Blindness and Irish National Identity in the Textual Afterlife of F. W. Burton’s A Blind Girl at a Holy Well

By Kylee-Anne Hingston
Published in Victorian Periodicals Review, 2025.
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Abstract

This paper traces the textual afterlife of Frederic William Burton’s 1840 watercolour A Blind Girl at A Holy Well to consider how periodicals and writers deployed the painting’s sentimental depiction of blindness as part of mid-century debates about Irish culture and nationhood. While the publications all agreed that the painting was emotionally moving and nationally significant, the character of those emotions and the definition of that nation differed according to each periodical’s political and religious aims, suggesting a flexible link in Victorian print culture between blindness and Irishness.