Helen Keller is Grateful to Her Friends for Supplying Her With Reading Material, and Praises Their Kindness and Mentions Her Own Gratitude

She mentions her two great companions, Anne Sullivan Macy and Polly Thomson

 

The letter also shows Keller’s intellectual acumen

Samuel Pepys was the author of Britain’s most celebrated diary, kept from 1660-1669. Pepys as an exceptionally skilled recorder of the political events of his time, and also everyday life. His record of contemporary events has become an important source for historians seeking an understanding of life in London during the mid-seventeenth century. Pepys kept the diary as a virtually daily record that was to stretch to more than a million words, with a quality that entertains and inspires people in the current day, nearly three and a half centuries after it was written. By the 1930s there was a braille version for use of the blind. Miss Prince, the librarian of The National Institute for the Blind, sent Keller a copy and she was quite smitten with it.

Anne Sullivan Macy was an teacher best known for being the instructor and lifelong companion of Helen Keller. Polly Thomson was Keller’s companion for more than half a century. These were the key people in Keller’s life, and they are mentioned in this letter.

Keller wrote Prince to thank her, giving her assessment of the diary and her mixed feelings about Pepys. Typed letter signed, South Arcan, Scotland, December 5, 1932, to “Dear Miss Prince”. “Your note was a cheery good-morning up here in the Scottish hills. Thank you so much for sending me ‘Pepys’s Diary.’ I am enjoying it immensely. Pepys does not appeal to me in the least – he is as full of faults and meannesses as a porcupine is of quills, but I admire the catholicity [breadth and universality] of his mind that keeps record equally of the small and the great. We are going to Glasgow tomorrow, and shall be there about ten days. Will you kindly have two volumes of the ‘Diary’ sent to me at the Central Hotel, Glasgow?

“It is very good of you to take so much trouble to keep me in reading. The kindness of my friends wherever I go fills me with gratitude and humility. Mrs. Macy end Miss Thomson send their greetings with mine.”

The recipient has noted, “Pepys sent Dec. 11 to Glasgow.”

Hearing Keller praise her friends for their efforts in supplying her with books is a moving tribute to her friends, and shows her reliance on them.

In the 1950’s, in “Scrapbook of Helen Keller and The Deaf-Blind”, the author notes Keller’s recollections of Pepys in those books read decades earlier “This week she returned from a two-months’ absence in South America, and she has not had a moment yet to catch up with the newspapers and magazines. Unable to talk politics, she talks at table about Pepys’s Diary, which our host Stuart Grummon is reading. She fishes up two or three facts about Pepys that I had forgotten or never knew, remembered from her own reading twenty years ago. What variety there is in her mind!”

A fascinating window into Keller’s life and mind, the finest we have had.