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Vanessa Warne, "By Touch Alone: Blindness and Reading in Nineteenth-Century Culture" (U Michigan Press, 2025)
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
That's why you rack welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Vanessa Warren about her book titled By Touch, Blindness and Reading in 19th Century Culture, published by the University of Michigan Press in 2025. Now this book is doing some really interesting things here because we're going to be talking about reading by touch, so blind people using Brail, for instance. But we're also going to be talking about what the prevalence or increased prevalence of that happening meant for people who didn't read by touch, who read in the sort of quote unquote normal way. Because as braille and reading by touch became more understood and known across society, that obviously changed people who were using that reading method. It also changed the perceptions of everyone else about what it meant to read and what it meant to learn things and what it meant to engage with the world. And so we're going to be talking about lots of different kinds of experiences and discussions here about reading, which given that we're the New Books Network, we love to talk about reading and books. So Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast. Tell us about your book.
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Thanks for the Chance to chat. Miranda I'm excited to talk about the book and the many interesting topics I believe it touches on. So I teach and I research at the University of Manitoba, and I live on Treaty 1 territory in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. And this book really began with work I was doing as a volunteer off campus, not as part of my academic life with the cnib, which is the Canadian National Institute for the Blind. And I was working there in their recording library, recording everything from kind of cookbooks to novels. And it got me thinking about this history and all of the things I didn't know about it.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It's often fun when something kind of comes up when you're not looking for a research project. You're like, oh, wait, hang on a second, what's going on here? Right, let's poke around and find something to explore. So from that initial impulse, then, what questions did you end up focusing on in the book and how did you develop them?
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
It began with really basic questions. When were the first audiobooks recorded? When were the first books for blind people printed? What were the kinds of experiences blind people had as they entered into literacy for the first time? And I started to think more about the first generations of blind people to have access to written culture. And I also wanted to think a lot about the contributions blind people to written culture in what proved to be a really exciting century, the 19th century, for literacy, for the history of the book, and for the history of blindness. So I was trying to think about how a very new way of reading changed the lived experience of blindness day to day. How did it shape people's lives as blind people living as a minority in a very ocular centric or sight focused world. And then I wondered how sighted people, and I am a sighted person, and how sighted people responded to this change and how it challenged them to think differently about what it meant to be blind. What did it mean to read? How does reading work at the level of the senses, cognitively? And then how did this change people's ideas about what books were? And I think especially about the interactions between the bodies of readers and the books that we read. And so a whole kind of a snowball, I guess, of questions started to gather around this history for me. And there were a lot of great people for me to kind of learn from, both contemporary scholars and then people from the past, past voices. And it seemed like every time I came across a new source or a new perspective, there were new questions to ask.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hmm. That's always the sign of a good project when one question leads to the next. And by listing out those questions, you've given us a lovely foundation for the rest of our discussion. Because I hope that we're going to answer some of those questions, obviously not in as much detail as the book, but to give people a sense of the things that you found when you went investigating. So to go kind of right back to, as you said, first principal questions really, when, why and how did reading by touch begin?
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Oh, this is a great question. And it really begins in France. Now, my project is Anglo American in its focus, but shout out to the French because very exciting things were happening, especially in Paris in the late 18th century. So very curious and complicated man, a sighted person named Valentin Aoui. He was an educator. He had a background in weaving. He came from a family who were weavers. And he had had interaction through the weaving community with blind people. He was very interested in education. And in 1780s he has this kind of very innovative moment where he develops a printing method and then pedagogical methods to support blind people in learning to read by touch. So these are the first inkless books. They use very heavy paper. It's dampened, it gets pressed or embossed with text. This man, Valentine Aloui, is going to use a, we would think, a very flourishing, attractive, visually elaborate kind of cursive print. And then he is going to have success. He's going to be able to teach a community of young blind people how to read by touch. All of this is happening in France in the 1780s. It will gather attention and public funding, state funding. He will found what became a very important educational facility both for academic and vocational training for blind people. And then, somewhat to my surprise, it takes quite a while for all of these innovations to make their way into English speaking culture and to make their way to the UK and to America, where people will kind of take up these kind of interesting innovations, this, this new idea of reading by touch, this new reality, and then they will very quickly try to modify it, adapt it and improve it. And it's that process of innovation, experimentation and also importantly, activism by the blind community that will really kind of shape, I think, reshape what it means to read in the course of the 19th century.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Okay, we're going to get to some of those efforts there. But besides, obviously a key sort of person to start this. Nothing happens just because of one person. So what other sorts of changes do we need to understand happening around this point, conceptually, technologically, for it to go from one person's idea to actually something that can become Bigger than just the one effort, for example, in these different countries.
