A picture presented to all our Senses: Vision in Gulliver’s Travels (1726) and Michael Clancy’s Memoirs (1750)

Sir, Some Friend of mine lent me a Comedy, which I am told was written by you: I read it carefully, and with much Pleasure, on Account both of the Characters,

and the Moral. I have no Interest with the People of the Play-house, else I should gladly recommend it to them.

Writing from Deanry House on Christmas Day, 1737, Jonathan Swift (1667–1745) addresses Michael Clancy (c. 1704–76), a physician and author, whose play The Sharper has recently crossed his desk in manuscript form. Swift tells Clancy that he has read it ‘carefully, and with much Pleasure’ but that he does not know ‘who lent me the Play, [and] if it came from you, I will send it back tomorrow’. Taking this letter as an ingress into eighteenth-century thoughts on vision loss, this article firstly offers a disability-studies approach to Gulliver’s Travels which is importantly grounded in a possibly fleetingconnection that Swift actually had to the writing of a now largely forgotten mid-century blind author. Therefore, the reading of visual impairment in

Gulliver’s Travels that follows tracks the influence of Swift’s satiric vision upon Clancy, a lesser-known mid-eighteenth-century author. Secondly, this

article explores how Clancy’s life writing resonates with Swift's presentation of sight loss as existential threat in his satire. Across readings of Swift’s satiric travelogue and poetry and Clancy’s life writing, this article demonstrates how in the writing of his Memoirs as a blind author, Clancy had occasion, at times, to recast Swift’s view of blindness as an existential threat in ways that quietly resisted the ableism of works like Gulliver’s Travels.