Most of us have a memory of being rocked as a child and of the comfort that brought. The rocking chair seemed to have great comforting significance to Mary Baker Eddy, too. In Mary Baker Eddy, a biography by Gillian Gill, she observes that “the rocking chair is a motif that will recur throughout the story of Mary Baker Eddy’s life, and that later in life, Mrs. Eddy was to remember herself as a tiny girl sitting in her little rocking chair next to her granny.”1
Did you know that there are twenty-three rocking chairs in the collection at The Mary Baker Eddy Library? The rocking chair was a popular furniture form in Victorian times and in Eddy’s household. In some photographs taken of Eddy’s study at Chestnut Hill, there are at least five different rocking chairs inhabiting the room!
This rocking chair, which probably dates from the late 1860s, was with Eddy for many years, and was an old friend. The chair became an icon for Eddy’s early struggles, and we find it in reminiscences, drawings, paintings, and Eddy’s own words.
“I moved nine times while writing the book and that chair was the only furniture and about all I possessed. My writing desk was simply a piece of book cover cardboard.…”2
When she purchased her home at 8 Broad Street in Lynn, Massachusetts, in 1875, she set up her rocking chair in the third floor attic room and there completed her work on the first edition of her major work, Science and Health.
Note that she mentions not having a desk. It isn’t known exactly when Eddy first started writing with her pad of paper on her lap, but writing on “a piece of book cover cardboard” while seated in a low rocking chair might have contributed to this longstanding practice. By the time Eddy lived at Pleasant View, Concord, New Hampshire (1892-1908), she generally sat in a large platform rocker positioned at right-angles to her desk (read about the desk in the Object of the Month May 2013). She usually wrote with her pad of paper on her lap.
Eddy’s private room at Pleasant View from the 1894 book Pleasant View: Home Surroundings of Rev. Mary Baker Eddy by J. F. Gilman and H.E. Carlton. (P06318.1)
In his reminiscences, James Gilman recalled that on Saturday, August 19, 1893, he went to Eddy’s home, Pleasant View, to give her drawings he had made for her poem Christ and Christmas, and she invited him to the sitting room to look at them with her. While there, Gilman suggested that he would like to draw a view of her sitting room with Eddy sitting in her armchair and with the chair in which she wrote Science and Health in the view. It was then that she related to him the story of moving with her chair nine times.
About two years later, Susan B. Schenk, an artist who had recently given Eddy another of her paintings, asked Eddy if she could make a painting of the rocking chair. Eddy replied:
…I thank you for your most kind offer to paint a relic of mine. When I have time (if ever that occurs) to attend to it I shall be pleased to have you paint the rocking chair that I wrote Science and Health in.…3
Painting by Susan B. Schenk, 1895 (0.2574),
The rocking chair became well-known to Christian Scientists when a photograph of the painting (which was hung in Mother’s Room in the Original Edifice of The Mother Church) was published in H.L. Dunbar’s 1898 book Illustrated Historical Sketches of Christian Science..
The horsehair upholstery on this rocking chair has most certainly been replaced at least once. Nonetheless, in its current state it shows the wear and character of years of continued use by Eddy in her early travels from place to place and in her homes in Lynn and Concord. It is now cared for at The Mary Baker Eddy Library.
