Elizabeth Palmer Peabody Biography

Dictionary of Literary Biography on Elizabeth Palmer Peabody

ELIZABETH PALMER PEABODY (16 May 1804-3 January 1894), friend and associate of the leading figures in the Transcendentalist movement, is remembered for her various educational interests, for her publication of the Dial (1842-1843) and Aesthetic Papers (1849), and for her founding of the West Street Book Shop and publishing house (1840-1850), which became the Boston gathering place for intellectuals and reformers.

Born in Billerica, Massachusetts, she was the oldest of seven children of Nathaniel Peabody, a physician and pioneer dentist, and Elizabeth Palmer, schoolteacher, both of whom came from solidly established New England families. After being educated in her mother's home school, Peabody herself began her career as a teacher at the age of sixteen, when the family had moved to Lancaster in the hope of improving her father's practice. She shared her responsibilities with her sister Mary, the future Mrs. Horace Mann, and took a lively, if somewhat imperious, interest in the education of her younger sister, Sophia, who would in 1842 become the bride of Nathaniel Hawthorne.

The year 1822 found Peabody teaching in Boston and revelling in its cultural opportunities. She took Greek lessons with Ralph Waldo Emerson, then newly graduated from Harvard, and listened with rapt attention to the sermons of the Reverend William Ellery Channing. Both men were to have a lasting impact on her intellectual life. Privately, she undertook a course of reading in theology equal to that of a Harvard divinity student. After two years, she went to Maine as governess to the affluent Vaughans and Gardiners, making constant use of their extensive libraries and improving her French with the resident Parisian tutor. In 1825 she returned to found a school with her sister Mary. Boston was to remain her home center until the 1860s, when Concord became the place to which she returned, and where Sleepy Hollow Cemetery became the place of her final rest after her death in Jamaica Plain, near Boston, in 1894.

The pattern of her life was characterized by great intellectual energy and by unfailing concern for human need wherever she observed it. However, these very qualities led her to dissipate her forces in the pursuit of a succession of "worthy causes"--whether of educational theory or of social justice. In consequence, while she was both admired and esteemed by her contemporaries, she was also regarded with a certain indulgent amusement. More seriously, her lack of focus prevented her from contributing major works in the fields of theology, history, language, and education, which were her perennial interests. However, the works that she did publish reveal a capacious mind steeped in the scholarship of both Europe and America.

Record of A School, Exemplifying the Principles of Spiritual Culture, which was published in three editions (1835, 1836, 1874), contains her transcripts of A. Bronson Alcott's inductive lessons given in the Temple School while she was his assistant (1834-1835). It is a document of great importance for any student of Transcendentalism, for it demonstrates the most self-consistent of all applications of the belief that the source of truth is to be found within the child's own consciousness. By the 1860s, Peabody had moved away from Alcott's radically idealist position, and had come under the influence of Friedrich Froebel, the German founder of the kindergarten, whose method was empirical. During the years 1873-1877, she edited the Kindergarten Messenger, for which she wrote numerous articles defining purpose, method, and controlled activities for the kindergarten. In 1888 she published her Lectures in Training Schools for Kindergartners. Although there is a shift toward learning through the senses, she retained her transcendentalist view of the soul as active, and continued to insist that "inspiration is the universal principle of education."

Also akin to Emersonian Transcendentalism was her emphasis on the significance of language as essentially symbolic. However, this concept was imperfectly blended with influences from Herder's controversial work on the origins of language and the identification of language universals attempted by the Hungarian, Dr. Charles Kraitsir, whose work Peabody was issuing from her publishing house. Her own writing on the subject, which to some extent anticipates twentieth-century linguistic theory in phonetics, includes a long essay entitled "Language" (1848), and several books of exercises for language arts in the schools, notably, After Kindergarten--What" (1877) which she coauthored with her sister, Mrs. Mann.

Although Peabody's interest in history somewhat sets her apart from her mentors, Emerson and Channing, her work in this field, too, is dependent on the scholarship of others, such as George Bancroft in American history and Karl Ottfried Muller in early Western history. Her aim in promoting the study of America appears to be largely to foster patriotic pride and to find moral exempla. In such essays as "The Dorian Measure" (1848) and "Essay on the Earliest Ages" (1850), myth, history, and religion are interwoven to provide vistas on both historical fact and universal truth. For her the study of history holds the place that Nature holds for Emerson and Thoreau: it provides a means to that self-awareness which enables one to live life deliberately.

Among Peabody's most admired works in her own time were her personal recollections of famous men and women she had known. Chief among these were three essays which form the nucleus of the collection Last Evening with Allston (1886), the tribute "Emerson as Preacher," included in F. B. Sanborn's Genius and Character of Emerson (1885), and the book-length Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channing (1880). In these writings she fulfilled Theodore Parker's observation that her rare qualities of mind and heart fitted her to be the "Boswell" of the day.

Like Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody was a member of the Transcendental Club, standing at the center of New England Transcendentalism. She exemplifies in her life and writings both the strengths and weaknesses of that movement: her diffuseness and casual inconsistencies are obvious, but they are offset by an intense moral purpose, a lively intellectual curiosity, and an unflagging energy for pursuing new fields of knowledge. In addition, she had the true educator's gift of spending herself for others. It is here, perhaps, that her greatest honor lies.