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Yes, an excellent point. So it's going to take a lot of people who are deeply curious about what can be achieved through printing methods and what it might mean to create books without ink, which is a radical idea. People had relied on ink to make books for centuries. This was a kind of non negotiable facet of bookmaking. So it's going to take this notion of using a printing press in a different way to create embossed text. It's going to take affordable sources of paper because there's a lot of paper used in making these specialized books. So the money you're saving in ink is nothing compared to the higher cost of kind of specialized printing machinery and also a very heavy paper. You're also going to need a lot of openness and willingness to think about literacy as something that is important for all people to have and shouldn't be limited to certain kind of individuals or groups in society. So there's going to have to be a sense of, of kind of the value of literacy and its kind of life transforming and dare I say, kind of humanizing effects. And so we're going to have to have interest in technological innovation. We're going to have a strong social commitment to literacy and its value. We're also going to have a new awareness or interest in the experiences of marginalized communities of visually disabled people. We're also going to have to have a visually disabled community with an appetite for literacy. And we certainly had that. There's going to be a lot of money that has to flow to make this happen. A lot of this money, interestingly, is going to come from religious groups who are going to want to get Bibles literally into the hands of blind people as part of their, you know, value systems. So we're going to have to have a lot of things happen, but really on a fundamental level, we're going to have to have both blind and sighted people invest in the notion that visual acuity, the ability to see is not necessary for reading. And that by thinking about reading and about books in new ways, new things can happen that will really radically change the lives of blind people on so many different levels. So we're going to have whole communities of individuals who are actually going to, in interesting ways, compete with each other. They're going to become rivals. So very early in England and Scotland, actually, I should correct myself. In Scotland, there's going to be a competition. They're going to put a call out to innovative individuals to come up with the best way to print the Alphabet, to print language for blind people. And we're going to have over 20 people send in for this kind of gold medal prize that's being offered radically different ways to transcribe language onto paper for it to be embossed for blind readers. And so we're going to need a whole community of people to come together, make proposals, and then we're going to need also a group of people who are willing to kind of test to learn. Some blind people in 19th century were able to read by touch six or seven radically different rival script systems. And so there was a great deal of learning. And then there had to be a lot of kind of weeding out, a willingness to let systems become obsolete and for others to grow dominant so that the needs and preferences of blind readers were prioritized. And so, yeah, there has to be a great deal of curiosity and energy and investment, both intellectual investment and material investment, for all of this to happen in the course of just a few decades.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, there's so much going on here that if we just focused on the sort of the one genius who came up with the idea, we'd miss both a lot of complexity and also a lot of interest. So I'd love to pick up from those many things you just told us about the competition of the different systems, because of course, we don't usually think of kind of multiple systems of reading by touch today. What were some of the ones that were tried?
