I do not see in this school the two or three children actually present—but the thirty thousand deaf mutes of Great Britain.
—Alexander Graham Bell
In Great Britain, as his daughter entered the world, as the telephone grew in popularity, as everything in his life felt like it was coming together, Alec finally found himself free enough to return more wholeheartedly to his work teaching the deaf. It was the winter of 1878–1879, and Gertrude wanted him to use this time to resume his speech lessons with Mabel—she feared Mabel’s skill was slipping, that it needed to be further refined. Alec refused to do it, insisting that he and Mabel, as husband and wife, were equals, and they couldn’t reenter into the unequal power dynamic of teacher and student. But he wasn’t turning his back on teaching altogether.
Over the past year he’d been corresponding with a man, Thomas Borthwick, who was starting up an oralist school in Greenock, Scotland. Alec started advising him in November 1877; in May 1878, he traveled to Scotland to give a lecture to support the founding of the school; and then he began to arrange for a teacher to come from America to help with the school’s launch. Alec loved the idea of the Greenock school, and thought it could serve as a pilot program, “likely to inaugurate a revolution in the method of teaching deaf mutes in Europe.” And he was ready to turn his full attention toward this work again.
As it was, in Scotland, if people wanted their deaf children to have an education at all, they had to send those children to England or Europe, removing them altogether from their families. This removal concerned Alec. When the students returned, he thought, “they were looked upon as strangers. The only friends they had were amongst themselves.” This, he believed, was how it would remain all the rest of their lives. “In large cities the adult mutes dwelt in communities, intermarried with one another and tended in that way to perpetuate their defects.”
But as he pushed forward in the idea that this separate community was undesirable, he refused to admit the ways in which the deaf community created a space in which deaf people could access their own sense of power and self. Instead, his insistence that deaf people were in no way different than the hearing led him to think that deafness—and the language and community that blossomed within it—offered nothing. He saw deafness as a “defect,” and suggested that the world would be better off without it. This school, like all oralist schools, would be built off this assumption.
The Greenock school was slated to open in early September 1878, but by late August, the teacher Alec had arranged was nowhere to be found. And so Alec began to travel back up to Greenock himself, to temporarily act in place of the missing teacher and open the school.
When Alec imagined these children whom he would be teaching, only five and six years old, he grew worried. It had been years since he had been in front of a classroom. He feared that they might not defer to his authority, that they might run to their mothers. He imagined potential tantrums: children screaming and crying on the floor of the old lumber room where the school had been relegated. Red-faced, tear-streaked, they would beg to be let out of the room.
Alec’s fears proved unfounded: the children were bright, pleasant, smiling, ready to learn. At the start of the day, they gathered between piles of books, slates, pens, “deceased writing matter,” and “bundles of mysterious build,” all of which were covered in dust and cobwebs so old they were blackened. It was humble, but it was just the beginning. And as he waited for permission from the trustees to clean, he drew a face on the blackboard. This is where they began, how he’d always began. There weren’t many students throughout the course, just two or three on any given day. But Alec didn’t mind. For him, it wasn’t only about the students present; there were thirty thousand deaf people in Great Britain, all of whom he believed stood to benefit if he could succeed with these children.
Here in Greenock, Alec worked to educate the children in speech without the use of signs. He began with an easy word, like pea. First he wrote it on the board in English, then in Visible Speech. When students didn’t know written English, like the youngest, he would use gestures to guide them, like any foreign language teacher would, but there remains a question of what additional signs he may have used. He wasn’t opposed to the manual alphabet, and with his own fluency in ASL, it’s hard not to wonder if the language slipped in. However he did it, he guided the children to their own pronunciations of the word. As they spoke, he wrote what they said, in his symbols, underneath the word they were meant to say. They began to learn how close or far what they said was to the word they were supposed to say. He made a game of it: Who would be the first to offer the correct pronunciation?
He was back doing the work that he saw as his calling; this was the return he’d sought for years. He wanted to bring his ideas forward, push them out into the world, and uplift, as he did, the whole of the deaf community. All deaf people, he thought, could be empowered to go out into public with self-assured dignity, could speak to anyone they wished.
