Lofty Souls and Miserable Carcases: Walter Scott's Dwarfs

From William Hay in 1754 to Julie Rotta in 2005, people perceived as dwarfs have deprecated how cultural preconceptions have marked them as Other. Recent scholarship in disability studies has emphasised the role of representation in the stigmatisation and marginalisation of dwarfs. This essay argues that Walter Scott, even as he deploys traditional tropes about how normates respond to dwarfs, individualises his dwarf characters – Elshie in The Black Dwarf (1816), Hudson in Peveril of the Peak (1822), and Nectabanus in The Talisman (1825) – in a historically informed project to humanise his dwarf characters. Scott's dwarfs simultaneously enact and resist the stereotypes forced on them by cultural perceptions and prejudices.