Accessibility and Archives: “A happy cheerful invalid”

In the first of a pair of blogposts, Philip Milnes-Smith presents evidence for the life of a disabled Victorian boy (William Geldart) who died before he reached adulthood.  It quotes Victorian language which may now cause offence.

In an earlier blog in this series we met a fictional Victorian child who became disabled and died before adulthood, and whose story inspired provision for disabled people.  But real disabled childhoods can be hard to recover.  The subject of this blog did not even feature in the 1851 census so public records are limited to birth and death.  Unusually, William Geldart’s short life (1842-1858) was commemorated twice in print.  First, just over a year after his death there was a volume by his mother (Hannah Ransome Geldart, née Martin), a writer of Christian books for children.  Strength in Weakness; or Early Chastened, Early Blessed, had been published with the idea of offering a pattern of Christian determination to other invalids, and according to one obituary “met with a large circulation”.  She claimed publishing this was in accord with wishes expressed on his deathbed.  While some critics found her book touching, others noted that she had “laid herself open to no small amount of criticism” and imagined readers who would find it a “subject for ridicule” and regard “the whole as dictated by a perverted imagination at the expense of sound sense”.  Her second son (Edmund Martin Geldart) published his autobiographical sketches twenty years after her death.  Between them we can piece together something of Willy’s disability story. 

We are told that the earliest hint of a problem with Willy came shortly after the family’s removal to London, from Norwich, when he was five.  There is talk of “[t]he effects of the damp clay soil of Holloway, the deprivation of many out-door enjoyments, and of the garden-life at Norwich” and we learn of “a troublesome tumour, which had for some time been forming on his forehead” requiring two operations.  The next chapter mentions a removal to Blackheath for the sake of his health and confesses that “[t]he true state of his spine, strange to say, had never struck his parents, although an old lady once remarked upon a stoop he had acquired.”  The medical profession recommended “perfect rest and confinement to the couch” and daily outings for fresh air were possible at that time only in a “long carriage” permitting him to recline.  A key moment he recollected from this period was the first time he passed in the hall the bat and ball that were now out of bounds – his “groan of anguish” found its way into a short story in his mother’s Sunday Thoughts, or Great Truths in Plain Words.

It was perhaps at this time that he encountered a woman on the heath who had commented aloud, “What is the matter with that child?” and had gone on to ask why he didn’t walk, if he couldn’t, and so on.  The redoubtable governess Miss Ewing had set her straight: "I told her, if he were lame, God made him so : but he was not deaf; and that I had often seen bitter tears flow from his eyes after such questions. I then added, as she did not seem angry, that I advised her not to remark on afllicted children”  His mother recalled an earlier glimpse of a visibly disabled man which had led Willy to say “[If] I were so, I should not like to be stared at by anybody."

Subsequently, Willy was treated with what his brother described as “iron stays” and his mother as “an artificial support to the head, which would press with considerable force on the spine and chest” and later a “better-adjusted instrument” that enabled him to resume gentle exercise, and make the most of country life in Reigate – separated as far as possible from what his brother describes as “the officious sympathy of every stranger who beheld him.”   Although he could again stand and walk, both might still prompt “great fatigue and pain” and he was using a reclining “invalid-chair” at home, and could take “a ride in the chair” for day excursions (“pleasant expeditions to other places of interest where his chair could pass”).  A period of mental crisis ends with him being told the truth about his prognosis.

His brother summarises him as “a constant invalid” whose “spinal complaint slightly deformed him” and who “was subject to a hectic cough”.  The closest either gets to a medical diagnosis is “consumptive”.  If, for example, the allusion were to Tubercular Spondylitis, it would clear both the nursemaid supposedly suspected of dropping him and Martin himself who wondered if a childhood see-saw prank meant he had caused his brother’s disability.

In Willy’s final months he coughed up blood, after which “his breathing was shorter, and the difficulty of going up-stairs considerable. His nights, too, were more disturbed, both by cough and fever and the mornings languid and spiritless... The step was but little feebler, though he leaned more heavily on the arm which supported him... The hour for rising became a little later.”  His strength and ability to breathe continued to decline and he died aged sixteen and half, being buried in Bowdon.  His verbal testament donated a small sum to the future restoration of the church building which would go on to elevate it to the state visible in the preview image.

In the second of this pair of blogs, I will follow the example of Sasha Callaghan in broadening out from the individual to the family.

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