Click here for two pre-recorded talks marking UK Disability History Month, 18 November – 20 December 2020.

1. Harriet Martineau: Living with deafness, in her own words

Jenny Childs, Archivist at the Cadbury Research Library, reads extracts from her favourite archive collection, that of nineteenth-century author Harriet Martineau. Harriet started losing her hearing at the age of 12, and in later life used an ear trumpet. This is the first of two talks from Library Services about Harriet Martineau as part of the University of Birmingham’s programme of events for UK Disability History Month.

2. Twenty-first century reflections on Harriet Martineau’s “Letter to the Deaf”

The second talk about Harriet Martineau by Helen Barrell is part of the University of Birmingham’s programme of events for Disability History Month. Helen looks through Harriet Martineau’s “Letter to the Deaf” (1834) and finds some surprising parallels with her own experience of hearing loss nearly 200 years later.