The University of Manchester Library’s Special Collections are home to a diverse and internationally significant collection of books, manuscripts, artworks, objects and records. One such significant collection is the Library for Deaf Education (also known as the Deaf Education Collection), which contains over 11,000 books and periodicals ranging in date from the 16th to the 20th centuries.
Although the primary focus of the collection is works dealing with the various systems of teaching Deaf people and the history of Deaf education, it also contains material on the broader societal attitudes towards Deafness and Deaf people, language and linguistics, and the medical treatment of Deafness.
The collection was established at the University Library in 1919 to support the University’s newly created Department for Education of the Deaf. It was funded by an initial grant from the Carnegie United Kingdom Trust and three years later the remainder of the monies were used to purchase the Arnold Library from the National College of Teachers of the Deaf.
In 1932 the celebrated and influential teacher of the Deaf, Abraham Farrar, who was himself Deaf, donated his valuable collection of books relating to Deafness to the Library. It is through this donation that many of the collection’s oldest and rarest volumes came into the Library’s possession. Farrar also bequeathed a further £1,000 in his will so that additional works could be purchased after his death.
The collection as a whole comprises over 11,000 items and includes works dealing with the various systems of teaching Deaf people, lip-reading, speech therapy, the psychology of speech and hearing, phonetics, acoustics, and the anatomy, physiology and diseases of the ear, as well as sociological, historical and other works concerning Deafness.
The bulk of the collection, comprising modern monographs and periodicals, is held at the Main University Library. The Farrar Collection, which also includes early print and rare material removed from the Deaf Education Collection or acquired since 1932, can be found at the John Rylands Research Institute and Library.
The collection includes Reduction de las letras (Reduction of Letters) by Juan Pablo Bonet, (Madrid: Francisco Abarca de Angulo, 1620). Bonet’s work is acknowledged as being one of the earliest descriptions of a systematic form of education for Deaf people and contains the first modern treatment of phonetics as a subject.
Bonet was a secretary in the household of Juan Fernández de Velasco, the constable of Castile in Spain, whose son Luis became deaf after a childhood illness. It is likely that he observed the work of Manuel Ramirez de Carrion, Luis’s tutor, who in turn employed the methods developed by Pedro Ponce de Leon, the Benedictine monk and teacher who developed a sign language based on the gestures used by monks and nuns in situations when speech was forbidden, such as mealtimes.
In addition to texts dealing with the theory, methods and content of Deaf education, there are also works that speak to the experience of Deaf children and young people within the institutions set up ostensibly on their behalf. One such book is British butterflies, their distinctions, generic and specific (Birmingham: Thomas Knott Jnr, 1828) by Charles Baker.
Baker was a keen entomologist who worked as a teacher at what was then known as the Institution for the Deaf and Dumb at Edgbaston. The book contains 33 exceptional illustrations of the various species, reproduced in lithographs, all of which were drawn by children at the Institution. Sadly the names of the student illustrators have not been recorded but the work is an example of how the pupils’ skills and enthusiasm enabled them participate in useful research and contribute something of considerable value to the wider community.
British butterflies has been fully digitized and is available to view on Luna.
The Deaf Education Collection is not the only collection of materials relating to Deafness and the experience of Deaf people. We are also fortunate enough to hold the archive of Richard Goulden, a librarian and archivist who was involved with several organizations concerned with the rights, welfare, and social life of Deaf people from the 1950s onwards.
The collection constitutes an important resource for the history of Deaf activism in this period, and covers a wide range of social, educational, and political topics, including the promotion of sign language in public life and attempts to improve employment and cultural opportunities for the Deaf. There is an excellent blog describing the collection and its contents here. The Library also holds the papers of Henry Baker (1698-1774), naturalist, poet, and pioneer of speech therapy and education for Deaf people.
Items from the Deaf Education and Richard Goulden Collections are currently on display in We Have Always Been Here exhibition at the John Rylands Library.
Steven Hartshorne
Curator (STM rare books)
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