by Mike Davis
Biographies are probably one of the most popular forms of nonfiction today—you’ll find books on celebrities, non-celebrities, and well-known historical figures in virtually any bookstore or bookstore website.
In her later years, Mary Baker Eddy achieved celebrity status; many felt she was most famous woman in the United States at the time. Not surprisingly, there was a great deal of interest in her life story. A few years after her death in 1910, The Mother Church asked people who had known her to write up their recollections of her, known today as reminiscences.
Over 800 reminiscences, ranging in length from one to close to a thousand pages, are housed in The Mary Baker Eddy Library in Boston. They contain much fascinating information about Mrs. Eddy, and they can often be valuable in correcting inaccurate accounts of history. Newspaper reports and biographies about Mrs. Eddy—during her lifetime and up to the present day—have not always contained reliable information.
Facts found in reminiscences can help set the record straight, and often give details that can’t be obtained in any other way. They can also be valuable in documenting the larger "surround" of Mrs. Eddy’s life and times, as well as the personal impressions and reactions of those who interacted with her. Sometimes they provide the most significant information for periods of Mrs. Eddy’s life that are not otherwise well documented. One example of this is the reminiscence of Addie Towns Arnold, who was a child in Tilton, New Hampshire when Mrs. Eddy lived there as a young woman.
Mrs. Arnold writes about Tilton, giving a vivid picture of the provincial small-town life of that time, and includes details of the activities of Mrs. Eddy (then Mary Glover, and later Mary Patterson) that are not available from any other source. Later in her reminiscence, Mrs. Arnold writes of being healed through Christian Science and studying Science and Health. Eventually she discovered that she had known its author years before in Tilton. She’d read in Science and Health Mrs. Eddy’s account of healing Ellen Pilsbury (Mrs. Eddy’s niece) of enteritis (inflammation of the intestine). She decided to investigate the details of this healing, and describes how, through her knowledge of Mrs. Eddy’s family, she was able to hear confirmation of the healing firsthand from some of those family members.
Reminiscences recounting events from later periods of Mrs. Eddy’s life often include memories of spiritual instruction Mrs. Eddy gave to rouse those around her to strive to be better Christian healers themselves. One of her secretaries, William Rathvon, in a diary entry he included in his reminiscence, records her remarks during a staff meeting that illustrates the intensely practical approach to Christian Science that Mrs. Eddy expected of her employees:
Jan. 1, 1909 Begin the New Year by doing, not talking. Talk is dangerous if it satisfies us and thus prevents us from going further and making our demonstration. If it does not prevent, it may hinder. The tongue may lie, but healing the sick is no lie. Wrong thought leads to wrong action and vice versa. If one is done, the other will do itself, just as the little boy in school who whistled, and when spoken to by his teacher, said, ‘I did not whistle. It whistled itself.’
Mrs. Eddy’s employees’ reminiscences also give a lot of information about life in her household—what it was like to support Mrs. Eddy practically as she carried on her work. They frequently speak about aspects of that life that would not be apparent from reading Mrs. Eddy’s correspondence.
The collection has reminiscences by many others besides household workers. Accounts by officials of The Mother Church tell about interacting with Mrs. Eddy as Leader of the Christian Science movement. People who attended her classes in the Massachusetts Metaphysical College in the 1880s or who were in her last class in 1898, share their memories. Residents of Concord, New Hampshire, recall their encounters with her when she lived there. And there are those who shared their memories of witnessing Mrs. Eddy’s healing in February 1866, which she would come to view as the occasion of her discovery of Christian Science.
Christian healing is at the heart of Mrs. Eddy’s message, and the Library has inspiring accounts of Mrs. Eddy’s own effectiveness as a healer, often written by those who were healed or who witnessed the healings.
Well, in this brief blog I’ve barely scratched the surface of the riches to be discovered in the Library’s collection of reminiscences. Mrs. Eddy’s cook, Minnie Weygandt, wrote in concluding her own reminiscence: "There are many other things which I could relate, but as The Mother Church probably knows as much, if not more, than I do about them, I will not go into further details." While today we’ll never know what those "further details" were, we can hope that a significant number of them can be found in the hundreds of reminiscences in the Library’s collection. If you’re in Boston and would like to read them, please stop by the Research Room on the fourth floor of The Mary Baker Eddy Library. Or, if you’d like to buy your own copies, please call 617-450-7218 for more information.
Mike Davis is a Researcher in The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
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After my class instruction a few years ago, I wanted to read as much as possible about MBE. I dig into those reminiscences you are talking about and I really enjoyed them like a roman! I wanted to know more about MBE, what she thought, what she would have said or done. To me understanding her way of life is a way to better understand Christian Science and to try to apply it the way she did (well I still have a lot of work to do!)
Thank you for the Library, thank you for your research work, thank you Mike for those wonderful messages.
This is a great article, and Mike’s right–there’s a wealth of material about Mrs. Eddy in the LIbrary. And even today, there are people who aren’t church members but know about her. One hot summer day a friend and I went into a Carvel to buy ice creams and because it was so hot, we stayed inside to eat the cones. We got to chatting with the owner who asked where we worked. When I mentioned The Christian Science Publishing Society, he said, “O Mrs. Eddy! Such an interesting woman!” He then went on to talk about her life in a way that showed he was really familiar with it and expressed a lot of appreciation for what the Church was doing.
When my friend and I got outside, we both agreed that never in a million years would we have expected to talk to someone who already knew about Mary Baker Eddy while we were having ice cream. And it’s happed other times, too.