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“An Object of Peculiar Interest”: The Education of Laura Bridgman

In the 1840s, Laura Bridgman, a teenage girl from a New Hampshire village, was among the most famous women in the Western world. Thomas Carlyle called her life story “one of the most beautiful phenomena at present visible under our Sun.” British intellectuals, including the novelist Charles Dickens, the geologist Charles Lyell, and the phrenologist George Combe considered a visit with Laura Bridgman an important stop on their much publicized American tours. Dickens devoted fifteen pages of his American Notes to describing his visit with her, and Combe reported that “Laura Bridgman is very much admired by the British public, and her case is universally attractive. It is spoken of with deep interest and admiration in every society into which I enter.” Journals on both sides of the Atlantic published annual updates on her life, periodic chapters in a biography hailed as a tale “of thrilling interest, not surpassed by those of the novelist.”