Charles Dickens, whose bicentenary is celebrated today, wrote a short story, Doctor Marigold, with a deaf character Sophy who is adopted by the narrator, Marigold. It is typically Dickensian in its melodramatic plot. In the short story, Marigold is a cheap-jack whose wife beats their child and then his wife kills herself. Marigold ‘adopts’ a child who has been beaten, then wins her trust and teaches her to communicate using (invented) signs. Eventually he sends her to “the Deaf and Dumb Establishment in London” where Sophy falls in love with another student. They marry and she has a hearing child.

In a recent article in English Literary History Jennifer Esmail examines the place of deaf people in Victorian fiction. She questions why, in Harriet Martineau’s words, “blindness is frequently made interesting in books; deafness seldom or never.” Martineau, who would have identified as ‘deaf ‘ rather than ‘Deaf’ says Esmail, addressed her “Letter to the Deaf” to “speaking people who experience deafness, and she was generally dismissive of the abilities of signers.”

While characters with disabilities appear frequently in Victorian fiction, deaf characters, specifically, are almost entirely absent. In fact, the only deaf characters who use sign language in Victorian fiction are Madonna Blyth in Wilkie Collins’s Hide and Seek and Sophy Marigold in Charles Dickens’s “Doctor Marigold.” Grounding its analysis in these two texts, this article contends that it is, in particular, a deaf character’s relationship to language that disqualifies him or her from conventional representation in Victorian fiction. Through reading Hide and Seek and “Doctor Marigold” in the context of Victorian deaf history, Collins and Dickens’s realist aims, and Victorian generic conventions rooted in transcribing orality, this essay argues that the absence of deaf characters reveals the investment of mid-Victorian fiction in a particular and normativized relationship between bodies, spoken language, and textuality.

While ‘normativized’ is not a word that I would ever use, the article is well worth reading.

A reading from Doctor Marigold was one of the last public appearances of Dickens in Nottingham in 1869.

Image by Jeremiah Gurney from Wikimedia Commons

Esmail, Jennifer “I listened with my eyes”: Writing speech and reading deafness in the fiction of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins. ELH – English Literary History  Volume 78, Issue 4, December 2011, Pages 991-1020.

Literature Arts and Medicines Database on Doctor Marigold

Literature Arts and Medicines Database on Hide and Seek

Matineau, Harriet Principle and Practice; or The Orphan Family. 1827

These are some more Dickens connections with deafness:

1842-60  Sometime between these dates, the novelist visited the privately-run Rugby Deaf School, and presented his friend, the headmaster, Henry Brothers Bingham with a signed engraved print (according to Selwyn Oxley’s card file)

1842    Visited Perkins Institution in America and observed Laura Bridgeman and Oliver Caswell; wrote about them in American Notes (British Journal of Disorders of Communication, 1969, 4, 107-16).

1843    Spoke at the 7th Anniversary festival (23rd of May) of the Charitable and Provident Society for the Deaf and Dumb, and became a governor for life by donating £5.00 (24th Annual Report of the Society, and The Times, 1843, 24 May, 7; his speech is paraphrased in Fielding, K.J. The speeches of Charles Dickens. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1960.).

1853    Speech given at Society of Arts banquet, temple Roe, Birmingham (6 Jan) mentioned visit to deaf and dumb institutions in Birmingham and praised the regulation and consideration with whicht they were run

1865    Christmas no. of All the Year Round includes Dr Marigold’s Prescriptions; Prescriptions 1, 6 and 8 (pp. 46-48 are the original version of Dr Marigold which appears in Christmas Stories.

1909    Pears’ Annual includes Doctor Marigold’s Prescriptions, with illustrations.