By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture
By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture
by Vanessa Warne and Vanessa Kay Warne
University of Michigan Press, 2025
ISBNs
Cloth: 978-0-472-07751-9
Paper: 978-0-472-05751-1
eISBN: 978-0-472-90508-9 (OA)
About the Book
By Touch Alone demonstrates how reading by touch not only changed the lives of nineteenth-century blind people, but also challenged longstanding perceptions about blindness and reading. Over the course of the nineteenth century, thousands of blind people learned how to read by touch. Using fiction, essays, letters, and speeches authored by blind readers, By Touch Alone traces the ways in which literacy changed blind people's experiences of education, leisure, spirituality, and social engagement. Analyzing records of activism and innovation as well as frustration, this study documents the development of an inkless book culture shaped by blind readers’ preferences and needs.
While By Touch Alone features the writing and ideas of an understudied community of nineteenth-century blind authors, innovators, and activists, it also engages the work of sighted authors such as George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling to explore the culture-wide effects of reading by touch. The emergence of a new category of readers who did not rely on sight to read prompted sighted people to reimagine blindness and adopt more progressive attitudes toward blind people. In our own era, one characterized by the increasing digitization of our reading lives, Vanessa Warne’s exploration positions scholars and blind readers to navigate present-day developments and shape the future of their reading lives. A carefully contextualized study of how reading by touch shaped Victorian culture, By Touch Alone adds new chapters to the history of disability and reading.
While By Touch Alone features the writing and ideas of an understudied community of nineteenth-century blind authors, innovators, and activists, it also engages the work of sighted authors such as George Eliot and Rudyard Kipling to explore the culture-wide effects of reading by touch. The emergence of a new category of readers who did not rely on sight to read prompted sighted people to reimagine blindness and adopt more progressive attitudes toward blind people. In our own era, one characterized by the increasing digitization of our reading lives, Vanessa Warne’s exploration positions scholars and blind readers to navigate present-day developments and shape the future of their reading lives. A carefully contextualized study of how reading by touch shaped Victorian culture, By Touch Alone adds new chapters to the history of disability and reading.
About the Author
Vanessa Warne is Professor of English at the University of Manitoba.
Reviews
“By Touch Alone presents a fresh and much-needed chapter in the rich history of the relationship between disability, technology, and book history. Warne's commitment to bringing the experiences of blind readers and writers to our attention is not only commendable, it also makes this study in the history of the book truly groundbreaking.”— Karen Bourrier, University of Calgary
“In this fascinating new addition to the history of reading and disability studies, Warne explores the invention of reading by touch in the 19th century and how both blind and sighted reading publics experienced this development. Summing up: Highly recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.”
— M. Anderson, Choice"By Touch Alone is one of the most engaging scholarly books I’ve encountered in a very long time. Warne’s broad and deep reading is everywhere on display, and her analysis of the historical, critical, and theoretical dimensions of her subject matter is quite impressive."— Maria H. Frawley, George Washington University
"By Touch Alone breaks important new ground in disability studies, Victorian studies, and studies in the cultural histories of literacy, publishing, the book, and epistolarity.”— Martha Stoddard Holmes, California State University
“This important book calls attention to a new dimension, quite literally, of the social constructions of blindness.”— Mary Klages, University of Colorado Boulder
"A fascinating look by the Professor of English at the University of Manitoba at how reading was made accessible to blind and partially sighted people in the 19th century, and the ways this new form of book culture changed their lives."— Alex Johnson, Fine Books & Collections
Tags
Corporealities: Discourses Of Disability, Victorian Era (1837-1901), Blind, Blindness, Books and reading, Disability, Great Britain, 19th century, Social aspects, Europe, Social Science, History
Open Access Information
License: CC BY-NC
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