Beginning in the late 1820s, raised-print books began appearing that allowed blind people to read and participate in print culture. This was historically significant in terms of literacy, of course. But more importantly, as Vanessa Warne makes clear in By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture, the rise of raised-print books “revised perceptions of blind people’s capabilities” and offered “a new understanding of what it means to read,” because reading by touch “changed the meaning and nature of reading.” Warne charts the various raised-print alphabets created in the Victorian era, including William Moon’s, which was developed with working-class people’s calloused hands in mind, and its subsequent surpassing by Louis Braille’s system. Braille eventually became the standard and was utilized with devices called “Braillers,” which allowed blind people to type. Reading had long been established as an essential skill, “a route to full membership in the human community.” Suddenly, in the early 19th century, reading by touch “transformed many people’s experiences of education, faith, social inclusion, and privacy.” What’s more, blind people’s newfound ability to read “prompted sighted people to reimagine what it means to be blind,” permanently altering conceptions of and depictions of blindness.

Blindness wasn’t the only disability to be transformed in the Victorian era. According to Riley McGuire in Dysfluent in Fiction: Vocal Disability and Nineteenth-Century Literature, the 19th century also saw the rise of vocal normalization, instituted as a result of technological, medical, social, political, and philological changes that sought standardization. This new process was made possible through the development of speech therapy, the listing of standard pronunciations in dictionaries, the publication of elocution manuals, the invention of the phonograph and the telephone, the implementation of compulsory educational exercises aimed at standardizing children’s speech, and the general pathologization of vocal irregularity.

Both McGuire’s and Warne’s monographs examine specific types of disabilities and utilize extensive historical archival research and close reading techniques. But they also both gesture toward a new trend for the field of Victorian disability studies: increased attention to materialism, in terms of both historical material conditions and material concerns about the body, on and off the pages of literature. In this, they work alongside other recent materialist Victorian disability monographs, namely Ryan Sweet’s *Prosthetic Body Parts in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture *(2022). This burgeoning movement could be called new crip materialism. Combining frameworks from crip theory, disability studies, theories of embodiment, and archival research, new crip materialism focuses on lived realities in both historical and literary material, taking seriously the experiences of living with a disabled body.

Although sight and hearing are often considered the most important senses, McGuire and Warne explore the importance and complexities of speech and touch, thereby expanding our theorizations of bodily capacities and abilities in all their rich materiality. Both dive deep into literary and historical archives to find traces of these haptic and aural phenomena, providing models for new crip materialist praxis and methodology. This is significant itself, since the somatic traces they have found—such as fingers glossing over raised text or voices uttering stuttered syllables—are hard to capture in a historical archive. Their monographs incorporate historical detail throughout, demonstrating intense and rich research into their respective bodily experiences.

Justifying their focus on the Victorian era, Warne and McGuire ground their work in 19th-century technological, scientific, and bibliographical transformations and innovations, including Braille printing and audio recording. Both convincingly argue that the Victorian era is a (if not the) crucial period to study for blindness and vocal disabilities. Warne traces the development of raised text from 1820 onward, and McGuire explores why the period was dubbed “the stammering century.” *By Touch Alone *and Dysfluent in Fiction offer interventions for the field and encourage scholars to go in-depth exploring specific bodily conditions and historical contexts, probing the unique affordances that disability can offer for literature, for historical archives, and for wider understandings of the body.

*Dysfluent in Fiction *and *By Touch Alone *demonstrate how particular attention given to the material conditions of embodiment can help expand and bolster the field. Work of this type is almost inherently interdisciplinary, bringing in medical, sociological, scientific, and journalistic source material and putting it in conversation with literary works, both fictional and nonfictional. Disability studies has always been committed to the body, but this current movement of new crip materialism recenters the body and the ways it has left enduring marks upon the literary and historical record, encouraging scholars to think through material conditions of non-normative embodiments.

