'This horrible condition of body:' Cultural meanings of crippled and lame children in Anglo -American fiction, 1843--1915

This study examines the cultural meanings of crippled, deformed, lame and otherwise "unfit" children in selected literature of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Crippled, lamed or "deformed" child characters in fiction primarily written for children such as Cohn Craven in The Secret Garden (1912), Klara in Heidi (1881), and Prince Dolor in The Little Lame Prince (1875), coupled with similar characters, bearing striking similarities, portrayed in Victorian fiction written primarily for adults such as Olive Rothesay in Olive (1850), The Earl of Cairnforth in A Noble Life 1865, and Franky Hall in "The Three Eras of Libbie Marsh" (1847) function as a site for discourse on Victorian and Edwardian anxieties about the relation of deformity to wholeness, sickness to health, constraint to freedom, dependence to independence, and damnation to salvation. These crippled, lame, or "deformed" children perform ideological work in representing the late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century preoccupations with and anxieties about health, disease, faith, and racial degeneration. The presence of these crippled and "deformed" children ultimately reshapes and redefines the notions and definitions of children and childhood. Ironically, behind the images of healthy children and adults of the eras under discussion exists a lamed, bedridden, sickly child whose condition controls the discourse of fiction, medicine, religion, identity, health and disease.;The emerging discourses of eugenics and ethnology, Victorian responses to the concern about the overall fitness of the race, find their way into the texts since both the stunted, unwholesome bodies of poor, urban children and the crooked, lamed, bedridden bodies of middle-class and aristocratic children were perceived by Victorians as signs of racial degeneracy. Physicians, pioneering the medical treatment of children (soon to be called pediatrics), began to make huge leaps in diagnoses and treatments specifically for childhood diseases. Medical knowledge grew quickly if unevenly throughout the century, and this knowledge---or lack of it---is reflected in novels and stories from 1843--1915 featuring sickly, bedridden, or invalid figures. Crippled and lame children do not serve so much to further the discourse about medicine or medical discoveries, but to focus on ideas of authority, the bodily condition, and the power of spiritual change or transformation.;The very notions of children, childhood, and the child are elusive. A child is a contested figure that can serve an author in a multitude of ways. In Child-Loving (1997), James Kincaid's essential point is that children mean what a culture wants them to mean. That notion of child as an all-purpose metaphor is both challenged and reinforced by an examination of the nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century texts in which crippled children respond to a culture's ideological needs and desires.