Wheelchairs, Crutches, and Disability in Victorian Literature

FAIN: FT-286103-22

Alexandra Rae Valint
University of Southern Mississippi (Hattiesburg, MS 39406-0001)

Research and writing leading to a book on prosthetics and mobility aids in Victorian literature.  

Wheelchairs, Crutches, and Disability in Victorian Literature will be the first monograph to center mobility aids and their users in its approach to analyzing Victorian literary depictions of disability. I argue that mobility aids are not mere peripherals but profoundly shape disabled characters’ experiences, narrative arcs, and social and spatial relations within Victorian literature. This project contributes to the study of both literature and disability during a key period in the history of disability. I also contextualize literary representations with a broader examination of how mobility aids are discussed and pictured in nineteenth-century medical journals, newspaper articles, song lyrics, catalogues, and advertisements. An NEH Summer Stipend for June and July of 2022 would enable me to make progress on chapter 4 of the project, which focuses on disabled child characters in Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol (1843) and Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Noble Life (1866).