Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
subject: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
description: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894) devoted her long and full life to the expression of Transcendental idealism in a variety of forms. Greatly admired by some of her contemporaries as a model of passionate commitment, she was dismissed by others as meddlesome and absent-minded. Abolitionist minister Theodore Parker praised her as “a woman of most astonishing powers … many-sidedness and largeness of soul … rare qualities of head and heart … A good analyst of character, a free spirit, kind, generous, noble.” Margaret Fuller, on the other hand, was impatient with Peabody’s inattention to detail, and Emerson—who admired much about her—could not keep himself from commenting on her careless grooming. Novelist Henry James caricatured her mercilessly as Miss Birdseye in The Bostonians (1886). Teacher and educational reformer, founder of the kindergarten in America, abolitionist, opponent of European autocratic despotism, friend of political refugees, advocate of Native American rights and education, of woman’s suffrage, and of world peace, Peabody worked unceasingly toward the improvement of society. In the 1840s, she ran a circulating library and bookstore at 13 West Street in Boston, providing the Transcendentalists with volumes of foreign literature and philosophy. Margaret Fuller conducted some of her conversations at 13 West Street, and the Brook Farm utopian community was planned there. Moreover, Peabody was a publisher at a time when few women were involved in that business. She published Emancipation by Dr. William Ellery Channing (her mentor), several volumes by Hawthorne, two of the four volumes of The Dial, and the short-lived journal Aesthetic Papers (1849), which included the first appearance in print of Thoreau’s “Resistance to Civil Government” (“Civil Disobedience”). Peabody was also a gifted linguist, familiar with some dozen languages, and a prolific writer on education, reform, language, history, art, and other topics. Sister-in-law of Nathaniel Hawthorn…
publisher: Concord Free Public Library
date: Undated
rights: All materials courtesy of the William Munroe Special Collections at the Concord Free Public Library