The Peabodys and Concord

Is it possible that there is no image remaining of the younger Elizabeth Palmer Peabody? Nor of her sisters, Mary or Sophia? These Peabodys are a truly remarkable family, I think, and yet, I have no idea what the sisters look like. I want a material presence. I suspect that there are images of them later in their life, and I can and will check on Google Images, but in The Peabody Sisters, by Megan Marshall, the book I have just finished reading, there are no photographs of any of them. Just sketches, and one etching of Sophia at age 36 which no one cared for very much, and which Sophia herself tried to touch up! The book recounts the lives of the sisters (Elizabeth, Mary and Sophia) through their relatively early years, through Sophia’s marriage to Nathaniel Hawthorne in her early thirties, and Mary’s marriage, in her late thirties, to Horace Mann. Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, the eldest sister, never married, though she had fallen in love with both Horace Mann and Nathaniel Hawthorne, had even become secretly though briefly engaged to the latter, and had life long relationships with some very notable and married men: William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Bronson Alcott. The sisters knew Margaret Fuller and Henry David Thoreau. Elizabeth is credited with founding the kindergarten in the United States, and she edited The Dial and ran a book store where ‘the transcendentalists’ hung about, before hanging out was a concept, much less a term. Elizabeth and her sisters seemed to have known everybody I would have loved to know, and the three seemed to live at the center of the Transcendentalist furor in a geographical locus I have long considered attractive.

I’ve always imagined that Concord, Massachusetts in the middle of the nineteenth century would be an ideal community. Walk out any morning and I could run into Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Lidian Emerson, William Ellery Channing, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Sophia Peabody, (and, on the right day,) Herman Melville, and Henry David Thoreau—who, it might be realized, would be personal favorite. I wonder where he and I might walk—hopefully, we wouldn’t have to eat a woodchuck raw. But to move amongst these personages approaches the community I have invented as my ideal community. Brook Farm without the farm work and financial investment. Fruitlands with meat and root vegetables. Two chairs for company and three for society.