o:3213 “A gaunt and shorn-haired invalid in the final stages of consumption”: disability, victorian femininity, and childhood in Barbara Hambly’s The lost boy „Ispijeni invalid kratko ošišane kose, u poslednjem stadijumu sušice“: invaliditet, viktorijanska ženstvenost i detinjstvo u izgubljenom dečaku Barbare Hembli en The subject matter of this paper is the representation of tuberculosis-related disability in Barbara Hambly’s 2008 novelette, The Lost Boy. Relying on the research of social historians, medical professionals, and literary critics ranging from Katherine Ott, Helen Bynum, and Diane Yancey to Alex Tankard and René Dubos, inter alia, the paper examines said depiction against the background of the nineteenth-century medico-cultural treatment of “consumption”, and its implication in Victorian gender ideology and classism. The central argument is that The Lost Boy, as a gaslamp fantasy, depicts the physical and social aspects of Mary Watson’s disabling illness in fact-based, historically accurate detail, yet problematizes Victorian construction of the female “invalid” (some contemporary feminist interpretations of Victorian “invalidism” as empowering, too), thus offering a much more realistic – still poignant – perspective on disability and dying. The Lost Boy, it is argued, achieves this by intersecting Mary Watson’s disability with the complex mythology and reality of Victorian childhood, via Peter Pan who functions both as the character and the bearer of this mythology, as well as the link with Mary’s own, profoundly unhappy, childhood Philologia Mediana, br. 17, 2025, str. 843-856. Barbara Hambly, childhood, consumption, disability, femininity, Peter Pan, Sherlock Holmes 1552099 10.46630/phm.17.2025.55 1552101 1821-3332 2026-03-13T17:17:32.382Z 44 yes 46 Danijela Lj. Petković Filozofski fakultet 21000807 0000-0003-4112-1266 2025 application/pdf str. 843-856. 259992 https://phaidrani.ni.ac.rs/o:3213 no yes 18 2025 70 11 1066537 1066576 92000001 2025 18A13 18A1308 Philologia Mediana 17 843 856 Niš : Filozofski fakultet 2025