Disability and the Victorians: Attitudes, Interventions, Legacies is a very timely work. In the midst of a global pandemic that has left many people newly impaired, there is an increased need for scholarship that provides frameworks for coming to terms with disability as a sociocultural phenomenon and a lived identity. Scientific and medical paradigm shifts combined with socioeconomic conditions make the nineteenth century a pivotal period in the history of disability. As Iain Hutchison, Martin Atherton, and Jaipreet Virdi note in their introduction to the collection, Victorian attitudes about disability have persisted in various forms throughout the last century. The historical research represented in this collection contextualizes and provides perspective on past understandings of disability, while shedding light on the influence of past practices, institutions, and ideologies on the present.

This slim volume, which grew out of a 2012 conference run by the Leeds Centre for Victorian Studies, straddles the fields of disability studies and medical history. The ten chapters examine such diverse historical sources as institutional records, novels, and in one case, personal experience of the nineteenth century's lasting effects on institutional practices. Issues that run through the collection and give it coherence are the medicalization of specific conditions, the institutional management of disability, and the centrality of the English and Scottish Poor Laws to Victorian understandings of disability as the inability to engage in productive labor. Hutchison, Atherton, and Virdi employ a broad definition of disability, including discussions of deafness and illness, a choice that seems appropriate to the era under consideration. They take a similarly inclusive stance toward the term Victorian and the theories of disability employed within the chapters: the borders that demarcate the period stretch beyond the limited confines of Victoria's reign, while the chapters represent a diversity of approaches that include, but are not restricted to, the social model of disability.

Disability and the Victorians is organized into three sections: “Attitudes,” “Interventions,” and “Legacies.” The three chapters that make up the first of these serve as an example of the way in which the majority of the chapters in this volume are structured: each uses specific, detailed examples to illuminate broader issues. For example, in the first chapter, Amy W. Farnbach Pearson details the ways in which the treatment of working-class patients in two nineteenth-century Scottish hospitals reveals middle-class assumptions about the poor, highlighting the exploitative use of diseased and impaired bodies to further medical research. Likewise, in an insightful chapter on the limits of literary realism as a medium for representing disability, Deborah M. Fratz focuses on works by two authors, Harriett Martineau and George Eliot. A very strong chapter is Esme Cleall's analysis of three deaf figures in relation to empire. Cleall warns against a simplistic use of colonization as a metaphor for the situation of deaf and disabled people and instead examines the varying ways in which individual lives intersected with and were complicit in the imperial project.

In the second section, Interventions, the four chapters discuss the ways in which disabilities were redefined as a problem for medical and public health experts to solve. Once again, the authors employ examples that illustrate larger cultural struggles over meaning and control. Chapters by Virdi, Joanne Woiak, and Paula Hellal and Marjorie Lorch provide thorough and well-researched narratives regarding the role played by emerging institutions and ideologies in the pathologization of deafness, alcoholism, and childhood language disabilities, respectively. The final chapter in this section, the only one in the collection to focus on the United States, was a particularly compelling one. In it, Caroline Lieffers looks at the marketing of the first patented prosthetic limb in the United States, demonstrating that the medical model was also a consumer model, which cast disabled individuals as consumers of medical goods and services.

The final section of the collection, “Legacies,” deals with the afterlife of Victorian views of disability from the twentieth century to the present. In the first of three chapters in this section, Hutchison discusses the persistence of Victorian philanthropic rhetoric, examining Scottish institutions for disabled children from the late eighteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries. In the second chapter, novelist Fred Reid calls upon firsthand experience of institutional life to examine panopticism and resistance at Edinburgh's Royal School for the Blind in the 1950s. The final chapter of the volume is the strongest in terms of forging connections between past and present, bringing us up to the current moment. Atherton looks at the economic ramifications of Victorian perceptions of deafness and concludes that Victorian stereotypes characterizing deaf people as incapable of self-supporting work still have a considerable impact on job prospects for deaf people today.

Taken together, the chapters in this volume illustrate the durability of Victorian attitudes toward disability in contemporary Britain. As with many such collections, there is some unevenness in the scope of the topics covered. For instance, three of the ten chapters discuss institutions in and around Glasgow and Edinburgh, while only one concentrates on the empire beyond the British Isles. The collection maintains a focus on physical, as opposed to mental, disability, and, for the most part, discussion of the medical management of disability overshadows the voices of disabled Victorians. However, the authors and editors make up for imbalances by consistently connecting specific instances to larger cultural concerns. On the whole, Disability and the Victorians makes an important contribution to the history of medicine and attitudes toward disability in Victorian Britain and beyond and provides a useful resource for scholars of nineteenth-century Britain.