Public Disability History

By Emmeline Burdett and Penelope Friday A few months ago I was reading an article in Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine, that told the story of the novelist Jane Austen’s disabled brother George. I’d heard about George before: he featured in the 2007 film Becoming Jane, starring Anne Hathaway as Jane Austen, and the film suggested both that the siblings had a relatively close relationship, and that George was the reason that his sister knew sign language. More darkly, other sources have shown that George was not included in his family tree, as though he had not existed at all. The article in Jane Austen’s Regency World magazine was written by Penelope Friday, a disabled writer whose website is https://penelopefriday.com . I interviewed Penelope Friday for Public Disability History. Figure 1 - George and Jane Austen from the 2007 movie "Becoming Jane". Credit:  https://janeausten.co.uk/blogs/jane-austen-life/george-austen?currency=eur  .  1.   What year was George Austen bor

– A disabled artist and his self-determined life – The Object We [the authors] discovered this miniature self-portrait of Theodorus Steib. It is not just a testament to his painting skills, but also to how he saw himself. His painting skills were truly amazing, and he also managed to capture his experiences as a disabled person in seventeenth-century Austria and Germany.  Self-portrait of Thodorus Steib. Oil on oak wood, dated 1651. Photo: K.-K., Rhineland-Palatinate, image courtesy of the owners. The picture shows him deep in concentration, sitting on a red cushion on the floor. His gaze is fixed on his feet. As he was born without hands or arms, his feet allowed him to live a self-determined life.  He is shown surrounded by the tools of his trade. Beside him there is an inkwell, an ink blotter, and two quills. By his other side there is a stack of paper with scissors, a drinking vessel, a can and a cut-out object. All these things are expressions of his independence, which show in hi

By Teresa Michals A victorious career fighting the French at sea as a Royal Navy officer during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars required a lot: highly specialized seamanship skills, charismatic leadership, absolute indifference to death or injury, well-placed and active patrons, and luck. What it did not require was two arms or two legs. From 1795 to 1837 at least twenty-six officers survived amputation of limbs damaged in battle and continued in active service, including command at sea. They continued to capture, sink, or burn enemy ships. Six returned to fight without a leg; twenty without an arm (Michals, Lame Captains and Left-Handed Admirals: Amputee Officers in Nelson’s Navy . All statistics and quotations from this source.). All these officers were gentlemen and thus well-positioned within patronage networks.  The support offered by their elite social and professional status shaped their experience of limb loss in their day, as did the fact that this loss was not congenita

By Emmeline Burdett This quotation comes from Beethoven Was One-Sixteenth Black , one of the short-stories in a collection by the white South African writer Nadine Gordimer, which was published in 2007. It demonstrates how differing interpretations of the past can easily become a politicized battleground. A new chamber opera which looks at disability history through a highly politicized lens demonstrates both the pitfalls and the possibilities of this approach.  The Paradis Files was created by Graeae Theatre Company and tells the story of Maria Theresia von Paradis (1759-1824), an Austrian composer and pianist who went blind at around the age of three, and who wrote at least five operas, two cantatas, fifteen keyboard works, several songs and a piano trio. Graeae was founded in 1980 by the disabled actor Nabil Shaban, specifically to counter prejudices and popular myths about disabled people. It was named after the Graeae of Greek mythology - three sisters named Deino (dread), Enyo

By Stephanie Evelyn-Wright In June 2014, I attended a performance of ‘ Cabinet of Curiosities : how disability was kept in a box’. This show explored the ways in which disability and disabled people are portrayed in museums (School of Museum Studies 2022).  However, the skeletons of actual disabled people were omitted.  I asked the show’s performer – the disabled actor Mat Fraser – about this, and he told me that he was interested in disability as a social construct, but not as a ‘medical condition’. Fraser’s attitude is an example of the social model of disability, which holds that it is not a disabled person’s medical condition which causes problems, but the failure of the society in which that person lives to accommodate him or her. This is, however, an unhelpfully narrow view, for skeletons are continually shaped by the world - for instance a person’s diet and occupation can leave osteological traces which attests to their lived social world. Disabled people’s remains are frequentl