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The 19th century has captured the attention of disability studies since almost the very beginning of the field. Lennard Davis’s *Enforcing Normalcy *(1995) argued that the application of statistics and standard deviation (thus the concept of the norm and normalcy) to demography and medicine led to greater stigmatization of disability, as bodies could be marked normal or abnormal. He likewise contends that literature played a role; for Davis, the novel form rests on and promotes normalcy.

This argument was picked up by other early theorists. In David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s *Narrative Prosthesis *(2000), disability is a plot device or metaphor, a form of deviance removed by narrative’s end. In its earliest stages, the field tended toward arguments like these: very large, sweeping, often teleological and nonhistorical.

Quickly though, scholars working in various subfields and historical periods took up this work and applied it to their own milieux. Victorian studies has enthusiastically embraced disability studies, beginning with Martha Stoddard Holmes’s *Fictions of Affliction *(2004). In the past 20 years a boom of research has explored various aspects of disability and embodiment in the 19th century, especially in literature and the history of medicine.

Work in Victorian disability studies has been diverse in its aims, sometimes focusing on a particular gender expression (Karen Bourrier’s *The Measure of Manliness *[2015]), genre (Heidi Logan’s *Sensational Deviance *[2018]), or type of disability (Patrick McDonagh’s *Idiocy *[2008], Jennifer Esmail’s *Reading Victorian Deafness *[2013], Heather Tilley’s *Blindness and Writing *[2017]). In the past few years, this research has taken a turn toward new crip formalism, incorporating formalist ideas, historicism, and contextual narratology, evidenced by Kylee Anne Hingston’s *Articulating Bodies *(2019) and Clare Walker Gore’s *Plotting Disability in the Nineteenth-Century Novel *(2019). Likewise, caregiving and recovery have come into focus, particularly with Talia Schaffer’s *Communities of Care *(2021) and Hosanna Krienke’s *Convalescence in the Nineteenth-Century Novel *(2021). The latest trend is a move toward materialist concerns, which McGuire’s and Warne’s books represent.

It is essential for scholars to find, pay attention to, closely read, historicize, and theorize the conditions of embodiment in all their material messiness, difficulties, atypicalities, affordances, and glories.

McGuire’s *Dysfluent in Fiction *explores various depictions (in novels, life writing, and stage melodrama) of vocal disabilities. The term dysfluency is borrowed from Chris Eagle’s *Dysfluencies *(2018); McGuire explains that, for his own purposes, “dysfluency” is “an umbrella to designate modes of communication that depart from normative expectations of pace, articulacy, and fluency, such as stammering, lisping, baby talk, and mutism.” The scope is thus both broad and specific, going beyond a simple understanding of speech impediment to a broader spectrum of types of atypical vocality. However, even in this restrictive context, dysfluency abounds, and in the period, there was a “push-and-pull between instituted oral standard and inevitable vocal diversity.”

“Dysfluency is more than fluency’s opposite,” McGuire crucially notes. We should think of it “as a form of communication with its own literary conventions, ideological implications, and social insights.” Accordingly, he explores how Victorian authors crafted new conventions for writing dysfluency, such as speaker tags, atypical typography, and misspellings. These techniques point to dysfluency’s unique relationship to embodiment, for as McGuire clarifies, it is “not necessarily of the body, but emanating from it,” thereby become something like a byproduct of the body, a new form of materialist ephemera.

*Dysfluent in Fiction *examines real-life examples, including a stammering would-be assassin of Queen Victoria, a melodrama actor hamming up a lisp in Our American Cousin, and various authors with speech impediments, such as Lewis Carroll, Henry James, and Charles Kingsley; it also offers readings of fictional representations in works by William Makepeace Thackeray (Vanity Fair), Charlotte Brontë (Villette), and Mary Elizabeth Braddon (The Trail of the Serpent), among others. In the fictional register, McGuire contends that dysfluency was deployed “as a dynamic plot engine, essential element of characterization, and fraught analogical device.” He notes that genre frequently determines if the vocal disability is stigmatized or embraced: in marriage plots and memoirs, dysfluency is seen as a barrier to marriage and professional life and must be regulated, standardized, or cured, whereas in children’s literature, sensation fiction, and stage melodramas, characters can keep their dysfluency, and it can act as a refutation of vocal normalcy.

