Parmi les ouvrages en relief conservés dans les collections du Musée Valentin Haüy, il en est un qui mérite une attention particulière.[1] C’est un livre volumineux (34 x 24 x 7 cm) et, malgré son mauvais état actuel, son dos recouvert de précieux vélin prouve la valeur qui lui fut accordée. Quand on l’ouvre, une annotation manuscrite en noir (écriture des voyants) au revers de la couverture indique qu’il s’agit d’une Géographie de la France, écrite en 1832 par Monsieur Hayter en braille abrégé primitif ; le texte est illisible au brailliste d’aujourd’hui. Une ancienne fiche ajoute qu’il existait aussi une Géographie de l’Asie, et que les deux titres furent écrits “avec l’imprimerie mobile de Mr Hayter “.

Edgard Guilbeau, fondateur en 1886 et premier conservateur, jusqu’en 1894, du Musée Valentin Haüy, explique que c’est Henry Hayter qui aurait rappelé à Louis Braille l’existence du w, lettre essentielle pour la langue anglaise[2]. Sinon, l’inventeur l’aurait oublié. Pourtant, le w existe en français, au moins depuis Charlemagne, pour écrire les mots d’origine anglo-saxonne. Considéré comme une lettre étrangère, il a longtemps été placé à la fin, comme dans l’alphabet braille originel.

Le nom de Hayter est associé à un autre ouvrage des collections du musée. Il s’agit d’un petit livre (22 x 14 x 2 cm), dévolu à une notation musicale en système Lucas, une sténographie qui utilise des traits, droits ou courbes, des cercles et des traits combinés à des points.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Au verso de la couverture, quelques lignes manuscrites en noir, qu’occulte partiellement une étiquette en braille ajoutée ultérieurement, nous permettent tout de même de lire le nom du propriétaire, Henry Hayter, l’indication « professeur de musique » et une adresse à Paris, rue de Vaugirard.

Henry Hayter (1814-1893) est le fils de Sir George Hayter, peintre anglais anobli en 1842 par la reine Victoria. Il est le troisième enfant, aveugle, d’un mariage de son père, à pas tout à fait dix-sept ans, avec Sarah Milton, qui en avait vingt-huit. Le couple se sépare deux ans après la naissance d’Henry[3]. Le jeune homme est élevé à l’Institution des jeunes aveugles de Paris.

Henry Hayter est aussi cité à la fin d’une lettre manuscrite en noir, dictée à un secrétaire par John Bird, aveugle, qui a tenu à la signer de sa main et à écrire lui-même le nom de son destinataire (malheureusement indéchiffrable):

 [numéro illisible] Duke Street Grosvenor Square W.

Oct 4 h 1874

Dear [nom illisible]

Should you be able when in Paris to reach so far at the School for Blind Children situate I believe Rue de Sèvres, I will thank you to ask for M. Victor, if still alive and there, and should you find him there please to remind him that I visited the School frequently when in Paris 25 years since with John. At the Exhibition of 1851 in England I first learned from M. Foucault of the Quinze-Vingts that the Alphabet of M. Louis Braille was in general use in Paris, but that all mention of it was suppressed through M. Guadet’s influence, who wished that his own [mot illisible] system should have all the credit. I do not wish a large frame for writing Braille’s system, because I have the very one from which Mr Tomlinson had the sketch taken for the Wood cut for his Cyclopædia; but I will thank you to bring me one or two specimens of the smaller size to carry in the pocket, generally about 4 inches long sufficiently thick for strength, and about 1 inch wide, with two Rows of quadrangular holes corresponding to the three grooves below, or rather on the wood or metal below.

If you can also obtain a small specimen of the best kind of paper they have in use as well as 2 or 3 square inches of the “Cuivre jaune” M. Victor uses for making Stereotype-plates. Should you see him remember me kindly to M. Victor and to anyone else who may remember me.

