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This article presents information on some sources for the history of the education of handicapped children in England and Wales. The year 1960 saw the bicentenary of the opening of the first special school for handicapped children, and even before the first school isolated and often successful attempts at educating individual handicapped children had taken place. Since the school established in Edinburgh, Scotland by Thomas Braidwood in 1760 was for deaf children, it is appropriate that the first of the handicaps to be dealt with historically was deafness. Thomas Arnold, a Congregational Minister turned teacher of the deaf, published in 1881 "The Method of Teaching the Deaf and Dumb Speech, Lip-Reading, and Language." Within a decade it was republished by the newly-founded College of Teachers of the Deaf and Dumb under the title Education of Deaf-Mutes: A Manual for Teachers. Of the books on blind children, the best is J.M. Ritchie, Concerning the Blind, although this has its faults. Ritchie himself describes some of them. He writes in the preface that the book was twenty years in the making and written in disconnected snatches it cannot fail to be patchy and uneven.