This becomes a central tension for the work as a whole, one that McGuire does not try to tidily resolve; he argues that dysfluency in the 19th century was used for a variety of purposes “from comic mockery to tragic flaw, from subversive eccentricity to realistic variation, from stigmatized deviation to pleasurable difference.” On the one hand, representations can be ideologically inflected, with authors acting as speech pathologists enforcing vocal standardization. On the other hand, dysfluent representation can also highlight vocal diversity and be used as a tool of narrative, “as a way to individuate figures in dauntingly large casts of characters, as a serial memory aid, as a reprieve from dialogic monotony, and as a tool to advocate for the aesthetic and social value of vocal difference. Dysfluency’s prevalence is presented as both something requiring its own forms of discipline and producing its own kinds of charm.” McGuire thus often takes a both/and approach (which perhaps captures historical nuance but leads to a somewhat unsatisfying conclusion), noting how depictions of dysfluency could be both stigmatizing and liberatory.

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Warne’s By Touch Alone, while also interested in literature, more primarily concerns history; hence the focus on raised-print text and Braille. *By Touch Alone *explores various types and figures of blind reading, from blind people reading aloud from raised-print books in public to blind scholars, blind authors with sighted amanuenses, blind letter writers, and blind people interacting with art objects in museums. Most significantly, Warne concludes that this practice had a profound impact on how people thought about reading’s relationship to embodiment: “Reading by touch distanced reading from visual acuity, making the ability to see immaterial to the ability to read. Blind people’s literacy … challenged established ideas about what it means to read and about the relationship between books and the bodies of their readers.”

Warne’s text pairs journalistic, medical, and sociological coverage of reading by touch with literary depictions (such as Wilkie Collins’s *Poor Miss Finch, *George Eliot’s Romola, and Grant Allen’s Linnet). In some cases, Warne contrasts the differing ways sighted and blind authors wrote about reading by touch, drawing on pieces by blind writers including Alfred Hirst, W. W. Fenn, Alice King, Frances Browne, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Henry Fawcett. Often the sighted authors have errors in their depictions of blind reading (particularly in terms of the material conditions of reading raised-print texts) and use reading by touch to sensationalize blindness. More extended engagement with and close reading of blind novelists such as Browne and King could have helped expand the archive, introducing readers to new novels to explore.

Raised-print books also helped transform “persistent and powerfully negative beliefs about blindness … as tenacious as they are negative, conventions regarding the literary depiction of blind characters were, like real-world perceptions of blind people, challenged by blind people’s highly publicized acquisition of the ability to read.” Raised-print text thus led to something like a revolution—for literacy, reading practices, representations of blindness, medical and journalistic discourse about blindness, and perhaps most important, for the everyday lives of blind people.

McGuire and Warne, to various degrees, engage with the wider trend in Victorian studies to undiscipline and think more globally, especially about race and nationhood. McGuire, for example, has a transatlantic focus, including a globally touring American melodrama as well as memoirs from formerly enslaved people. Both scholars engage with scale, analyzing how visual and vocal disabilities were understood personally, communally, and nationally. In this, they argue that blind reading and vocal dysfluency were relational: Warne points to reading shared books, being taught to read Braille, and participating in a literature culture; McGuire, meanwhile, understands dysfluency as a way for authors to explore various forms of sociality, desirability, and professionalism.

These two texts help us imagine what it might have felt like to touch Braille and be able to read a book as a blind person for the first time, or to have dysfluent speech accurately captured in a literary text. Both note how vital it is that the Victorians intentionally depicted these types of bodily experiences in a variety of texts and forms. It is essential, then, for scholars to find, pay attention to, closely read, historicize, and theorize the conditions of embodiment in all their material messiness, difficulties, atypicalities, affordances, and glories.

This article was commissioned by Leah Price.

Featured image: Detail of Blind Man and His Reader (ca. 1850). Image courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.