I remain yours very truly

John Bird

PS: enquire if M. Hayter be still connected with the Institution. He is the son of the late Sir George Hayter who painted the Coronation of her Majesty and enquire also of M. Claude Montal and his daughter Clementine.

Cette lettre est insérée dans une brochure appartenant au fonds de la bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy, Cyclopædia of Useful Arts, celle-là même que cite John Bird. Un chapitre est consacré à l’imprimerie pour les aveugles. On y apprend que John Bird est allé sur le continent visiter différentes écoles spécialisées. Celui qu’il nomme « M. Victor » est Victor Laas d’Aguen. Il fait partie des élèves voyants que l’Institution de Paris intègre pour seconder les aveugles. En 1841, il devient surveillant des études et imagine, vers 1849, d’utiliser la stéréotypie pour l’impression du braille[4]. François Foucault est un ami de Louis Braille avec qui il conçoit en 1842 une machine pour écrire en noir avec des points[5]. Quant à Joseph Guadet, premier instituteur des garçons, puis chef de l’enseignement de l’Institution de Paris, il fonde en 1855 une revue pédagogique spécialisée, L’Instituteur des Aveugles, qui promeut l’usage du braille.

 

Un autre encart est ajouté dans la brochure à la suite de la lettre. C’est un article découpé dans le London Mirror du 19 février 1870, signé du même John Bird, intitulé « The Battle of the Types for the Blind ».

Il est utile de citer Henry Hayter dans cette histoire des systèmes qui se sont concurrencés, avant l’adoption franche et massive du braille, qu’illustre si bien Touching the Book. C’est un Anglais qui a imprimé le premier livre en braille, avec un matériel lui appartenant et très tôt après la publication du code braille. En 1832, Henry Hayter a dix-huit ans. Louis Braille en a vingt-trois, il a publié trois ans auparavant son Procédé pour écrire les paroles, la musique et le plain-chant au moyen de points et disposés pour eux. Cette première édition de 1829 comporte des signes qui combinent, non seulement des points, mais aussi des points et des traits, ainsi qu’un système sténographique. La seconde édition du Procédé, en 1837, propose encore quelques abréviations, mais abandonne les traits, insuffisamment perceptibles au doigt. La Géographie de la France comporte effectivement encore quelques uns de ces signes avec traits.

Ces documents témoignent de la constitution au XIXe siècle d’un réseau entre personnes aveugles qui outrepasse les frontières nationales et favorise la circulation des savoir et des savoir-faire. Ils prouvent surtout la détermination de ces personnes à s’approprier le braille.

Le fonds iconographique du musée conserve un portrait en pied d’Henry Hayter. La photographie n’est pas datée. Elle a été prise dans un appartement bourgeois, à moins que ce ne soit un décor. Lambris d’appui au mur, tombé d’un grand rideau sur le côté droit, du côté gauche fauteuil cabriolet louis XV, sur l’assise duquel Hayter a posé son chapeau haut de forme. C’est un homme mûr qui a de la prestance. Il se tient droit sans raideur. Son visage est ovale, ses cheveux coiffés en arrière dégagent un front haut, les paupières sont baissées, il porte une fine moustache. Il est vêtu d’une élégante redingote, son pantalon et sa chemise sont clairs, son cou est entouré d’un foulard sombre formant cravate. Il tient dans ses mains à hauteur de ceinture un petit objet impossible à identifier, sur lequel il semble concentré : un poinçon à écrire le braille ?

 

 

Noëlle ROY

Conservatrice du musée Valentin Haüy

Responsable de la bibliothèque patrimoniale Valentin Haüy

Association Valentin Haüy

Au service des aveugles et des malvoyants

5 rue Duroc 75343 PARIS CEDEX 07

00 33 (0)1 44 49 27 27

www.avh.asso.fr

Birkbeck’s Touching the Book exhibition encourages visitors to think about the experiences of Britain’s first generation of visually disabled readers: about what visually disabled Victorians read and about how they read.  In this entry, I’d like to take up two objects from the exhibition and use them to think about the ‘where’ of the nineteenth-century history of blind literacy: about the spaces in which Britain’s earliest raised-print books were read.

* * *

 In Touching the Book, curator Heather Tilley pairs fragile specimens of Britain’s earliest raised-print books with examples of the antiquated tools that Victorians used to produce text to be read by touch.  The exhibit also features a number of photographs and engravings of people reading raised-print books.  As Tilley’s attentive treatment of this material makes clear, images of this kind need to be handled with care.  Visual images of blind people reading necessarily reveal more about how visual impairment and reading by touch were perceived by the sighted Victorians who produced and consumed the images than they do about the lived experiences of visually disabled people.  While images of blind people reading by touch respond to the achievements of individual readers and to advancements in the realms of printing and education, they function as records,  not of the experience of blind literacy, but of how the entry into literacy of people with visual disabilities was imagined and, in many instances, idealized by sighted people.

With this in mind, I’d like to think about where the Victorian visual record locates the experience of reading by touch.  Among the images of visually disabled readers included in Touching the Book are two images linked by their association of the reading of raised-print books with the home.  The first is a very personal item, designed for display in a home.  It is a small gilt-framed calotype photograph of a woman, possibly Ann Whiting, whose name is written on the back of the photograph.  She sits indoors, a fireplace visible behind her.  Silent and solitary, she is alone and reads with her mouth closed.  The second is an example of a widely circulated engraving of George Smith’s painting, Light and Darkness (1865).  Reproduced so that it could be hung in homes across Britain, Smith’s painting characterizes a blind woman’s reading as domestic but also as social: she reads aloud from her book as she sits near the hearth of a home crowded with people, some of them listening attentively while others pay no heed.  Be it for pleasure, education or edification, reading by touch is represented by these two images and by others like them as a domestic pastime, located in the home and conducted at a distance from the public sphere.

If the visual record links the reading practices of visually disabled Victorians with the home, the written record does something quite different.  Many written accounts suggest that the face of blind literacy in the nineteenth-century sighted imagination was not that of a woman reading by a hearth but was instead that of a man reading on a street.  Take for example Henry Mayhew’s encyclopedic London Labour and the London Poor (1851-61).  It contains an interview with an unnamed man with a visual disability who, having learnt how to read by touch, supports himself by reading aloud in two locations in London, Mornington Cresent and Euston Square.  This literate blind man is anything but leisured, complaining to Mayhew that he makes “less than 18d. a-day” and lamenting “I am tired of these streets; besides, being half-starved” (3:155).  This reader does not read for pleasure nor for edification; he reads to solicit spare change from passers-by.  One of many graduates of Britain’s new programs for teaching reading by touch who found themselves literate but unemployed, Mayhew’s interviewee was by no means alone on the streets.  He read portions of the Bible alongside other visually disabled street performers, including musicians, animals trainers and pavement writers, and he competed for the public’s charity with other literate blind people attempting, like him, to make a living through the display not only of their ability to read by touch but also of their disability, poverty and piety.

While Mayhew’s street reader’s meager earnings suggest that public support for street reading was limited, some accounts of street readers are quite positive.  In 1878, a correspondent for Chambers’s Journal suggested that these readers, while not well compensated, were well liked.  The essayist writes of an unnamed blind man who read on Waterloo Bridge that:

Passengers who have gone backwards and forwards over the bridge cannot have failed to notice the old blind man who sits in one of the recesses day after day, reading aloud by the aid of his fingers from an embossed Bible.  He has been at his post summer and winter for about twenty years, and is much respected and esteemed by all who know him.  (“Waterloo Bridge,” 751).

An English Illustrated Magazine article, published a decade later, described the same blind man on the bridge, asserting confidently “Most Londoners know the Old Blind Bible reader on Waterloo Bridge. He has been there for more than thirty years. What experiences he must have had, for London has changed wondrously in the last thirty years” (“London Street Scenes,” 802).

While these commentators strike a positive note, others weren’t just critical of the presence of blind readers on the street: they were suspicious that readers on the street were merely pretending to read.  Here is a reporter, writing under the penname Shadow, responding in 1858 to a street reader, “a poor blind man, dressed in homely fustian” he encountered in Glasgow:

He is seated upon the ground, reading aloud a portion of the Bible, from a book with raised letters for the blind.  We are surprised by the apparent ease with which he manipulates.  On close examination, however, we have suspicion that the tongue is greatly more nimble than the fingers, or that the Word is better known to memory than to touch.  (82)

The suggestion that blind people who read in the streets only pretend to read text, that they are faking finger reading, was echoed several decades later by Thomas Rhodes Armitage, a visually disabled activist for blind education.  Armitage expressed opposition to the finger reading of raised-print books in public streets in 1886 when he described a representative reader of this sort as a “man who sits in some public thoroughfare reading, or pretending to read, some portion of the Bible, which he gives in a loud voice as soon as he hears a footstep approaching” (59).  B.G. Johns, a sighted educator of blind students, made similar insinuations. Markedly different in his assessment of the reader on Waterloo Bridge than the authors of the positive accounts given above, Johns describes him as:

the stout, elderly, good-natured looking man who sits in one of the recesses of Waterloo Bridge, and professes to be reading, in a loud, strong voice, some page of Saint Paul, in Frere’s system. Whether he is reading it or not is entirely another question. At all events he has learned a good many pages by heart most correctly; and so reads on glibly enough in all weathers, rain, east wind, or snow, when the finger of an unprofessional blind boy would be utterly disabled. (84)

When Johns characterizes the reading that takes place on Waterloo Bridge as fake, as a recitation from memory, he distinguishes between the blind street performer and respectable blind readers, represented for him by “the unprofessional blind boy,” a sensitive reader who could not manage to read in harsh outdoor conditions if he wanted to.

Why was the reading of raised-print books on the street dismissed as fake while the reading of raised print books in the home was celebrated?  Why is the visual record dominated by images of blind people reading in domestic spaces?  Why did reading on the streets inspire suspicion, not just in the average observer but in well-informed commentators who practiced and taught reading by touch?  Clearly, the ‘where’ of reading by touch mattered a great deal to Victorians.  The inference that the blind street reader is not really reading was a useful one for advocates for the education of visually disabled people and for improved employment opportunities. Criticizing the practice of street reading, commentators sought a relocation of blind reading from street to home, a relocation that could cleanse reading by touch from the taint of the public sphere and from the problematic association street reading created between blind literacy and begging.  Troubled by a past and present day characterized by radically inadequate employment options, these educators and activists celebrated forms of reading by touch that closely resembled reading by sight.  They wanted reading by touch off the streets.

Written accounts of the reading of raised-print books on the streets of Victorian Britain communicate very different ideas about the where and the why of reading by touch than are communicated by visual images of blind people reading in domestic settings. The written record may not be more accurate than the visual record but it is nonetheless valuable for the way it complicates the visual record’s arguably sanitized portrayal of visually disabled Victorians and their reading practices.  Thinking about the spaces occupied by Britain’s earliest generations of visually disabled readers—about reading that took place in the street as well as the home—can help us to better understand the lived experiences of visually disabled Victorians.  Visiting the Touching the Book exhibit is both a prompt and an opportunity for us to do so.

Vanessa Warne, University of Manitoba

References

Armitage, Thomas Rhodes. The Education and Employment of the Blind: What it has been, is and ought to be. 2^nd Ed. London: Harrison, 1886.

Johns, B.G. Blind People: Their Works and Ways. London: Murray, 1867.

“London Street Studies.” The English Illustrated Magazine. 5: 1888. 799-804.

Mayhew, Henry.  London Labour and the London Poor.  4 vols, New York: Dover, 1968.

Shadow.  Midnight Scenes and Social Photographs. Glasgow: Thomas Murray, 1858.

“Waterloo Bridge.” Chambers’s Journal. 55: 1878. 750-2.