Holiness.
A Transcendentalist’s Retelling of The Faerie Queene
[Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer]. Holiness; or, the Legend of St. George: A Tale from Spencer’s Faerie Queene, by a Mother. Boston: E.R. Broaders, 1836.
12mo.; black cloth; printed paper spine label, worn; lightly rubbed; extremities worn; foxed throughout.
First edition. A presentation copy, inscribed on the front endpaper: Ellen Gray from her teacher Miss Peabody December 19th, 1863. One of only two prose works by Peabody, Holiness is Peabody’s attempt to make the stories in Spencer’s Faerie Queene accessible for young readers. The Transcendentalist and educational reformer clearly believed that the message and values behind The Faerie Queene was vital for children to understand as part of their Christian education. In her preface, Peabody writes of the “profound philosophy of moral life” and “exhaustless mine of thought” which pervade the Spencer’s text (p. vi). Following in the successful tradition of Lamb’s Tales of Shakespeare and James Cowden Clarke’s Tales of Chaucer, Peabody retells the chivalric legend of St. George in simplified prose form, including a few of her own footnotes to help make the allegory more clear.
Ellen Gray does not look up in standard bibliographic sources, but the inscription suggests that she was most likely a student of Peabody’s either from her days teaching at the girls’ school she founded in Brookline, MA with her sister Mary, or from the Temple School in Boston, which she founded with fellow Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott.
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody (1804-1894), Transcendentalist, educational reformer, abolitionist and teacher, was born the eldest of seven children in Billerica, Massachusetts. She was reared and nurtured by intellectually inclined parents: her father, Nathaniel Peabody, was a physician and a dentist; her mother, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, was the headmistress of the Franklin Academy in Salem, Massachusetts. Peabody matriculated at her mother’s school, where she later began her teaching career in 1820.
In 1822, Peabody attempted to found her own school in Boston—however, economic hardship forced her to close it a year later. To compensate for her financial loss, she accepted a position as governess in Hallowell, Maine. There she became a student of Ralph Waldo Emerson, with whom she studied ancient Greek and Transcendental philosophy until 1825, when she and her sister Mary established a school for girls in Brookline, Massachusetts. This endeavor proved life-changing for Peabody: she was introduced to William Ellery Channing, the Unitarian transcendentalist leader, who enrolled his daughter in her school. Channing became her spiritual advisor and instructor of educational methodologies, philosophy and theology. As a result of his tutelage, Peabody, at the age of thirty-three, became one of two female charter members (the other was Margaret Fuller) of the Transcendental Club. She also became Channing’s secretary, and was responsible for seeing many of his sermons through press.
After Peabody relinquished her position with Channing in 1834, she opened the alternative Temple School with fellow Transcendentalist Bronson Alcott. Her third school was based on Socratic educational methodologies, which encouraged free expression of ideas and sought to lead students from thought to thought by a process of inquiry. Peabody recorded the experience of such classes in her first book, Record of a School. Self-published in 1835, Record brought Alcott’s philosophies on spiritual consciousness and educational methodologies into public light. Their joint enterprise came to an abrupt halt in when Alcott enraged priggish Bostonian parents by discussing childbirth with his students.
After four years of unceasing controversy over Alcott’s pedagogical philosophies, Peabody opened a bookstore and lending library in Boston. The West Street bookstore soon became the meeting place for intellectuals. The influx of cerebr
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