Katharine Quarmby is a journalist, film-maker and disability rights campaigner. Most recently she has worked as an associate editor for Prospect magazine and written for the Economist. She has also worked as a producer on Panorama and Newsnight for the BBC and news-edited Disability Now. She has just published her first book, Scapegoat: Why We Are Failing Disabled People
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"Here's a list of some of the most memorable – and, at times, disturbing – depictions of disability in English literature. I've spent the last four years or so looking at the stereotypes of impairment that feed the prejudices behind many violent crimes against disabled people, culminating in my book. From early childhood, we read tales that conflate evil with disability – wicked witches, brutal giants and dastardly pirates lacking limbs, to name but three. Other stereotypes appear more benign at first glance – the disabled person as a tragic and pitiful figure, such as Beth in Little Women, or the invalid Klara in Heidi, although many disabled people find them equally stifling as stereotypes.
"But some depictions are more complex, as the list below demonstrates. Although some of the characters are clearly not positive I think it's important to recommend influential books here, rather than the few written by disabled writers seeking to promote positive images that haven't reached the mainstream. It's also interesting to note that there are fewer disabled characters in the canon nowadays, except in children's literature, where there has been a deliberate attempt to promote positive images of disabled children and adults, thanks to activists like Richard Rieser and Susie Burrows."
1. Gullivers Travels, by Jonathan Swift (1726)
In Gulliver's Travels Swift plays with the notion of difference to great effect. Gulliver is too big when he arrives in Lilliput, where the inhabitants are one-twelfth the size of most humans, and then he travels to Brobdingnag, poulated by giants. (Here, he is set upon by the King's dwarf, who is depicted as malicious.) The other two parts of the book are less successful, but Swift's treatment of difference, as a question of personal perspective, is refreshing. Anyone, of any size or shape, he argues, can be good or bad.
2. A Christmas Carol, by Charles Dickens (1843)
A controversial discussion point for disabled people, many of whom can't stomach the depiction of the saintly, physically impaired Tiny Tim. I'm not sure I agree: in some ways, despite the unfortunate language, Tiny Tim is a positive portrayal of a human being who happens to be disabled and is clearly depicted as the much-loved heart of the Cratchit family. I'm not sure Dickens deserves the opprobrium that is heaped upon him for this character (although that can't be said of others, such as Miss Havisham in Great Expectations, for example).
3. Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
A very interesting examination of disability being visited on Edward Rochester, "blind, and a cripple", as a "judgement" for the sin of keeping his first marriage to the "mad" Mrs Rochester a secret. One character says he would have been better off dead and Sir Edward tries to push his putative lover, Jane Eyre, away. But she marries him anyway, and describes his impairment as drawing them even closer together, and considers herself "supremely blest". Great stuff, although it's worth pointing out that the depiction of the first Mrs Rochester, Bertha, is one of the least positive descriptions of mental illness in English literature.
4. Moby-Dick, by Herman Melville (1851)
Herman Melville's Captain Ahab, who hunts the Great White whale that tore off his leg, is an unforgettable character – a physically disabled character that is quite clearly not unmanned by his impairment. He is, instead described as standing firm on his ivory leg, with an "infinity of firmest fortitude, a determinate, unsurrendable wilfulness" to hunt down Moby-Dick. On the other hand, his obsession with killing the animal that disabled him is disturbing, to say the least.
5. The Moonstone, by Wilkie Collins (1869)
A wonderful depiction of a disabled servant, Rosanna Spearman, who has a "deformed shoulder", as the head servant Gabriel Betteredge describes it. She is suspected of stealing a priceless diamond and kills herself in despair. Her reputation is defended tigerishly by her friend, Limping Lucy, and by her employers. Her miserable end is described with real empathy by Betteredge. Collins was very short of stature and had a facial disfigurement – perhaps this explains the sense of empathy in many of his books towards disabled people.
6. Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)
The sinister figures of Long John Silver, the one-legged pirate, and Blind Pew, his sightless shipmate, neatly conflate wicked deeds with missing body parts in this classic – although, in truth, Long John Silver occupies an ambiguous role as he is also temperate, thrifty and Bible-fearing. The writer was disabled himself – perhaps this is one of the reasons for the many disabled characters in the book.
7. The Secret Garden, by Frances Hodgson Burnett (1910)
I find this a very complex examination of different sorts of impairment. Mr Craven was deeply loved by his wife despite his spinal impairment. But the depiction of Colin, his son, who is born after his wife's untimely death and who internalises it and grows up "crooked" in mind and body as a result (similar to the treatment of Richard III by Shakespeare) is more haunting. It takes a spoilt child, Mary Lennox, and another child, Dickon, to get Colin walking again – as if physical impairment was all in the mind.
8. Lady Chatterley's Lover, by DH Lawrence (1928)
A great confirmation of one very popular talking point of the eugenicist times in which DH Lawrence lived – the obsession with the sex lives of disabled people, who were usually either seen as impotent, or oversexed. Sir Clifford Chatterley is described, brutally, as "lamed" and therefore unable to have children, and as having "the watchful look, the slight vacancy of a cripple". He's also "helpless" because of his impairment. No wonder his wife has to have sex with the gamekeeper. It was written when DH Lawrence was feeling "unmanned" himself, as he was dying of TB.
9. Lord of the Flies, by William Golding (1954)
In this very disturbing novel about "othering" and boundaries, it is worth noting that the three children who are picked off by the others have impairments or physical or mental vulnerabilities. "Little'un," the first one to disappear, has a facial disfigurement. The next is Simon, who has fainting spells and whose mental health deteriorates on the island. But perhaps the most tragic is Piggy, clearly the most intellectually and morally clear-sighted of the boys, he is murdered. He has asthma, is teased by the others for his obesity and is also short-sighted.
10. Grace Williams Says It Loud by Emma Henderson (2010)
A refreshingly different take on both physical impairment and communication difficulties. This is a first person narrative by Grace, a disabled woman who has been put away, "spastic and flailing" and is an eloquent account of her life and passionate love affair in an institution.
