Accessibility and Archives: “I have been gifted with obstinacy in the face of physical and other disadvantages”

In this blog for LGBTQ+ History Month, Philip Milnes-Smith reflects on the particular challenges of finding queer disability history. 

Indigo Dunphy Smith’s 2025 toolkit (How to Queer Your Country House) may not include the word disability, but I want to suggest some of the guidance is just as relevant to thinking about the disabled lives in (and omitted from) our collections. It argues for taking an inclusive approach, for example, avoiding “the straight until proven gay mindset”.  Other Blogs in this series have similarly argued against the presumption of non-disability.  The toolkit also observes “Evidence of queer histories have often been hidden or destroyed. This is a story in itself. When you encounter gaps in the record, acknowledge them and invite conversation about what they might mean and how that has shaped the spaces lived in and left behind.” 

For some of recent history, homosexuality was deemed a disorder.  Even beyond that era, however, heteronormative expectations could be oppressive, with repression a likely consequence for those who felt they must not act on their desires, and guilt and shame for those who chose to do so.  That context means that it may have been thought wise for queer folk to pass for non-disabled in other respects.  It also often means we can lack incontrovertible evidence in the words of individuals, disabled or non-disabled: in some cases, it may have been thought too compromising to have been written down in the first place, and, in others, scandalised family members may have consigned to the flames letters or diaries, for example, even if they had been obfuscated by code.

This means that (with rare exceptions) we are left with glimpses of queer, disabled life in hostile places like court proceedings, and sensationalised newspaper reports.  Here, for example is a moment in Orwell’s Hop-picking: "There was an imbecile pauper there, a great lump of about sixteen stone, with a tiny, snouty face and a sidelong grin. He was at work very slowly emptying chamber pots. These workhouses seem all alike, and there is something intensely disgusting in the atmosphere of them. The thought of all those grey-faced, ageing men living a very quiet, withdrawn life in a smell of WCs, and practising homosexuality, makes me feel sick."  We shouldn’t make the mistake of assuming he was applying a queer identity to the unnamed youth with a learning disability.  Rather, some of the disgust he feels about the place is bound up with the disgust he feels about the permanent residents of the workhouse (like this lad), living sex-segregated lives in a place where the vulnerable were at risk from the more powerful.

An exceptional survival, which I want to explore further here, is The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds, “a literary scholar, cultural historian and poet” (1840-1893).  Married, and with four daughters, his published work included the privately published Problem in Greek Ethics which concludes with a reflection about the texts that had been made the basis of European education:  “Ought this literature to remain the groundwork of the highest education in a modern commonwealth?.. How many young men have had their imagination perturbed and their moral judgment warped by philosophy and poetry which invest with sublimity and beauty what society repudiates with loathing!  How many might confess that their early years of manhood had been embittered by temptations emanating from the classics they were bound to study!”  This might seem like a repudiation of queerness, but Symonds’ memoirs are (still) shockingly open about his own homosexual desires and behaviours (e.g. “I am far from normal in my personal proclivities and instincts”).  Rather, it is a good example of what Dunphy Smith has in mind when suggesting that we have to look beyond “same sex sexual acts” to broader aspects of relationships and communities, including (in this case) those fostered in sex segregated establishments such as boarding schools and universities (and, bearing in mind the previous paragraph, workhouses).

Symonds describes his early childhood as follows: “I was a very nervous child and subject to many physical ailments… It seems that I suffered from a gastric fever soon after my birth, and this left me weak…  At night… I often lay awake for hours with my fingers in my ears… Lights seemed to move about the room if I opened my eyes in the dark… I took no pleasure in athletic sports of any kind… I hated the exertion rivalry and noise of games…” Later, he offers the reader a chapter on his “intellectual and literary evolution” and notes as follows: “The larger part of my early years was spent in apparently ineffectual dreaming…  I am certain that my memory was originally weak and unreliable.  I remembered nothing definitely which I had not either seen or acutely felt.  Names, dates, numbers, historical events entered my mind with facility, abode there for a short space… and vanished again as though I never possessed them… Having an active brain and a lively curiosity, I was always acquiring information; while the defect of my retentive power made me continually lose the larger portion of it… I have never been able to overcome the congenital inferiority of my brain in these respects…

For numbers I have absolutely no head.  I do not visualize them except in the most rudimentary way… I am unable to remember the multiplication table; and it is notorious in my family that I constantly make mistakes between a ten and a hundred, a hundred and a thousand, so feeble is my grasp upon the value of the symbol ‘0’… My brain was always impenetrable to abstractions… What I have once regarded with curiosity I retain… I remember the atmosphere of things, the feelings they exhale, their specific quality so far as I am able to perceive it… Emotional states, whether painfully poignant or fragile in their evanescent lightness, I remember with unerring accuracy… Concentration lies beyond my grasp.  The right words do not fall into the right places at my bidding.”  Taken together, his words suggest that he might now have identified as neurodivergent.

He also described how he came to be an invalid with tuberculosis: “I caught a bad cold in the lungs… This cold developed into a sharp attack of bronchitis… I had a long and tedious illness; my good friend and doctor, John Beddoe, pronounced that the left lung was now at last seriously and dangerously compromised… I fell ill at Turin.  A night of acute physical disturbance and fever there warned me that I was upon the verge of a serious collapse… The day after I reached home, I was laid prostrate with a violent haemorrhage from the lungs… A great peace came over me as I lay for weeks in bed… It was a blissful interlude in my life of passion… I was maimed and bruised, definitely convicted of actual phthisis and of breaking down of the lung tissue… It was impossible to think of remaining in England… I decided against the sea journey… I knew too much about its inconvenience from invalids who were better able to endure them than I was… I ought here to mention that it had become an article in my creed of social duty that men and women convicted of hereditary disease, phthisis or insanity, ought to refrain from procreation.  Acting upon this principle I separated from my wife with her approval.”

The author specified that his Memoirs should be saved for posterity, and was lucky that his literary executor Horatio Brown followed through, despite playing down his non-normative sexuality in his 1895 biography.  The manuscript was transferred to the London Library following Brown’s death in 1926 on the proviso that publication was to be delayed a further fifty years.  It was opened to scholars only in 1954, more than sixty years after Symonds’ death.

Guest contributions to this series remain welcome.  In the first instance, please contact diversityandinclusion@archives.org.uk

Thumbnail image credit: By en:Carlo Orsi (-1894)