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.  

 

A close-up section of Cook's letter, with the characters drawn with a series of pin-pricks, like a dot-to-dot drawing. It is difficult to make out the words at a glance, as no ink is used. The paper is thin, off-white, and shiny, which further increases the difficulty. Horizontal fold lines are clearly visible.
By courtesy of the Derby collection. Letter from Charles Cook, 21 May 1859. Liverpool Record Office, 920 DER/14/200/16/40

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.   

 

Zoomed image of one word in the letter, overlaid with a digital tracing of the word to improve visibility. The word is spelled 'repquest', and the letters are placed at slightly different heights. The simplistic letter shapes (and use of one backwards letter) are reminiscent of a child's handwriting.
Selection from Charles Cook’s letter, showing his use of dots to represent characters.

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'.
Here we can see pencil corrections to Cook’s embossed characters

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.