and advocate for the blind community. In part 2, "Literary Blindness," Tilley turns to several canonical examples. Her chapter on Jane Eyre (1847) and Aurora Leigh (1856) challenges the critical chestnut that blinding is a form of symbolic castration, reading blindness in the context of biographical material from Elizabeth Gaskell's The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857). She then moves to Charles Dickens, reading his encounter with Laura Bridgman, a young deaf and blind girl whom the novelist met on his 1842 tour of North America, as well as his depiction of Esther Summerson's brief and often overlooked loss of sight in Bleak House (1852–53). Her choice to focus in this chapter on David Copperfield (1849–50), whose protagonist she reads metaphorically as a "blind" writer, is puzzling, given that there is no dearth of characters with visual impairments in Dickens, and that her stated intention in the book is to recover the material circumstances of blindness in a critical tradition that often reads disability only metaphorically (13). By contrast, Tilley achieves such a materially grounded reading of blindness and writing in her fascinating recovery of Frances Browne, who lost her sight after contracting smallpox as an infant and was contemporarily known as "The Blind Poetess of Ulster." Tilley offers a reading of Browne's little-known novel, My Share of the World (1861), alongside Wilkie Collins's Poor Miss Finch (1872), which is now a central text in Victorian disability studies. Interestingly, Browne's novel contains a tragic blind heroine, while Collins, the sighted novelist, offers a more positive representation of a blind heroine. The book concludes with a reading of George Gissing's New Grub Street (1891).

Throughout Blindness and Writing, Tilley is attentive to the relationship between blindness and literary form, arguing that new technologies, such as embossed print, which aimed to make literature accessible to those with visual impairments, shaped both the experience of blind people as...