The Cricket on the Hearth was the most popular of Dickens's Christmas Books, which he wrote both to support his large family and to generate readers' sympathy and charitable giving, often through characters who are poor, suffering, and/or physically disabled.

This fictional portrayal is similar to Dickens's description in American Notes (1842) of the deaf and blind girl Laura Bridgman, whom he saw on a visit to the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. The pathos of Bertha Plummer's love for Tackleton depends on the assumption that blind women do not marry. Non-fiction of the time documents both the fact that blind women did marry, and the severity of Victorian anxiety about hereditary transmission of disabilities. These fears made it both exciting to place blind women in courtship plots and imperative to keep them from achieving marriage.

Dickens's representation of Bertha Plummer as tragically removed from the world of courtship participates in stereotypes about blindness and femininity that linger into the twentieth century. His extension of Bertha's blindness to a cognitive dullness is an example of the sociological phenomenon of "spread," in which one disability is assumed, without evidence, to produce impairment to other physical and mental functions.