Forty-five years before Helen Keller, Laura Bridgman became the first deafblind person famous for learning English. Born in 1829 in Hanover, New Hampshire, she lost her sight, hearing, smell and taste to scarlet fever at age two, the same illness that killed her two older sisters. A hired hand named Asa Tenney gave her her first tactile signs. In October 1837 she went to Samuel Gridley Howe’s Perkins Institution for the Blind in Boston, where Howe and matron Lydia Drew taught her with raised letter labels on spoons and keys, then loose letters, then a finger alphabet traced into her palm.

Charles Dickens praised her in American Notes in 1842, and crowds came on Saturdays to watch her. Then her support vanished: Drew left to marry, Howe took a 15 month honeymoon with Julia Ward, and teacher Mary Swift left in 1845. At 16 Laura’s weight fell from 113 to 79 pounds, and she recovered on a visit home in 1846. In the early 1880s she shared a cottage at Perkins with a young Anne Sullivan, who learned the manual alphabet from her before going to teach Helen Keller.

• Her father stamped on the floorboards to get her attention through vibration
• She learned arithmetic on a metal board with square holes and type in under three weeks
• Howe and Swift clashed over her religious instruction, Unitarian against Congregationalist
• She begged to follow teacher Sarah White to the Sandwich Islands as a housekeeper and was left behind
• Kate Keller sought help after reading Dickens on Laura, and Sullivan brought Helen a doll whose clothes Laura had sewn