Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf: The Popham Notebook and Associated Texts by ed. John Wallis

Abstract

Reviewed by: Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf: The Popham Notebook and Associated Texts by ed. John Wallis William T. Ennis III (bio) Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf: The Popham Notebook and Associated Texts, by John Wallis, ed. David Cram and Jaap Maat (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018, hardcover, 320 pages, $100.00, ISBN: 978-0199677085) David Cram and Jaap Maat's Teaching Language to a Boy Born Deaf: The Popham Notebook and Associated Texts is an incisive and thoroughly researched book on the education of Alexander Popham, born deaf to a wealthy English family in the mid-seventeenth century. Under the tutelage of first William Holder, then John Wallis, Popham learned to speak, read, and write to some level of success. However, the case of Popham has attracted more attention from historians due to the bitter rivalry between Holder and Wallis and their dispute over who should claim credit for Popham's success. The story of Popham's education reentered the public consciousness with the 2008 discovery of a leather notebook belonging to Wallis, who had used the notebook in educating Popham. Scholars, who generally agree Wallis wrote the notebook himself, believed that its discovery might provide information that would settle the dispute between Wallis and Holder over which of them had more influence on Popham's education. Such a dispute might be attributed to men haughtily bickering over who should have the credit for Popham's success. However, at a time when any education of deaf people was exceedingly rare, the title "first educator of the deaf in England" entailed certain material rewards, in addition to fame. Holder, a clergyman, worked with Popham beginning in 1659 until a year later, when Holder was appointed prebendary to a different parish in Ely. Three years later, in 1663, Popham's mother contracted [End Page 628] with Wallis, also a clergyman and polymath, to continue Popham's education. For both Wallis and Holder, educating Popham involved teaching him both language and speech. Holder spent more time working on speech than language, while Wallis focused on the inverse. It seems fitting to us today, with the increased attention given to the language deprivation of deaf children, to note that Wallis believed that teaching language to deaf people was more beneficial than teaching speech (77). This is reflected in the Popham Notebook, with its singular focus on grammar and vocabulary. Furthermore, Wallis, more so than Holder, also believed, "We must endeavor to learn their language (if I may so call it) in order to teach them ours—by shewing what words answer to their signes [sic]" (87). The crux of the feud between Holder and Wallis, which began in 1670, was how much of Holder's teaching Popham retained during the intervening years before Wallis began his work. Wallis asserted that when he began working with Popham in 1663, Popham had retained none of the speaking abilities that he learned from Holder. In 1670, Wallis published a letter, which he originally wrote in 1662, in the Philosophical Transactions, the scientific journal of the Royal Society, of which both men were members—this letter would spark the bitter feud between the men. The letter was addressed to Robert Boyle, a founding member of the society. In the letter, Wallis discussed his work with Daniel Whaley, his first deaf student, and included a postscript that described his later work with Popham, but he did not identify Popham by name (107). Holder took issue with Wallis' omission, from his letter and postscript, of Holder's earlier work with Popham. Wallis later argued that he intentionally omitted Holder to shield him from criticism that Popham had not retained any of the speaking ability he developed under Holder's tutelage. Exacerbating the issue, Wallis claimed that Popham denied that Holder taught him to speak and gave credit to Wallis (113). Wallis chose to publish this eight-year-old letter about his work with Whaley and Popham because the year before, in 1669, Holder had published his book, Elements of Speech. Reviews of the book in the Philosophical Transactions recognized Holder's reputation as the most prominent phonetician of his time and...