Accessibility and Archives: “I look… from the inside”
In this, the third in a sequence of blogposts around disability and inclusion from the Accessibility working group of ARA’s Diversity and Inclusion Allies, Philip Milnes-Smith explores interconnected past disabled lives in fact and fiction. It features historic terminology which would now be considered problematic.
The 1901 novel, The History of Richard Calmady, was inspired by (although not closely modelled on) the life of a real disabled person - Arthur MacMorrough Kavanagh (1831-1889). Arthur had been born without lower arms and legs (phocomelia). The privilege and opportunities afforded him by his family’s wealth and social status meant that he grew up to be a widely travelled gentleman tourist in the Mediterranean, Levant and India. When short of cash in Maharashtra, he even briefly served as an employee of the East India Company. His public service began four years after his return home to Ireland with election to the guardianship of a poorhouse in 1857. In 1866, he was prevailed upon to stand for Parliament, commuting from Ireland on his own yacht which would be moored adjacent to the House of Commons.
He made his maiden speech three years later – and by prior arrangement with the speaker, rather than having caught his eye. One member of the press noted that he was one of “that type of men which wins in public life, the men with the large heads, deep chests, and faces full of force”. Nevertheless, he would go on to lose his seat in 1880 in the context of the Land War. Although he then sat on the Bessborough Commission on landlord and tenant relations in 1880-1881, he refused to sign the report, disagreeing (at length) with its recommendations. He was made a member of the Privy Council of Ireland in 1886. Being a British patriot in what would end up as the Republic of Ireland has probably not helped him be recognised as a disability pioneer.
In the novel he inspired, the doctor confirms there is nothing wrong with the title character, and that he is not ill and not, strictly speaking, deformed. Richard is in due course revealed to have feet where the knees ordinarily are (although unlike Arthur, he has the usual arrangement of arms and hands). The novel maintains a tension between the visible difference that makes him the subject of “brutal comment, followed by a hoarse laugh” from strangers and the perspective of his doctor that he is a “very strong and well made” and even “a very handsome fellow”, who should not view himself as being “ill or invalidy”.
As an adolescent, Richard is represented as encountering a travelling fair equipped (by report) with giants, dwarves and a man born without arms – just the kind of setting where Sarah Biffin (1784-1850) had once ‘performed her disability’ in order to support herself (threading needles, writing notes, using scissors, writing and sketching), before training as an artist. This experience prompts Richard to reflect that for disabled people, “it is safer… to be rich.”
In Volume 4 of Mayhew’s London Labour and the London Poor, a case is briefly made for institutional provision for limbless people, but it is to protect the rest of the world from having to see the “more hideous” who cause “alarm” to ladies. Arthur’s first biographer seems to be addressing just such an audience, focusing on ability and achievement as much as possible, and we should note that Arthur’s portrait carefully edits out his shoulders and stops above the waist. His fictional counterpart notes of Victorian society:
“Of course hideous creatures and disabled creatures are an eyesore... They are a nuisance, since they are a standing witness to the fact that things, here below, very far from always work smoothly and well, and that there are disasters beyond the power of applied science to put right.”
Strikingly, this is the prelude to Richard explaining that he has taken upon himself to establish a home for other disabled people, saying:
"I look at all such unhappy beings from the inside, not, as the rest of you do, merely from the out. I belong to them and they to me. It is not an altogether flattering connection. Only recently, I am afraid, have I had the honesty to acknowledge it! But, having once done so, it seems only reasonable to look up the members of my unlucky family and take care of them… —not on the lines of a charitable institution, which must inevitably be a rather mechanical, stepmother kind of arrangement at best, but on the lines of family affection, of personal friendship."
Richard’s fictional fellow-feeling across the classes may be felt to stretch credulity, and certainly there seems little evidence that this detail was borrowed from Arthur’s life. But it is important to note that disabled people have created provision of charitable assistance as well as being merely recipients: for example the Royal School for the Blind, Liverpool which was founded in 1791 at the instigation of Blind people including the poet Edward Rushton, and the musicians John Christie and Robert Lowe.
It is also worth noting that Richard’s care extends beyond those people exactly like himself to those with acquired disabilities from industrial accidents – as Charles Manby-Smith noted:
“Commerce maims and mutilates her victims as effectually as war... Had they been reduced to a like miserable condition while engaged in killing their fellow-creatures on the field of battle or on the deck of carnage, a grateful country would have housed them in a palace, and abundantly supplied their every want; but they were merely employed in procuring the necessaries of life for their fellows in the mine or the factory, and as nobody owes them any gratitude for that, they must do what they can.”
Contributions to this blog series are welcomed, particularly if you are working with records of disabled people or with disabled people. If you are interested, in the first instance, please email diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk .