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.

Front cover to ‘A Description of an Apparatus for Enabling the Blind to Emboss in Lucas’s Characters’. Credit: Association Valentin Haüy

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.

Frontispiece to ‘A Description of an Apparatus for Enabling the Blind to Emboss in Lucas’s Characters’. Credit: Association Valentin Haüy

A page from ‘A Description of an Apparatus for Enabling the Blind to Emboss in Lucas’s Characters’. Credit: Association Valentin Haüy

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.

Front cover to ‘Cyclopaedia of Useful Arts and Manufactures, Mechanical and Chemical, Manufactures, Mining, and Engineering’, (1854), Credit: Association Valentin Haüy

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.

A page from Henry Hayter’s ‘Géographie de la France’, 1835. Credit: Association Valentin Haüy

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.

Unknown Photographer, Henry Hayter (n.d.). Credit: Association Valentin Haüy

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.

Unknown photographer, Ann Whiting, ambrotype, c. 1850-60s. Private Collection

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.

George Smith, ‘Light and Darkness’, 1865. Location unknown.

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.

As I studied the online Touching the Book exhibition, I was struck by how many of the books were printed in roman embossed types, even those published many decades after the invention of braille. Although Louis Braille published his writing system in 1829, it was not recognized as the official writing system for people who were blind in France until 1854.[1] British educators only began to endorse braille from 1870.[2]

An embossing plate in Boston Line Type from 1846. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind.

In the U.S., embossed writing systems in roman script held sway for even longer than in Britain and Europe. Michael Anagnos was director of Perkins School for the Blind in Massachusetts, and one of the sighted educators who advocated for embossed alphabet writing systems. Nonetheless, in 1877 he wrote of braille, “This system has so many advantages that render it popular among the blind, that they would undoubtedly adopt it in preference to all others, if they were left free to make their own choice.”[3] What accounts for the reluctance to use a writing system that offered elegance, compactness, portability, and perhaps most important of all, the freedom to write?

In part, the tenacity of the embossed roman alphabets might be explained by the investment that was poured into them. The American Printing House for the Blind was established in Louisville, Kentucky, in 1858 by private backers who were committed to producing tactile books for readers who were blind. Materials in raised letters had been published by a few U.S. schools for the blind for more than 20 years, and the founders of APH did not seem to question the wisdom of continuing this practice. The agency produced materials exclusively in embossed roman alphabets until 1882, and didn’t cease publishing them until the 1920s.[4]

Sighted teachers sometimes claimed that they resisted arbitrary code systems like braille or New York Point because they “constituted an additional barrier between blind and sighted people.”[5] Writing about embossed roman alphabet systems in his essay, “War of the Dots,” Robert B. Irwin said, “… it was contended that the blind people, by using a type similar to that of their seeing associates, were set less apart from the rest of the world.”[6]

Perhaps sighted educators had a more compelling reason for resisting point systems. Many were simply unwilling to memorize a new set of symbols. Irwin puts this tactfully when he writes of embossed roman alphabets, “Their virtue as compared with arbitrary codes seemed to be that they could be read by sight by the seeing teachers with no special instruction.”

In spite of resistance to point systems, their benefits were undeniable. William Bell Wait, head of the New York Institution for the Blind, developed New York Point in 1871, and promoted it among educators prodigiously. In spite of its many drawbacks compared to the braille system, many schools adopted it. In 1882, the American Printing House for the Blind decided to devote half of their book production to New York Point.[7] Given the opinion of educators and the financial investment in non-braille writing systems, how did braille finally win acceptance as the writing system in the U.S.?

New York Point alphabet. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Bind.

Braille came to the United States in 1860, when the Missouri School for the Blind introduced it into its curriculum. School Superintendent John Sibley wrote, “Children will master the ‘Braille’ in a few days, but many months and sometimes years of hard work result in a failure to learn the ‘Line Letter (embossed alphabet system).’”[8]Perkins was one of the headquarters of resistance to point systems, but only nine years later, the school was selling braille slates alongside its embossed books. How did braille so quickly find a place in an institution that championed Boston Line Type?

Although no other school officially adopted braille for decades, and the American Printing House did not produce braille materials until 1893,[9] the system was embraced by pupils at the schools for the blind. Compelled to read embossed alphabets or New York Point for study, the students were free to use braille for personal correspondence and notetaking (except at the Illinois school, which confiscated braille slates).[10] If their school would not teach them braille, the students apparently taught one another. I like to think that braille spread virally, with the Missouri school as the epicenter.

In the mid-1870s, a team of teachers and graduates at Perkins School for The Blind compared all the embossed and point writing systems, determined to identify the best. Braille was the unqualified winner. Perkins director Michael Anagnos wrote of braille, “The scientific ingenuity upon which its construction is based, renders it remarkably simple and methodical; and it is thereby easily acquired and remembered. The arrangement for musical notation is so systematic, so concise, and so comprehensive, that it can scarcely be equalled by any similar contrivance.”[11] Arising from the unequivocal findings of this comparative study, the school added braille into its curriculum for both reading and writing, without dropping its older methods.

American braille alphabet card. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind

Unable to leave well enough alone, Anagnos charged a brilliant and inventive teacher to improve upon the original code. Joel W. Smith reassigned the braille cells so that the most frequently used English letters were represented by the cells with the fewest dots. This Modified, or American, braille might have been a bit faster to read and write than Standard braille. Unfortunately, it introduced yet another writing system for students to learn, and another camp of bickering proponents in the increasingly contentious argument about the best writing system for readers who were blind.

A flyer in Boston Line Type from c. 1820s. Courtesy of Perkins School for the Blind.

In spite of the preference of readers for the clearly superior braille point system, Perkins incomprehensibly continued to publish its books in embossed alphabets for over 30 years more. The American Printing House for the Blind only ceased publishing in New York Point in the 1920s, when schools for the blind stopped teaching it. It was not until 1918 that Standard braille was selected as the official writing system for the U.S. After more than a decade of wrangling and disagreement with educators from Great Britain, a committee of educators settled upon Revised Braille Grade 1-1/2.

Nearly 60 years after its introduction into the U.S., braille was finally the official writing system for people who were blind. This success is attributable to its loyal users, who would not give braille up, even when attempts were made to supplant it or even to suppress it. I like to think that this is one of the first milestones in the beginnings of the disability rights movement.

Jan Seymour-Ford, Research Librarian, Perkins School for the Blind

Jan.seymour-ford@perkins.org

With their unwieldy, mechanical and ornamented appearance, writing machines for blind and visually impaired people capture the spirit of scientific-technological progress that was so characteristic of nineteenth century society. Not only could machines be used to extract raw materials and make the production of goods and supplies more effective, they could also be applied to social and cultural issues such as the spread of information, the promotion of communication and the improvement of education. Writing machines like the ones on display at the Touching the Book exhibition illustrate this confidence in the civilizing impact of technology. As for the makers of these apparatuses, they won public recognition as philanthropic innovators who worked for the benefit of visually impaired people.

An advertisement for William Hughes’s Typograph published in Edmund Johnson’s ‘Tangible Typography’, 1853

Of the two machines exhibited here, only James Hammond’s model from 1902 conforms to what we normally associate with the typewriter. The earlier machine, William Hughes’s Typograph from 1850, was conceived more as a printing device, which could press embossed roman characters on paper. Although Hughes, who was the director of Henshaw’s Blind Asylum in Manchester, intended his machine for private correspondence, he clearly drew inspiration from the kind of machines that were used in printing houses and from the tactile skills of printers. In Edmund C. Johnson’s book Tangible Typography. How the Blind Read, from 1853, the term typograph was also used in conjunction with blindness. Tangible typography referred to the act of reading with one’s fingers. The term tied the different acts of writing and reading to one another in a tactile way. An ad for Hughe’s Typograph, printed at the end of Johnson’s book, describes how this “new mechanical contrivance for the use of the blind”, had been praised for its speed and ease at the Great Exhibition by none other than Queen Victoria.

If the Typograph was designed explicitly with the blind in mind, James Hammond’s Braille Typewriter model of 1902 was a modification of an existing typewriter that was adjusted to non-sighted users. With Hammond’s machine we’re well into the period of professional typewriting and competing brands. Hammond was first and foremost an inventor and entrepreneur who, unlike Hughes, had no experience of blind people. The aim of the Hammond 2 braille Typewriter was simply to aid typists with impaired vision to better perform their duties. In this sense, Hammond’s adjusted typewriter was manufactured as a professional tool and not primarily as a device that would make it easier for blind people to correspond with each other.

With its braille attachment over the carriage, the Hammond model was indicative of the tension between sighted and non-sighted typing. Skilled typists did not have to look at the keys, let alone at the paper on which they typed. Already in the early days of typewriting there seems to have been an awareness that one could learn to type without looking. In a letter from 1876, the Danish inventor of the writing ball, Rasmus Malling-Hansen, asked his brother to disregard the many spelling errors, which had been caused by the fact that he had not looked at the keys while writing. Another aspect of the typewriter that often was brought up was that it enabled people to work long hours without getting tired. An advertisement for the Remington typewriter recommended weary merchants to switch to typing with the following rhyme: “If writing fatigues you, ‘tis good reason why/You should for your office a Type-Writer buy”. These two features, to write without looking and to write tirelessly for hours, would later become quintessential features of the twentieth century typist. However, in the nineteenth century, the image of the typist was still being formed and blindness and visually impaired people played an important role in how this new technology was perceived. In an article in the occasional journal The Blind, Henry Stainsby from the Institution for the Blind in Birmingham argued that blind people were particularly suited for this new occupation and that they were fully capable of mastering the typewriter.[1] Stainsby was also convinced that it would be a good idea to establish Typewriting offices with blind employees. In a later article in the same journal, he gave a short account of a Typewriting office that had been set up in Birmingham with two blind women employed as operators. Stainsby clearly regarded the typewriter as a new means for the blind to earn a living and as a decent way to integrate them into society on their own terms.

The Bartholomew Stenograph

A third feature that often was discussed alongside the blind stroke of the keys and the working capacity of the typist was the impressive speed by which things were accomplished with the typewriter. According to Henry Stainsby, blind typists were capable of writing up to 100 words a minute on a good typewriter. The question of how fast a blind person could type was often discussed in connection to the launch of new typewriter models. Typewriters were often displayed and demonstrated at the periodic conferences for teachers of blind and visually impaired people. The conference in Düren 1888 for instance, included a small exhibition of writing machines such as the Bartholomew Stenograph which was presented as a device that enabled the blind to write down spoken words as fast as even a sighted person. As typewriting was established as a new profession the question of how fast one could type became an important employment argument. But speed was not only a quality that resided in the fingers of skilled typists, blind or sighted. With increasingly new models introduced on the market, speed also became an important sales pitch in the marketing of new advanced typewriters.

Speed is probably the last thing that comes to one’s mind when confronted with the beautiful collections of typewriters that are kept in museums such as the Musée Valentin Haüy in Paris, the Perkins Museum in Watertown, Massachusetts and the Medical Museion in Copenhagen. It’s difficult to imagine that the blockish keys once were pressed with great speed and precision. For hands accustomed to light computer keys and the flat surface of the mobile display, writing has long since lost touch with the weight and pressure of the early typewriters.

Dr Jan Eric Olsén, Associate Professor, Medical Museion, Copenhagen

Like the Touching the Book exhibition, the Musée Valentin Haüy in Paris has a fascinating collection of tactile books and writing systems on permanent display.[1] Yet whilst the two exhibitions have much in common, they also tell us very different things about the ways in which embossed literature for the blind developed on either side of the channel during the nineteenth century.

An alphabet code from the front of a braille version of the Gospel of Saint Matthew, published in Paris in 1868. Letters of the braille alphabet are embossed alongside corresponding Roman alphabet letters using Haüy’s typeface. Credit: RNIB

Both exhibitions display a number of tactile books made with embossed versions of the Roman alphabet. These books, whilst often surprisingly attractive to the eye, were paradoxically difficult for the blind to read. As I found when I tried reading one of Haüy’s books in Paris, fingers struggle with the lines and curves which make up our alphabet.  Whilst relatively easy for the sighted to read, these early embossed texts were frustrating and unwieldy for the blind themselves. These attempts to replicate the sighted reading experience in tactile form demonstrate that early inventors were unable to imagine non-sighted ways of accessing the written word. As resoundingly occulocentric titles such as William Moon’s Light for the Blind: A History of Moon’s System of Embossed Reading unwittingly suggest, blindness was seen as an irretrievably negative condition where the afflicted were plunged into a darkness which only access to the written word – or the word of God – could alleviate.  Unlike the books in London, several of the books on display in Paris have the embossed characters also highlighted in ink in order to further encourage the sighted to read these books alongside the blind. Whilst it may at first seem merely unfortunate that Haüy and his British counterparts developed embossed books which the blind found hard to read, the reasoning behind their decisions might be more sinister. It is possible that some sighted producers of books for the blind were reluctant to create a system – such as Braille – which the blind would master more easily than the sighted. Such a system could well reverse the hierarchical relationship between the sighted and the blind by freeing the blind from their dependence on sighted readers and publishers. The beauty of arbitrary systems like Braille is that they are not only easier to feel – dots being easier for the fingers to identify than lines – but they also give the blind levels of autonomy and independence which place them outside the control of the sighted. They allow the blind to both run, and teach in blind schools and they enable two blind readers to communicate without the intervention – or knowledge- of their sighted teachers, family and friends.

W. and R. Chambers, An Introduction to the Science of Astronomy (Glasgow: Printed in the Asylum at the Institution Press by John Alston 1841). Credit: RNIB

It is not just the appearance of the embossed type which differs from one country to another. One of the most interesting aspects of the history of embossed literature is the subject matter of the books on display. Whilst the books at the Musée Valentin Haüy cover a range of subjects including science, geography, music and philosophy, the books on display in London are largely religious. This reflects one of the essential differences between British and French endeavours: whilst the French wanted to enable the blind to read in order to educate them, the British were more concerned with their spiritual, rather than their intellectual welfare. The leading proponents of the various embossed systems; blind schools, church groups and visiting teachers, took embossed tracts and Bibles to the blind in order to help them literally feel the word of God. Indeed it is easy to imagine how the sensual experience of reading embossed text would be seen to magnify the power of the religious experience. There are two books in the London exhibition which focus on the wider general education of the blind. One, A Peep into the Menagerie of Birds, a guide to bird identification, provides detailed descriptions of the appearance of various British birds. On the one hand this might be seen as an endearing – if patronising – attempt to bring nature within the grasp of the blind and enable them to engage in meaningful conversation with their sighted peers. But on the other hand, it seems at best tactless and at worst cruel to provide the blind with descriptions of birds they will never see. Surely an evocation of their songs would be of more value? Likewise, An Introduction to the Science of Astronomy details how to use a telescope to identify various constellations. But why teach the blind to look at stars they will never see? This emphasis on sight in the content of the non-religious books on display paradoxically draws attention to the very faculty which the tactile reader is lacking. As with the emphasis on embossed texts based on the Roman alphabet, replicating such content in tactile books emphasises the Victorian era’s inability to imagine that life without sight might be valuable in its own right.  At least in Paris the emphasis which Haüy and his followers placed on music suggests that they understood that both the form and the content of books for the blind should appeal to the non-visual senses.

Aside from revealing interesting cultural differences between British and French understandings of blindness and the blind, a comparison of these exhibitions also raises important questions about the publication of material in non-standard forms which are still relevant today. The decidedly odd choice of content in the works referred to above encourages us to wonder who was responsible for deciding which books should be translated into embossed print and what criteria they applied when making such choices. According to the RNIB, only seven per cent of book published today are produced in large-print, Braille or audio formats. Who decides what the blind can and cannot read? And what do these choices tell us about society’s view of the blind?  Such decisions must not be taken lightly. They go to the heart of a politics of cultural inclusion and education which will determine how future generations relate both to their blindness and to the wider world.

Dr Hannah Thompson is a Senior Lecturer in French at Royal Holloway, University of London. She is the author of the popular blog Blind Spot and is currently writing a book on representations of blindness in French literature.

Borrowing from the narratives of origin and progress that characterise the nineteenth-century discourses of embossed literature, let me briefly detail my own first encounter with this material. Six years ago, I ordered up a copy of James Gall’s First Book on the Art of Teaching the Blind to Read from 1827 at the British Library, not quite sure what to expect. From the outside covers, Gall’s book is small, light and unassuming. The only thing that distinguishes it, perhaps, is the sootiness of its front cover: the printed letters announcing this as ‘A FIRST BOOK FOR TEACHING THE ART OF READING TO THE BLIND; WITH A SHORT STATEMENT OF THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ART OF PRINTING AS HERE APPLIED TO THE SENSE OF TOUCH’, are smudged, wearing away in places. The book has a sense of fragility: the cover paper is brittle, flaking at the edges, the stitching coming undone. The text though, is in bold, black print: so far, so ordinary.

Turning the first page, a notice for ‘Bibles for the Blind’ is printed on the inside of the front cover, proposing publication by subscription the Gospel of St John in three volumes super-royal octavo, at the price of one guinea for subscribers. This notice promises something similarly miraculous to St John’s gospel in which a blind man is restored to sight: that blind people will be able to ‘acquire the capacity of reading in a few days’, owing to the simplicity of the embossed system. This miraculous hard sell becomes, I learn, central to embossed alphabet inventors’ promotional strategies. This is followed by further printed text: James Gall’s statement on ‘the art of printing for the blind’ (of which more shortly). That this experiment is clearly driven by evangelical concerns is stressed by the book’s closing notices, printed in ink on the back cover, which advertises two of James Gall’s publications: A Clerical Record, for Parishes and Particular Congregations; with an Introduction […] and The End and Essence of Sabbath School Teaching, and Family Religious Instruction.

At the end of the statement on printing for the blind, we find Gall’s embossed alphabet code, consisting of two lines of printed alphabet characters in lower case, with Gall’s embossed letters beneath. The characters visually correspond to the Roman alphabet letters, but have sharper angles: the curves of a, b, c, etc, transformed to triangles. The raised letters are sharp enough to have made indentations on the facing page. Touching the letters, the sharpness of their lines is satisfying to the fingers, but as a sighted researcher, I am still guided by the visual appearance of the letters. Their tactual distinctness is harder to identify. Turning the page, the paper is thicker than Gall’s printed statement, feeling more like weighted card than paper. The next page contains the alphabet with no corresponding visual alphabet. It also compares the sentence ‘King of Jerusalem’ in Gall type to the French embossed Roman script. The French looks pretty to the eyes, gently swirling strokes of letters resembling a neat, handwritten script – but it feels far more muddy to the finger. Turning the pages again, the ‘First Book’ consists of, we find, the Lord’s Prayer in embossed characters, followed by the Creed. Pages have been stuck together to allow for continuous text (embossing on both sides was not yet possible). Again, I read the text by eye, the typographical design and sculptural quality of the letters aesthetically pleasing.

Closing Gall’s book opened up not only new research questions for me, but also issues concerning my critical method and approach. Up to this point, my research had been concerned with standard textual and printed sources that depicted blind people and fictional characters: published biographies, fictional works, charitable reports. In these sources, the question of representation of visually-impaired identity is particularly fraught: mediated variously through lenses of pity, fear, and sentimentality. Some of the biographical material published by blind people raised other questions for me around the mediation of voice. Accounts by blind individuals such as James Wilson, John Bird and Edmund White are mediated by another’s eyes and hand as their blind authors relied, a la Milton, upon amanuenses to transcribe their words and participate in nineteenth-century publishing culture.

James Gall’s First Book invited another set of questions, which were enriched by more research into the significant number of embossed books produced by both Gall and his British competitors: Dr Fry, John Alston, James Frere, T. M. Lucas, George Hughes, and William Moon, to name the most significant. How did the experience of text change for blind people in the nineteenth century? In what ways did having direct access to means of textual consumption and production affect blind people’s sense of self and identity, and enable them as authors? As the blind author of a piece titled ‘Blind Leaders of the Blind’ in All the Year Round put it in 1870 (a key year for embossed literature in Britain) ‘if the ability to read be essential to the welfare of a human being who can see, how much more so is it to all who have “wisdom at one entrance quite shut out”!’ In a culture in which increasing emphasis is put on the role of literature in the formation of social identity, being literate counts in new ways.[1]

Gall’s statement suggests how the relative privileging of vision over touch limited early ambitions for blind people’s literacy, as he stresses that ‘the grossness of the sense of touch when compared with that of sight, precludes the idea of this art, as applied to the Blind, ever attaining any high degree of comparative perfection. Their Books, both in regard to size and convenience, must always labour under many disadvantages […]’. Whilst in related philosophic and scientific discourses new attention to touch was opening up the tactile perceptivity of the finger, skin and nervous system, an anxiety about the inferiority of touch to sight continues to resonate throughout the early history of embossed literature by sighted people.[2] Materially, this contributed to a persistence amongst early educators for a raised alphabet system based still on the Roman alphabet, and hence legible to the eye.

The theorisation of touch was however far from static in the nineteenth century. By 1872, a blind character in a serialised novel by a mainstream author, Wilkie Collins, declared scornfully “You people who can see attach such an absurd importance to your eyes! I set my touch, my dear, against your eyes, as much the most trustworthy, and much the most intelligent sense of the two” (Poor Miss Finch).[3] Collins’s novel – as he pointed out in the preface to the first published version – ‘carefully gathered the information necessary to the execution of this purpose from competent authorities of all sorts’ (p. xxxix). This included eighteenth-century philosophic and medical texts exploring the issue of sight restoration to the long-term blind (George Berkeley’s New Theory of Vision [1709] and William Cheselden’s account of the surgical removal of a young man’s cataracts, published in Philosophical Transactions, 25 [1728]). Collins also however engages with a more positive tradition which detailed tactile experience from the standpoint of blind and visually-impaired people, including Denis Diderot’s instrumental Essay on Blindness (1749). He also draws on the cultural zeitgeist mentioned above, the early 1870s being a point at which blind people publicly began to assert control over embossed literature. As detailed in the exhibition (objects 19 and 20), the British and Foreign Society for Improving the Embossed Literature of the Blind was set up by blind and partially-sighted men including Thomas Rhodes Armitage, James Gale, W. Fenn and Daniel Connolly to investigate and determine the best raised finger reading and writing system.  And as Mary G. Thomas cites in her 1952 biography of Thomas Rhodes Armitage, the guiding principle of the committee was that ‘the relative merits of the various methods of education through the sense of touch should be decided by those and only by those who have to rely upon this sense.’[4] Blind writing practices were part of, and contributed to, a rewiring of the nineteenth century sensory hierarchy.

