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Abstract: Victorian teachers have long been associated with the cane; yet we have missed that this connection has as much to do with disability as it does discipline. Using memoirs and the archives of teacher training colleges and government education committees, this essay demonstrates the ubiquitous linking of disability with teaching in the early nineteenth century. State intervention intensified this association in 1846 through James Kay-Shuttleworth's "pupil-teacher scheme," which provided government funding for working-class children to train as teachers. The rise of national education precipitated a widespread "disability panic," wherein anxiety about the corporeal health of teachers helped instantiate disciplinary norms for the emergent teaching profession. Showing that an investment in physical mobility was used to regulate the pace and progress of social mobility, this essay argues that resignifying disability was a crucial mechanism of managing class difference.
"Hardly anyone is brought up into the business unless he suffers from some bodily infirmity."
-Mr. Winder, Report of the Commissioners Appointed to Enquire into the State of Popular Education in England (1861)
In 1781, John Pounds, a young apprentice in the shipyards of Portsmouth, fell from a great height into the drydock and damaged his leg, causing permanent difficulties with walking. In 1819, while simultaneously cobbling, he began providing lessons to the poor children of the neighborhood in what became known as the first Ragged School.1 Although Pounds was rare in the attention and homily he attracted, the contours of his story were not uncommon. In the first half of the nineteenth century, teachers who opened schools as a result of congenital impairment, illness, or accident were a fixture of the diverse and unregulated educational economy in Britain. By the last quarter of the century, with the embedding of teacher-training programs at education colleges-or, as they were known at the time, "Normal Schools"-the disabled teacher had all but vanished.
The teachers in Charles Dickens's novels suggest the same gradual disappearance of the disabled working-class teacher. Those who read Dickens's novels with close attention to the dates of their settings will notice that his teachers get progressively less corporeally marked. Wackford Squeers, the villainous teacher in Nicholas Nickleby (1838-39), has "but one eye" and "the blank side of his face [is] much wrinkled and puckered up,"...