Alec envisioned not just a school but a revolution, a liberation. Yet he’d been away from the work for years now, and within the world of deaf educators and deaf people themselves, the arguments around oralism had shifted. It wasn’t just about the declining use of Visible Speech; by the late 1870s, a decade after Clarke opened, the whole method of oralism was falling out of favor. Its biggest argument—that speech was necessary and doable—had been embraced by the manualists, who had increasingly incorporated speech into their ASL-based educations. Now many of them were calling themselves by a new name—not “manualists” but “combinists,” or the group that combined the best opportunities of each method. But combining didn’t mean conceding. They didn’t believe that signs needed to be forbidden in order for students to learn speech.
Their argument now was much bigger than Alec realized and had much greater stakes. By now everyone had seen what oralism could do—and what it couldn’t. Namely, it couldn’t teach the deaf to speak perfectly, and only a small number would even learn to speak intelligibly. And what was more, while speech was being taught, basic education seemed to lapse. Both sides understood that, as valuable as speech was, acquiring it required sacrifice. Now the argument was over how much to sacrifice. It seemed like the students learning by oralist methods were considerably stunted in their emotional and intellectual growth. Was speech worth that?
For the most part, deaf leadership—teachers and principals of deaf schools, writers and publishers of deaf newspapers, and founders of deaf clubs and associations—was excluded from the highest levels of this conversation. The best they could hope for was to have the attention of one powerful hearing man: Edward Miner Gallaudet. Informed in part by his communications with deaf leaders, he brought many of the deaf community’s concerns to the forefront of the debate. And he would present Alec with his greatest challenge as he moved back to his own work with the deaf.
Edward was no newcomer. He was following in the footsteps of his father, Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who had helped introduce sign language to American deaf education in 1817 after his trip to England and France.
When Edward took over his father’s work with the deaf, he did so with the understanding that sign language was fundamental to the education and empowerment of deaf people. His own mother, Sophia, was deaf. As an adult, Sophia couldn’t speak—but that didn’t get in the way of her life, not as Edward saw it. Edward believed in the equalizing power of sign language.
When he opened the first college for the deaf, the Columbia Institution for the Deaf and Dumb (later the National Deaf-Mute College and today Gallaudet University) in 1864, he envisioned it as a place where deaf people could “be made the social and intellectual equals” of hearing people. At a time when even relatively few hearing people went to college, the college extended an affordable opportunity for talented deaf people to access higher educations—often becoming the first people in their families to do so. The college fundamentally shifted the possibilities for deaf equality.
In 1867, the same year as Gardiner opened the Clarke Institution and Melville published Visible Speech, E. M. Gallaudet went on his own trip to study deaf schools abroad. There, as he watched a variety of methods in a variety of European schools, his pro–sign language approach became more complicated.
At an oralist school in France, he found that the sacrifices required for an oralist education were considered worth it. For students, “the power of communicating freely in speech with their fellow-men… was so great a boon as to justify a lower standard in the intellectual training of the deaf and dumb.” This alone might have shocked Gallaudet, but it was nothing compared to the knowledge that the teachers felt this concession was justified despite the fact that only about half of their students ever mastered speech well enough to use it in practice. Of the students Gallaudet spoke with, some he could understand clearly, others not at all.
Again and again he saw the students struggle with general education. In one school, where the students’ speech was very well developed, he found the simplest of math equations being taught in the advanced classes. There seemed an inverse relationship between the advancement of speech and the quality of education.
But it wasn’t just that the fundamental educations of these children were sacrificed—something even more insidious was going on. In one German school, a high-achieving child was brought to Gallaudet to show him how she could pronounce certain elementary sounds. She did well with the vowels, but struggled with the consonants, repeatedly getting them wrong until she began to cry. Of this incident, Gallaudet wrote, “the acquisition of artificial speech is oftentimes, under the most favorable circumstances, a painful and embarrassing task to the pupil.”
Gallaudet began to see what speech could do for those who had learned it, but he also saw the harm it could do both intellectually and emotionally. He didn’t take this lightly. He was an early voice advocating for manualist teachers of the deaf to begin to instruct in articulation, but his recommendation was couched in the idea that the training should be abandoned for any student who didn’t seem well-aligned with it, and that it should never stand in the way of general education. Speech was valuable, but not as valuable as the oralists claimed: “The utterance of many pupils was so indistinct and imperfect as to be understood only when most closely attended to, while that of others was, to a stranger’s ear, hardly more than gibberish.” He didn’t judge the speech of these students to have been worth the work that must have been put into it.
