This chapter examines a selection of domestic realist novels by Dinah Mulock Craik and Charlotte M. Yonge in which disability is situated at the heart of familial and romantic plotlines. Both authors represent disability as a powerful state which develops the disabled character’s moral qualities, enabling them to exert an uplifting influence upon those around them, and fostering dependent relationships which are depicted as mutually beneficial. For both writers, this becomes a way of validating experiences and qualities coded ‘feminine’. Moreover, the disabled character’s problematic relation to the marriage plot enables these authors to experiment with familial structures which are not based on the marriage bond, and to experiment with alternative narrative possibilities for female characters, without overtly questioning the desirability of marriage. This chapter also demonstrates that attitudes to disability have been inextricably bound up with the reception of domestic fiction, showing how these authors serve as test-cases for understanding the relationship between disability and canon formation.

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This book examines the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters in the Victorian novel. By plotting disabled characters across the field of nineteenth-century fiction via Dickensian melodrama, Wilkie Collins’s sensational mysteries, domestic fiction by Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik, and realist works by George Eliot and Henry James, it demonstrates the centrality of disability to the Victorian novel, and shows how attention to disability sheds new light on texts’ arrangement and use of bodies. It also traces how the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction, and explores how shifting attitudes to disability have affected the critical reception of nineteenth-century novels. This study establishes that disability was in itself a major preoccupation for nineteenth-century novelists, but also argues that it was a concept which enabled them to test the possibilities and limitations of the marriage plot, to explore questions of social and narrative justice, and to probe the connection between embodiment and identity. The nineteenth-century novel threw open the question of who might be worth writing about: this book uses disabled characters as test cases who push the limits of the novel’s inclusivity, and lay bare its organising structures. By showing that categorising characters according to their embodiment has been as vital to the organisation of novels as the dis/ability system is to the organisation of society, this study shows how disability can provide a new vantage point from which to narrate the story of the nineteenth-century novel.

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