Joseph Edgar Chamberlin
As it turns out, in a certain generation, our family’s best memory keeper was Helen Keller.
I am indebted to the Helen Keller Archive at the American Foundation for the Blind for allowing me to come to know – four generations later – my great-great grandfather, the Boston author and journalist, Joseph Edgar Chamberlin. My current book in progress, called Letters from Red Farm, reveals new information about Helen Keller as it tells the untold story of her deep and enduring friendship with her beloved "Uncle Ed, " my ancestor, and Helen’s literary mentor and close friend for over 40 years.
The story of Helen’s friendship with my family was only superficially known to us until a few years ago when I first contacted the AFB.
Like millions of readers around the world, I grew up fascinated by books about Helen Keller. I was captivated by the story of the child who could neither see nor hear and whose inner potential and delightful personality were revealed by her teacher, Annie Sullivan. While reading, I had a unique and personal relationship to the story: books about Helen frequently talked of the times she spent with a family named Chamberlin at their home called Red Farm in Wrentham, a suburb of Boston. I knew that she had spent those happy hours with my great-great grandparents, Ed and Ida Chamberlin, and their children. Their fourth child was Elizabeth, my great-grandmother.
The fact that Helen spent parts of her childhood with my ancestors was the extent of my knowledge of the friendship until January 2012 when I called the AFB in New York, where most of Helen’s personal letters and papers are archived. From an online search, I knew there existed a box of materials related to the Chamberlins in their collection.
I telephoned Helen Selsdon, the archivist, and began by telling her that I was the great-great granddaughter of Joseph Edgar Chamberlin, a man who had been a journalist in the Boston area and friends with Helen Keller, and I was interested in doing some research.
I could hear the phone being jostled, repositioned. "Say that again?"
I repeated my story— not even sure at that point whether I had any business making this call. "Oh my goodness!" Ms. Selsdon said. "The Chamberlins were huge in Helen’s life. It’s so amazing to hear from you. Are you really of the family?"
She was eager to help me. Five days later, in the mail, I received a twenty-page list of hits in the Foundation database that involved the Chamberlins.
It was immediately obvious that the narrative revealed would not be the one I had expected. Somehow I had imagined I would discover a simple, pleasant, and straightforward tale about my friendly family who invited Helen and Annie for dinners and holidays at their home. Instead, I found a complex and multi-layered story that told of joys and talents, but also controversy, tragedy, and personal failings. It was clear that I had something bigger on my hands than merely a collection of family anecdotes.
Six months after my first call, I visited the AFB offices in New York. The Archives file room was filled floor to ceiling with neatly labeled boxes of letters and photographs, movie reels, and monographs related to Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan. The hundreds of letters related to my search were organized by author and in chronological order. The earliest was a March 1892 letter from Ed to Annie Sullivan asking if Helen was giving thought to an earlier request from him to write "a little written account of her instruction" for the popular periodical he edited called The Youth’s Companion. I was thrilled to see for the first time the small, flowing handwriting of my great-great grandfather, written on Youth’s Companion letterhead. It was clear that Helen and her teacher were already acquainted with him, for he wrote, "You know me, I do not want a long story." Nine months later, in December 1892, Chamberlin writes a long, chatty letter to Keller, addressing her as “my dear Helen.” In it he writes about having received a "most pleasant and interesting little note" from her and then talked in charming detail about his children.
Those files provided the perfect starting point for my research. The AFB documents then led me to the Alexander Graham Bell Family Papers digitally archived at the Library of Congress, which provided copies of many more letters. Joseph P. Lash’s epic work, Helen and Teacher, and Kim E. Nielsen’s 2009 biography of Annie Sullivan, Beyond the Miracle Worker, were both recommended by Selsdon and served as important references, filling in critical story details not provided by letters.
As a journalist for more than sixty years, Ed Chamberlin left a long and rich trail of his own. Online searches provided reprints of many of his Boston Transcript newspaper and Youth’s Companion articles, as well as several of his published books. The Perkins School Archive with its carefully kept scrapbooks of over a hundred years of newspaper clippings, was also invaluable.
But the writer who provided the greatest insight and richest written accounts of life in the Chamberlin household was Helen Keller. Keller wrote that her Uncle Ed— whom she met when she was just eight years old, "most enabled and sweetened my life." She found him to be a tender and poetic man; a man who lived "in the service of words," cared deeply about social issues and the natural world, and was a sympathetic and understanding friend and mentor.1
Though she met countless famous literary figures throughout her life, Helen gave Chamberlin credit for launching her literary career. In a letter Helen Keller wrote to Chamberlin in 1934, she said, "it was not until we met you that our education in literature and literary ways truly began." From the earliest days of their friendship, Chamberlin advocated for Helen’s education and was an active supporter of the work of the Perkins Institution. Ed stepped in to defend Helen when she was accused of plagiarism as a twelve year old in 1892. When Radcliffe balked at admitting Helen as a student in 1900, Ed wrote to Dean Agnes Irwin and asked gently for her to please resolve the situation. Helen was admitted shortly afterward.
My great-great grandfather was convinced that Keller could, and should, lead a life with no limits. He also viewed Helen as capable of deciding her own future. When she and Annie abruptly left the Cambridge School for Young Ladies in 1897 under a storm of controversy, Ed empowered Helen to make a potentially life-changing decision: In a private conversation with her, he told her that it might soon be incumbent on her to decide whether she would stay with Annie Sullivan or go away with her mother. In response, Helen told him, "Uncle Ed, if I have to decide between my mother and Teacher, I will stay with Teacher." Ed would later say simply, "This decided me as to my own sympathies in the case." All of his subsequent actions and advocacy would be guided by Helen’s statement.2
In my search to uncover my family’s story, I realize that I have emulated my great-great grandfather the newsman—ferreting out information and following leads wherever they take me. Modern digital technology is giving me a huge advantage with my detective work. My work—and the work of fellow researchers—is no longer thwarted by our inability to travel to archives to undertake research in person – information is fully available at our fingertips.
Digitizing historical materials is key to my discoveries and I am delighted that the National Endowment for the Humanities and private organizations such as American Express and the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation have enthusiastically funded the digitization and dissemination of a large portion of the Helen Keller Archive. I’m delighted that AFB recently received additional funding to digitize the press clippings and scrapbooks contained in Keller’s archive. I look forward to digging further and to uncovering more information about the times in which she lived. Keller’s battles, and indeed my great-great grandfather’s work for greater social equality are as relevant today as they were over a century ago. I look forward to sharing the story of the Chamberlin-Keller friendship on a broader basis.
Note The writer’s great-great grandparents, Joseph Edgar (Ed) and Ida Chamberlin were close friends of Helen Keller and her teacher, Annie Sullivan, having met the pair in 1888 when they first came to Boston to attend Perkins. Ed Chamberlin was an important literary figure at the time, writing a popular daily column for The Boston Transcript and serving as an editor and staff writer for The Youth’s Companion, a nationally distributed family magazine. He and his family lived in Wrentham, outside of Boston, where their home called Red Farm was a gathering place for literary and artistic figures of the day. A former grant writer, Elizabeth Emerson is currently working on a book called Letters from Red Farm about the Chamberlin-Keller friendship and conducting research with AFB.
1. Helen Keller, “Joseph Edgar Chamberlin” in American Magazine, Vol. 73, p. 421-422. Retrieved at https://books.google.com/books/TheAmericanMagazine
2. J.E. Chamberlin to Nella Braddy Henney 6/10/1927. Nella Braddy Henney Collection, Courtesy of the Perkins School for the Blind.
