This book takes an exciting new approach to characterisation and plot in the Victorian novel, examining the vital narrative work performed by disabled characters, and demonstrating how attention to disability sheds new light on these texts' arrangement and use of bodies. It also argues that the representation of the disabled body shaped and signalled different generic traditions in nineteenth-century fiction. This wide-ranging study offers new readings of major authors including Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, George Eliot and Henry James, as well as exploring lesser known writers such as Charlotte M. Yonge and Dinah Mulock Craik.