Tangible Burns

Abstract

The publication in 1786 of both Robert Burns’s Poems, Chiefly in the Scottish Dialect and Valentin Haüy’s Essai sur l’education des enfans-aveugles, the world’s first book printed in raised letters to be read by the hands, demonstrates the diversity of the eighteenth-century printed book. While the poems and songs of the Scottish Bard disrupted the hegemony of standard printed English, their oral-auditory effects would not be made accessible to blind and low-vision readers in Britain for one hundred years, only after suspicions of the revolutionary-era French technology had lapsed and the Protestant control of printing and education for the blind had ceased. I investigate the tactual and hermeneutic discipline by which Scottish reformers sought to assimilate the blind to an Anglophone community represented by the common Roman alphabet, and the passing of this physically, imaginatively, and linguistically restrictive regime by the embossing of Burns’s poems in the more tangible Braille code.