Without a standardized literacy system, education for the blind was limited to families who could afford personal tutors. This lack of accessible education meant that blindness was also a sentence of beggary, poverty, exploitation, dependence, and exclusion.
Attitudes Toward the Blind
1700s-1800s
Blind Beggars Collection, Perkins School for the Blind Archives
"Thus with respect to all social utility and importance, people in these unhappy circumstances (people with blindness) were to be accounted dead members...the most part of them victims at once to the double calamity of blindness and indigence, had no other portion assigned them but the miserable and sterile resource of begging...in the horrors of a dungeon the moments of a painful and burdensome existence."
~ Essai sur L'éducation des Aveugles (An Essay on the Education of the Blind), Valentin Haüy, 1786
"John Richards, a blind beggar," JSTOR, 1803
"A Sitting Blind Beggar Sells 'Love Sonnets' to Obtain Money..." JSTOR, 1816
The "Ugly Laws"
In the mid-1800s, American cities passed unsightly beggar ordinances, prioritizing urban aesthetics and criminalizing the public presence of people with visible disabilities, including the blind.
SAN FRANCISCO
Newspaper sketches from "Beggars Must Keep off the Streets," 1895, San Francisco Call, Volume 77
Newspaper clipping from "Beggars Must Keep off the Streets," 1895, San Francisco Call, Volume 77
"Any person who is diseased, maimed, mutilated or in any way deformed, so as to be an unsightly or disgusting object, or an improper person to be allowed in or on the streets, highways, thoroughfares or public places in this city and county, shall not therein or thereon expose himself or herself to public view."
~ Section 29 of the General Orders of the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, 1867
With rising hostility against people with visible disabilities, reforms in independent literacy had never been more crucial.
Evolving Attitudes
Enlightenment philosophers promoted education as the key to knowledge, challenging long-standing assumptions that blindness limited intellectual capacity.
"Would a man who was born blind and who later gained his sight be able to distinguish a cube from a sphere?"
~ Famous question posed to John Locke by English Physicist William Molyneux, UNESCO Courier, Pierre Henri
"We have arranged that these signs (written text) should be common property and serve...for the staple in the exchange of our ideas. We have made them for our eyes in the alphabet, and for our ears in articulate sounds; but we have none for the sense of touch...For lack of this language, there is no communication between us and those born deaf, blind, and mute. They grow, but they remain in a condition of mental imbecility. Perhaps they would have ideas, if we were to communicate with them in a definite and uniform manner from their infancy..."
Quote from French philosopher Denis Diderot in "Lettre sur les Aveugles (Letter on the Blind)," 1749
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Early Tactile Innovation