Jane Groom and the Deaf Colonists: Empire, Emigration and the Agency of Disabled People in the late Nineteenth-Century British Empire

This article explores an emigration scheme, envisioned by Jane Groom, a deaf woman, whereby deaf working-class people from the East End of London would be relocated to Manitoba. During the 1880s and 1890s about fifty families emigrated under Groom’s auspices. This article aims to do three things. Firstly, recovering the life of Jane Groom enables us to think about disabled activism and agency in a global arena: her actions were widely discussed both in the British Empire and in the US, and these were actions that she made as a disabled person because, not in spite, of her disability. Jane Groom’s life is an example of advocacy and activism in a period when we have few details about disabled figures, female ones still less. It also reveals a thriving deaf community which merits attention as a distinct social group. Secondly, it allows us to think about the way in which disability connected with wider concerns: with, for example, the philanthropic milieu in late Victorian London, nineteenth-century anxieties about the body, and issues of emigration and settlement. Thirdly, it helps us to think about the relationships between different kinds of colonising practice within the British Empire.