Blind Writing Before Braille
Blind Writing Before Braille
Tilly Guthrie delves into the history and development of tactile literacy through this examination of the letters of Victorian writer, Charles Cook.
In May 1859, Charles Cook wrote a letter to the Earl of Derby, seeking an investment in his new small business. He had arrived in Liverpool from India five years previously “for the purpose of learning Music”. Unfortunately, things hadn’t gone to plan; “not being able to render my Music of any practicle [sic] value”, he had turned instead to the “business of a hawker”. Now he only lacked “capital sufficient to procure some tea & coffee” to sell on. What Cook doesn’t mention, but is apparent from the physical form of his letter, is that he was blind. Instead of using ink, the shapes of letters are made up of a series of dots embossed into the paper with pins. This created visually recognisable characters for the sighted recipient of the letter, but in a tactile form that could be legible to the fingertip.
This letter catches a crucial moment in the history of tactile literacy. Although Braille was invented in the 1820s, it wasn’t taught across Britain until the 1870s, and was not standardised until 1905. Instead, various embossed scripts were developed for blind readers based on the printed Roman alphabet. The aim was integration with the sighted world, but with a failure to acknowledge that the complex shapes of Roman letters were impractically difficult to decipher by touch alone.
Charles Cook’s letter embodies this approach. He uses embossing stamps made from a block of wood or metal, with protruding pins arranged in the shape of a letter. The character appears backwards on the stamp, and the text written right to left, so that once pressed into the paper it appears the right way around in relief. This technique allowed Cook to write independently, in a script that was legible to the sighted reader who was not familiar with Braille. However, it proved to be a compromise for both parties; the pin-prick letters were difficult to read both by touch and by eye. Further examination of the materiality of this text shows that the downfalls were not merely practical, but affected how a blind writer was perceived in their correspondence.
![Zoomed image of the date and a section of the first line of the letter, again overlaid with a digital tracing in red. The pin-prick words are interspersed with corrections in pencil italic handwriting, which I illustrate here with square brackets: 'May [21st] 1859' and 'I hu[m]bly'.](https://culturesofdisability.mmu.ac.uk/wp-content/uploads/sites/451/2025/01/Picture3-300x178.png)
Even though Cook uses lengthy formal language appropriate for addressing a social superior, mistakes in spelling and spacing become more frequent as this letter progresses. This not only indicates the arduousness of the writing process, but also makes Cook appear careless or unprofessional in his request for investment. Similarly, where corrections are added to the text, they are written in pencil. This has the feel of a teacher correcting a student’s work, especially when the smooth italic handwriting is juxtaposed with the childish letter shapes created by these stamps.
Charles Cook’s letter therefore serves as a case study of a blind person who was clearly aware of formal epistolary conventions, but whose writing inadvertently gives the impression of childishness or perhaps carelessness. Through this kind of material analysis of text, the experience and perceptions of blindness in the Victorian era can be partially uncovered. When faced with the dearth of autonomous disabled voices in the archives, these fragments provide a vital insight into their history.
Further Reading
- Armitage, Thomas Rhodes, The Education and Employment of the Blind: what it has been, is, and ought to be, second edition (London, 1886).
- Golden, Catherine, Posting It: The Victorian Revolution in Letter Writing (Gainesville, 2009).
- Levy, William Hanks, 'Blindness and the Blind' (London, 1872).
- Ott, Katherine, ‘Material Culture, Technology, and the Body in Disability History’, in Michael Rembis, Catherine Kudlick, and Kim E. Nielsen (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Disability History (New York, 2018), pp. 125–39.
- Tilley, Heather, Blindness and Writing: from Wordsworth to Gissing (Cambridge, 2018).
Tilly Guthrie is a PhD researcher at the University of Sheffield, working on the history of blindness and tactile writing in the Nineteenth Century. She is sighted, but an avid appreciator of Braille in all its forms.
Bringing your Whole Self to Work and the Limits of Assistive Technology
Bringing your Whole Self to Work and the Limits of Assistive Technology
Gabril Hoskin, assistive technology tutor, explores the potential of anthropology to increase accessibility and inclusion.
Late 2022, in an article entitled 'Bringing Your Whole Self to Work', consumer editor and lifestyle journalist Heidi Scrimgeour proposed that assistive technology (AT) opens the door to ensure employees have a voice in an ‘authentic’ workspace. As an AT tutor with a social enterprise supporting university students with disabilities, I see an appetite to create such spaces on a daily basis. It’s not just work colleagues who seek a stake in a credible enterprise: many of my students express a sense of alienation from the university system due to that system’s lack of accessibility. However, I question the extent to which technology can promote inclusion and visibility; the big data called on by tech developers (and, indeed by numerous service providers, universities included) is not sufficient to address the complex needs of disabled ‘users’.
