Susan Coolidge’s What Katy Did has never been out of print since it was first published in 1872. Along with Louisa M. Alcott’s Little Women and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, it’s one of a handful of North American classics which have remained popular with young female readers on both sides of the Atlantic – and, upon re-reading, it’s not difficult to see why. Written in a jaunty, accessible style, heavy on dialogue, light on description, and featuring a
Read moreTag: Disability Studies
A Digital Reader: 19th Century Disability—Cultures & Contexts
By Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi (University of Toronto) Based on an idea jestingly put forth in The Spectator, Ugly Face Clubs were gentleman’s clubs whose members prided themselves on their facial eccentricities and pledged their theoretical allegiance to physiognomy.[1] Spanning throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, these clubs provide us with a compelling case study of deformity as a paradoxical practice of social exclusion and aesthetic inclusion. Ugly Clubs also offer us a window into the relationship between culture and disability. While
Read moreReview: Channel 4’s Queen Victoria and the Crippled Kaiser
Rebecca Fairbank (University of Oxford) UK readers can still watch this programme here. The story of the human struggle of royal figures has captured the imagination recently, as films such as The King’s Speech (2010), and the less successful Diana (2013) attest. Channel 4’s Queen Victoria and the Crippled Kaiser reiterates this trend on the small screen. This engaging documentary probes the hidden disability of Queen Victoria’s grandson, Wilhelm II, born to her eldest daughter Vicky with a paralysis of
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