Journal Article

Deafness and Holiness: Home Missions, Deaf Congregations, and Natural Language 1860-1890

PEMBERTON, NEIL

2009

Overview

The British Royal Commission on the Blind and the Deaf and Dumb—a parliamentary committee set up in 1886 to inquire into extending state support to deaf education—was the arena for this interchange on the intelligibility of signed services conducted to deaf adults; it was part of a power struggle over the use (and status) of signed languages in deaf education in particular, and in Victorian culture in general. The report—which was coloured by the views of the Scottish inventor and eugenicist Alexander Graham Bell, who, earlier that decade, had warned of the prospect of a \"deaf variety of the human race\"—characterized missions as a form of reckless philanthropy that prompted deaf people to dissociate themselves from mainstream society. Whereas poorer pupils were taught written English by a combination of sign language and the manual alphabet (a system that became known as the \"silent system\" in this period), fee-paying pupils underwent extensive speech training and lip-reading, and in some cases would become teacher assistants (Branson and Miller 121-47). In his seminal study of deaf education in Victorian America, for example, Douglas Baynton is principally concerned with demonstrating the cultural underpinnings that allowed manualism to flourish as an educational practice before being superseded by approaches that stressed the incorporation of deaf people into day schools to receive speech training and lip-reading.

• Publisher: Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada,Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: 19th century / Adults / Christian missionaries / Consciousness / Culture / Deaf culture / Deaf education / Deafness / Education / Intelligibility / Language / Lipreading / Lips / Missionaries / Natural language / Philanthropy / Religion / Schools / Sermons / Sign language / Sign languages / Society / Victorians