Publisher's Synopsis
Excerpt from Household Words, Vol. 7: August, 1853
The popular notion of an idiot would probably be found to vary very little, essen tially, in different places, however modified by local circumstances. To the traveller in France or Italy, the name recalls a vacant creature all in rags gibbering and blinking in the sun with a distorted face, and led about as a possession and as stock - in-trade by some phenomenon of filth and ugliness in the form of an old woman. In association with Switz erland, it suggests a horrible being, seated at a chalet door (perhaps possessing sense enough to lead the way to a neighbouring waterfall), of stunted and misshapen form, with a pendulous excrescence dangling from his throat, like a great skin bag With a weight in it. In the highlands of Scotland, or on the roads of Ireland, he becomes a red-haired Celt, rather more unreasonable than usual, plunging ferociously out of a mud cabin, and casting stones at the stranger's head. As a remembrance of our own childhood in an English country town, he is a shambling knock - kneed man who was never achild, with an eager utterance of discordant sounds which he seemed to keep in his protruding forehead, a tongue too large for his mouth, and a dreadful pair of hands that wanted to ramble over everything - our own face ia cluded. But in all these cases the main idea of an idiot would be of a hopeless, irreclaim able, unimprovable being. And if he be further recalled as under restraint in a workhouse or lunatic asylum, he will still come upon the imagination as wallowing in the lowest depths of degradation and neglect: a miserable monster, whom nobody may put to death, but whom every one must wish dead, and be distressed to see alive.
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