Pears soap box, c. 1900. 0.2637.1 AB. (Contemporary package shown for comparison.)
Among the many unique items in the collections at The Mary Baker Eddy Library are three cakes of Pears glycerin soap. This transparent soap was first produced in 1789 in London—and is said to be the first registered brand in the world. Pears is still available today, and is the oldest continually existing branded product.
1896 Munsey’s Magazine: According to this advertisement, Pears was an important part of a soldier’s hygiene routine.
In 1900 three bars of this soap were sent to Mary Baker Eddy from the Philippines, in the name of Lieutenant J. Malcolm Graham. Eddy responded on May 17, 1900 with a letter of thanks,1 Graham wrote back on September 1—saying he had not sent the soap!2 In a second letter, dated September 18, 1900, he suggested that an inquiry to Company C of the 19th Infantry (U.S. Army) might uncover the true identity of the person who had sent the gift.3
Calvin Frye, Eddy’s longtime secretary, then wrote Company C. and received a reply from one George Doble. In a letter dated December 26, 1900, signed only G.D.D., Doble acknowledged it was he who had sent Eddy the soap. But he maintained that he had meant to remain anonymous.4
So, what’s so unique about these bars of soap? Embedded in each cakes were 10 five-dollar Liberty Head—or Half Eagle—gold pieces! According to Doble’s letter, these coins represented four months’ pay that he had received on his release from a four–month hospital stay. He attributed his survival of a severe bullet wound to Christian Science, and had sent the money to Eddy as an expression of gratitude.
Eddy was so humbled by this act of generosity that she spoke of it in her Message to The Mother Church for 1900:
Only last week I received a touching token of unselfed manhood from a person I never saw. But since publishing this page I have learned it was a private soldier who sent to me, in the name of a first lieutenant of the United States infantry in the Philippine Islands, ten five–dollar gold pieces snuggled in Pears’ soap. Surely it is enough for a soldier serving his country in that torrid zone to part with his soap, but to send me some of his hard–earned money cost me a tear! Yes, and it gave me more pleasure than millions of money could have given.5
Along with the correspondence, those three cakes of soap—with the coins still embedded in them—remain a meaningful part of the Library’s archives.