My background is in anthropology, a discipline that leaps on any mention of the ‘A Word’ -Authenticity. What makes something ‘authentic’? Why might people desire this? Are there things and people who are ‘unauthentic’? How are such predicaments expressed in behaviour? In an article exploring ethnography and disability studies, Monica Casper and Heather Talley (2005) suggest that the very category of disability and the potential for inclusion rests on what people perceive as authentic. Posing the question of how disability comes to be viewed as ‘authentic’ or ‘unauthentic’, they highlight a number of studies that suggest that such categories are relational and are constructed by a range of actors, all of whom harbour different cultural identities, be those gender, socio-economic, ethnic or national.
As machine learning and online interaction has become inextricably entwined in ‘everyday behaviour’ (we can see this in choices ranging from smartphone cases to preferences for online dictionary interface) a myriad of these social groups, all involved in the authenticity trade, are now vying for representation and looking to be heard.
In an article that signals new approaches to disability and assistive technology, Smith et al. (2022) note that AT is now recognised as both a means to and an end in itself in the achievement of rights of persons with disabilities. Both the WHO and UNICEF encourage action to increase global access to AT. Concurrently, the service sector’s pursuit of the experiences and meaningful interactions of its customers as an antidote to the quantitative data generated by machine learning has picked up pace.
What is perceived as ‘authentic’ and the way in which such authenticity is negotiated among users have come centre stage in this debate. The focus of disability service providers is slowly shifting to accommodate the reality that, if we are truly customer focused, looking to increase accessibility and amplify the voices of persons with disabilities, we need to engage with this debate. My hope and belief is that the methods employed by anthropologists to explore ‘other people’s worlds’ are going to lead the way.
Gabril Hoskin is an assistive technology and study skills tutor with Assistive Solutions, a London-based social enterprise. His background is in ethnomusicology and his research interests include: cultural diversity, disability, popular music and migration.
More Than Skin Deep: The Representation of Disfigurement in Modern Gaming
More Than Skin Deep: The Representation of Disfigurement in Modern Gaming
Here, Gabriele Aroni explores the topic of facial scarring in videogaming, asking if disfigurement can be portrayed positively
Videogame protagonists come in all shapes and sizes, from humans and animals, to fantastic beasts and robots. Facial scarring, on the other hand, is more rarely seen, since from a game standpoint, as well as within the framework of disability, it does not necessarily imply an infirmity or a decrease in functions. A scar, as visible as it can be, is difficult to translate into a game function, such as mobility impairment. Videogame characters can become figuratively “disabled” by a reduction of capabilities following a player’s mistake, such as taking damage from an enemy, but there is not a “disability” to overcome when it is related to facial scarring. In fact, completely disfigured characters are often portrayed as villains.
In the role-playing game Mass Effect 2 (BioWare, 2010) the protagonist carries visible scars that affect both the story and the gameplay, albeit in a limited way. The game begins with the protagonist Shepard presumed dead and resurrected thanks to cybernetic implants. These implants carry a visible, glowing mark on Shepard’s face (see image 1). The scars are not disfiguring but definitely noticeable, and most importantly, can be reduced by the player, but only by performing certain actions. These implants, the player will learn, are based on the very same technology of the game’s antagonists, hence the scars are the visual beacons of her/his “corruption” to the enemy’s side. In fact, it is possible to remove the scars by performing certain in-game actions, and removing them will award the player with “paragon points” that will move her/him toward the “good” side. Interestingly, it is still possible to play as a “good” character regardless of the scars, but the link between the presence of facial scars and being a “renegade”, i.e. a “bad” guy, is obvious.
© BioWare 2010.
© BioWare 2010.
Another character from Mass Effect 2 worth mentioning is Garrus, who receives a severe facial scar that leaves him disfigured for the rest of the game. However, Garrus is already an alien with an appearance that one would define as monstrous (see image 2). As such, the same scars on a human face would have a considerably different visual effect. If the player decides not to remove the scars, the protagonist and Garrus are shown joking about their respective scarred faces, with a type of humour that is positive, as it removes potential negative associations with disability.
The issue of linking scars to a “good” character still lingers, but the fact that the player can nevertheless play as a heroic character is indeed positive. Moreover, the light, jesting attitude taken towards the issue of the protagonist’s and her/his companion’s scars, while at the same time not making it a stigma or the subject of lengthy discussions, is already a positive direction.
