George Washington Peck was born on December 4, 1817 in Rehoboth, Bristol County, Massachusetts, United States. He was the son of George Washington Peck and his second wife, Hannah Bliss (Carpenter), and a descendant of Joseph Peck who came to Massachusetts in 1638. The first George Washington Peck is described as having "settled, lived, and died on the homestead", but his son saw much more of the world.
George Washington Peck attended Brown University, graduating in 1837.
George Washington Peck taught for a time in Indiana and Ohio, engaged in journalism in Cincinnati, and returned east to study law in Boston under Richard Henry Dana. It may have been literary as much as legal ambition that led him to seek this association with the author of Two Years Before the Mast, but he was admitted to the Massachusetts bar on May 19, 1843, and for the next four years is recorded in the Boston Directory as a "counsellor. " Yet even during this period he seems to have been most active as a journalist and music critic. Peck contributed articles on music and the drama to the Boston Post, and in 1845 he founded the Boston Musical Review, a monthly publication of which only four numbers appear to have been issued.
In 1847 George Washington Peck gave up whatever connection he may have had with the law and removed to New York, where he joined the staff of the Morning Courier and New York Enquirer and established a rather close connection with the American Review, later the American Whig Review, which had a brief but rather conspicuous career. In February and May 1847 Peck published articles on "Music in New York" in this periodical, and from February 1848 to January 1849 was represented by at least one article a month. He was an occasional contributor up to 1850, his subjects including reviews of Longfellow's Evangeline and Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights, discussions of Cooper, Dana, Poe, and of Charles Lamb's letters, besides speculations entitled "On the Use of Chloroform in Hanging, " fiction, and forty sonnets in two instalments of twenty each.
In 1849, under the transparent pseudonym Cantell A. Bigly, George Washington Peck published a volume called Aurifodina, describing adventures in California among a strange people whose commonest possession was gold. Obviously modeled on Gulliver's Travels, it also suggests Poe's influence and in some ways is like Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. The ravages of consumption, of which he died, reduced the output of his last years; but he made a trip to Australia in 1853, writing letters to the New York Times, and published an account of the journey in his Melbourne and the Chincha Islands; with Sketches of Lima, and a Voyage Round the World (1854). After the publication of this book there is little certain trace of him till the official record of his death in Boston.
George Washington Peck died on June 6, 1859.
George Washington Peck was unmarried.