Front cover to James Gall’s ‘The First Class Book for the Blind’, 1840. Credit: RNIB

I first started working on nineteenth-century embossed books for blind people about six years ago, as part of my PhD research into the relationship between blindness and writing in the nineteenth century. It is a research process that has been underpinned by two, overlapping, concerns: firstly, the question of academic ownership and secondly, the relationship between touch and sight. These books, as the exhibition draws attention to, were initially produced within the realm of the visual: often produced by people with sight, and designed to be read simultaneously by people with sight.

As a sighted researcher, I was conscious of the fact that much of the discourse around these books – the guides, codes, statements and reports that detailed their production and use – was in printed text, difficult to access by blind people (the sources have largely not been digitised in a meaningful way). The embossed alphabet systems themselves – many of them long obsolete – might have little tactual meaning to a blind person in the twenty-first century. The content of much of the early embossed literature also raises a further set of problems as it belongs very much to mid-nineteenth century evangelical culture, with an emphasis on biblical texts and spiritual guides. To what extent is it helpful or desirable to transcribe the content of these embossed books into other formats (for example braille)? As my researches unfolded, the question of form and media became more central to my analysis than content (although there are correlations between all three), as the point at which the important issue of blind peoples’ reading experiences began to emerge.

First page of the St John’s Gospel embossed in Frere type, 1843. Credit: RNIB

What then, do we do with these books? How do we read them, and what histories can we draw from them? We need, first of all, a critical practice that more clearly attends to the experience of touch, and its relationship to vision in this period. As my post on James Gall’s first book details, and the exhibition explores, touch was frequently theorised as a useful but often inferior tool for cognitive understanding in early discourses on embossed reading practices. This is where the history of embossed literature intersects with the history of the senses, as shifting ideas of both touch (as well as the literary sign) open up the way for experiments and innovations in this area. We might also explore how these experiments in turn affected wider cultural understanding of both blindness and the sense of touch (interest in the hypothetical blind man restored to sight, a key figure in Enlightenment philosophy, shifts to the tactile intelligence of the feeling blind person in texts such as Alexander Bain’s The Senses and the Intellect, 1855). These are the questions that underpin the exhibition, and that I, and other colleagues – not least the exciting work being done by Vanessa Warne and Jan-Eric Olsén – are exploring in other research forums.

Most significantly, what was it like for blind and partially-sighted people to touch and handle these books? How successful and enriching was their reading experience, from both a perceptual and educational/entertainment point of view? Archives recording traces of reading experiences by blind people are notoriously scanty, as it is mainly institutional perspectives (such as correspondence between institution directors and teachers) that were deemed worthy of recording for posterity.

Unknown photographer, Ann Whiting, ambrotype, c. 1850-60s. Private Collection

It’s my point here that we can learn something about reading experiences from the form of the books themselves. These books invite an affective reading, impressing traces of previous readers in the dirt of the pages, and the worn surfaces of some of the embossed letters. There is a sense, then, of these books as things which have been used and handled. Indeed some books, such as the copy of St John’s Gospel in Lucas type on display in the exhibition that belonged to Harriet Curry, can be attributed to particular owners and readers. It is this that led to the development of an exhibition proposal that would explore the physical and material qualities of the books themselves and invite reflection on the relationship between these books and their readers. Whilst the fragility of the books means that they will be presented in cases in the exhibition, relief images of some of the central alphabets and texts will allow visitors to get a sense of how these books felt to the touch.

Beyond the exhibition and in the UK, the Royal National Institute for Blind People (RNIB) is based nearby and has a rich collection of embossed literature available to consult. And part of the scope of the exhibition blog is to help build up a sense of where other materials are located, and to share information and knowledge about this history. Over the coming months, a series of guest contributors will post about other objects, materials, and collections relating to this history. There is a rise of interest in the history of visual disability. It’s my hope that this rise entails the recovery of more narratives and records about the people who read these books, beyond the hyperbolic – and silencing – accounts we often find in official discourses.

Heather Tilley, Exhibition Curator

References

Alexander Bain, The Senses and the Intellect (London: John W. Parker and Son, 1855), pp. 346-47.