Anecdotes & Incidents of the Deaf and Dumb

Finger spelling at a family dinner becomes a small lesson in communication when a pupil home from Derby teaches his relatives to say a blessing. This incident sets the scale of W. R. Roe's collection: brief accounts of deaf people at school, at work and among their families. Roe, head master of the Midland institution at Derby, hopes the book will also bring financial support to its teaching work.

The selections include clergymen, an ingenious boy who carves a wooden sewing machine, and artists whose achievements receive public recognition. An account of Laura Bridgman describes conversation through touch, her needlework and her pride in teaching other pupils to sew. For readers today, these pieces offer a view of educational and charitable attitudes in the nineteenth century. The old terminology and the preface's assumptions about disability belong to that setting, while the individual accounts record skills, relationships and efforts to communicate.