Narratives of the Disabled Poor

Disability was perceived as an occasion for storytelling. When poor characters with wooden legs, missing limbs or other visible signs of disability were encountered in eighteenth-century periodicals, pamphlets, or novels they were frequently implored to relate the circumstances of their impairment. The Spectator’s fictional character Sir Roger de Coverley explained that when crossing the river Thames he always chose a waterman who had ‘lost a leg or an Arm’, preferring to trust in the honesty of one who had ‘been wounded in the Queen’s Service’ over the more disreputable types that worked on the river. Crossing the river in a vessel rowed by a fellow with a wooden leg in May 1712, he ‘obliged the waterman to give us the History of his Right Leg’, and upon hearing that he had lost it at the battle of La Hogue (1692), ‘the Knight in the Triumph of his Heart made several Reflections on the Greatness of the British Nation’ as to the inferiority of Frenchmen and ‘many other honest Prejudices which naturally cleave to the Heart of a true Englishman’. ¹