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Well, I'd love to tell you, Miranda, about William Moon. And again, we don't want to do the solitary genius narrative, but William Moon's a very interesting figure. He's English. He becomes blind in midlife, and he becomes a really productive activist and innovator. So this is a blind person who has concerns. He's aware of the innovations that have been happening in France. He's aware of the early experiments in the English speaking world. And he thinks all of this is great, it's grand, but it's not going to work for working class people. So many working class blind people are supporting themselves and their families through doing manual labor. They're making baskets, they're making brushes, they're making brooms. And all of this is resulting in calloused fingertips. So what William Moon wants is something that will work for all blind readers, including those with calloused fingertips. And so he thinks, I need to take my knowledge of kind of the conventional transcription of language by the Roman Alphabet or the Latin Alphabet, and I need to simplify it. Now that I'm a blind person to support other blind people. So he's going to take the letters of the Alphabet and he's going to reduce those 26. Six letters to just seven shapes. So if we can visualize in our mind's eye the shape of a tent, you know, a letter A without the. The crossbar, and then we could think of flipping it up to make a letter V. Great. So now we have a simplified A and a simplified V. Well, if we turn it on our side, we could make the letter K and so on and so forth. So he's going to say, look, we need to think differently about how we put this Alphabet under the fingers of blind people like me so that it is easy to read. And he made some quite, you know, extraordinary claims. He said this could be read not only by a calloused finger, but by a person wearing a glove. And he's going to do this to try to make this new way of reading as broadly available as possible. And then William Moon is going to say, okay, I've made this radical, you know, suggestion. I'm printing books in this way. I've come up with a new script. He's going to call it Moom script. He says, let's go one step further. When a blind person is reading, they get to the end of the line of text, and then they have to, in ways that don't work as well for fingers as they might for eyes, navigate back to the start of the next line of text on a page. He said, forget this. My finger moves more easily left to right in the conventional ordering in English of letters. And then, actually, my finger would do way better if I just then swept right down and went from right to left, so back and forward and back and forward, like an ox plowing a field. We call this the boostrophonic line. So he says, I want to make radical changes not just to how the Alphabet is turned into shapes on a page, but also how words and letters are arranged on the page, so that the design of books and the script system in which those books are printed are both well suited to the needs of blind people. And so these kinds of radical innovations are happening all over the place. Other inventors are saying, no, no, no. My script system is the best because it's radically abbreviated. I'm doing a kind of stenographic thing here. I'm only giving you the consonants. We don't need the vowels. And that's going to save space and time. That's best for blind. Others are saying, and these are Often I would note, sighted people. No, no, no, what we need is we need a script system that absolutely copies as closely as possible that of the, of the standard ink print world of sighted people. Because we want blind and sighted people to be able to read together. We want sighted people to be able to teach blind people how to read. We don't want to create a kind of separate culture. And they were very anxious that something like Braille, which uses dots in the six cell system, would, would move blind people away from and apart from the cited majority. And so they said, no, no, no, we're just gonna, we're gonna shift from ink to a textured surface. That, that's all we need to do. And then it took, you know, decades for blind people to push back against that and, and determine what actually did suit reading by touch best. And so there's a really rich period of debate. It's also a very expensive process though, Miranda, because what's happening is the same text. Often, you know, a book of the Bible is being reprinted and reprinted and reprinted instead of, you know, printing that, that work of scripture and then also a novel and then also a book of poetry. And so everyone can see that this is a generative but a wasteful process. And they want to move towards kind of determining a universal script system for blind people, a way for blind people to access written culture in the easiest, most pleasing, most efficient way.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Of really interesting factors that I don't know if we would necessarily always consider right ideas about vowels and word length I think would necessarily go into the conversation. But then things like sort of line formatting and placement add a whole dimension and things like calloused fingers and class distinctions. Can we add another one in you discuss in the book where reading by touch taking place as being significant. Can you tell us about this aspect?
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Yes, thank you for mentioning this. One of the things that I was surprised to learn was that a lot of the reading done by blind people was being done on bridges and thoroughfares, at intersections, in public spaces, in cities. This surprised me, but it was a really important discovery for me to make as a scholar in terms of better appreciating some of the pressures that blind people were under and how reading, which could easily be kind of conceived of in celebratory ways. Oh, you know, Harriet Martineau famously said the blind can now read. You know, job done, check, check, we're done with this. But in fact, the fact that many blind people were reading not in the comfort of their parlors but instead on city streets alerts us to a reality about literacy and what the entry into literacy meant for blind people. We might be thinking, great. Increased access to privacy, the ability to read one's own correspondence, for example. We might be thinking, increased access to education, wonderful. The ability to Read magazines or newspapers with the latest news in them. These are all wonderful. We might be thinking about pleasure and leisure and delight, but. But the one thing that literacy didn't bring to members of the blind community was paid employment. And so poverty remained a reality for many, many blind people who were understood to be, you know, ill suited to paid labor and really excluded from participation in the workplace. And so what happened was blind people were taught how to read. This was going to change their lives, it was going to improve their lives, it was going to make them more spiritual and informed and connected, but it didn't make them employable, unfortunately. And so many people took these skills that they'd been taught, they took the books that they'd been given and they went onto bridges and into streets and they stood and read for money for the spare change of passersby. And so what happens in this process is that to a certain extent, this private, humanizing, enriching experience becomes commodified. And reading, instead of becoming an end to, you know, long standing equations between, for example, blindness and begging, reading actually gets caught up in that system. And this is very distressing not only to the individuals who participate in this practice. They called themselves street readers. It's not just distressing to these individuals, but it's distressing to the larger community that's investing in reading by touch because they, they don't want people reading aloud from Bible on streets for spare change. They want blind people reading the Bible in their parlor. They want a normalized experience of reading, and that's not what they get. And so these street readers become really the public face of reading by touch. And many, many sighted people would have had their first exposure to this, this new reality, to this new form of literacy, as they, for example, crossed over Waterloo Bridge in London and encountered a blind street reader reading from the Bible by touch.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
This is really interesting. The ways in which we're already seeing the integration of one individual reading and then kind of making that claim on wider society and sort of bringing that into public view. So thank you for telling us about that space aspect. One question though, that kind of obviously comes up from this really bustling, interesting period you're describing to us of all sorts of experimenting is obviously that's not where we're at now. Now we sort of have the standard expectation that if one is reading by touch, it is using braille. So how did we get from all of those different ideas and experimenting to braille being the mainstream option?
