Zero to Hero? Disabled People in Literature

The presence of the crippled Tiny Tim adds an element of sentimentality to the description which helps to evoke the shared emotional response in the audience that would unite them in a community of feeling. The depiction of Tiny Tim elicits the empathy amongst his readers that Dickens saw as essential to the Christmas spirit. (Waters 1997, 76)

Dickens writes, "Alas for Tiny Tim, he bore a little crutch and had his limbs supported by an iron frame" (CC, 61)

Pope-Hennessey tells us of, "The Christmas scene at the Cratchits", the good cheer, the affectionate family atmosphere and above all the courage of Tiny Tim, the cripple' (Pope-Hennessey 1968, 197)

The pitiable Tiny Tim and Ebenezer Scrooge who was "hard and sharp as flint" (CC, 6) portray two extremes of human nature. As Irving remarks, "Also common is Dickens"s penchant for the juxtaposition of extremes. (In his own words: “It is a fair, even-handed, noble adjustment of things) "(Irving 1995, xiv)

Scrooge"s physical appearance is also abnormal as Dickens states "The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shriveled his cheek ... made his eyes red, his thin lips blue;" (CC, 6). In Carey we are told, "Dickens" obsession with deformity combines here with his habit of separating the body into inanimate bits ... Tiny Tim's crutch is a variant of the wooden leg fixation.' (Carey 1973, 97). The ghost of Christmas past is similarly depicted as having a disjointed appearance, "it looked upon him with a face, in which in some strange way there were fragments of all the faces it had shown him" (CC, 49).

In his novels, Charles Dickens reflects the attitudes of his day towards women, ethnic minorities and people with disabilities. Campbell remarks of the patriarchal view in Dombey and Son (1846),

Dickens intends Dombey time to be at once a parody and a perversion of what can be called patriarchal time, the temporality sanctioned by both Victorian capitalism and nineteenth century British Christianity, which advocated obedience to the Victorian paterfamilias as the earthly, temporal representative of a heavenly father. (Campbell 2003, 89)

In Oliver Twist (1837), the Jew is represented as evil in the form of Fagin and mirrors a strong anti-Semitic feeling in Britain. During a meeting with the criminal Sikes, Dickens writes, "These words, in plain English, conveyed an injunction to ring the bell. It was answered by another Jew, younger than Fagin, but nearly as vile and repulsive in appearance." (Dickens 1837, 153). In Barnaby Rudge (1841), Collins writes "Barnaby is twenty three years old ... he is an idiot with the mind of a child ... his father is an absconded criminal, who is responsible for Barnaby"s idiocy' (Collins 1965, 194).

This chapter has examined how Dickens's and his contemporary writers' use disabled people to represent the sinister or pitiful, indicating that society already had very fixed ideas about disabled people. Their status as "surplus population" is expressed by Malthus in his "Essay On The Principles Of Population" and I have discussed the way that Dickens attacks this proposal in A Christmas Carol. Dickens' obsession with deformities has also been examined and how Dickens fragments some of his characters into inanimate parts.