In July of 1749, as a result of the publication of Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, two police officers arrived at Diderot’s home and searched it for manuscripts “contrary to Religion, the State, or Morals.” They arrested and imprisoned him at the Château de Vincennes for three months.10
Though Diderot’s Letter on the Blind was essentially a response to Molyneux’s philosophical question about the perceptions of the newly sighted, it had long-ranging consequences for the blind. For the first time, a blind man had been given the opportunity to speak of his experience and to assert that his experience held its own primacy. “People try to give those born blind the gift of sight,” Diderot wrote, “but, rightly considered, science would be equally advanced by questioning a sensible blind man.” Oliver Sacks interpreted Diderot’s Letter as an exercise in cultural relativism that suggested that the blind “may in their own way construct a complete and sufficient world, have a complete ‘blind identity’ and no sense of disability or inadequacy, and that the ‘problem’ of their blindness and the desire to cure this, therefore, is ours, not theirs.”
The widely held assumption that blindness holds nothing but loss is quickly corrected by the testimony of the blind themselves.
Valentin Haüy, born in Paris in 1745, was a professional translator, linguist, teacher, handwriting expert, and certified interpreter of Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, German, English, Dutch, and Swedish. Fascinated by language in general, he was also versed in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew. Having taken an interest in the methods of sign language that the Abbé Charles-Michel de l’Épée devised in the 1760s to instruct his deaf-mute students, Haüy began to envision similar methods for teaching the blind. At that time, quite a few blind people of the upper classes had had the privilege of private tutors and readers, and their educational successes were well documented. Struck by Diderot’s Letter on the Blind, Haüy hoped to make education available to blind people of all classes. As inspiration for his efforts, he cited both the blind man of Puiseaux, who had instructed his own son with raised letters, and Nicholas Saunderson, who had taught mathematics “in the midst of a circle of sighted people.” In his Essay on the Education of Blind Children, Haüy stated that his ultimate purpose in giving the blind an education was to put “the means of subsistence in their power.”11
Haüy’s ultimate inspiration came in the form of a spectacle he witnessed at the St. Ovid’s Fair in September 1771, in which inmates of the Quinze-Vingts hospital performed a farcical “concert” for the entertainment of fairgoers. The event was described in the Fairground Almanac of 1773:
The orchestra consisted of eight men dressed in long gowns and holding pointed bonnets. A ninth was suspended in the air on a peacock and beat time (but was out of beat). Like his comrades, he had a red gown, clogs on his feet, and a big dunce cap with ass’s ears. In turn, they sang amusing couplets, accompanying themselves ridiculously on the violin.…In front of each blind person was a sheet of music and a lit candle. The throngs of people who came to see this farce were sometimes so large that it was necessary to place fusiliers at the coffeehouse door.
The cacophonous show left the spectators in absolute stitches. Haüy, however, was unamused. He described the event as a “public dishonor to the human race” and claimed that upon witnessing it, he vowed to “replace this ridiculous fable with truth. I will make the blind read.”
Twelve years passed before Haüy, who had limited means, was prepared to appeal to the relatively new Philanthropic Society of Paris for assistance in founding his Royal Institution for the Young Blind. By that time, he had succeeded in teaching an intelligent seventeen-year-old blind beggar named François Le Sueur to read, write, do mathematical calculations, identify the various continents and countries on specially created tactile maps, write music, and print books for other blind people. (Haüy had hired experts to help him create raised type that could be interpreted and manipulated by the blind and to develop methods of embossing raised type on wet paper.) In 1784 Haüy and Le Sueur publicly demonstrated all that Le Sueur had learned: Le Sueur read aloud from a book of type printed in relief, wrote down dictated sentences, and performed mathematical calculations on a device that Haüy had perfected. His demonstration impressed his audience, and, with the support of the Philanthropic Society of Paris, Haüy’s group of students grew. Le Sueur was hired as their teacher, and Haüy’s free school for “those born blind” officially opened in 1785. The school accepted blind students from all the social classes and instructed them all in the same manner with no distinction or favoritism. In addition to academics, the students learned crafts such as string-making, net-making, knitting, printing, and bookbinding.
