Abstract
Far more successful than Emerson at nurturing and promoting careers in the marketplace was Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, whose “conversations” held at her Transcendentalist bookstore were instrumental in publicizing New England intellectuals. Beyond the fact that she did not pay for everything, what differentiated Peabody from Emerson as a literary intermediary was that she elevated conversation to an art, both as an intellectual subject and as a means to create social change and influence public values. For as famous as Emerson was, he certainly did not circulate as much among the literati and intellectuals of New England, nor did he share her dedication to the art of conversation on such a consistent level. As such, Peabody was ideally equipped to bring New England’s writers in contact with the publishing industry in Boston and beyond. Specifically, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s career owed much to her promotional tactics and influential market connections that also linked her to Horace Greeley. Perhaps the best connected of all the Transcendentalists, Peabody landed Hawthorne a position at the Custom House through correspondence with George and Elizabeth Bancroft, whom she had engaged to participate in one of her literary conversation clubs.
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Notes
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance Woman, ed. Bruce A. Ronda (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 55–56.
Charlene Avallone, “Elizabeth Peabody and the’Art’of Conversation,” Reimagining the Peabody Sisters, ed. Monica M. Elbert (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 23–44.
Margaret Fuller, “Translator’s Preface,” Conversations with Goethe (Boston: James Munroe, 1839), viii.
Bruce Ronda, “Scandal and Seductive Language: Elizabeth Peabody Reads Clarissa” ESQ 44 (1988), 302.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of Rev. Wm. Ellery Channinß, D.D.(Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), 408.
Bruce Ronda, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: A Reformer on Her Own Terms (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999), 158.
Anne C. Rose, New England Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1830–1850 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981), 103.
Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables (London: G. Routledge, 1852), 45.
Ronald J. Zboray, A Eictive People: Antebellum Economic Development and the American Reading Public (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 155.
Bruce Ronda, “Print and Pedagogy: The Career of Elizabeth Peabody,” A Living of Words: American Women in Print Culture, ed. Susan Albertine (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1995), 41.
Qtd. in George Willis Cooke, An Historical and Biographical Introduction to the “Dial,” vol. 1 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1961 [originally pub. 1902]), 148.
Caroline Healey Dall, Margaret and Her Friends; or, Ten Conversations with Margaret Fuller (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1895).
Charles Capper, “Margaret Fuller as Cultural Reformer: The Conversations in Boston” American Quarterly 39 (Winter 1987), 511, 523.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, vol. 1 (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1884), 147.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Fmerson, ed. William Gilman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 262.
Steven Fink, “Antebellum Lady Editors and the Language of Authority,” Blue Pencils and Hidden Hands: Women Editing Periodicals, 1830–1910, ed. Sharon M. Harris and Ellen Gruber Garvey (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 206. A publicist-agent like Peabody who did not write for a living, it must be noted, also did not share precisely the same struggles with authorial identity. The socially imposed shame Mary Kelley argues most popular women writers suffered from in Private Woman, Public Stage: Literary Domesticity in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1984) did not apply to Peabody. Indeed, her comfort in business dealings and courtship of the market is more consonant with Susan Coultrap-McQuin’s assertion that many bestselling female authors like Harriet Beecher Stowe happily took to their roles as literary professionals, as they embraced the role of domestic lady creative counterpart to the public gentleman businessman, Doing Literary Business: American Women Writers in the Nineteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990). Peabody is so revolutionary that she explodes even Coultrap-McQuin’s progressive refiguring of Kelley’s old theory by proving that she could very well thrive in the gentleman’s role of publisher to Hawthorne and Channing’s lady writers, as it were, in a full inversion of such gender roles seemingly so neatly inscribed in the code of business ethics and practice of the literary market.
Charles H. Foster, “Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,” Notable American Women, ed. Edward T. James (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, Harvard University Press, 1971), 34.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ralph Rusk and Eleanor Tilton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1939), 46.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Review of Twice Told Tales” The New-Yorker 5 (24 March 1838), 1–2. Peabody, Letters, 223.
Katharine Rodier, “Authorizing Sarah Winnemucca?: Elizabeth Peabody and Mary Peabody Mann,” Reinventing the Peabody Sisters, ed. Monika M. Elbert (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2006), 108.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Language,” The Aesthetic Papers, ed. Elizabeth P. Peabody (Boston: The Editor, 13 West Street; New York: G.P. Putnam, 1849), 221.
William Ellery Channing, Slavery (Boston: James Munroe, 1835), 9.
Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Wealth,” The Conduct of Life in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Brooks Atkinson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 632, 631.
Henry David Thoreau, Waiden (New York: Signet, 1960 [originally pub. 1854]), 75.
Gloria Steinern, qtd. in Nancy Levit, The Gender Line: Men, Women, and the Law (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 145.
Helen R. Deese, “A New England Women’s Network: Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Caroline Healey Dall, and Delia S. Bacon” Legacy 8.2 (1991), 89.
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© 2011 David Dowling
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Dowling, D. (2011). Boston and Beyond: Elizabeth Peabody’s Promotional Practice. In: The Business of Literary Circles in Nineteenth-Century America. Nineteenth-Century Major Lives and Letters. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230117082_6
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