All The Worlds A Stage: Identity and Performance of Disability in Nineteenth-Century Britain

This thesis explores invalidism in nineteenth-century Britain as a performative identity, shaped by personal agency, social expectations, and spatial contexts such as the sick room, health resorts, and encounters with welfare systems like the Poor Law. Drawing on an interdisciplinary approach that bridges history and anthropology, it examines how individuals strategically navigated medical authority, societal norms, and lived experiences through performances of invalidism. While existing scholarship has primarily framed invalidism in terms of social regulation, medical discourse, or cultural representation, this study argues that invalidism was also a dynamic and fluid process of self-fashioning, through which individuals exercised agency in constructing their identities. Using sources such as letters, medical texts, domestic advice literature, and Poor Law correspondence, this research considers how invalids actively shaped their public and private identities. It explores how impressions, whether in the home, in institutional settings, or in written appeals for relief, were carefully curated to establish legitimacy and elicit particular responses from family, medical professionals, and state authorities. The decoration of sick rooms reflected shifting ideas of care, convalescence, and control, while travel to health resorts offered opportunities to challenge medical authority and redefine illness on one's own terms. At the same time, interactions with the Poor Law required invalids to adopt specific rhetorical and behavioural performances to secure aid, reinforcing the idea that all aspects of invalidism were shaped by audience and expectation. By examining the role of performance and visibility in shaping disabled identities, this study reframes invalidism as an active negotiation rather than a fixed medical or social category. Whether within the home, at a resort, or before Poor Law officials, invalids were not simply passive patients but strategic actors on a carefully constructed stage, adapting their performances based on social context and necessity. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the growing field of disability history by tracing the historical roots of disability identity and highlighting the complex ways in which individuals engaged with authority, space, and social perception in the nineteenth-century.