Lend-A-Hand: Monthly of Organized Philanthropy.
[Keller, Helen]. Anagnos, M. “Helen Keller.” In Lend A Hand.: A Monthly Magazine Of Organized Philanthropy. III.3 (March 1888), 137-145.
Slim 8vo.; wrappers glued at spine over stapled signatures; spine lightly chipped; few stains from staples. In a specially made cloth slipcase.
An astonishing survival: Sullivan’s first national account of her early work with the young Helen Keller, illustrated with excerpts from Sullivan’s letters about the case as well as by Keller’s letters in facsimile, reprinted with the permission of Mr. Anagnos. This appearance is preceded only by its publication in the annual report of the Perkins Institution, a virtually unobtainable document. The unsigned introduction states that
[i]n the last annual report of the Perkins Institution of South Boston, we find a marvelous account of this work [in teaching the deaf, dumb, and blind]. A little girl named Helen Keller, not eight years of age, deprived of the use of sight and hearing by serious illness when in her second year, had been placed under the care of Miss Sullivan, a graduate of the institution. Helen Keller is a child of remarkable talent, quick and keen, bright and cheerful, ambitious to learn and with a singularly ready grasp of ideas…Her progress is best told in Miss Sullivan’s account of her life and education and we are indebted to Mr. Anagnos for permission to reprint Helen’s letters in fac-simile.
Sullivan’s report indeed reveals Keller to be a “remarkable” girl, learning to sign the entire alphabet in just a few days; acquiring many words a day, after a single repetition, with perfect recall; understanding the difference between verbs, adjectives, and proper names; mastering the written alphabet, both upper and lower case, in a single day. Just over a month after Keller’s first lesson in letter-tracing, she wrote “without assistance a correctly spelled and legible letter,” and continued to develop her skill in writing even as she began to comprehend the Braille alphabet. Though Sullivan’s discussion of Keller’s personal qualities—her quickness, intelligence, enthusiasm, patience, and perseverance, her “wonderful sagacity or instinct in divining things”—is truly impressive, what is most phenomenal are the section of facsimile samples of Keller’s hand-written letters: one to her mother, two to several blind girls she visited in Boston, and one to Mr. Anagnos, which she closes, “I do like to read in my book. You do love me. I do love you. Good by. Helen Keller.”
Other articles in this issue of Lend a Hand discuss temperance work, homes for working girls, the Ramona School, the Ten Times One clubs, Young Women’s Christian Temperance Unions, A Medical Office for Business Women, the International Council of Women, and other topics related to the role of philanthropic women in contemporary society.
A childhood illness left Alabama-born Helen Keller (1880-1968) deaf, blind, and mute at the age of one and a half. In 1887 she met Anne Sullivan (later, Anne Macy) who within a matter of months taught Keller to read and write. Keller bestowed on her the tag “Teacher,” by which she was known throughout their association. (Keller’s biography of Macy was published in 1955 under that title.) But the publicity they received for their joint achievements never assuaged the tension caused by the public’s vacillating praise of each either as the miracle or the miracle worker, rather than as a team. After several years at the Perkins Institution in Boston, nine months at Arthur Gilman’s Cambridge School for Young Ladies, and two years with Macy and a private tutor, in 1900 Keller entered Radcliffe College, where she focused her studies in the humanities.
Keller published her first book in 1902: The Story of My Life was the first of her two autobiographies, written at the suggestion of editors at the Ladies’ Home Journal with the assistance of a Harvard instructor and Anne Sullivan’s future husband, John Macy. (Midstream,
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