“Mountains might be marked by a drop of glue”: Blindness, Touch and Tactile Maps

Warne, Vanessa

doi:10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_6

Vanessa Warne⁴

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

Pairing analysis of tangible maps with discussion of their use, this essay examines how Victorian map-making for and by blind people responded to challenges surrounding the accurate representation of the environment and to ideas about disability. It argues that the adaptation of maps for blind users required significant changes to established systems of map-making, most particularly in relation to the inclusion of text on maps—a practice radically modified by makers of tangible maps. Furthermore, while the use of maps by blind people prompted a reconsideration of the complexity and information-gathering potential of touch, a sense traditionally dismissed as unsophisticated and unreliable, the development and use of tangible maps also contributed to the emergence of progressive notions about the intellectual potential of disabled people.

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Notes

1.
Philip Gibbs , “The Education of the Blind,” The Windsor Magazine (July 1900): 218. Gibbs was a journalist and novelist. He is best known for his coverage of the First World War , for which he was knighted after the war. Note that I use the phrase “blind people” in preference to “the blind.”
2.
Gibbs , “The Education of the Blind,” 219.
3.
Gibbs , “The Education of the Blind,” 219.
4.
A diverse array of private and publicly funded schools dedicated to the academic and vocational education of blind people were founded in the United Kingdom and the United States over the course of the nineteenth century. In the United States, states opened schools of their own. In the United Kingdom, prominent schools included the Royal Normal College for the Blind (in London ) and the Royal Glasgow Blind Asylum. For more information on the education of blind people, consult John Oliphant, The Early Education of the Blind in Britain c. 1790–1900: Institutional Experience in England and Scotland (Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellen Press, 2007).
5.
Robert Meldrum , Light on Dark Paths: A Handbook for Parents of Blind Children (Edinburgh: John Menzies, 1883), 93.
6.
Alexander Barnhill, A New Era in the Education of Blind Children; or, Teaching the Blind in Ordinary Schools (Glasgow: Charles Glass, 1875), 38.
7.
“Instruction of the Blind, Especially in Geography,” Penny Magazine, 1 October 1836: 387.
8.
For more information on Glasgow’s globe, see John Alston, Statements of the Education, Employments, and Internal Arrangements Adopted at the Asylum for the Blind , Glasgow (Glasgow: John Smith and Sons, 1842), 27.
9.
“Instruction of the Blind,” 387.
10.
W. H. Levy , Blindness and the Blind; or, a Treatise on the Science of Typhlology (London: Chapman and Hall, 1872), 140.
11.
Levy, Blindness and the Blind, 139.
12.
Johann G. Knie , A Guide to the Proper Management & Education of Blind Children, 4th ed., trans. William Taylor (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1861), 38.
13.
Alston , Statements of the Education, 29.
14.
Levy, Blindness and the Blind, 139–40.
15.
Thomas Anderson, Observations on the Employment, Education and Habits of the Blind (London: Simpkin, Marshall, 1837), 70.
16.
Thomas Armitage, The Education and Employment of the Blind: What It Has Been, Is, and Ought to Be, 2nd ed. (London: Harrison and Sons, 1886), 35.
17.
Armitage , The Education and Employment of the Blind, 35.
18.
W. W. Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” in Half-Hours of Blind Man’s Holiday, vol. 2, 160–70 (London: Sampson, Low, Marston, Searle and Rivington, 1878), 164–65.
19.
Barnhill , New Era in the Education of Blind Children, 38.
20.
Anderson, Observations, 71.
21.
Martin Bruckner, The Geographic Revolution in Early America: Maps, Literacy, and National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), 7.
22.
T. Clark [John Galt], Modern Geography and History (London: J. Souter, 1823), iv.
23.
Clark, Modern Geography and History, iii.
24.
“Professor Agren’s Constructive Method of Teaching Geography,” The Quarterly Journal of Education 6 (July–October 1833): 32.
25.
J. A. Cummings, Introduction to the Ancient and Modern Geography on the Plan of Goldsmith and Guy, 3rd ed. (Boston: Cummings and Hilliard, 1815), xx (emphasis in original).
26.
Cummings , Introduction to the Ancient and Modern Geography, vi.
27.
Edward Salmon, “How the Blind are Educated,” The Strand 6 (January–June 1891): 568.
28.
“The Normal College for the Blind,” Sunday at Home 33 (March 1886): 170.
29.
“Instruction of the Blind,” 387–88.
30.
Anne Ritchie, “Mr. Campbell’s Pupils,” Cornhill 33 (January–June 1876): 352.
31.
Ritchie, “Mr. Campbell’s Pupils,” 352.
32.
For information on ways in which reading text by touch contributed to a reassessment of the capacity and sophistication of touch and its place in the human sensorium, see Vanessa Warne, “‘So That the Sense of Touch May Supply the Want of Sight’: Blind Reading in Nineteenth-Century Britain,” in Media, Technology, and Literature in the Nineteenth Century: Image, Sound, Touch, ed. Colette Colligan and Margaret Linley (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2011), 43–64.
33.
James Gall, An Account of the Recent Discoveries Which Have Been Made for Facilitating the Education of the Blind with Specimens of the Books, Maps, Pictures, &c. for Their Use (London: Sampson, Low and Marston, [1837] 1894), 46.
34.
Gall , An Account of the Recent Discoveries, 47.
35.
Gall , An Account of the Recent Discoveries, 47.
36.
Gall , An Account of the Recent Discoveries, 48.
37.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 167.
38.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 165.
39.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 170.
40.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 167–68.
41.
For an important discussion of James Holman’s travels, see Eitan Bar-Yosef, “The ‘Deaf Traveller,’ the ‘Blind Traveller,’ and Constructions of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Travel Writing,” Victorian Review 35, no. 2 (2009): 133–54.
42.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 168.
43.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 162.
44.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,” 163.
45.
Fenn , “Feeling the Way,”163.

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Department of English, Film and Media, University of Manitoba, Winnipeg, MB, Canada
Vanessa Warne

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Vanessa Warne
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University of Melbourne, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Grace Moore
Monash University, Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Michelle J. Smith

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Warne, V. (2018). “Mountains might be marked by a drop of glue”: Blindness, Touch and Tactile Maps. In: Moore, G., Smith, M. (eds) Victorian Environments. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_6

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-57337-7_6
Published: 08 March 2018
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-137-57336-0
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-57337-7
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