Disability and the Victorian Prison: Experiencing Penal Servitude.

This article uncovers the hidden experience of
prisoners with physical disabilities in the Victorian
prison system. This is a largely under-researched
area, hampered by both the limitations of
historical records of prisoners and the lack of
interest in social histories of disability.1 Borsay
suggests that this lack of interest is due partly to
the relatively recent development of social
history, but also that social history has tended to
focus upon the social experiences of everyday life
directed towards the socio-political inequalities of
poverty, class, gender and race.2 Histories of
disability have thus continued to be marginalised
and that ‘social exclusion has been matched by
intellectual exclusion’.3