Justice  /  Comparison

Inspiration Porn and Depictions of Impairment in Early America

How people understood disabilities in the 18th century, in contrast to contemporary interpretation, requires historical nuance.

In 1775, seventeen-year-old Daniel George, a ‘student in astronomy’ from Massachusetts, composed an almanac. In an eclectic fourteen pages of printed text and tables, he recorded the rising and setting of the sun and the moon, the location of the planets, the tides, the weather, Quaker Meetings, ‘Remarkable Days’, ‘Liberty Days’, and poetry. He also included ‘for the use of the gentlemen officers and soldiers in the American army’ a narrative of the Battle of Concord, recently fought at the outset of the Revolutionary War. George had studied mathematics and astronomy extensively, and the almanac was the result of painstaking calculations throughout the year. In August 1775, George and his father visited the Reverend Samuel Williams, who was known for his interest in astronomy. Seeing the quality of George’s work, Williams forwarded the almanac to Salem printer Ezekiel Russell, including a letter of recommendation. 

A shrewd marketer, Russell published George’s almanac in 1776 under the title: ‘George’s Cambridge Almanack … By Daniel George, a Student in Astronomy at Haverhill, in the County of Essex, who is now in the Seventeenth Year of his Age, and has been a Cripple from his Infancy.’ He also printed Reverend Williams’ endorsement, which included further details of George’s impairment. Williams began by noting his initial impression of George as ‘a singular object of pity and compassion’. However, the Reverend noted, ‘with all the disorders of body under which he labors, his mind does not seem to have been at all affected’. Williams went on to recommend the almanac’s publication and praised George’s intricate calculations as ‘equal to other compositions of that kind’ and indicative of ‘rising genius’, despite his ‘singular situation’. He closed his appeal: ‘…if you favour the productions of a Cripple, in the seventeenth year of his age, it must not only give pleasure to him, but to the benevolent and humane who wish success to the ingenious and comfort to the wretched.’

Russell’s choice of title and Reverend Williams’ short narrative places George’s achievement firmly in the context of his impairment, portraying his ‘genius’ as particularly impressive considering his ‘uncommon disadvantages’. Read outside of its eighteenth-century context, this framing of the almanac as the unlikely but remarkable feat of a young man with a physical impairment reads suspiciously like what we would now call ‘inspiration porn’.