ABSTRACT

The previous chapters have examined the visibility of disability in eighteenth-century English culture and society, the anxieties it raised, and the various cultural responses it elicited. A wide range of material—from jokes to magazines, conduct books to social commentary—stressed the importance of self-fashioning for people with disabilities, of presenting infirmities and impairments in certain ways in order to gain sympathy and admiration. The role of presentation and self-fashioning is also a key theme in the final two chapters of this book, which turn their attention away from cultural representations to sources more firmly rooted in personal experiences of disability, deformity, and chronic illness.