On Dis-abling Regency Comic Illustrated Periodicals

TY - JOUR

T1 - On Dis-abling Regency Comic Illustrated Periodicals

AU - Shannon, Mary L.

PY - 2026/4/22

Y1 - 2026/4/22

N2 - In periodicals of the 1820s and 1830s, the ‘King of the Beggars’ was a disabled man: first William ‘Billy’ Waters, a Black disabled sailor with a wooden prosthetic leg; then Andrew Whiston or ‘Little Jemmy’, a white man born with physical disabilities. This article argues that disability theory and periodicals should be placed into deeper dialogue, through a case study which analyses two known and two newly discovered images of Waters and Whiston from serials and periodicals and wider Regency visual culture. My claim is that periodicals have an important – and hitherto unexamined – part to play in our understanding of the ways in which disability theory is opening up new methods of analysis for a range of cultural forms. What I call ‘dis-abling periodicals’ is a practice and a metaphor; a layered methodology which I propose via a case study of the ‘King of the Beggars’ in Regency comic illustrated periodicals and serials. This article asks what it might mean to ‘dis-able’ periodical studies, and in particular the Regency comic illustrated serials and periodicals which are so invested in the carnivalesque potential of non-normative bodies. I draw upon Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s concept of the ‘extraordinary body’ and Tobin Seibers’s term ‘disability aesthetics’ to argue that not only might Regency comic illustrated periodicals be considered extraordinary bodies themselves, but that they reveal how scholars within and beyond both periodical studies and disability studies might reclaim the carnivalesque mode as having lasting, rather than temporary, radical and ethical effects. Dis-abling periodicals opens up serial texts to new means for interdisciplinary and undisciplined study.

AB - In periodicals of the 1820s and 1830s, the ‘King of the Beggars’ was a disabled man: first William ‘Billy’ Waters, a Black disabled sailor with a wooden prosthetic leg; then Andrew Whiston or ‘Little Jemmy’, a white man born with physical disabilities. This article argues that disability theory and periodicals should be placed into deeper dialogue, through a case study which analyses two known and two newly discovered images of Waters and Whiston from serials and periodicals and wider Regency visual culture. My claim is that periodicals have an important – and hitherto unexamined – part to play in our understanding of the ways in which disability theory is opening up new methods of analysis for a range of cultural forms. What I call ‘dis-abling periodicals’ is a practice and a metaphor; a layered methodology which I propose via a case study of the ‘King of the Beggars’ in Regency comic illustrated periodicals and serials. This article asks what it might mean to ‘dis-able’ periodical studies, and in particular the Regency comic illustrated serials and periodicals which are so invested in the carnivalesque potential of non-normative bodies. I draw upon Rosemarie Garland Thompson’s concept of the ‘extraordinary body’ and Tobin Seibers’s term ‘disability aesthetics’ to argue that not only might Regency comic illustrated periodicals be considered extraordinary bodies themselves, but that they reveal how scholars within and beyond both periodical studies and disability studies might reclaim the carnivalesque mode as having lasting, rather than temporary, radical and ethical effects. Dis-abling periodicals opens up serial texts to new means for interdisciplinary and undisciplined study.

M3 - Article

SN - 0709-4698

JO - VICTORIAN PERIODICALS REVIEW

JF - VICTORIAN PERIODICALS REVIEW

ER -