Historical Causality and the Theory of Absurd Coincidences
(From an unpublished British manuscript lost in a house fire)
Let’s All Thank Charles Dickens’
Grandmother for Hellen Keller’s Success
No, really! Thanks to Charles Dickens’ paternal grandmother and her timely passing, Dickens’ family was released from debtors’ prison. His grandmother died and left them enough money (£450 pounds) to pay their creditors. Dickens, still a boy (age 12) escaped from a terrible job covering pots of paste-blacking ten hours a day in an old dilapidated building where rats swarmed. This change in the family’s fortune came at a crucial time in his life; otherwise, we perhaps would never have heard of him for none of his novels might have been written.
To reprise the chain: grandmother dies; the family leaves debtors’ prison; Dickens quits his rat-infested job; he goes to school and he becomes one of the world’s greatest writers. In due time fame arrives and with it a modest income; he travels to America. He has special places in mind: he visits the Perkins Institute in Boston, a school for the deaf and blind. He meets Laura Bridgman, the first blind-deaf girl who (miraculously!) has learned how to read.
What’s next in the chain of events tying Dickens’ grandmother to Helen Keller becoming the first deaf-blind person in the world to graduate college–he’s a writer, remember? He writes about Laura in his travel book American Notes. The book is eagerly read by a woman in Alabama, by a mother who is dealing with a terrible tragedy: her daughter contracted an unknown illness at a very young age (19 months) which has left her eyes unable to see and her ears unable to hear: dreaded news, her daughter is deaf-blind![1]
Dickens’ description of Laura Bridgman’s life gives the poor mother hope for her own daughter. She gets in touch with a doctor who refers her to Dr. Alexander Graham Bell (yes, the inventor of the telephone who has been working with deaf children.) Dr. Bell puts her in touch with the Perkins Institute of Boston (where Laura Bridgman lived and caught the sharp eye of Dickens!) The rest is history, as they say, either of the causal or coincidentally absurd kind!
The Institute sends a remarkable woman named Annie Sullivan whose character is passed down to us as “Teacher”, the woman who engineered the most amazing breakthrough in the knowledge, understanding, and education of the poor woman’s daughter, who turned out to be none other than Helen Keller: the first deaf-blind person to receive a Bachelor of Arts degree!
All thanks to a grandmother of Charles Dickens passing when she did!
Thanks, Grandma!!
[1] The illness was suspected by doctors to be either scarlet fever or meningitis. t|rad�bYr���
