Reformer

Youth.

Dorothea Lynde Dix was born in 1802 in Hampden, Maine, into the impoverished family of a lay Methodist preacher. Her father, an alcoholic, exercised severe discipline, and the family moved constantly from place to place. Her childhood was so unhappy that in later life she never mentioned her parents and sometimes claimed that she had been orphaned. At the age of thirteen she left her parents and divided her time between a wealthy grandmother in Boston and a family of cousins in Worcester, Massachusetts. Governed by a strong sense of independence and of duty, she began teaching school at age fifteen. At sixteen she took responsibility for both of her younger brothers.

Education.

Dix educated herself. An uncle arranged for her to have borrowing privileges at the Boston Athenaeum, and she soon cultivated a particular interest in the natural sciences. She corresponded regularly...