Mr. Dickey: Secretary to Mary Baker Eddy with a Chestnut Hill Album
Baxter, Nancy Niblack. Mr. Dickey: Secretary to Mary Baker Eddy with a Chestnut Hill Album. Carmel, IN: Hawthorne Publishing, 2008.
This second edition of Mr. Dickey includes the same biographical information as the first edition for the first half of the book. But the second half of the book replaces Dickey’s ‘Memoirs’ with his ‘Chestnut Hill Album.’ The first half describes Dickey’s role as helper for Mary Baker Eddy in her last years and his own leadership role after her death in 1910. Since the publication of the first edition (2005), Dickey’s album journals were found and acquired by Keith McNeil who shared them with Baxter for this publication (2008). They include the specific journal entries and photographic images collected by Dickey during his years in Eddy’s home in her last two years (1908–1910). Unlike many of the publications during the immediate years following Eddy’s death, this collection highlights the agonizing challenges Eddy faced and the way she chose to deal with them. Dickey’s journal entries indicate surprising exchanges in his own dealings with Eddy, resulting in vivid images of Eddy’s personal struggles and the difficulties within the ‘family’ of 18 or more ‘helpers’ who lived in her household. Eddy clearly trusted Dickey “to transmit her conviction that Christianity is both a crown and a cross lived in daily life” (4-5).
ISBN-10: 0978716779
ISBN-13 (Hardcover): 978-0978716776
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