Mabel Bell: Alexander's Silent Partner

Robin V.H. Bellamy was an editor and bibliographer in Vancouver.

Mabel Hubbard, later the wife of inventor Alexander Graham Bell, lost her hearing through an attack of scarlet fever when she was five. At a time when “deaf children, if educated at all, were segregated in asylums for deaf mutes” (p.xvi), only her parents’ determination, wealth, and influence allowed her to lead a relatively normal life. With private tutoring and schooling, the stimulation of a busy social life, and travel plus more schooling in Europe, Mabel retained her ability to speak, learned to lip read, exercised her intellect, and became self-confident. At 15 she began to study under a young professor of vocal physiology at Boston University, Alexander Bell; four years later they were married.

As the subtitle suggests, this book concentrates on Mabel in relation to her husband. Her story is told partly through Lilias Toward’s narrative, but largely through excerpts from Mabel’s own letters to her mother and Alec, letters that reveal her absorption with her husband. In her parents’ home Mabel had been accustomed to considerable affluence and social status, and to the idea that a woman’s role was to manage her home and family. Mabel accepted all of this as desirable, and poured her energies into running not only Alec’s household but his career. She encouraged, cajoled, and pressured him to pursue projects she thought (often in accordance with her father) most likely to bring him profit and prestige. When Bell was torn between his obligations to those backing his work on the telephone (among them Mr. Hubbard) and his own desire to continue his work with the deaf, Mabel wrote:

You don’t know how much my heart is in your work [on the telephone] and how anxious I am that you should succeed. I want so much that you should take your proper place among scientific men. I don’t think you care very much about it, but for my sake and for the sake of others who might depend on you, you ought to. That remark looks so selfish I am inclined to tear up this whole letter but I have no time for another note before the closing of the mails and besides what is for me is for you also. (p.31)

In fact, Mabel was “above all things... antagonistic to [her] husband’s efforts to keep up his association with the deaf’ (p. 192); although she did not admit this openly until after his death, Alec recognized her attitude early in their relationship, declaring, “it is a sorrow and grief to me that you have always exhibited so little interest in the work I have at heart” (p.58). Mabel justified her behavior by explaining, “when I was young and struggling for a foothold in society of my natural equals, I could not be nice to other deaf people. It was self-preservation” (p. 193). Her role as “partner” in Bell’s work is not, then, an entirely positive one; what would have been lost or gained without her influence on him is one of the intriguing questions this biography — albeit unintentionally — raises.

During the last 35 years of their lives, the Bells often lived at Beinn Bhreagh, their estate near Baddeck, Nova Scotia. There Bell conducted experiments in aeronautics and developed the hydrofoil, while Mabel took care of their domestic and social affairs and became a leader in the cultural life of Baddeck.

The work of Lilias Toward — a native of Nova Scotia, a lawyer, and cousin to Hugh MacLennan — will be appreciated by those interested not only in the Bells but in socially pioneering women at the turn of the century, in the development of Baddeck, and in the psychology of someone physically disabled. Access to information in the book is greatly hampered, however, by the absence of an index. An earlier (indexed) biography by Helen Elmira Waite, Make a Joyful Sound: The Romance of Mabel Hubbard and Alexander Graham Bell (Philadelphia: Macrae Smith, 1961) covered much of the same subject matter: the particular value of Mabel Bell: Alexander’s Silent Partner is that it presents Mabel Bell in her own words.