Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman (December 21, 1829 – May 24, 1889)
is known as the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education
in the English language, fifty years before the more famous Helen Keller. Bridgman was left deaf-blind at the age of two
after contracting scarlet fever. She was educated at the Perkins Institution
for the Blind where, under the direction of Samuel Gridley Howe, she learned to
read and communicate using Braille and the manual alphabet developed by
Charles-Michel de l'Épée.
For several years, Bridgman gained celebrity status when
Charles Dickens met her during his 1842 American tour and wrote about her
accomplishments in his American Notes. Her fame was short-lived, however, and
she spent the remainder of her life in relative obscurity, most of it at the
Perkins Institute, where she passed her time sewing and reading books in
Braille.
Early years
Laura Bridgman was born in Hanover, New Hampshire, the third
daughter of Daniel Bridgman, a Baptist farmer, and his wife Harmony, daughter
of Cushman Downer, and granddaughter of Joseph Downer, one of the five first
settlers (1761) of Thetford, Vermont. Laura was a delicate infant, small and
rickety, and suffered from convulsions until she was eighteen months old. Her family was struck with scarlet fever when
Laura was two years old. The illness killed her two older sisters and left her
deaf, blind, and without a sense of smell or taste. Though she gradually recovered her health, she
remained deaf and blind. Laura's mother kept her well-groomed and showed the
child affection, but Laura received little attention from the rest of her
family, including her father who, on occasion, tried to "frighten her into
obedience" by stamping his foot hard on the floor to startle her with the
vibrations. Her closest friend was a
kind, mentally impaired hired man of the Bridgmans, Asa Tenney, whom she
credited with making her childhood happy. Tenney had some kind of expressive
language disorder himself, and communicated with Laura in signs. He knew Native
Americans who used a sign language (probably Abenaki using Plains Indian Sign
Language), and had begun to teach Laura to express herself using these signs
when she was sent away to school.
Education at the
Perkins School
In 1837, James Barrett of Dartmouth College saw Bridgman and
mentioned her case to Dr. Reuben Mussey, the head of the medical department.
Mussey visited the Bridgman home and found Laura an affectionate and
intelligent girl who, despite her severe disabilities, could perform basic
household tasks such as sewing and setting the table. Mussey sent an account to Dr. Samuel Gridley
Howe, the director of the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, who was
eager to educate the young Bridgman, who entered the school on October 12,
1837, two months before her eighth birthday. Bridgman was frightened and homesick at first,
but she soon formed an attachment to the house matron, Miss Lydia Hall Drew
(1815-1887), who was also her first instructor at the school.
Howe had recently met Julia Brace, a deaf-blind resident at
the American School for the Deaf who communicated by using a series of
primitive signs; however, her instructors had failed to teach her more advanced
methods of communication, such as adapted forms of tactile sign. Howe developed a plan to teach Bridgman to
read and write through tactile means — something that had not been attempted
previously, to his knowledge. Howe's plan was based on the theories of the
French philosopher Denis Diderot, who believed the sense of touch could develop
its "own medium of symbolic language." At first he and his assistant, Lydia Hall
Drew, used words printed with raised letters, and later they progressed to
using a manual alphabet expressed through mapping the English alphabet on to
points and tracing motions on the palm of the hand. Eventually she received a broad education.
Howe taught Bridgman words before the individual letters.
His first experiment consisted of pasting paper labels upon several common
articles such as keys, spoons, and knives, with the names of the articles
printed in raised letters. He then had her feel the labels by themselves, and
she learned to associate the raised letters with the articles to which they
referred. Eventually, she could find the right label for each object from a
mixed heap. The next stage was to give her the individual letters and teach her
to combine them to spell the words she knew. Gradually, in this way, she
learned the alphabet and the ten digits. The whole process showed that she had
human intelligence, which only required stimulation, and her own interest in
learning became keener as she progressed.
