“True” Manliness and Adoptive Fatherhood in Dinah Mulock Craik’s A Noble Life (1866)

In A Noble Life (1866), Dinah Mulock Craik conforms to mid-nineteenth-century depictions of men with disabilities as “unmarriageable” yet also explores the ways in which disabled male characters can reclaim some of the power that their exclusion from the marriage plot costs them. Narratives depicting male characters with disabilities as adoptive fathers not only partially alleviate eugenic fears about the transmission of disability but also enable these characters to qualify for masculine status. The similarities that men with disabilities and adopted displaced children shared in the Victorian imagination have not been closely examined. Like men with disabilities, displaced children were simultaneously considered objects of pity as well as possible social threats, likely to perpetuate the immorality thought to have been inherited from their indigent or criminal parents. Yet, ironically, in A Noble Life , Craik’s pairing of two eugenically suspect groups becomes integral to how the author attempts to alleviate concerns about genetically transmitted “taints.” Adoption is depicted not only as a way to evade the perceived adverse reproductive potential of the disabled male protagonist but also as a means of saving the adopted child from their inherited “moral depravity.”