In its early years, the institution weathered many upheavals (not least the French Revolution), financial setbacks, rivalries, and, once nationalized, a great deal of state interference, including the school’s disastrous merging with the Hôpital des Quinze-Vingts. Control of the institution’s administration was wrested from Haüy, and his students were turned into little more than sweatshop workers churning out textiles and forced to live under strict surveillance in appalling conditions. Without Haüy’s authority and protection, the students suffered the same disregard the blind had always been subjected to. “These…poor wretches seemed infinitely less well taken care of than the orphans of La Pietie,” wrote the German author August von Kotzebue of his visit to the institute. “The residence is big but dirty.” For political reasons, Haüy was eventually completely deposed and forced to leave the school.
The machinations of the various parties vying for control of the institution, its students, and its funding were complex; as a result, the school was in turmoil for years. Suffice it to say that not until 1821 did the school return to the educational model that Haüy had envisioned. The blind were still feared, reviled, and reduced to beggary (although by 1808 begging was forbidden by law in Paris), but for once they did have a school that catered to their particular needs.
In 1819 a ten-year-old blind boy named Louis Braille entered Haüy’s institution, which was now called the National Institute for Blind Youth. When he was three years old, Braille accidentally injured one of his eyes with a knife he found in his father’s workshop; the eye became infected, the infection spread to his other eye, and he was left completely blind. Braille was extremely intelligent, a prize-winning student, and he was particularly gifted in the sciences. He could play the piano and the violin well. At twelve years of age, he examined a new form of tactile writing that had just been introduced to the institute. It had been developed by Nicolas Barbier de La Serre, an army officer who was searching for methods of speed writing that would be of benefit to the military; the system was based on punctiform symbols that he called night writing. Braille immediately identified the flaws of Barbier de La Serre’s method, and after long experimentation he came up with a vastly improved version. Braille was said to be extremely humble and modest. In the foreword to his 1829 Method of Writing Words, Music, and Plainsong by Means of Dots, for Use by the Blind and Arranged for Them, Braille, who was now twenty years old and must have known that his system far surpassed Barbier de La Serre’s, graciously wrote, “At the end of this work can be found a sort of stenographic system for which twelve signs suffice to write all the words in the French language. Three of these signs take up as much space as one of Mr. Barbier’s. If we have signaled the advantages of our method over this inventor’s, we must also say, to his credit, that it is his system that gave us the first idea for our own.” Not long after Braille completed his work with the dotted alphabet and began teaching it to other students at the school, he was called for the draft by the French army. Census records state that Braille was exempted from military service because he was blind and therefore “unable to read and write.”
While the blind students at the institute took quickly to the Braille method of writing (in 1837 they published the first Braille book in the world: a history of France in three volumes), it was slow to catch on with school a
uthorities. The assistant director of the school, P. Armand Dufau, was dead set against the Braille system, claiming that it made the blind “too dependent”; he preferred instead a system invented by the Scotsman John Alston. To ensure that Alston’s system and not Braille’s would be adopted, Dufau burned the school’s entire library—all of Haüy’s raised-type books as well as all the Braille books he found. In the hope of putting a final end to the Braille system, he confiscated all of the school’s Braille writing equipment.
The students at the school, most of whom had thrived on the Braille system, were horrified by Dufau’s actions and staged a sort of passive protest by continuing to write notes to one another in Braille with whatever implements they could find: forks, nails, knitting needles—any pointed objects that were handy. As their punishment for writing in Braille, the students were slapped and starved, but this did not deter them. Passionate about communicating their ideas and feelings with Braille’s system, they passed the method on to new students.