Howe devoted himself to Bridgman's education and was
rewarded with increasing success. On July 24, 1839 she first wrote her own name
legibly. On June 20, 1840 she had her first arithmetic
lesson, with the aid of a metallic case perforated with square holes, square
types being used; and in nineteen days she could add a column of figures
amounting to thirty. She was in good health and happy, and was treated as a
daughter by Howe. She lived in the director's apartment with Howe and his
sister, Jeannette Howe, until Howe married Julia Ward in 1843. Her case already began to interest the public,
and others were brought to Dr. Howe for treatment.
Fame
From the beginning of his work with Bridgman, Howe sent
accounts of her progress and his teaching strategies to European journals, which
were "read by thousands." In
January 1842 Charles Dickens visited the Institution, and afterwards wrote
enthusiastically in his American Notes of Howe's success with Bridgman. Dickens
quotes Howe's account of Bridgman's education:
Her social feelings,
and her affections, are very strong; and when she is sitting at work, or by the
side of one of her little friends, she will break off from her task every few
moments, to hug and kiss them with an earnestness and warmth that is touching
to behold. When left alone, she occupies and apparently amuses herself, and
seems quite content; and so strong seems to be the natural tendency of thought
to put on the garb of language, which she often soliloquizes in the finger
language, slow and tedious as it is. But it is only when alone, that she is
quiet; for if she becomes sensible of the presence of any one near her, she is
restless until she can sit close beside them; hold their hand and converse with
them by sign.
Following the publication of Dickens's book, Bridgman became
world famous. Thousands of people visited her at the Perkins School,
"asked for keepsakes, followed her in the newspapers, and read paeans to
her in evangelical journals and ladies' magazines". On Saturdays, the school was open to the
public. Crowds gathered to watch Laura read and point out locations on a map
with raised letters. Laura became "very much excited" by these
events, but her teachers were concerned because Laura knew she drew more attention
than the other students. In the late
1840s, Howe said that "perhaps there are not three living women whose
names are more widely known than Laura Bridgman's; and there is not one who has
excited so much sympathy and interest."
Teenage years
Bridgman suffered a series of emotional losses during her
teenage years and early twenties. In 1841, Lydia Drew, Laura's first teacher at
the Perkins School, left her teaching position to marry. Drew was replaced by
Mary Swift, an excellent teacher, though not as openly affectionate with
Bridgman as Drew had been. Swift also
attempted to instill Bridgman with her Congregationalist religious views in
direct defiance of Howe's New England Unitarianism. An even more devastating loss occurred in May
1843 when Howe married Julia Ward, a woman 18 years his junior. Howe had
treated Bridgman as a daughter, and she had loved him as a father. She was
depressed by the lengthy separation following the marriage—the Howes' honeymoon
in Europe lasted 15 months—and worried that Howe would no longer love her now
that he had taken a wife. Bridgman's
fears were realized when the couple returned from their honeymoon in August
1844. Howe had lost interest in Bridgman, though he had made provisions for her
to have a home at the school for life. Bridgman never developed a close relationship
with Julia Ward Howe who, according to her daughters, had a "physical
distaste for the abnormal and defective" and a "natural shrinking
from the blind and other defectives with whom she was often thrown" following
her marriage to Howe. Mary Swift left
the school in May, 1845 to get married, leaving Bridgman without any
instruction for several months. Bridgman's next teacher, Sarah Wight,
compensated for many of the losses Bridgman had suffered in recent years. A
gentle, religious, outwardly timid young woman to whom Bridgman was immediately
drawn, Wight taught Bridgman the traditional academic subjects — mathematics,
history, geography — but she also set aside plenty of time for the two of them
to engage in "finger" conversations, one of the activities Bridgman
liked best. While Wight cared deeply for Bridgman, she
also felt that, because of her "celebrity" status, the girl enjoyed
privileges denied to other students. Bridgman had a private room, and she rarely
mingled with the other students unless they paid her "particular
attention". Wight also saw that
Bridgman could be willful and irritable, behavior characteristics that required
discipline. Bridgman could also be
emotionally demanding of her young teacher, becoming peevish and short-tempered
whenever Wight wanted some time alone.