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Great question. And, and really this could have been a book about Obsolescence about how we go from 20 options to one. And I think that that's such an interesting kind of, I would suggest, way for us to understand a process of activism, innovation and experimentation. So the one thing that braille really had over all of these interesting rivals, including William Moon's wonderfully simplified version of the Roman alphab, the one thing braille had and still has today is writability. So literacy for blind people, had we stayed in the realm of William Moon, would have been limited in a, in a pre digital age to, to reading. You could take text in, but unless you had a printing press and you set up the printing press and you set your type and you, you ran it through, you couldn't make a grocery list or with ease write a letter home or, or in other ways express your ideas and thoughts. So there were many different writing systems that blind people experimented with. There was a wonderfully complicated machine that looked like a really big kind of accordion called the Foucault frame. And it was demonstrated at the Great Exhibition in 1851. People also used a much more rudimentary set of tools. You can think of a box of letters and each letter is decorated with, with pins. And you would take the letter and push it into the page and it would create a perforation. And those letters could be read by sighted people using vision and then by blind people using touch. So there were ways to write. And of course, there were also traditions of blind people being taught and becoming quite expert at writing with a pencil or a pen and typewriters also. But the problem was none of this was very easy or efficient and, and the fastest, easiest methods of writing that are available to sighted people, writing with a pencil or a pen produce text that was inaccessible to its creator. Braille was the exception, with a guide and a stylus, very affordably, very easily, very conveniently, just like contemporary braille literate people do today. Blind people of the 19th century could write a letter or make a note. They, they could take notes on whatever they were reading, they could communicate, they could keep a diary. All of this made braille the winner of the competition that took place in the 19th century. Its ability to be easily written really won the game. I would also add though, that braille had some other advantages. It was pleasurable to read, it was easy to read, it's very compact on the page. So braille books were far less costly and bulky than those of the rivals. So we can see over the course of the 19th century, from like the 1830s to the 1880s in particular a process of kind of winnowing out as these systems, many of them proposed by sighted people, fall away. And braille, developed by Louis Braille in the early 19th century, comes to the fore and experiences the dominance, the universality that it retains today.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, when you list them like that, that's a whole bunch of reasons why it would make sense that braille would be the one that persists. Now that we have that understanding though, can we talk maybe a bit more? We've had it sort of sprinkled throughout of the impact of this on people. But now that there's sort of the experimenting is over, there's more of an established way that isn't just about reading, but as you've just explained, writing as well. What were the sorts of impacts that people said to be able to keep a diary for the first time, to be able to engage with these sorts of reading cultures? Obviously you mentioned right at the beginning that class difference could play into it in terms of physically being able to touch the braille. Do we see any other differences in terms of impact and experience based on geography or gender or age?
