ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the White’s Blindness in order to explore the role of poetry in a working-class man’s experience of acquired visual disability. In The Genius of the Blind, White also praises less widely read blind poets, namely Edward Rushton, Turlagh Carolan, Dennis Hampson and Anna Williams. Whereas personal experience of blindness shapes White’s poetry, sighted authors imagine blindness and then assign the experience to the characters they depict. White, for whom blindness is unambiguously tragic, draws here and elsewhere on culturally established identifications of blindness, if with death, at least with interment. White’s Blindness conforms closely to Holmes’ characterization of the self-representation of people with disabilities in Victorian Britain. A forerunner of contemporary crowdfunding, subscription was established as a practice in the seventeenth century. It developed to support the publication of books whose features, such as expensive illustrations, made them unusually costly to print.
