Representing Madness and Disability

Hall’s first illustration of Miserrimus Dexter, for chapters 17 and 18, shows him in Eustace’s room—a scene from a testimony Valeria is reading of her husband’s trial. The testimony is that of the Procurator-Fiscal, and the illustrated scene is from his viewpoint. Dexter, seated in his wheelchair, is turned toward the viewer with a look of accusation—long-haired and bearded, with a dark brow and finger pointed at himself. The caption, from chapter 17, reads: “Finding there was no moving him by fair means, I took his chair and pulled it away, while Robert Lorrie laid hold of the table and carried it to the other end of the room. The crippled gentleman flew into a furious rage with me for presuming to touch his chair. ‘My chair is Me,’ he said; ‘how dare you lay hands on Me?’” (Collins 138). Eustace, all but obscured by shadow, has his hand up to his face and Robert Lorrie on the far right is shown moving the table. But Dexter, one hand gripping the wheel of his chair, head angled, commands the illustration. It’s a grand moment to first see Collins’s Miserrimus Dexter character—the moment he declares angrily, “My chair is Me.” Although only a brief moment in the Fiscal’s story, Hall’s illustration heightens all that is sensational, unsettling and mysterious about it. The wheelchair evokes sympathy, but Dexter’s Old-Testament-prophet appearance and fierce expression and gesture are at odds with sympathy.

Dexter reappears four images later for chapter 24, “Miserrimus Dexter—First View.” Again, Hall chooses a moment in the story lush with sensation. Valeria and her mother-in-law peer around a doorway to watch Dexter leap from his chair—“a head and body in the air, absolutely deprived of the lower limbs” to land on his hands on the floor (Collins 194). As in the text, the whole scene is very dark, illuminated only from the fireplace. Dexter is a dark, unnaturally shortened figure against the fire, bulky but legless.

For chapter 30, however, Dexter is the brightest, largest figure in the picture, with a shadowy Valeria watching him from the background. This is probably the most dramatic of Hall’s depictions of Dexter and one of the most arresting of all The Law and the Lady’s illustrations. Dexter’s torso takes up most of the frame. His arms are raised and he looks upward, “his face lifted in rapture to some fantastic Heaven of his own making,” his hair and beard waving about his face. A chair lies overturned in the background, but what is especially unnerving is Dexter’s “deformed body poised on the overthrown chair” (Collins 245). It appears to be a terribly uncomfortable position for someone without a lower body, and this pain together with Dexter’s upraised arms, Heaven-ward gaze, and illuminated body calls to mind the figure of Christ. This is not necessarily an association one might get from the text; in this chapter Dexter’s “eyes glittered; his teeth showed themselves viciously under his moustache,” Valeria loses patience with him, and before long “the old madness seized on him again” (Collins 238, 244). Hall’s illustration makes Dexter all the more awesome and terrifying for its religious suggestion.