The represesentation of disability and illness in Victorian England Essay

The represesentation of disability and illness in Victorian England novels - Essay Example r themselves in all this plentitude and opportunity, those who were somehow stricken with illness or disability were determined to be of somehow lower or disdainful quality. This was largely because people tended to judge others based upon their material acquisitions in these quickly changing times. Wealth was taken to be an accurate measure of the person’s character while illness or disability was seen to be a reflection of a diseased soul. These attitudes in society were explored in books written in the time. As will be discovered in this paper, novels emerged during this time period as society’s most accurate means of reflecting on the social ills of the day and novels such as those written by Charles Dickens or George Elliot repeatedly demonstrated that the ill or disabled Victorian was somehow held to be of lower quality or worth than whole-bodied individuals. During the Victorian period, the process of psychoanalysis had not yet been published, much less widely discussed and applied to social structures. The principle means of reflecting issues common to the contemporary society was through the explorations provided in the fiction produced during the period. Borislav Knezevic says of Dickens and his contemporaries: â€Å"Professional novelists became not only providers of relatively lucrative cultural products, but also voices of great social authority, and representatives of that middle-class wisdom and success. [†¦] The novel became a locus of middle-class symbolic power† (Knezevic, 2003: 4). In the Victorian era, the novel was as much about information as about entertainment, as Salman Rushdie observes in his entry on The Nation: â€Å"The word ‘novel’ derives from the Latin word for new; in French, nouvelles are both stories and news reports. A hundred years ago, people read novels, among other things, for i nformation. From Dickens’s Nicholas Nickleby, British readers got shocking information about poor schools like Dotheboys Hall, and