“Correcting Arthur Munby: Philanthropy and Disfigurement in Victorian England” focuses on the life and works of Arthur Munby, a poet and amateur social scientist whose literary representations of working-class women and efforts on behalf of disfigured women have been overlooked in Victorian scholarship. This project examines Munby's journals and poetry for evidence of the extent to which he fought institutional and symbolic oppression on behalf of working-class and disfigured people on three critical fronts: literary representation, the right to employment, and access to healthcare. I demonstrate the extent to which Munby combated oppression at the individual level of personal action, the symbolic level of representation, and the institutional levels of access and inclusion.
In Chapter One I examine Munby's fifty-year writing career that. I argue that his literary accounts of working women are important in their attempt to change the symbolic level of working-class oppression in Victorian England. Instead of presenting pastoral images of country folk that sanitize the working-class, I argue that through his poetry, Munby sought to accurately represent the dialect, labor, and pride of working-class women.
In Chapter Two I argue that Munby's commitment to working-class women extended into the realm of employment and medical treatment through his relationship with a severely disfigured woman, Harriet Langdon. I argue that for Victorians, disfigurement was collapsed within the frame of disability, the two conditions conflated to such an extent that there was little appreciable difference. I argue that Munby's philanthropy was based on benevolence rather than exclusively on abjection.
In Chapter Three I explore the lack of access to hospital care for the disfigured and Munby's successful fight to help provide that access. I critique the Royal Hospital for Incurables where Langdon became a pensioner as fundamentally embedded in classist and ableist practices. I argue that while Munby provided immense aid to Langdon, he was deeply complicit in the negative rendering of the disfigured as unhappy, pathetic, and depressive individuals who can never marry or integrate fully into the social fabric of Victorian life. I use the journals as literary texts and argue that Munby is an unreliable narrator, unwittingly revealing his own prejudgments of disfigured life more than the reality of what it meant to live within a disfigured identity. I read against Munby's
version of Langdon to reveal her subjectivity, normalcy, and capacity for joy.