The meanings of blindness in nineteenth-century America.

GEORGE HENRY spent only one day at the Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind, but the experience made a profound impression on him. Midway through a colorful career as a canal builder and bell maker, Henry developed an inflammation of the eyes that gradually destroyed his vision. Desperate to find some new way to support his family, in the late 1830s he went to the school's workshop in Philadelphia hoping to learn brush-making and to get the stock and tools he would need to work at this new trade. Arriving at the institution, Henry found an impressive schoolhouse surrounded by a 'spacious park' where the blind promenaded on wide gravel walks. By chance, that evening the students were hosting their annual Lyceum, open to blind participants only, and they invited Henry to join them. He was amazed to find the school's main hall filled with more than a hundred educated blind people, conversing on 'the general topics of the day' and enjoying themselves singing, dancing and reading to one another from raised-letter books, 'all seeming to be as familiar with things foreign and domestic as if enjoying their organs of vision.'