The Education of Laura Bridgman: First Deaf and Blind Person to Learn Language

272 Pages·2001·1.28 MB·English

by  Ernest Freeberg

The Education of Laura Bridgman
Ernest Freeberg
The Education of
Laura Bridgman
First Deaf and Blind Person
to Learn Language
Harvard University Press
Cambridge, Massachusetts, and London, England • 2001
Copyright © 2001 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Freeberg, Ernest.
The education of Laura Bridgman : first deaf and blind person to learn
language / Ernest Freeberg.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 0-674-00589-9
1. Bridgman, Laura Dewey, 1829–1889. 2. Blind-deaf women—United
States—Biography. 3. Blind-deaf women—Education—United States.
I. Title.
HV1624.B7 F74 2001
362.4⬘1⬘092—dc21 00-054219
[B]
Contents
Introduction 1
1 In Quest of His Prize 7
2 Mind over Matter 29
3 In the Public Eye 49
4 Body and Mind 66
5 The Instinct to Be Good 91
6 Punishing Thoughts 109
7 Sensing God 122
8 Crisis 147
9 Disillusionment 173
10 A New Theory of Human Nature 191
11 My Sunny Home 205
12 Legacy 215
Abbreviations 222
Notes 223
Acknowledgments 258
Index 260
To Lauren
The Education of Laura Bridgman
1. Samuel Gridley Howe’s education of Laura Bridgman was con-
sidered by many of his peers to be one of the greatest humanitar-
ian acts of the nineteenth century. (Courtesy of Perkins School for
the Blind, Watertown, Massachusetts)
Introduction
In 1851 a “Great Exhibition” was held in London. There, under
1 the dome of the Crystal Palace, each nation displayed its finest
contributions to nineteenth-century civilization. Many Americans were
mortified to learn, however, that their own offerings to this pageant were a
dismal failure. The American exhibit, which included a model of Niagara
Falls, some false teeth, and a large collection of pasteboard eagles, had
“fallen so far short of expectation as to excite ridicule.” Some citizens of the
young republic were stung by this blow to the nation’s self-esteem.1
The editor of the Boston Evening Transcript offered a solution. There was
one thing his countrymen could send to London which was sure to attract
an even larger crowd than the one lining up for a peek at the “Great Dia-
mond”—one product of “American art” which would surpass “the looms
of England, the delicate fabrics of France, and all the products of Ger-
many.” This great accomplishment of American culture was Laura Bridg-
man, a humble young woman from a farming village in New Hampshire.
In 1837, when Laura was seven years old, she had entered Boston’s Perkins
Institution for the Blind. There, under the guidance of the institution’s di-
rector, Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, she had become the first deaf and blind
person ever to learn to communicate through language.2
No European treasure, this editor proclaimed, could teach the exhibi-
tion’s visitors “a higher or better lesson of humanity” than Laura Bridg-
man. America might not be able to compete with its Old World ancestors
in a “contest of show and parade,” but the republic had its own new and
priceless “art” to offer the world, the transformative power of Christian
philanthropy and enlightened democratic education. Laura Bridgman was
a perfect symbol of her society’s commitment to educate and respect all of
its members, no matter how humble their station.3
In the fourteen years between Laura’s first words and the opening of
London’s Great Exhibition, the story of her accomplishment had been re-
told countless times, in newspapers, literary and theological journals, chil-
2 The Education of Laura Bridgman
dren’s books, and most often in writings and speeches by Dr. Howe him-
self. Fascinated by this tale of intellectual resurrection, tourists flocked to
the Perkins school to take a look for themselves. Each Saturday hundreds
jammed into the school’s exhibition hall to see Laura read, write, and talk
with a manual alphabet. Many clamored for a souvenir—an autograph or
a piece of knitting—made by Laura’s own hand. By mid-century, Howe
boasted that his student had become one of the most famous women in
the world, second only to Queen Victoria.
A century and a half after Laura signed her first words, we can still share
in the curiosity which so many nineteenth-century Americans felt when
they first heard her story. For us, no less than for them, the thought of ex-
periencing such a double handicap evokes mingled emotions of dread,
sympathy, and fascination. Just as they had done for her contemporaries,
Laura’s handicaps force us to reflect about what life might be like sealed off
from all sight and sound. Perhaps even more inconceivable, Laura’s early
years make us wonder about what human consciousness could be like
without language.
Contemplating the depth of Laura’s predicament, we can appreciate the
joy that so many antebellum Americans felt when Howe announced that
the isolation experienced by the deaf and blind could, in large measure, be
overcome. Though the story of Helen Keller has made this discovery com-
monplace today, we may still recover some of the wonder felt by Laura’s
peers when they first learned that a person whose sensory experience of
the world was so radically different from their own was still fully human,
that her mind could be enlivened and her isolation conquered by the mys-
terious power of language.
Though we share this common ground of interest and sympathy with
our nineteenth-century predecessors, still this does not seem a sufficient
explanation for the intense interest which her case aroused in the 1830s
and 40s—the scientific and theological debates, the throngs of tourists,
and the countless newspaper and magazine accounts. Why were these early
Victorians, on both sides of the Atlantic, so fascinated, so moved by her
story? What did her breakthrough into language, and her subsequent edu-
cation, mean to them? This book is an attempt to answer that question
by showing how relevant Howe’s famous experiment with Laura Bridg-
man was to the wider theological, intellectual, and social controversies of
their day.
One plausible explanation for the public’s fascination with Laura Bridg-
man might simply be that the child was a curiosity, a freak of nature who
captured the attention of a society that was hungry for spectacle. Her story