THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF HELEN KELLER.
[To THE EDITOR OD THE " SPECTAT011.1 Spz,—The reviewer of the autobiography of Helen Keller in the Spectator of November 28th is in error when he states that, compared with her, "Laura Bridgeman was, of course, far more inaccessible to instruction, for she [Laura] was born a blind deaf-mute." As a matter of fact, Laura Bridgeman. though a puny and rickety infant, and subject to fits till twenty months old (after which, for four months, she became apparently well, and seemed to have normal senses), only lost her organs of sight and hearing in consequence of a ravaging attack of scarlet fever at two years old. From that attack she emerged blind, deaf, dumb, and without power of smell; and it was not till she was seven years old that the late Dr.
S. G. Howe began to teach her at the Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston. So far as concerns the respective ages at which Helen Keller and Laura Bridgeman became blind deaf-mutes and began the instruction which overcame such terrible obstacles, no real distinction can be drawn, though the case of Laura Bridgeman is historically the more interesting, because the first, of these two marvellous deliverances of the human mind from an apparently hopeless incapacity for human intercourse. I am led to make this comment by the perusal of a volume sent me from America,—" Laura Bridge- man" (Boston : Little, Brown, and Co.), written by two of the late Dr. Howe's daughters, which has not yet been pub- lished in England. This volume, from which I take the facts given above, gives the story of Laura's education from Dr. Howe's own notes. He had intended, shortly before his death (1876), to publish such an account; but it has been left to his family to carry out. The book is certainly a fascinating record of the work of a devoted philanthropist, the man of whom Whittier wrote :— "Behold him, The Cadmus of the blind, Giving the dumb lip language, The idiot clay a mind."
38 Prince's Square, W.
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