Dr Gabriele Aroni is Senior Lecturer in Games Art. With a background in architecture, digital media, and communication, his research focuses on the visual semiotics of digital games. As a burn survivor, he analyses the representation of scarred characters in digital games and how it relates to narrative and gameplay.
Unearthing an Archaeology of Disability
Unearthing an Archaeology of Disability
In this post, Kyle Lewis Jordan explains the connections between archaeology and disability, and considers how the heritage sector can best represent the history of disability.
Archaeology is the study of ‘things’ that people leave behind. Whether these things were placed deliberately and with care, or we discover them where they fell and were left behind, an archaeologist strives to use these things to piece together the lived experiences of people going back hundreds of years.
Such study is rich with possibility, but we cannot achieve the full scope of that possibility without interrogating the tools and systems that have built archaeology as a discipline. Empire-building – from antiquity right to the present day – is an exercise in classification and control: of people, of land, of knowledge and the ‘things’ that fall within the interests of the imperial core. Archaeology as a discipline today is in a moment of soul-searching, reckoning with a material and intellectual legacy which directly influenced – and indeed, benefited from – these classifications, both out in the field but also in the museum and in the archive. False binaries of enlightened; savage, civilised; barbarous, order; chaos, just to name a few. Among these we should also include able; disabled.
Disability, as a medicalised categorisation of a human being’s capacity and capability to fulfil a determined list of “normal” functions, is something that began to gather steam in the 18th and 19th centuries, when states began to take a statistical interest in the lives of their citizens for the purpose of standardizing methods of work and education. Anyone who could not meet this state of “normalcy” then became a statistical anomaly that had to be rationalised and explained through pseudoscience’s like eugenics, which promoted systems of coercion and control to ensure genetic “purity”. This was legitimated in part by the abuse of ancient human remains and the aesthetic centring of classical sculpture in the museum as an institution, just as disabled people themselves were institutionalized, and colonial subjects incarcerated.
Today, as we re-evaluate the role of the museum collection and the archival record, uncovering the narratives of d/Deaf, disabled and neurodivergent people through equitable co-production has a crucial role to play. Not just to point at an object or record and say, “here is disability”, but to demonstrate how disability is an intrinsic part of the human experience. An archaeology of disability sees humankind at its most raw and most beautiful; interrogating not just the substance of our being, but also the historical and contemporary processes that have shaped what we have and can become.
Kyle Lewis Jordan is a disabled early career archaeologist and museum curator who specializes in studying disability in antiquity. He has curated for the Ashmolean Museum, Pitt Rivers Museum and Verulamium Museum.
A Memorable Visit to the Club
A Memorable Visit to the Club
Here, Nadia Tira introduces us to entertainment clubs in Second World War USA, and explains how they offered new opportunities for veterans with disabilities.
During the Second World War, several entertainment clubs were set up to serve and entertain troops still in or returning to the United States. My project analyses how disability was experienced in these places. The clubs I am looking at for my thesis were the ones run by the USO (United Service Organizations), which had a more religious and conservative background, and the famous Hollywood and State Door Canteens, where many of the people volunteering to entertain the troops were celebrities from the cinema and theatre world, something that added a layer of spectacularity to a memorable night.
When these entertainment places were created, they had regular servicemen and, many times, servicewomen in mind. The dances were its most famous and popular attraction, with troops and women volunteers (known as hostesses) jitterbugging to the latest hits or chatting about what the men missed the most from back home. However, as the war wore on and more disabled and wounded troops started returning home, they too visited these clubs and canteens, especially in communities near military hospitals or big cities like New York.
Often, these outings were the first time these newly disabled (or wounded) men and women were outside of either the hospital or the military. So, the trips to these clubs were their first interactions with civilians and provided them a glimpse of what their postwar life could be like.[1]
Newspaper reports of these visits related how some of the men overcame their fears and anxieties with the help of the hostesses, such as George Brisco, a serviceman who had lost a leg and was too self-conscious to go to the dancefloor until Deanna Durbin persuaded him.[2]
Ultimately, these experiences were these men’s first test of life in civilian clothes post-disablement and reflected a desire for them to regain their place in American society.
[1] Hortense Morton, ‘Stage Door Canteen Here Presses N.Y. for Honors’, The San Francisco Examiner, 1 April 1945, p. 63.
[2] Edith Gwynn, ‘Inside Hollywood’, The News Tribune, 20 December 1942, p. 38.
