Thomas Wiggins, aka Blind Tom
(1849 – 1908)
He was the highest-paid concert pianist of the century. He was also blind and an autistic savant, able to play 7000 songs from memory, mimic other pianists perfectly, and conjure wildly imaginative improvisations from the sound of rainstorms, sewing machines and battlefields. It is hard to believe such a man could be forgotten. Yet that is precisely what happened to Thomas Wiggins.
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Born sightless in Georgia under the slave name of Thomas Bethune, at the age of four he was heard playing beautifully on a parlour piano. Darold Treffert, a psychiatrist and savant historian at the St Agnes Hospital in Fond de Lac, Wisconsin, notes that Wiggins was “fascinated by sounds of all sorts – rain on the roof, the grating of the corn sheller, but most of all music.” Snatched up by an avaricious promoter, “Blind Tom” became a concert sensation, playing at the White House and before panels of the top judges in Europe. Soon the child prodigy was grossing $100,000 a year.
Sceptical musicians challenged him with new compositions that he could not possibly have heard before: he would play them back flawlessly. He would also cheer himself wildly after such feats, stalk the stage between numbers, and then hum oddly during them. The fact that Wiggins would introduce his compositions in the third person only added to the otherworldliness of his performance. Harry Houdini fretted that Wiggins’s concerts might really cause people to believe in the supernatural. Largely defrauded of his earnings by promoters, Wiggins died in obscurity in Brooklyn. It has only been through recent efforts by pianist John Davis that Wiggins’s startlingly original works have come to light again.
Martin Tupper (1810 – 1889)
A would-be clergyman and then London lawyer whose career was stymied by severe stuttering, young Martin Tupper turned to poetry with his earnestly moral Proverbial Philosophy (1838). The book grew into a cultural juggernaut through the 1840s and 1850s, selling about 250,000 copies in the UK and a staggering 1.5 million in the US – something few poets before or since have rivalled. Gift editions were pressed upon children for birthdays, and given to newly-weds on their big day.
Tupper was reputed to be Queen Victoria’s favourite poet, and only narrowly lost the post of Laureate to his friend Alfred Tennyson. On a US tour, Tupper even caught his barber selling his hair clippings to eager fans. But Tupper’s ubiquity and moralising eventually changed him in the public mind from great poet to crashing bore, making him the target of incessant ridicule. Nor did it help that he could write howlers like The Toothache, with the immortal opening line: “A raging throbbing tooth – it burns, it burns!” Still, few could have imagined that Tupper would wind up out of print and forgotten. Even scholars do not bother with him. Yet the word “Tupperian” lives on – as a term of abuse for bad poetry.
Hinton Helper (1829 – 1909)
Born and raised on a North Carolina plantation, Helper wrote one of the most important and least remembered polemics of the 19th century: The Impending Crisis of the South (1857). Backed by census figures showing the South lagging badly behind the North, it argued that slavery was holding Southerners back economically, morally and intellectually, and had reduced the region to “imbecility” and “poor white trash”.
Anti-slavery Northerners seized upon the work of this rebellious native son. The Impending Crisis went through an estimated 114 printings, and the Republican party printed 100,000 copies of its own. Southerners were not so enamoured. Laws were swiftly passed forbidding its distribution or ownership. Three men were lynched for owning copies, while others were jailed or run out of town.
Yet Helper was no friend to African Americans: he hated them, and opposed slavery because it meant sharing the same continent with them. Helper exhausted the goodwill of northerners with these views, and squandered his royalties pushing for a railroad that would run from the Hudson Bay to the tip of South America. He proclaimed himself “a new Columbus”, but few were listening anymore. The would-be racist leader and rail tycoon eventually died by his own hand in a Washington DC flophouse, just a few blocks from the Capitol.
Marguerite Durand (1846 – 1936)
As publisher of the cheekily named newspaper La Fronde (the slingshot), Durand was one of the most controversial and well–known figures in turn–of–the–century France. La Fronde featured an all-female staff, from political correspondents and a cross-dressing sports editor, to the janitors who cleaned the offices, and the typesetters and printing staff.
Its 1897 debut was ridiculed by competitors, but La Fronde became a potent force in French public life, weighing in on women’s property rights, anti–war feelings, and defending the much–maligned Captain Alfred Dreyfus, whose false imprisonment for treason in 1894 had sparked a long–running row about anti–Semitism.
Prominent women made a point of visiting La Fronde’s stylish offices on Rue Saint–Georges, where in one room Durand was also assembling one of the world’s finest collections of women’s literature.
Durand herself became an inimitable presence in Parisian society, thanks in part to rumours of the former actress’s affairs. “Feminism owes a great deal to my blond hair,” she quipped. Curiously, she also became known for her love of dogs, particularly after founding one of the first pet cemeteries.
Though La Fronde and Durand are barely remembered today, Durand’s library lives on as a resource for scholars of women’s studies. La Fronde’s offices have fared much worse. When I visited Rue Saint-Georges last year, I arrived to find the building being demolished by a wrecking crew.