Beschreibung
Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman, The Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl. By Mary Swift Lamson. Boston: New England Publishing Company, 1878. First Edition, 373 pp, 7.75 x 5.25", 8vo. In fair condition. Green decorated cloth boards scuffed at edges & worn/bumped at corners. General shelf-wear to boards and spine; gilt lettering dulled but still presents well. Head and tail of spine collapsed. Two newspaper articles on Bridgman pasted onto front paste-down. Front fly-leaf lacking. Foxing to tissue guards, especially frontispiece's guard. Title page exhibits off-setting from frontispiece. Toning throughout text-block, with some instances of age-staining. Pressed leaf and off-setting found on pages 256-7. Pages 330-1 also exhibit off-setting from a previous laid-in item. Binding intact. Please see photos. Laura Dewey Lynn Bridgman (1829-1889) was the first deaf-blind American child to gain a significant education in the English language, twenty years before the more famous Helen Keller. Laura's friend, Anna Sullivan, would eventually become Helen Keller's aide and teacher. Bridgman was left deaf-blind at the age of two after contracting scarlet fever. She was educated at Perkins Institution for the Blind where, under the direction of Samuel Gridley Howe (1801-1876), she learned how to read and communicate using Braille and the manual alphabet developed by Charles-Michel de l'Épée (1712-1789). Form the beginning of his work with Bridgman, Howe sets accounts of her progress and his teaching strategies to European journals, which were supposedly read by thousands. For several of her teenage years, Bridgman gained celebrity status when Charles Dickens met her during his 1842 American tour and wrote about her accomplishments in his American Notes. Dickens wrote: "Her face was radiant with intelligence and pleasure. Her hair, braided by her own hands, was bound about a head, whose intellectual capacity and development were beautifully expressed in its graceful outline." Bridgman lived a relatively quiet and uneventful adult life at the Perkins 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 were added for the blind girls were added to the Perkins campus, and Bridgman was moved from the larger house of the Institution to a cottage. Bridgman befriended Anne Sullivan (1866-1936) when they shared a cottage together in the early 1880s. Helen Keller's mother, Kate Keller (1859-1921), read Dickens's account of Bridgman 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. Incredibly interesting first addition. Gift quality. RAREA1878PROQ 03/24 - HK1288. Bestandsnummer des Verkäufers RAREA1878PROQ
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