Nadia Tira is a second-year PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her PhD project deals with the experiences of disability at several entertainment clubs for servicemen during the Second World War and in the late 1940s in the United States of America.
Deafness and Great War Veterans
Deafness and Great War Veterans
In this blog post, MMU PhD student Jemma Lakmaker shares some of her research on the experiences of veterans who experienced hearing loss or deafness after serving in the Great War.
After the armistice of the First World War in 1918, 1.6 million soldiers returned to Britain, wounded and with life-changing disabilities. 2.4% of the British army returned with hearing loss or deafness. Soldiers who experienced deafness or hearing loss had a unique experience after the war compared to soldiers with other war-caused disabilities. One of the main differences in experience was due to the invisible nature of deafness. The deafened soldier did not receive the immediate sympathy or compassion that was evoked by the severe visceral injuries that civilians saw every day, bringing shock and acting as a visual reminder of the harsh realities of what these men had sacrificed for their country.
A large number of deaf ex-servicemen did not receive pensions as medical professionals reported that their deafness was not caused or aggravated by the war. [3] After medical examinations, medical professionals gave their medical opinion about if the disability was caused or worsened by the war. There was no uniform method of testing hearing loss during the early twentieth century, therefore to successfully receive a pension, the ex-serviceman relied on the medical professional believing that his deafness was not a pre-existing medical condition. For many deafened soldiers, this resulted in them being rejected for a disability pension. For example, one ex-serviceman was not given a pension as the doctor stated his deafness was a pre-existing condition, despite the man’s pre-war doctor confirming that he had never before experienced hearing loss.[4] This oversight by medical professionals resulted in many deaf ex-servicemen not receiving the financial support that would have significantly benefited them.
The deafened soldier had different experiences after the war compared to those with more visible disability such as limb loss or facial disfigurements. The deafened soldier was not given as much support from the government and medical professionals who were responsible for their care upon their return from war. Finding employment was extremely difficult due to the negative perceptions of deafness, and as a result, the deafened soldier was viewed as idle and lazy. With many deaf veterans struggling to find employment or receive a government pension, and receiving less public sympathy than their visibly disabled comrades, the deafened soldier was at a clear disadvantage navigating the post-war experience.
References
[1] Douglas McMurtrie, The Disabled Soldier, (The Macmillan Company, 1919), p.134.
[2] Deborah Cohen, The War Come Home: Disabled Veterans in Britain and Germany, 1914-1939, (University of California Press, 2001), p.15.
[3] PIN 26/205; MH 106/2082/328; MH 106/2093/334.
[4] Ministry of Pensions, War pensions records: Frank Ernest Adams, 1915-1919 (PIN 26/247), The National Archives, London.
[5] Coreen McGuire, (2016) The ‘Deaf Subscriber’ and the Shaping of the British Post Office’s Amplified Telephones 1911-1939, Ph.D. The University of Leeds, [Online] [accessed 24/01/2024].
[6] McMurtrie, The Disabled Soldier, p.34.
[7] Ministry of Labour, ‘Correspondence concerning demobilisation and the position of the disabled soldier in industry’, (LAB 2/272/DR177/3/1918), TNA, London.
[8]Image from US National Library of Medicine, via https://archive.org/details/101560506.nlm.nih.gov/mode/2up.
[9]Imperial War Museum, IWM PST13211.
Jemma Lakmaker is a second-year PhD student at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her research examines the experiences of soldiers returning from the First World War (FWW) with hearing loss or deafness.
Lived Fiction at the Lowry - 17 October
Lived Fiction inclusive dance performance - the Lowry - 17 October 2024
Stopgap Dance Company present 'Lived Fiction' - this contemporary, inclusive dance performance features Deaf, Disabled, neurodivergent and non-disabled creatives in a dance work that is deep with compassion for the human condition.
"The sensual choreography of Lived Fiction is rendered anew with evocative audio description, exquisite projection art and captioning ... experience dance from multiple perspectives and share in a future that is rich with the enterprise, potential, and power of diversity."
Performance includes audio description and captioning.
Further information and tickets available here: Lived Fiction – Stopgap (stopgapdance.com) and Lived Fiction | What's On | The Lowry
Pier 8
Salford
M50 3AZ
History of Modern BSL
History of Modern BSL
Peter R. Brown explains the history of modern British Sign Language (BSL)
14 November 1792 is an important date for the British deaf community, in which to remember with pride, when the first cohort of 6 deaf newcomers and Joseph Watson came together. Joseph, their hearing master who knew so much about the deaf, played a key role during a crucial turning point in Deaf history – a ‘Big Bang’ moment. This subsequently resulted in the creation of the new and successful working-class community where deaf and hearing people would gather, share news and gossip using the same language – the modern British Sign Language (BSL).
