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“An Object of Peculiar Interest”: The Education of Laura Bridgman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Ernest Freeberg
Ernest Freeberg
Affiliation:
Mr. Freeberg is a doctoral candidate in American history in Emory University, Atlanta, Georgia. This article is the winner of the 1991 Sidney E. Mead prize.
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Extract

In the 1840s, Laura Bridgman, a teenage girl from a New Hampshire village, was among the most famous women in the Western world. Thomas Carlyle called her life story “one of the most beautiful phenomena at present visible under our Sun.” British intellectuals, including the novelist Charles Dickens, the geologist Charles Lyell, and the phrenologist George Combe considered a visit with Laura Bridgman an important stop on their much publicized American tours. Dickens devoted fifteen pages of his American Notes to describing his visit with her, and Combe reported that “Laura Bridgman is very much admired by the British public, and her case is universally attractive. It is spoken of with deep interest and admiration in every society into which I enter.” Journals on both sides of the Atlantic published annual updates on her life, periodic chapters in a biography hailed as a tale “of thrilling interest, not surpassed by those of the novelist.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 61 , Issue 2 , June 1992 , pp. 191 - 205
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1992

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References

1. Carlyle, Thomas to Gridley Howe, Samuel, quoted in Letters and Journals of Samuel Gridley Howe, Richards, Laura, ed. (Boston, 1909), pp. 103–106Google Scholar; Dickens, Charles, American Notes (Gloucester, Mass., 1968), pp. 47–61Google Scholar; Lyell, Charles, Travels in North America, In the Years 1841–2 (New York, 1845)Google Scholar; Combe, George quoted in Maud Howe and Florence Howe Hall, Laura Bridgman: Dr. Howe's Famous Pupil and What He Taught Her (Boston, 1903), pp. 80–81; “The Christian Examiner and General Review,” July 1840, p. 359.Google Scholar

2. Howe and Hall, p. 44; Dickens, p. 47.

3. Lamson, Mary Swift, Life and Education of Laura Dewey Bridgman (Boston, 1881Google Scholar; reprint, New York, 1975), pp. 46–47.

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8. The Christian Observatory: A Religious and Literary Magazine 1 (March 1847): 130–139.

9. Howe and Hall, pp. 1–27.

10. Quoted in Howe and Hall, p. 38.

11 Howe and Hall, p. 39.

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13. Samuel Eliot quoted in Howe and Hall, p. 39.

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20. Howe's Reports, 1837, p. 9.

21. Howe's Reports, 1841, pp. 65–66.

22. Howe's Reports, 1839, p. 50.

23. Howe's Reports, 1840, p. 20.

24. Ibid.

25. Howe's Reports, 1840, p. 45; 1842, p. 89.

26. Howe's Reports, 1840, p. 44.

27. Howe's Reports, 1841, p. 71.

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35. Howe and Hall, p. 97.

36. Howe and Hall, pp. 149–150.

37. Howe's Reports, 1842, p. 97.

38. Howe's Reports, 1842, pp. 97–98.

39. Christian Observer, reprinted in Littel's Living Age (1844): 765.

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43. Howe's Reports, 1844, p. 117. Howe specifically exonerates Miss Swift of responsibility for Laura's unauthorized religious instruction, saying she was ‘faithful and industrious … Had all others been as discreet and wise as she, we should not have to regret some impressions the child has received’ (p. 107).

44. Howe's Reports, 1844, p. 117.

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47. Howe's Reports, 1849, p. 193.