Nor has he. Not for nothing does Martha Stoddard Holmes begin her seminal study of disability in the Victorian novel, Fictions of Affliction (2004) with a discussion of Tiny Tim.[2] He has triumphantly outlived every other disabled character in Dickens’s work, and even the novel which contained him, embodying the paradigm of disability that has dominated cultural representations of disabled people for well over a century.
The images below replicate exactly this structure of feeling. The first is the front page of a membership form for a charity for disabled children, The League of the Brave Poor Things. It shows its crest, a crutch and sword, and its motto “Happy in my Lot”. These clearly echo Tiny Tim’s resignation and cheerfulness, his acceptance, even embrace, of neediness. Its name is only effective if you accept that disabled children are, simply by dint of being disabled, both ‘brave’ and ‘poor’. The Jerry Lewis telethons in America went on using disabled children in a similar way until 2010. The boy in the image I have used here, Ben Mattlin, grew up to be an author and disability activist who was none too keen on having being presented as (literally) a poster boy for hopeless cases, pointing out that there was not really any reason why he shouldn’t grow up.[3]

Similarly, it is impossible to imagine Tiny Tim when he is no longer tiny. As a child, he is the perfect ‘cripple’: he has no sexuality; the question of his place in the labour market is not raised; he is not expected (even in 1843) to be self-sufficient, so his dependency is unproblematic. Tiny Tim is the perfect image of a disabled person for a culture which wants disabled people to be both appealing and undemanding, inspirational yet unobtrusive – which wants them, in a word, to be Tiny.
Yet the antidote to such images, as well as their source, is to be found in Dickens’s novels. He was also the creator of Miss Mowcher, the beautician in David Copperfield whose dwarfism leads others to mistrust her, and who explicitly takes the hero (and by implication her creator) to task for making stereotyped and prejudicial judgements about her, admonishing David to “Try not to associate bodily defects with mental…except for a solid reason.” In Our Mutual Friend, the bearer of the “active crutch” is the spiky doll’s dressmaker, Jenny Wren, self-proclaimed “person of the house” and worldly-wise, self-supporting business-woman. Although these figures are long dead in the popular imagination, perhaps the time is right for their resurrection. Every year Tim reassures us that he cannot live without us – but it might be time we decided that we can live without him.
[1] F.G. Kitton, “The Man Who ‘Invented’ Christmas”, Traveller (November, 1903), 35-36.
[2] Martha Stoddard Holmes, Fictions of Affliction: Physical Disability in Victorian Culture, Corporealities (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2004), pp. 2–3.
[3] http://benmattlin.blogspot.co.uk/2011/09/jerry-lewis-legacy.html