Joseph Gaudet, Dufau’s assistant, understood the power of Braille and warned Dufau that his position might be at risk if government officials found out that the students were unanimously defying him. In addition, he pointed out, if the school could claim that one of its students had invented this new popular method of tactile writing, it would only benefit the school and boost the reputation of its administrators. Dufau saw the logic in this and altered his position: Braille was once again adopted as the primary means of communication and tutelage at the school.
Some months later, during a public lecture, Dufau praised Louis Braille’s system and asked the blind students to demonstrate its effectiveness. A blind child took dictation in Braille, and then another blind child (who had not been in the room to hear the dictation) read it back. The audience was captivated but skeptical. One man called out that the whole thing was a trick and a put-on, that the children must have memorized the passage beforehand! Dufau responded by asking the doubter to produce any written material he could find in his pocket and read it out loud to the students. He did so; one blind girl wrote the text down in Braille, and another read it back exactly, word for word, “before the man even returned to his seat.” It is said that the audience members were so astonished they applauded for six minutes.
The Braille method encountered a great deal of resistance internationally, and always for the same reason: It appeared to the sighted nothing at all like the print they were familiar with, and this made it somehow unacceptable. A full fifty years passed before the Universal Congress for the Improvement of the Lot of the Blind and Deaf-Mutes voted at the 1878 World’s Fair in Paris to accept Braille as the international writing system for the blind. The United States did not accept it until 1917.
In 1826, John Dix Fisher, a physician from Boston, Massachusetts, visited the National Institute for Blind Youth in Paris and was so impressed by what he saw there that he resolved to found a similar school in Boston. As a result of Fisher’s efforts and the general mood of progressive humanitarian social reform that was sweeping New England at the time, the Massachusetts legislature voted in 1829 to establish the New England Asylum for the Blind—the first school for the blind in the United States. Fisher appointed Samuel Gridley Howe as its director.
In her history The Imprisoned Guest: Samuel Howe and Laura Bridgman, the Original Deaf-Blind Girl, Elisabeth Gitter gives an in-depth portrait of Howe, a man who was described by many as arrogant, vain, prideful, competitive, quick-tempered, defensive, overbearing, hungry for glory, a shrewd publicist and promoter, and generally unlikable. Howe’s wife, the long-suffering Julia Ward Howe, stated that her husband was “incapable of enduring criticism or of profiting by it” and was also “much led by flattery.” Charles Dickens called Howe a “cold-blooded fellow.” Nevertheless, Howe was intelligent, determined, and had a genuine sense of empathy for the disadvantaged. In a letter to his friend Charles Sumner he wrote, “Every year I live brings closer to home the conviction that we must work for others & not for our own happiness.” Howe’s ambition for both himself and the Asylum for the Blind laid the foundation for what would become the world-famous Perkins Institution.
On a visit to the Paris institute, Samuel Howe was initially impressed with the school and pleased to see the blind students happily and diligently learning. However, after closer investigation, he found the school deeply disappointing. In an essay titled “Education of the Blind,” published in the North American Review in 1833, Howe offered severe criticism of the Paris establishment in particular and of the other fledgling European institutes for the blind in general, stating that these European schools should be used only as cautionary examples; they represented everything that should be avoided in the founding of similar establishments in America. When Howe asked the authorities at the Paris institute how many of its graduates went on to support themselves with work, he was shocked at the response: “Not one in twenty.” Incredulously, he remarked, “This is very like educating men for the almshouse,” and he proceeded to condemn nearly every aspect of the school, from the impracticality of its teaching methods to its antiquated equipment to the amount of time wasted every day to its failure to address each individual student’s particular talents to, finally, its self-satisfied atmosphere of showmanship, secrecy, and mystery.