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
That's a great question. I think all of this is in play. The one I think I'd highlight is the question of class. A really surprising thing to me was that a lot of privileged upper class blind people chose not to learn to read by touch. I expected this to be an experience shared across classes and that people who were privileged upper class people would be as excited to access raised print as working class people. Interestingly, it doesn't seem to have been the case. Thousands of people were learning to read by touch in the course of the 19th century. Estimates are varied, but around 30,000 people living in the UK are blind in the 19th century and at least it seems 20% of those people are reading by touch. Interestingly though, it's much more heavily kind of weighted towards working class people. And this has a logic to it. As I soon realized, upper class people had people who could read to them for money. They had the leisure to sit and listen to people read to them. They could pay an amanuensis, a secretary, to participate in the work of transcription from dictation. And so many privileged and highly educated blind people didn't actually use who's raised print as part of their daily lives. But there are also important exceptions to that pattern and some really prominent upper class educated, privileged individuals who were very involved in activism around the improvement of race print and its proliferation But I will say that we have really compelling testimony from blind people who learned how to read about the changes it made in their experiences of education and faith, social inclusion. Privacy was extremely important. People who'd relied on other people to read their letters to them could shift into a world of private correspondence. And that was very, very valued and meaningful. I think more generally there's this idea, this investment in Western culture that literacy is kind of a prerequisite of a fully realized humanity. And I think, think that, you know, supported investment in raised print books and in teaching blind people how to read. But it, it also helped blind people with their kind of self conception and, and sense of identity in really interesting ways. So I will also say that I think blind people felt the benefits of reading by touch culturally, in the sense that, you know, while. While literacy didn't allow either sighted or blind people to fully abandon some of the very negative associations that Western culture has with blindness, you know, their view of blindness as a calamity and blind people as suffering and blindness as tragic, all of these deeply ingrained stereotypes and ideas and notions about blindness, they didn't go away, but they were deeply challenged by this notion that blind people could read and did read. They could write and they did write. There's a wonderful story that a French commentator, Maurice de la Cizeren, shares at the beginning of a book he wrote about being in a train carriage. And he's reading his braille correspondence and he's writing in braille and his secretary is actually asleep in the corner. I think he'd been reading a Jules Verne novel or something. And. But Cizerand hears the conversation of those around him saying like, ooh, he reads, he writes and he kind of interrupts and he says, yes, I do all of these things. And this experience prompted him to write a book about the experiences of blind people, to try to kind of intervene in and correct some of these misunderstandings about blindness and to kind of disrupt the identification of blindness with, with tragedy or calamity. And so I think really radical things happen in the way that blind people perceive themselves and in the challenge that literacy presents to sighted people's conventional identification of blindness with suffering. And so lots of exciting things happen that call on both blind and non blind communities to rethink blindness and the experiences of blind people in this moment. And I think that for me is one of the most important and I like to think lasting effects of this historical development. The new Popeyes and Hot Ones menu is fire flavor. Trust me, because I'm about to eat it. That hits right away. Attempt the Popeyes Hot Ones menu in Stores love that chicken from Popeyes. Limited time in participating US Restaurants.
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
That's amazing.
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
I am not fireproof.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Just get in my mouth.
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Dr. Vanessa Warren
Actually kind of comfy in here. It is.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's definitely a really big impact that goes well beyond sort of any one individual person. Can we talk more though, about the impacts within sighted communities, not just in terms of perceptions of what blind people can and cannot do, but also about these questions you raised earlier of kind of, what does it mean to read if we now know that sighted people, blind people, are reading by to?
- [35:07]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
Yeah, absolutely. So one of the things sighted people are going to have to do is they're going to have to think about blindness and blind people in different ways. But they're also going to have to think about books in different ways. They're going to have to think about the Alphabet in different ways. They're going to have to say, oh, like it's not natural or inevitable that the letter A will look the way I know it to look, because maybe the look of it doesn't matter so much as the feel of it. So they're going to have to think about really radical things like, like why are we transcribing written, you know, why are we transcribing language into writing or printing in these ways? Which is quite an exciting and radical thing. The other thing they're going to have to think about is like, how does reading actually work? Like, what are the sensory dimensions of reading and what are the cognitive dimensions of reading? And if we have a different sensory input, do we have a different cognitive experience? So this is going to prompt them to really kind of of think about reading itself as not natural. So books aren't natural. The Alphabet is a natural Reading isn't natural. All of these things are culturally specific, they're historically specific, they're transformed by technology. And the different bodies of different readers can shape all of these things, you know, from kind of the ground up. The other thing that's going to happen is that sighted people are going to, and perhaps this is not surprising, find this history deeply moving. They're going to be tempted to, and in many cases they will embellish it, mythologize it, misrepresent it. Authors and artists are going to invest a lot into depictions of blind people reading because they find this very moving, very touching, very new, very novel. And so lots of of sighted people who are cultural creators, whether they're working in the field of visual art, or they're writing for the periodical press, or they're writing fiction or poetry, they're going to take this up and build reading by touch into their work to create emotions and sensations and to see what will kind of come of representing this new way of reading. And so we see a kind of, of flurry of cultural works in the course of the 19th century that will take the blind reader as their subject. And that's kind of interesting to think about. So they're going to see the blind reader as a way to kind of inspire or provoke emotional responses in other sighted people. And that helps raise awareness of this new reality, but also comes with challenges of its own. So a lot of myths will be perpetuated. The notion that, oh, there was this blindness and she worked so long at basket making that her fingers were so numb that she thought she had to give her raised print Bible away, she couldn't read it anymore. And so she put her lips to it and kissed it goodbye and discovered in that moment she could read with her lips. And so none of this is valid, this is all apocryphal. But sighted people are going to take a new development and they're going to embellish it in ways that reveal a lot about their desire to sensationalize blind people's experiences, to insist on their difference rather than their sameness. So I think those experiences are worthy of study in and of themselves. The other thing that's really going to push, of course, sighted people is that blind people can write. They can't just read, they can write. So there's going to be opportunities for kind of unmediated written expression by blind people. So no longer dictating to a sighted person, but writing directly. And that new access to education and state funded education for blind people is also good to really challenge sighted people who actually have to stop and listen. Instead of pontificating or imagining experiences of blindness, they have more ready access to firsthand accounts of the lived experience of blindness. And that's gonna be really enriching, but also for some people, very challenging.
