Purchase, use and adaptation: interpreting ‘patented’ aids to the deaf in Victorian Britain

Despite the enormous number and variety of hearing devices sold in the nineteenth century, and currently displayed in a variety of museums across the UK and the United States, there has hitherto been no commercially focused study of the business of selling and making them. While this might be because remaining company records are very sparse, another key issue is that such technologies, unlike artificial limbs, do not fall obviously in the domain of disability, nor medicine or communications. Hence they have until recently been under-represented in the historical studies of the Victorian period. We focus on the diverse lived experiences of hard-of-hearing people who did not necessarily identify as (partially) ‘deaf’ but who were nevertheless treated normatively by hearing contemporaries as if relatively deaf. By engaging with their experience of hearing aids to either pass as ‘hearing’ or at least be visibly ‘hard-of-hearing’, our study complements the recent work of Jaipreet Virdi-Dhesi on medical encounters with deaf subjects; of Jennifer Esmail on Deaf sign-language culture, and of Mara Mills on USA hearing technologies in the twentieth century.