In 1845 at the age of sixteen, Bridgman developed anorexia,
her weight falling from 113 pounds to 79 pounds. Howe rightly surmised that
Bridgman was "reacting to the many abandonments and losses she had
endured," and he proposed that she pay a visit to her family, with whom
she had had little contact in recent years. Accompanied by Wight, Bridgman
traveled to her family's New Hampshire farm in June 1846. She particularly
enjoyed being reunited with her mother, sisters Mary and Collina, and brother
Addison, who was able to communicate with Bridgman in sign language. She was
also reunited with her old friend Asa Tenney, who visited her frequently during
her two-week stay. Though Bridgman
resumed eating, her often obstinate and temperamental behavior persisted; this
troubled Wight, who understood that few people would endure such conduct in a
grown woman.
Wight left the Perkins School in November 1850, having spent
five years as Bridgman's teacher and companion. Wight was engaged to a Unitarian missionary,
George Bond, and following their marriage, the couple planned to travel to the
Sandwich Islands (Hawaii). Bridgman
begged to go along as Wight's housekeeper but, ultimately, Wight went without
her, leaving Bridgman with no friend, companion or teacher to console her.
Religion
With no outward sources of consolation, Bridgman turned inward
to prayer and meditation. She eventually
embraced her family's Baptist religion and was baptized in July 1852. She began occasionally to write devotional
poems, of which "Holy Home" is the best known:
Heaven is holy home.
Holy Home is from ever
Lasting to everlasting.
Holy home is Summery.
Holy home shall endure
Forever...
Bridgman feared death, but she saw heaven as a "place
where these fears might at last be laid to rest".
Adult years
Bridgman's formal education ended when Wight left the school
in 1850. She returned to New Hampshire
and, for a time, she enjoyed being reunited with her family; however, she was
homesick for the school and her anorexia eventually returned. When
Howe learned that Bridgman's health was rapidly deteriorating, he sent a
teacher, Mary Paddock, to the Bridgman home to take his former student back to
the school. Bridgman's health gradually
improved, and though she received occasional visitors, she was now largely
forgotten by the public. She occupied
herself by writing letters to her mother and a few friends — Bridgman kept in
touch with both Mary Swift and Sarah Wight — sewing, reading the Bible in
braille, and keeping her room fastidiously clean. She earned a little spending
money, about $100 a year, from selling her crocheted doilies, purses, and
embroidered handkerchiefs, but she was primarily dependent upon the school to
supply her with room and board.
Bridgman lived a relatively quiet and uneventful life at the
school. She never became a full-time teacher, but she did assist the young
blind girls in their sewing classes where she was considered a "patient
but demanding instructor." In 1872,
several cottages (each under a matron) for the blind girls were added to the
Perkins campus, and Bridgman was moved from the larger house of the Institution
into one of them. Bridgman, always eager for someone to communicate with in
sign language, befriended Anne Sullivan when they shared a cottage in the early
1880s. The death of Howe in 1876 was a
great grief to her; but before he died he had made arrangements ensuring her
financial security at the school for the rest of her life. In 1887 her jubilee
was celebrated there, but in 1889 she was taken ill, and she died on May 24.
She was buried at Dana Cemetery in Hanover, New Hampshire near her family's
farm.
Legacy
Bridgman became famous in her youth as an example of the
education of a deaf-blind person. Helen Keller's mother, Kate Keller, read
Dickens's account in American Notes and was inspired to seek advice which led
to her hiring a teacher and former pupil of the same school, Anne Sullivan.
Sullivan learned the manual alphabet at the Perkins Institution which she took
back to Helen, along with a doll wearing clothing that Bridgman had sewn
herself.
Bridgman's case is mentioned in La Symphonie Pastorale by André Gide.
A Liberty ship was named after her.
In 2014, a fictional account of the life of Bridgman, What Is Visible by Kimberly Elkins, was
published.
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