Self-Propelled Wheel-Chair

History

By the mid-nineteenth century, self-propelled wheelchairs were available to users, though they were often expensive. Unlike the three-wheeled Bath chairs, which were available earlier and usually pushed by an attendant, these devices were often lighter and sometimes featured wicker chairs. They were primarily designed to be used indoors. Arguably the most famous wheelchair user that appears in nineteenth-century literature is the highly eccentric Miserrimus Dexter from Wilkie Collins’s 1875 novel The Law and the Lady. For more on wheelchairs in the nineteenth century, see Karen Bourrier’s chapter “Mobility Impairments: From the Bath Chair to the Wheelchair” in A Cultural History of Disability in the Long Nineteenth Century, edited by Joyce L. Huff and Martha Stoddard Holmes (Bloomsbury, 2020).