Mrs. Sigourney of Hartford: Poems and Prose on the Early American Deaf Community

About the Texts

About the Texts All of Sigourney’s poems that were published more than once were altered, if only very slightly, at nearly each new appearance. Except in the case of “On Seeing the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind Girl of the American Asylum, Hartford, at a Festival,” for which alternate opening stanzas are given, no attempt has been made to show such variation. We have retained Sigourney’s spelling and punctuation in all cases except those few in which a typographical error is obvious, as when the word is spelled correctly elsewhere in the same essay, story, or poem. Such printing errors have been silently corrected. This means that when Sigourney spells “Cogswell” as “Coggswell” and leaves it in that spelling over several editions of her collection Zinzendorff, and Other Poems, that is the way we present it. Spelling in antebellum America did not yet uniformly conform to the innovations proposed by West Hartford native Noah Webster and codified in his dictionaries, so Sigourney’s works have a bit of a British look, with spellings like “centre,” “chequer,” “recognise,” and “Saviour.” We also find words like instructor and visitor sometimes spelled with -er. Double ls are found reduced to single, and vice versa, so we find “untill” and “instil.” Sigourney habitually indicates whether preterit-tense verbs ending in -ed are to be pronounced with or without the additional syllable: an apostrophe in place of the e as in “gaz’d” and “moan’d” indicates pronunciations with no additional syllable for the suffix, while the -ed spelling usually means that the suffix is to be pronounced as a separate syllable as in “saluted”—or “fixed,” which must be pronounced “fix-ed” to fit the meter of the poem. This convention is like that seen in more familiar shortened pronunciations of over as “o’er” or never as “ne’er.” Words that are common today but that had slightly different meanings in Sigourney’s time are glossed to the right of the line in which they appear, or, in prose, at the bottom of the page. Four such words used very frequently, however, are not glossed at each 49 Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 49 4/4/2013 12:35:30 PM appearance: peculiar, friends, cell, and train. The word peculiar never means “odd” and always means “unique to the person”: “peculiar to themselves,” “her peculiar misfortune,” “peculiarly affecting.” The word friends commonly denoted, at this date, family or relatives , not people one otherwise feels close to. The word cell never refers to rooms in prisons or monasteries, but, for Sigourney, means any private room such as in a dormitory or hospital and sometimes means any private abode at all, such as the Cogswell family home in “Funeral of Mason F. Coggswell” or even an igloo in “Laura Bridgman.” We also see cell used metaphorically in “La Petite Sourde-Muette” and “Meeting of the Blind with the Deaf, Dumb, and Blind,” where the deaf girls’ minds reside in a “guarded cell” or “hermit-cell.” The word train denotes, at this date, only a group of people and is used by Sigourney to mean not a retinue or suite of followers, but more generally any group of people who come or go as a group, so that “yon mute train” means “that group of deaf people over there” while “the white rob’d train of peace” refers to the angels in heaven. Finally, the expression “deaf and dumb” was the standard, unimpeachable , and, indeed, only current denominator for people we now call “deaf” or “Deaf.” Alice Cogswell, in her correspondence, uses the charming abbreviation “D & D” to refer to herself, her classmates, and Mr. Clerc. 50 About the Texts Sigourney Main Pgs 1-162.indd 50 4/4/2013 12:35:30 PM ...