Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was an American educator and author.
Background
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was born on May 16, 1804 in Billerica, Middlesex County, Massachusetts, United States. She was the eldest child of Nathaniel and Elizabeth (Palmer) Peabody. Her father at the time of her birth was practising medicine and dentistry. Her mother, a daughter of Joseph Palmer, conducted a private school in which her children were trained and was an early American editor of the poetry of Edmund Spenser.
Education
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was educated by her mother, who for a time operated an innovative girls’ school in the home.
Career
As early as 1820, after a childhood in Salem, the sixteen-year-old Elizabeth Palmer Peabody had opened a private school at Lancaster and had begun a life of teaching. Two years later she began a more ambitious project, a private school in Boston, where she herself studied Greek as a pupil of Ralph Waldo Emerson, then teaching in his brother's school during his first year out of college. In 1823 she went to Maine as a governess; but, attracted by the opportunities of Boston, she returned in 1825 to open another school. While conducting this, she became a friend of the William Ellery Channing family and for nine years she acted as Channing's secretary and amanuensis, a relationship which resulted in her becoming familiar with the writings of Coleridge and other European transcendental writers, and which, nearly fifty years later, resulted in her book, Reminiscences of Rev. William Ellery Channing, D. D. (1880).
Except for a six months' rest in Salem, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody continued the double duty of being secretary and teacher until September 1834, when she relinquished both and became Bronson Alcott's assistant in his Temple School in Boston. The journal of her experiences there and of Alcott's unconventional method of teaching was published anonymously in 1835 under the title Record of a School. In 1836 she returned to live with her parents at Salem. Keeping her contacts with Boston, she became one of the first members of the so-called Transcendental Club and visited often in the Emerson home in Concord. Meanwhile, in 1837, she discovered that the author of certain stories which had attracted her attention in the New England Magazine was the playmate of her Salem childhood, Nathaniel Hawthorne. She introduced Hawthorne to her Boston literary friends and to her youngest sister, Sophia, whom Hawthorne married in 1842. Another sister, Mary, married Horace Mann in 1843.
In 1839 Miss Peabody returned to Boston and opened a bookshop in West Street. Herself responsive to all current social enthusiasms, and her shop the only one in Boston carrying a stock of foreign books, she found herself in the midst of the transcendental ferment of the time. Groups of reformers met in the shop to plan the Brook Farm community, liberal clergymen and Harvard professors came there for their European books, and in the back room she set up a press and published three of Hawthorne's books, several of Margaret Fuller's translations from the German, and for two years, 1842-43, the organ of transcendentalism, the Dial, to which she contributed two articles on Brook Farm. After 1845 she began in earnest her career in education. Before she was thirty she had published elementary textbooks of grammar and history.
From 1850 to 1860 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody turned her entire attention to the advancement of the study of history in the public schools and in 1856 issued her Chronological History of the United States. The reading of one of Friedrich Froebel's books and a conversation in 1859 with his former pupil, Mrs. Carl Schurz, inspired Miss Peabody to establish the first American kindergarten, opened in Boston in 1860. Though the experiment was successful in the eyes of her patrons, she herself feared it was not in full accord with Froebel's theories and, closing the school in 1867, she spent a year in Hamburg studying methods and theory. Returning, she published a magazine, the Kindergarten Messenger, from 1873 to 1875, and lectured in various parts of the country.
Indian education attracted Elizabeth Palmer Peabody's attention about 1880 and her enthusiasm culminated in the discovery of Sarah Winnemucca, founder of a school for Piute Indians, who preyed upon Miss Peabody's credulity and for ten years absorbed whatever money Miss Peabody would send or could persuade her friends to send. After this expensive bit of sentimentality, she retired to Jamaica Plain and to Concord, where from 1879 to 1884 she was a member and lecturer at Alcott's Concord School of Philosophy. The vivacious woman had become one who, in Moses Coit Tyler's words, had a "bulky form, puffy face, and watery eyes, " but whose charm of personality, especially in reminiscence, did not desert her. Her final book, A Last Evening with Allston (1886), recorded some of her reminiscences and reprinted some of her essays from the Dial. She died at Jamaica Plain on January 3, 1894 and was buried in Concord near Emerson and Hawthorne.
Views
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody was a prominent figure in the Transcendental movement.