The literary remains of the late William B. O. Peabody
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The Dramatic Works of William Shakspeare... Embracing a Life of the Poet, and Notes, Original and Selected; Volume 8
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Oliver William Bourn Peabody was an American lawyer, litterateur, and Unitarian clergyman.
Background
Oliver William Bourn Peabody was born on July 9, 1799 in Exeter, Rockingham County, New Hampshire, United States. He was a twin brother of William Bourn Oliver Peabody. Oliver William Bourn was the seventh of the ten children of Oliver and Frances (Bourn) Peabody, and the fifth in descent from Francis Peabody, or Frances Pabody, as he sometimes signed himself, who emigrated from England in 1635 and lived nearly half a century in Topsfield, Massachussets. His father, a graduate of Harvard College and the first student of law under Theophilus Parsons, was a jurist and politician of some note and for thirty-four years a trustee of Phillips Exeter Academy.
Education
Oliver William Bourn Peabody graduated from Harvard College in 1816 in the same class with his twin brother, to whom he bore a strong resemblance in appearance, manner, and endowments, and in the purity and delicacy of his taste. His own desire was to enter the ministry, but he took up the study of law to gratify his father, received the degree of LL. B. from the Harvard Law School.
Career
Oliver William Bourn Peabody was admitted to the bar in 1822, opened an office in Exeter, sat as a representative in the legislature, 1824 - 1831, edited at different times the Rockingham Gazette and the Exeter News-Letter, and delivered poems before the Harvard chapter of Phi Beta Kappa and on various occasions of state. The one recited at Portsmouth May 21, 1823, at the centennial celebration of the first settlement in New Hampshire was his most applauded performance and is a striking example of the persistence in America of the eighteenth-century poetic style. The personal collisions and asperities of the practice of law were repugnant to him, and in 1830 he moved to Boston to assist his brother-in-law, Alexander Hill Everett, with the North American Review, to which he contributed a number of able articles. For Hilliard, Gray & Company he supervised the preparation of the Dramatic Works of William Shakespeare (1836, several times reprinted). Though this edition was little more than an intelligent reworking of Samuel Weller Singer's, Peabody did compare his text with that of the First Folio and adopted some of the Folio readings, showing thereby a certain awareness of critical principles and making himself in a sense the first American editor of Shakespeare.
For Jared Sparks's Library of American Biography, Oliver William Bourn Peabody wrote lives of Israel Putnam (1837) and John Sullivan (1844). He was a member of the Massachusetts legislature, 1834 - 1836, and register of probate for Suffolk County, 1836 - 1842. In the latter year he accompanied Everett to the College of Jefferson at Convent, Louisiana, as professor of English literature, but finding the climate enervating he soon returned to Massachusetts. After studying with his brother at Springfield, he was licensed in 1844 by the Boston Association of Congregational Ministers and was settled in August 1845 as pastor of the Unitarian Church of Burlington, Vermont. His saintly life and polished scholarship made a deep impression on his congregation, but his health, never robust, soon began to decline. His last work was the preparation of a memoir of his beloved brother. Oliver William Bourn Peabody died after a short illness and was buried in Burlington.