The new Asylum, Britain’s first free school for the deaf, was named the “Asylum for the Support and Education of the Deaf and Dumb of the Poor”, situated in the Fort Place buildings, Grange Road, Bermondsey, south London. This first cohort would be the first occurrence of mass eduction of the deaf and poor. Scholars were educated for 5 years here, before moving onto various areas of the country (mainly in Lancashire and Yorkshire) where they would continue to flourish whilst passing on their education and language.
The school was founded by the brainchild, Rev. John Townsend, a Calvinist Methodist minister. The aim, to render “them, according to their various capacities, conversable and intelligents, able to receive and express ideas; to furnish them with moral and religious information” and plant them in “the germ of the present Society”.
By 1835 approximately 12,000 deaf people were living in Britain, and roughly one-sixth of them utilised BSL with some variant signs, perhaps similarly to what we see today. However by 1920, there were 12 different school sign languages – these included Manchester and Birmingham signs, along with the ‘dominant’ old London Asylum sign, the standard BSL. Roughly half of some 35,000 deaf people utilised the latter at missions where they had joined, obviously due to the infamous Milan conference 40 years prior, responsible for disrupting standard BSL. In 1889, Douglas Tilden, a renowned deaf American sculptor, visited Britain and spoke about the “disparity” of this language.
The missioners utilised the standard BSL through the nature of mobility around missions across Britain, and fought hard in an attempt to preserve it by publishing a small series of the “most popular signs” dictionaries in popular magazine, The British Deaf Times and other deaf publications. An example being The British Deaf Times with the “Family Circle Signs” page featuring Maxwell Stewart Fry demonstrating each sign, printed in 1912 and then reprinted again just before WW2. In around 1902, Fry met with former London Asylum scholar (1841-1846) and missioner, John Pugh Gloyn. Fry happily utilised this “grateful exponent of the old school sign language” – the standard BSL when communicating with him, at that time, Fry was aware of “the different system of signs that prevail”.
The first usage of the term British Sign Language (BSL) in an academc publication was likely to have been by Califorian sociolinguist, Aaron V. Cicourel in 1974.
There is a gem of a passage in Watson’s Instruction of the Deaf and Dumb, published in 1809. Watson states that deaf newcomers from hearing families are fortunate enough to “meet with an attentive companion, or two, especially where two or more deaf persons happen to be brought up together, it is astonishing what approaches they will make towards the construction of an artificial language” of signs. The 5 deaf newcomers from the hearing families were fortunate to learn from their master, Watson, but also their schoolmate, Sarah Pounceby. Pounceby had deaf siblings who unknowlingly, through shared signs and time spent growing up together, contributed to modern BSL, assisted in it’s formation and saw it flourish. Huge thanks go to Watson who arranged and brought Pounceby and the 5 other deaf newcomers together. Having spent the first few days simply learning from them, he then began to mould their signs, before introducing them to other “arbitrary signs” (old BSL) from Braidwood’s deaf private Academy in Hackney. Watson had worked there in 1784 for some 7 years.
In Watson’s 1809 passage, he states that he bowed to John Wallis’ early 17th century deaf education philosphy which insisted that we “must endeavour to learn” deaf newcomers’ sign language in order to teach them English with convenience. However, Watson didn’t see this “rude and imperfect language” as a language equivalent to the English language, he believed it to be an essential part of teaching English. He opposed Signed English and stated it was “more fanciful” and “useless”.
Awareness of the Asylum’s first cohort, really began for me around 1993, after reading Patrick Beaver’s 1992 book A Tower of Strength. It was this book that intrigued me. This fascinating book covers 200 years worth of history on Asylum in London and Margate. The latter, where I myself was a pupil from 1967. It was not until 2019 at a reclamation yard near Oxford, that I would rescue three tons of 1810 cast iron railings that was the perimeter of the second Asylum (1809) in Kent Road, Southwark. Here modern BSL was a mere 18 years old and it’s at this point where my interest piqued again, spurring me on and subsequently brought me spiritually closer to the first cohort. I decided to do some more investigating and with the 2020 lockdown providing me with more free time, I was able to research the history of BSL. I’m interested in how the research can help us better understand and in turn, make the world a better place for both deaf and hearing people.
Peter R. Brown is a BSL Teacher Co-ordinator with CityLit.