Back in 1874, while Alec was beginning to pivot his attention more fully to inventing the multiple telegraph, Gallaudet shifted his focus to defending sign language, which he felt was increasingly under attack. In an 1874 American Annals of the Deaf and Dumb, the most prominent journal of deaf education at the time, Gallaudet relayed his impressions of a visit to the Clarke Institution—the school that Gardiner had started and still the flagship school for the method. Of the students Gallaudet observed, he was impressed by some: those who had been taught for six years and were able to speak in such a way that they could be understood by a stranger.
He would come to believe that the ability to speak with this level of fluency was worth whatever work was put into it, and would not have been possible under a fully manual, or sign language–based, method. However, he was careful to express just how few deaf people were able to attain these results. He cited the numbers given to him by a German teacher of the deaf who had taught articulation for fifty years. According to him, in a group of one hundred students learning orally, eighty-five students could converse with the people closest to them; sixty-two could do so easily; and only eleven could converse easily with strangers. This was in line with assessments from other teachers he’d communicated with—only about 10 percent of deaf students would ever be able to speak with easily understood fluency.
Gallaudet came to see articulation training not as a necessity; rather, he saw it as a way of playing to a skill, akin to nurturing a student’s ability in poetry or music. It wouldn’t make sense to insist that all students become poets, and neither did it make sense to insist that all deaf students speak. Teachers could give lessons to those students who showed a special talent at it—the skill could certainly prove useful—but to insist that all students learn to speak was to risk the rest of their educations.
What Gallaudet and other combinist teachers were arguing was, essentially, that these students needed whatever education they could get as swiftly as possible. The problem with oralism wasn’t that it was impossible; the problem was that it took too long and that the results were too meager.
In the nineteenth century, no one was talking about neuroplasticity, about the way the mind of a young child was more malleable than that of an adolescent or adult; however, putting speech at the forefront carried tremendous risk for the development of the brain. From birth to about five years old, a child has the ability to develop a native language, and this language acquisition lays pathways in the brain not only to understand language but also to understand things associated with language: communication, of course, but also abstract thought, problem-solving, empathy, and social interaction. It doesn’t matter what the language is; what matters is that the language is fully accessible to the child before their language acquisition window closes.
The problem of oralism wasn’t just, as Gallaudet and others believed at the time, a problem of speech training taking classroom time away from general studies—that was, unfortunately, a vast understatement of the damage. Language is a fundamental building block of the human mind; it was almost impossible for the mind of a child without language to process and understand anything else they were supposed to be learning, either intellectually or emotionally. Language had to come first, and language wasn’t coming.
English was not a fully accessible language to most deaf children, and the time they spent floundering to learn it was time that their language acquisition window was closing. If they missed the window, they became language deprived. They would never get that neuroplasticity back, and would likely never have the ability to fully learn any language. Today, this is understood by experts as irreversible brain damage.
Gallaudet may not have understood this, but he could see evidence of what was happening—he could see the intellectual and emotional struggle of deaf children educated orally, and he was conscious of what the deaf community was arguing based on personal experiences. The deaf community was largely united for the preservation of sign language, and Gallaudet argued this, too. He said that deaf kids should be exposed to sign language immediately, and taught the foundations of written English through lessons conducted in sign language. Sign language was the most equitable, efficient, and compassionate vehicle for the education of deaf children.
In 1878, as Alec was turning back to the issue, oralists were doubling down. They had begun to argue for the absolute abolishment of sign language in the classroom. Alec didn’t practice this himself, but he didn’t stand against it, either. Some oralists argued that the learning of more than one language was injurious to the child, and almost all oralists argued that ASL was an inferior language. This wasn’t Alec’s argument, either, though he did believe that learning sign language stood in the way of social advancement.
While many manualists believed that only a small number of deaf people benefited from oralism, some oralists insisted that close to 99 percent did. The numbers cited fluctuated wildly, depending on measurement and what one considered success, and while it would be easy to find an article to correspond with whatever one already believed, it was also true that the vast majority of the articles published argued that oralism primarily benefited those deaf people who either became deaf postlingually or who retained some of their hearing. Oralism, for them, was rehabilitative speech therapy. It was building on something they already knew.
These were the people Alec was most familiar with—people like Mabel and Eliza, who were deafened postlingually. And he was drawing broad conclusions about all deaf people based on what he saw in this subset. This was happening even in Greenock. There, Alec was teaching ten children, but he wrote that he saw the whole of the deaf population of Great Britain in them. He said this as he observed only what was possible from the students who grew up in the most ideal conditions for speech training, students who already had language.
