LETTER: Photograph and two letters. (ALS, 1897; TLS, 1902.)
An Early Autograph Sentiment
With a Letter to Her Editor
and
and Photograph
Keller, Helen. Autograph sentiment signed, “Helen Keller.” Tuscumbia, Alabama, June 13, 1894; one leaf, recto only, in pencil; glue residue to version and top edge of recto; creased.
Boxed together with:
Keller, Helen. Typed letter signed “Helen Keller” to “Mr. Alexander.” Cambridge, May 5th, (1902); one leaf; folded to make four pages; three pages covered; glue residue to blank final page.
Boxed together with:
Black and white photograph of Helen Keller, Miss Sullivan and Joe Jefferson. 1902.
7” x 10”; mounted on cardstock; photographer’s label on verso.
The sentiment, composed by Keller when she was fourteen, in her hometown of Tuscumbia, Alabama, reads in full:
“One kindly deed may turn
The fountain of thy soul
To love’s sweet day-star,
That shall o’er thee burn
long as its currents roll!”
With kind love
Helen Keller
Tuscumbia, Ala. June thirteenth
eighteen ninety-four.
Keller’s 1902 letter to Mr. Alexander, the serial editor of her memoir, “The Story of My Life,” which appeared in Ladies Home Journal in five installments starting in April 1902, reads,
My dear Mr. Alexander;
I intended to enclose a little note to you with the receipt for the check you sent me; but I could not spare the time then.
I feel very humble when I receive these checks for my articles. It seems strange that any one should think them worth so much money. I am trying to go on with the story to please you; but it gets more and more difficult to put things into words that exactly fit them. Sometimes I feel the need of a new vocabulary to express my thoughts. You see, the words we have are like old soldiers – they have seen such service and are so full of the glory of great things done, we cannot make them glow with our experiences, be they ever so exciting from our point of view. But I thank you for asking me to write my story. Unexpectedly it has become a great pleasure to me. I am glad to have put in form the recollections of my childhood. In the distance the darkest clouds are rose-tinted, and I have learned to dwell lovingly in the shadow of God’s wing and find it in the sweet heaven of content.
Please give Miss Sullivan’s and my kindest remembrances to Mrs. Alexander. The pansies she gave us at parting kept fresh for several days and looked sweet thoughts from a corner of Mr. Hutton’s great library.
Miss Sullivan sends her kindest regards to you, in which I most cordially join.
Sincerely your friend,
Helen Keller
Cambridge,
May fifth.
P.S. I am sending you the dedication which Dr. Holmes wrote in a little book of his poems which he gave me when I was a little girl. I need not tell you that it is one of my dearest treasures. Please take good care of it and return it to me when you are through with it.
The Mr. Hutton referred to above was a wealthy man who lived in Princeton with his wife Eleanor. The couple took responsibility for establishing a fund for educating Keller (Helen Keller, A Life, by Dorothy Hermann, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998, p. 101).
The photograph was taken at Gilbert’s Studio in Philadelphia, perhaps in relation to the publication of her Journal articles. Sullivan is in the center, facing forward. Keller, then 22 years old, is on the far left, facing Sullivan, whose face she “looks at” by placing her fingers over her mouth and cheek. They are holding each other’s right hands. A stern looking Jefferson, on the far right, regards them both. Keller and Sullivan befriended Jefferson in the 1890s; he was an American actor. Keller, Sullivan and Jefferson were all friends of Mark Twain. (ibid.)
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