There pervades that establishment a spirit of illiberality, of mysticism, amounting almost to charlatanism…the process of education is not explained [to outside visitors], and the method of constructing some of the apparatus is absolutely kept a secret!…Those Institutions, endowed and supported by the governments, in general aim too much to show and parade; their object seems to be to teach the pupils to perform such feats at the exhibition as will redound to the credit and glory of the government, rather than to their own good.
Howe’s final slap for the European institutions for the blind was that the students were treated “too much as mere objects of pity; they are not taught to rely with confidence upon their own resources, to believe themselves possessed of the means of filling useful and active spheres in society.” Howe’s stated purpose in educating the blind was identical to Haüy’s: to “enable them to pass their lives pleasantly and usefully in some constant occupation, which shall ensure to them a competent livelihood.”
Gitter maintained that Howe’s high ambition for his students was neither realistic nor practicable in the atmosphere of the era in which he was working. While Howe had none of the usual fear and revulsion at the sight of a blind person, many of his contemporaries—no matter how progressive or humanitarian they were—certainly did. Furthermore, Howe’s goal for his blind students to be fully self-supporting once they left his school was unrealistic in an age of rapid industrialization.12 More and more, the handicrafts—knitting, sewing, weaving—that the blind were taught were produced faster and with greater perfection by automated machines in the mills of Massachusetts.
By 1838 sixty students were enrolled at Howe’s New England Asylum for the Blind. They learned to read raised letters, to write, to do arithmetic, geography, and most of the other subjects taught in regular schools for the sighted. Out of deference to the squeamishness of sighted visitors and school employees, students whose eyes were missing or disfigured wore wide green ribbons to hide the deformities. To raise financial support for the school, Howe staged public exhibitions demonstrating the students’ capabilities; the exhibitions were a great success, prompting many private citizens to donate funds and materials. The school rapidly became a celebrated cause in Boston society circles, and in 1839 it was renamed the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts Asylum for the Blind in honor of the shipping magnate Thomas H. Perkins, who donated a house for its use.
Howe’s work brought him some renown in New England but nothing on the scale of the international fame that would visit him with the arrival of Laura Bridgman.
I am certain that I had never heard the name Laura Bridgman before I was forty-five years old. (I had heard the name Samuel Gridley Howe but could
not attach it to anything in particular other than the readily recognizable name of his wife.) Very few people today seem to know who Laura Bridgman was. This is remarkable in light of the fact that, in her day, she was considered the most famous woman in the world other than Queen Victoria.
Bridgman was, as far as the records show, the first deaf-blind person to be successfully educated. Born in 1829 on a rural farm in Hanover, New Hampshire, she was, by her mother’s account, a lively, intelligent, extremely curious child who had at eighteen months begun to “talk quite plain” and learn a few letters of the alphabet. But when she was two, she suffered a bout of scarlet fever that left her blind, deaf, and nearly devoid of the senses of taste and smell. Within a year, she had forgotten how to speak. (Her mother claimed that for a while after her illness, Laura repeated the words “Dark, dark” in puzzlement at her inability to see.) Laura was left with no form of communication other than crude gestures, and her early childhood resembled Helen Keller’s in scope and emotion. Pressed from all sides by darkness and silence, she was often frustrated, unruly, and aggressive. Though her mother was loving, she was also busy with her other children and with the house and farm, and she must surely have been at a loss as to how to raise a child deprived of all but one of her five senses. Years later, Laura wrote lucidly of her life on the farm:
I would cling to my mother so wildly and peevishly many times. I took hold of her legs or arms as she strode across the room. She acted so plain, as if it irritated her very much indeed. She scolded me sternly. I could not help feeling so cross and uneasy against her. I did not know any better. I never was taught to cultivate patience and mildness and placid[ity], until I came away from my blessed family at home.…My mother could not spell a single word to me with her fingers wishing me good night, nor good morning, [nor] Adieu, except that she gave me a most welcome kiss on my face. I did not know how to repay her for her welcome and cordiality.
For the Benefit of Those Who See: Dispatches from the World of the Blind Page 12