Laura Bridgman
Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman was the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, forty-five years before the more famous Helen Keller; Bridgman’s friend Anne Sullivan became Helen Keller's aide. 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
Bridgman was born in Hanover, New Hampshire. She was the third daughter of Daniel Bridgman, a Baptist farmer, and his wife Harmony, one of the five first settlers of Thetford, Vermont. Laura was a delicate infant, small and rickety, who often had 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 senses 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, 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. Bridgman 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, 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. Her own interest in learning became keener as she progressed in her studies.
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 had already begun 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 he wrote enthusiastically in his American Notes of Howe's success with Bridgman. Dickens quotes Howe's account of Bridgman's education: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. 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.