- [39:19]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely clear that this makes an impact for individual people and for entire communities and conceptions of kind of what it is to engage with the world and whose stories get told in what kinds of ways. Are there any other longer term or wider implications of this growth of reading by touch that we want to discuss?
- [39:38]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
I think one of them, and thanks for the chance, Miranda. I think one of them is how this new history changes the way people perceive the sense of touch. So the sense of touch in Western culture, you know, it hasn't got a lot of respect. You know, it's a very Oculus centric culture. So, you know, if there's a hierarchy of the human senses, vision is at the top and touch is pretty low down. Touch is not really conceived of as something that has the capacity to educate. It's not linked with kind of information gathering. It's viewed as unrefined. All of that is going to be challenged as blind people's ability to read by touch becomes better known by the sighted majority. So if touch can do the same thing sight can do, if we don't need sight to read, but we can use touch, what does that mean about touch? Is touch actually more important, more sophisticated, more informative than we had previously thought? Should blind people, people be teaching sighted people how to touch more, how to touch differently? People are going to obviously bring in kind of biological notions. Well, you know, there's this notion that blind people have a compensatory sense of touch, that their sense of touch has been heightened because they've lost the ability to see. But many people are going to push and say, no, no, no. And many of these people will be blind commentators and say, no, we don't have an innate or compensatory experience of touch that is more heightened or refined than yours. It's just that we use our sense of touch and it becomes more refined through use. And so there's this re evaluation and the title of the book, By Touch alone tries to highlight this. There's a real re evaluation of the relationship between the senses and the value of touch and a new awareness that this sense may have been underestimated, under, explored, underutilized. And so quite a few sighted people start kind of writing back and forward to one another. We see this in journalism, but also in letters and saying, well, maybe we should learn how to read by touch. If we learn to read by touch, well, this would be very convenient. We could read in the dark. We wouldn't have to waste money on gaslights or candles. But also, maybe we would become better at touching. And so I think that's important and that Miranda is going to change cultural institutions very broadly. So we're going to see things like licensed touching in museum spaces. We're going to see the first touch tours for blind people. We're going to see the recognition that touch could be useful in exhibition spaces and in art galleries. There's going to be really wonderful things that happen by innovative museum curators, for example, where they're going to think, okay, we are going to make our, you know, behind glass, carefully preserved, you know, collection available for blind visitors to touch. And at the same time, blind activists and leaders are creating, you know, touch collections made for blind people, curated by blind people. And so there's this just broader sense that touch doesn't just give access to text. It could also give access to visual art art, to sculpture, to natural specimens, to the history of shells and fossils. All of these things become available because this change in reading methods has resonance through a broader society. And the educational potential of touch becomes a new focus and a very exciting possibility for people to explore. But both blind and non blind.
- [43:33]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, opening up so many things. I mean, that list of examples alone is incredibly evocative and obviously is something that this, you know, asking those questions right at the beginning of kind of, where did this all start? You know, you wouldn't have necessarily. I think I would imagine that this is kind of where you would get to by sort of pulling that thread and seeing what happens. And I certainly found lots of surprises in the book of, oh, okay, what about that? You know, a big one definitely. Was the many different systems of reading by touch that were experimented with. Was there anything in particular you found surprising in investigating all of this?
