Imperial lives: confronting the legacies of empire, disability and the Victorians

This chapter explores the life histories of three deaf men and women from nineteenth-century Britain : John Kitto (1804-1854), George Tait (1828-1904) and Jane Groom (1839-1918), who all can, in some ways, be said to have lived imperial lives. John Kitto, from Plymouth, started work as a missionary in Malta, and later travelled to Baghdad where he wrote several texts in the ‘Orientalist’ vein. George Tait, born in the Scottish Highlands, became a Canadian settler, and set up the first school for the deaf in Halifax, Nova Scotia. And Jane Groom, originally from Shropshire, tried to establish a ‘deaf colony’ in Canada using the 1872 Homestead Act, which directly dispossessed First Nations people to secure land. As the lives of these three individuals intersected with the workings of the British Empire, this gives us an opportunity to consider the intersection between disability and colonialism more broadly.