The ‘celebrated blind traveller’ James Holman is one of the sitters featured in the display Facing Blindness: Visual Impairment in the Nineteenth Century. Both Holman’s biography and his portraiture helped to counter the more negative associations between blindness and poverty that existed in the nineteenth century. Holman’s portrait – which depicts him as a professional, smartly-attired individual surrounded by symbols of his learning and adventures – including his hand resting on a globe and his writing frame – very much refute other stereotypical associations of blindness and poverty. This association is illustrated in this etching of two blind beggars by the antiquary John Thomas Smith, who portrayed several other blind and visually-disabled poor people in his 1817 book Vagabondia or, anecdotes of Mendicant Wanderers through the Streets of London.…
By
Dr Heather Tilley, Postdoctoral Research Fellow, Birkbeck. Curator, Facing Blindness: Visual Impairment in the Nineteenth Century
10 April 2014
