The Peabody Sisters by Megan Marshall

Author:Megan Marshall
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Mariner Books

26

Little Waldo, Jones Very, and the “Divinity School Address”

Elizabeth was sorely tempted to catalogue her trials with Bronson Alcott one afternoon, while visiting the Emersons in Concord during November 1836. Waldo was having some fun at Alcott’s expense—laughing over a report of Bronson’s most recent birthday fete, for which the teacher had composed a celebratory ode for his students to recite. Elizabeth wrote afterward in her journal that Waldo had “seemed infinitely entertained” with the notion of a man who “gets up a festival in his own honor & writes the glorification himself.” But she bit her tongue and simply enjoyed hearing her erstwhile hero—whom Emerson continued to regard as “a good and guileless man”—taken down a peg.

As Elizabeth listened to Emerson poke gentle fun at Alcott—“a man of genius but with very few talents”—she was reminded of the reason she so enjoyed being in Waldo Emerson’s company: his surprising mix of keen attentiveness and sympathetic toleration for idiosyncrasy. She had discovered as early as her first overnight visit to Concord, in the company of Harriet Martineau the previous January, that talking to Waldo Emerson “makes me feel free.” His indisputably powerful influence somehow never left her feeling “constrained.” Instead, she wrote in her journal, “he responds with entire fulness to what ever truth I utter” and “feels my infinite capacity just as I do myself.” Quite likely Alcott felt the same benign acceptance from Waldo Emerson when they were together, the reassuring certainty that, in Elizabeth’s description, “he will not withdraw the light of his mind & the genial warmth of his kindness . . . because I make mistakes, occasionally offend his taste, or jar with his opinions.” After all, despite his awareness of Alcott’s shortcomings, Emerson had made sure that Bronson joined the newly formed Transcendental Club, whose all-male membership at the outset was otherwise exclusively drawn from the dissenting Unitarian clergy.

No place else but at the large white Emerson house on the Cambridge Turnpike did Elizabeth feel so sure of achieving an “inspiring communion”—a phrase full of meaning for a woman who had actually preceded her host in rejecting the ritual of communion in church. So Elizabeth had come to Concord in November 1836 to lick her wounds. Back home in Salem after the break with Alcott, she had thrown her energies into editing a new magazine, The Family School. In the first issue, published on September 1, she announced her hope that the journal would become “a weekly visitor to the domestic fireside, as a friend to the mother in her duties; an intelligent counsellor to her elder daughters in their moral and intellectual self-culture . . . and a not unwelcome play-fellow to boys and girls.” This publication was the first to which she had signed her full name, “Elizabeth Palmer Peabody,” and she did the same in advertisements for what was at the time a remarkably ambitious venture for a woman. Perhaps she had rushed into the project too soon, however, or possibly

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