Accessibility and Archives: “Oh, call my brother back to me: I cannot play alone.”

In the second of a pair of blogposts, Philip Milnes-Smith puts the life of the disabled Victorian boy (William Geldart) in a broader family context.  It quotes Victorian language which may now cause offence.

In the previous blogpost, we explored the life of Willy Geldart.  Considering his brother Martin too through a disability lens, we may note that reviewers of his book comment on his “eccentric career” and refer to an “inheritance of delicate nerves and a morbid disposition, relieved by a humour sometimes verbal, sometimes genuine”.  He self-describes as having been “a sickly, nervous, brooding child, with a lively fancy and a restless brain”.  He notes, “I can distinctly recall having serious doubts of the reality of the external world. I am sure that about this time my brain lapsed permanently into a more dreamy condition than before. I used often to ask myself, Is there any real difference between dreaming and waking? Am I actually awake now? Do I really feel pain, or do I only think so?”

He quotes a testimonial of his childhood character as “a curious child. He is exceedingly good, but sometimes seems as if he were possessed . He came down to dinner declaring he intended to make his company as disagreeable as possible; no one was to speak to him-the faces were most remarkable." He also recalls being warned “when I bit my nails and sulked that that was how mad people always began,.. but I… began to think that by diligent prayer and watchfulness I might yet keep out of an asylum.”  Comparing his condition with his brother, he notes, “Poor fellow! he had much to suffer physically, and I am sure I do not begrudge him his spiritual content. His body with my soul would have been enough to move the heart of the very devil himself.”

Willy is reported as being anxious on his deathbed for Martin’s “peculiar turn of mind and talents” and we saw last time that Martin had ruminated on the possibility that he was the cause of Willy’s disability. Although Martin notes of Willy that “he had a great deal more attention paid to him than I; which was quite right and proper”, we should not perhaps be surprised by his confession elsewhere that “I liked being nursed, and thought sickness a luxury. It was so comforting to be made a fuss about.”  Nonetheless, in 1870, he named his son William Martin Geldart.

Martin noticed the inconsistency and hypocrisy of adults and seemed not to understand social norms.  For example, when he was a pupil at the Merchant Taylors School in Suffolk Lane (see preview image), he challenged a policeman charged with preventing the accidental drowning of boys who had instead threatened to dunk one of them in the water.  “Policeman A,.. answered evasively and rudely by telling me it was time for school. I thereupon asked the time of my friend the adult bystander, and triumphantly told the peeler that he was telling a lie. His answer was short and decisive. He took me by the scruff of the neck, or at least the coat collar, and carried me off to school.”  Later he notes: “I wondered how Sir Henry Havelock could reconcile it with his Christian principles to send his swarthy brethren to hell in such numbers, and lead his troops to a like unenviable destination before he had satisfied himself that they had " saving faith. " I never could understand on Evangelical grounds how a soldier could be a Christian, still less how a Christian could be a soldier.  Of course, while Sir Henry Havelock was a soldier, it was technically his duty to send the Sepoys to hell; but why did he not resign the service as soon as he became converted?”  Reviewers commented on Martin’s “irrepressible and honest indignation”.  He notes his failure as a schoolmaster arising from refusing to wield the cane and his “exceedingly sensitive and nervous temperament” and he spent the next three months “at Malvern in the torture of hydropathic treatment… in a state of mind and body on which I shudder to reflect.” Taken together with an enthusiasm for entomology, we might speculate about neurodivergence.

Martin reports of 1862 that his mother “had never been herself since [Willy] was taken. And now her letter.. showed that her mastery… of any language at all, was sharing in the general break-down and break-up of her health as well of body as of mind… Epileptic fits had set in;.. two or three in a day—a sure presage of the coming catastrophe. My father brought her home to die.  She just knew us, and that was all.”  Martin’s own struggles ended in 1885.   A recent failure of employment having “preyed on his mind”, “depressed” and “very unwell”, he was presumed drowned from the Dieppe ferry.  The news item about the “Supposed Suicide” in the Greenwich and Deptford Observer uses the words “wayward and eccentric” to describe his autobiography.

Of course, the Geldarts’ experience of disability was a comparatively privileged one.  Not all children presenting like Willy had parents with the disposable income to seek specialist medical opinion, pay for orthotics and disability aids, or homes with gardens, or healthy coastal breaks in Southend, Lytham, Southport or on the Continent.  Her writing underlines that she was not unaware of this reality – in The Sick-room and its Secret the narrator notes that pandemics were not experienced by all alike, commenting that “fever's chosen abode, where its presence lingers longest and presses most heavily, is in crowded courts, and unwholesome cellars, or in close confined streets, where the breath of heaven cannot find entrance freely, to purify and refresh.” 

There is a sense both from their lives and Mrs Geldart’s stories that disability and death were just parts of life that might happen to anyone at any time – and that this ought to prompt sympathy between the temporarily sick and the disabled, and between people caring for those with different disabilities.  In A Message to a Sick Child in Sunday Thoughts, she presents a moment of solidarity across the classes as widowed mothers of differently disabled children meet in a waiting room: they “were not strangers now. The jewelled hand of the gaily dressed lady took the delicate hand-kerchief which she carried, and wiped away the falling tears of the poor widow.”  

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