Miracle Worker and the Transcendentalist by David Wagner

Author:David Wagner [Wagner, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Sociology, General
ISBN: 9781317264415
Google: eTLvCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2015-11-17T05:59:57+00:00

The “Frost King” Episode: The Reception Ends Altogether

Events that occurred in late 1891 and into 1892 would make the tensions and conflict that came before seem tame. A “scandal” and a trial would forever fracture what relationship remained between Keller and Sullivan and the Perkins Institution.

In 1891, as Keller was wont to do, she sent Michael Anagnos a story for his birthday entitled “The Frost King.” The lovely little story told how King Frost came to paint the trees in their autumn colors; the delightful children’s story spoke of how fairies were to deliver precious stones to Santa Claus, but became diverted and spent so much time hidden in the trees that their gems melted, making the beautiful colors of the change in season. Anagnos was delighted with the story, remarking, “If there be a pupil in any of the private or public grammar schools of New England who can write an original story like this, without assistance from any one, he or she certainly is a rare phenomenon.”31

Anagnos was in fact so pleased with it, he immediately had the story published in the Perkins alumni journal, and later the story was picked up by The Goodson Gazette, a weekly published by the West Virginia Institution for the Education of the Deaf and Dumb and Blind. About a week later, the Gazette reported one of its readers, a friend of a teacher at the institution, had identified the story as being very similar to a children’s story entitled “The Frost Fairies,” which was part of a collection by Margaret T. Canby entitled Birdie and His Fairy Friends, written in 1874. After a close comparison of the two works was made at Perkins (and by now elsewhere) and found the story essentially similar, Anagnos was furious and immediately began an investigation.

A series of interviews with pointed questions was held with Keller, who by now was tremendously upset but denied any plagiarism, and with Annie Sullivan, who not surprisingly was already blamed by many teachers and staff at the Perkins Institution for the incident. Sullivan was, in turn, furious and denied knowing anything at all about the story or having read the story to Helen. Anagnos interviewed teacher after teacher, and some accounts have Keller saying indeed that Sullivan had read her the story. Sullivan concluded after her own investigation (helped by Alexander Graham Bell’s aide John Hitz) that the story had been read to Helen by her friend Sophia Hopkins in the summer of 1888 when she was staying at Cape Cod with her and that Helen had evidently unconsciously recalled it while writing her own story.

What ensued surprised much of the world, whose attention by this time was very much on the Helen Keller phenomenon. Anagnos had set up a committee of eight people, four sighted and four not, to further rule on the incident. The panel eventually deadlocked 4-4 with Anagnos casting a negative vote. What this in itself meant became fodder for dispute years later when the “Frost King” episode was revisited this time in an informal investigation led by Franklin Sanborn.

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