Alec was used to people telling him that certain things couldn’t be done. Now he ignored the possibility of failure, but in doing so, he was also ignoring the harm that might be done by not admitting that he could be wrong. Now that he was the inventor of the telephone, his ideas were received differently by the outside world. Everything he believed was imbued with a sense of believability, even genius.
Teaching again at Greenock, even briefly, relit a spark in Alec. He was ready to reenter this world. He was ready to devote himself fully to the oralist cause.
For the first time since telling Gardiner about his idea for the telephone, he was able to focus fully on his true work. He was happy at last. “Happier,” he wrote, “than at any time since the telephone took my mind away from this work.”
Mabel had stayed in London, but now Alec begged her to come join him. They could live in Gourock, he said, two miles down the coast from the school, a town he described as “mountain and sea blended together.”
She didn’t want to join her husband in Gourock. She didn’t want her husband in Gourock at all. Later in life, she would admit being jealous of the attention Alec directed toward deaf children, and questioned his attitude toward them, wondering if all deaf children were, on some level, only “cases” to him. And at this point she wasn’t so far removed in time from when she was his student.
Mabel wanted nothing more than to forget deafness, to live her life liberated from it. It was the promise of her speech-based education. It allowed her to identify as not-quite-deaf. It allowed her to move closer to “normal.” The problem was that proximity to deaf people threw the whole act out of balance: “to have anything to do with other deaf people instantly brought the hardly concealed fact [of my own deafness] into evidence.” And it felt to her that her husband kept pulling her back to this world she wanted to leave.
She had resisted his work with the deaf before, but back then the resistance was, on the surface, about him focusing more on the telephone. Now something else was emerging. It seemed she didn’t want him working with the deaf at all.
Not that it mattered much to Alec. “You would really laugh to see how happy I am in my work,” he wrote to Mabel. “I like teaching little children far better than working at the Telephone. If I could only be relieved of pecuniary anxieties—I should be perfectly happy to devote my life to this work. I do so love little children—and I like nothing better than being among them.”
Mabel wrote that he was spending all his time with “a couple of babies.”
Alec snapped back: “You are mistaken in supposing that all the pupils are ‘babies’.… I do not consider myself as working so many hours a day ‘for a couple of babies’—but as inaugurating a revolution in the methods of teaching deaf children in this country.… I am not going to forsake my little school just when it is struggling for existence—though the telephone should go to ruin—and though my wife and child should return to America and leave me here to work alone.”
His response was extreme, and it didn’t end there. He threatened to stay in Scotland until Christmas, if that’s what it would take for the school to succeed, but then softened into the heart of the matter: “It is a sorrow and great grief to me that you always exhibit so little interest in the work I have at heart.”
He was willing to leave her, at least temporarily, for the work. Or that’s what he said in one breath; in the next, he said he missed her. These were his two greatest pulls, his greatest loves, and he couldn’t stand them in conflict. He couldn’t sustain it even for the length of a letter. Their time in Covesea was still so near to him, rambling on the beach, stringing telephones to fences. When Alec thought of Mabel, all he really wanted—deep in his bones, deeper than any argument—was to lay his head on her shoulder, to feel comforted by the presence of his wife. To wrap his arms around her, feel her love, give love to her.
Mabel traveled to him in mid-September. There, as Mabel wrote letters to family, baby Elsie sat on her lap, tearing up pieces of paper. Elsie was turning out to be a beauty, a good traveler, a good sleeper. The mothers of Alec’s students took quickly to showering her with gifts: a silver mug, a Scottish dress.
Alec had wanted to stay in Scotland with the Greenock school, but the permanent teacher eventually arrived, and it was time for him to return to his life, to the past he was running from. Alec wanted nothing more to do with the telephone, that was clear to everyone. For now, the Bells would travel back to North America together, a family, in only a few weeks. They planned to go to Canada, to spend some time with Alec’s parents, before moving on to Washington, DC.
Alec and Mabel were reunited, in love, building a home and a life. But there were things that were not resolved, fundamental wedges between them: her resistance to the fact of her deafness, everything she had learned to be and to hide, her aloneness in the experience of this struggle; his inescapable devotion to his life’s work, a part of his heritage, his reason for being, and his inability to see how this rubbed against his wife’s identity.