- [44:08]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
I think one of the things I found surprising was the response of sighted people who really, really felt threatened by braille. There was this sense that, I'm a sighted person, I'm an educated person, I'm a literate person, I should be able to read without any specialized training. The text beneath your finger. And so when that didn't happen, some sighted people had very negative responses. They said braille was barbaric, it was foreign, it was coded, it was secretive. They really wanted to stop the kind of innovation, experimentation that was going on. And Limit options for blind people. And so I found the kind of, I guess I would say the fear that some, some sighted people had about this practice really interesting. I was troubled also by suspicion. There was a lot of suspicion, especially in the middle of the 19th century that these people standing on bridges with books in their hands, they weren't really reading, they were reciting from memory that the whole thing was a fraud, it was a fake, it couldn't possibly be true. So there's kind of a skepticism there, there's a reluctance to embrace change, there's an unwillingness to kind of recognize a new reality of blind literacy. So I, I think that that surprised me. Maybe, maybe the right word has dismayed me. But I'm also, you know, what we see is against that opposition, against that skepticism, against frankly suspicion that blind activists and innovators push hard and are very successful in kind of fighting for their preferences and for their needs to be met. And so a great deal is happening and it's happening both locally. You know, groups are meeting to practice reading, to learn how to read, to exchange books, you know, in neighborhoods. But there's also a really rich international exchange that's happening at this time. And so it's a good news, bad news story at times. But I think, think, yeah, I'm really haunted by the energy that some cited commentators invested in declaring reading by touch as something other than really reading. They said that's not really reading, it doesn't count. They pushed really hard to keep a traditional and narrow and ableist notion of reading in play and they didn't succeed. But the effort they expended is. Yeah, that stays with me.
- [46:47]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, it's definitely worth highlighting in some ways because it makes the fact of the pushback against that kind of even more notable.
- [46:54]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
Right.
- [46:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That those aren't the voices that won out in terms of what reading meant. So definitely some interesting things to keep in mind there. What about you? What thread might you be pulling on next now that this book is out in the world?
- [47:08]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
World. Well, thanks for asking. I guess I take some inspiration or guidance from the proliferation of experiences of touching beyond the book out into places like museums and art galleries. And as I was doing the research for this book, I encountered lots of really intriguing accounts of blind people who were, yes, reading by touch, but were also doing very interesting, expressive, creative work. And so Henry Mayhew, the famous journalist and explorer of London's working class world, London labour and London poor will be familiar to many people. Henry Mayhew was quite intrigued by blind street sellers and blind street performers and their experiences. And he visits somebody and the sighted child of this blind man runs into the room with a, a prize winning carved pipe that the blind father had made and exhibited. And this moment stayed with me. And I thought, okay, so this man is reading by touch, he's working in the streets of London, but he's also carved a pipe. And this brings kind of joy to his family and pride to him. And so anyway, I've been thinking more and more about the handmade things that blind people made in the 19th century, either for their own pleasure or to sell, to exhibit. And a lot of the learning, the education around reading by touch was taking place in asylums and schools where people would spend a small portion of each day learning to read by touch and a large portion making things to be sold either to support the institution or in some cases to support themselves. So mattresses, mats, brushes, nets, knitted socks, all kinds of things. So blind people are crafting a lot of things in this time period partly because it's very difficult for them to access other forms of, of income. So they're making and selling things. But this kind of vocational training, this kind of workshop work, which, you know, profits are going to schools, it's supporting the initiatives of often cited educators. I wonder what blind people were making on their own for their own pleasure, for their own self expression. So I'm hoping in, in the work ahead to continue to think about touch, to continue to think about the history of blindness, to think about the lived experiences of blind people, but with a focus on craft and handcrafted objects rather than books. So we'll find out where that goes and where that might take me.
- [50:00]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
That certainly sounds like a very interesting direction to pursue. So best of luck with the project.
- [50:05]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
Thank you.
- [50:06]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
In the meantime, of course, listeners can read the book we've been discussing titled By Touch, Blindness and Reading in 19th Century Culture, published by the University of Michigan Press. Vanessa, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [50:19]
Dr. Vanessa Warren
Thank you for the chance to chat, Miranda. I appreciate it.
- [50:34]
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
It has arisen.
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