By Touch Alone

To explore blind people’s experiences of reading in nineteenth-century Britain and America and to better understand sighted people’s reception of the advent of raised-print books, I draw on a wide range of sources. They include firsthand accounts of reading by touch; press reports about the new schools where reading by touch was taught; poems, short stories, and novels that feature scenes of blind people reading; and works of visual art, such as paintings, that depict blind readers. I consider how the public display of blind people’s literacy, in city streets and on bridges, where some blind people read for money, shaped attitudes toward raised-print culture. I take up the ways in which reading by touch transformed blind people’s experiences in museums and art galleries. I explore the work of numerous blind authors, including the poet Edmund White, essayist W.W. Fenn, and novelist Alice King. I explore, among other topics, how reading by touch shaped blind authors’ relationships with sighted amanuenses. I also explore how the published writing of sighted authors of the era, such as George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, and Wilkie Collins, engaged experiences of reading by touch. I argue that the entry into literacy of blind people prompted many people to rethink the information-gathering potential of touch and to question Western culture’s perception of touch as a pleasurable but unrefined sense.