. . . abreast of the thought and the doings of the times

by Mike Davis

Many of us have been taught during our years in school that it is important for good citizenship and lifelong learning to continue to read widely and stay well-informed about world events. Mary Baker Eddy’s life certainly illustrated this approach to self education.

Documentation in the archival collections of The Mary Baker Eddy Library shows that Mrs. Eddy was an avid reader of books, newspapers, and magazines throughout her life. And not only that, she interacted with this material, often clipping articles from the magazines and newspapers to save in scrapbooks. She underlined and annotated passages in books she read.

She read fiction and nonfiction, and covered a wide range of topics. Among them are current events, history, politics, medicine, trivia, humor, psychical research, theology, natural science, various religious movements, and Biblical scholarship All of this provides ample evidence of a statement made by a reporter who interviewed Mrs. Eddy in 1901: “[Eddy] reads much, she says, and keeps abreast of the thought and the doings of the times. She reads several newspapers and subscribes to seven monthly magazines” (Joseph I. Clarke’s interview with Mary Baker Eddy, published in the New York Herald, May 5, 1901).

Mrs. Eddy’s personal library of books, periodicals, copybooks, and scrapbooks has been carefully preserved and is housed in The Mary Baker Eddy Library. She began writing in a copybook before she entered her teens. Copybooks, also known as “commonplace books,” contained blank pages in which people would copy articles and poems they liked. By the time she died in 1910, Mrs. Eddy had accumulated two copybooks, over thirty scrapbooks, and a library of over 1,000 books.

Collecting articles and poetry in scrapbooks and copybooks was typical in the nineteenth century. Newspapers and magazines were the primary sources of information; commercially printed books were not as affordable as they are today. Readers built their own personal libraries by clipping items of interest, and saving them in scrapbooks. As Mrs. Eddy’s income grew during her later years, she was able to purchase printed books. But her interest in saving things she read in scrapbooks continued undiminished.

Mrs. Eddy’s many books and scrapbooks provide a window on a number of aspects of nineteenth-century American culture. They also give us an intimate glimpse into some of her innermost thoughts and feelings at various stages of her life. They contribute to the picture of her as a multifaceted woman, intensely interested in the world around her. In a sense, she carried on a kind of dialogue with these books and articles. They spoke to her with information, inspiration, even entertainment, and she in turn frequently recorded in their margins her responses to what she was reading through marking passages or making comments. To take a few examples: In one of her scrapbooks (SB015, p. 41), Mrs. Eddy saved an undated article from the Literary Digest. The article shows the inadequacies of the then current educational system to meet the special needs of developmentally disabled children. It goes on to discuss the relationship between cerebral function and speech. Mrs. Eddy marked a passage that told of improvement in thought and intellect when these children were trained to speak more clearly.

She also showed interest in the writings of Helen Keller, whose story of triumphing over the limitations of being both deaf and blind has inspired many people. Mrs. Eddy marked and annotated several passages in Keller’s book, Optimism, such as this one on page 15: “It is a mistake always to contemplate the good and ignore the evil, because by making people neglectful it lets in disaster. There is a dangerous optimism of ignorance and indifference.”

Another work Mrs. Eddy heavily marked with evident appreciation is Emerson’s Nature - the essay that has been regarded as the beginning of the Transcendentalist movement. But she wrote in her copy her overall assessment of the work: “Emerson put so much reason into Mind and so much philosophy into Science that he lost the true sense of Spirit, God.”

Not surprisingly, Mrs. Eddy also enjoyed discussing current affairs and other things she was reading about. Biographer Gillian Gill notes that after she founded The Christian Science Monitor in 1908, “as a lifelong newspaper junkie Mrs. Eddy loved getting the Monitor every day . . . ” and she discussed its contents with her staff (Gillian Gill, Mary Baker Eddy, p. 533).

She used various means to gain a deeper knowledge of current affairs. For example, she made a point to learn much about China and its political situation through a correspondence with Sarah Pike Conger, wife of the American Ambassador to China. One result was Mrs. Eddy’s ability to discuss these matters in depth with William E. Curtis, a prominent journalist who interviewed Mrs. Eddy in her Concord, NH home in 1906. Curtis was accompanied by another journalist, Michael Meehan, who recorded what happened during the interview: “In the course of preliminary remarks, [Curtis] made a statement about affairs in China, touching which Mrs. Eddy asked for more detailed and definite information, and quite unconsciously, seemingly, she took the topic entirely out of his grasp, and for more than an hour, dwelt on the detail of the Chinese situation, with such wonderful insight and with such intimate knowledge of its social, political, and economic conditions, as to quite confound the man” (See Lyman P. Powell, Mary Baker Eddy: A Life Size Portrait, p. 215 in the 1991 edition).

Mrs. Eddy’s interest in keeping up with world events was certainly more than just an intellectual interest or hobby. It is evident from her correspondence that she was actively praying about these events and taking steps to bring healing to them. And it is plain that she expected her follows to do this, too. For example, in 1905, she requested that “every member” of The Mother Church pray for “the amicable settlement of the war between Russia and Japan” (See The First Church of Christ, Scientist and Miscellany, p. 279).

Her founding of The Christian Science Monitor, is a further indication of her desire that Christian Scientists and mankind in general stay abreast of what is going on in the world.

Mrs. Eddy’s wide-ranging interests and her practice of staying informed certainly serve as an outstanding example for us today. We, too, need to be knowledgeable citizens and healers in a world that is crying out for the healing touch of the Christ in every area of human thought and activity.

Mike Davis works as a researcher in The Mary Baker Eddy Library.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, October 16th, 2007 at 4:30 pm and is filed under Mary Baker Eddy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response.