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HYDE-DOCUMENT-2018.Pdf (619.9Kb) West Street: Nexus of Boston Reform, 1835-1845 The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Hyde, Lynn E.. 2018. West Street: Nexus of Boston Reform, 1835-1845. Master's thesis, Harvard Extension School. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:42004041 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA West Street: Nexus of Boston Reform, 1835-1845 Lynn E. Hyde A Thesis in the Field of English for the Degree of Master of Liberal Arts in Extension Studies Harvard University November 2018 Copyright 2018 Lynn Hyde Abstract Two adjoining row houses in Boston were known as the social and organizational centers for the transcendentalists and for William Lloyd Garrison's select core of abolitionists known as the "Boston Clique." These transcendentalists and abolitionists came from a common religious tradition – the Unitarian culture of William Ellery Channing. As philosophical siblings, they were more aware of their differences than their similarities. But over time, their core values, inculcated in the school of Channing, allowed them to collaborate in reform efforts in the years leading to the Civil War. Acknowledgments This thesis was only possible due to the extraordinary research that has been done in the field of abolitionism and transcendentalism by a long list of inspiring scholars. It is with no small trepidation that I place my humble brick on the foundation of their historiography. Though they are too numerous to mention here, I would like to express my gratitude in particular to the unheralded archivists of the Boston Public Library who have made digital access to the Weston Sisters’ correspondence possible. This work would not have been logistically possible without the luxury of that technological advancement. Personally, I am indebted to friends and scholars Phyllis Cole and Megan Marshall. Little do they know how their uncommonly generous support, advice and sharing has changed the course of my intellectual life. They provided entrée to the world of Elizabeth Peabody and her “atom of a shop” – an act of true serendipity. I could not have foreseen how the little brick building off the Boston Common would engage my life – and imagination – for a decade to come. Lynn Hyde Seattle, WA October 15, 2018 iv Table of Contents Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................. iv! Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1! Chapter 1 The Unitarian Stage .......................................................................................... 6! Chapter 2 Channing and His Children ............................................................................. 13! Chapter 3 Taking the Stage ............................................................................................. 22! Chapter 4 Rekindling the Divine Spark ........................................................................... 33! Chapter 5 The Children School the Father ...................................................................... 43! Chapter 6 Lining Up Behind Garrison ............................................................................ 50! Chapter 7 Channing Takes a Stand ................................................................................. 57! Chapter 8 Transcendentalist Club Takes on Its Church .................................................. 68! Chapter 9 The Grimkés Unleash the Women .................................................................. 77! Chapter 10 Emerson Shocks the Divinity School ............................................................ 86! Chapter 11 The Peabody Book Room .............................................................................. 92! Chapter 12 Convergence ................................................................................................ 103! Chapter 13 Common Threads ......................................................................................... 116! Chapter 14 The Ascension of Channing ......................................................................... 133! Chapter 15 Emerson Eyes Channing’s Shoes ................................................................ 147! Chapter 16 Fraternal Acceptance ................................................................................... 167! Conclusions ..................................................................................................................... 171! Works Cited. .................................................................................................................... 176! v vi Introduction Many have assumed that Transcendentalism had an important bearing and influence upon abolitionism, but the two movements actually ran in separate channels. – Henry Mayer, 354 In the year 1840, on a short, narrow street between Boston Common and the Publishers Row of Washington Street, four Federal style row houses from the 1810s stood facing a livery stable. West Street only measured one block long, but in the antebellum period, it packed a significant punch as a center of social, literary, educational and church reform. The neighborhood was in transition, evolving from one of residential character to one of mixed use. It made a proper home for a well-bred family from Salem, elevated in education, but markedly diminished in their prosperity. Transcendentalist Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, 36 years old, was the oldest of three unmarried sisters who had long been keeping schools to support themselves and their aging parents. Seized by an entrepreneurial spirit, she brought her family to No. 13 West Street in 1840, housing them on upper floors, while she generated income with a foreign language bookstore and circulating library on the first floor. Peabody’s clientele would be the controversial radical intellectuals of Boston known as the Transcendentalists – a broad spectrum of dissatisfied thinkers, mostly current and former Unitarian ministers, who nurtured hopes of wholesale societal reform. Discontented with their conservative mainstream brethren and their rational, corpse-cold 1 theology, the transcendentalists turned to the Romantic thinkers of Germany and England for inspiration and direction as they charged deeper into the nineteenth century. For some, the muse carried them into liberalizing the Unitarian church itself; others explored new kinds of spirituality, educational reform, the formation of proto-socialist communities, and the intellectual and social advancement of women. The Peabody Book Room evolved to serve the broad spectrum of interests of Peabody’s fellow Transcendentalists, offering hard-to-obtain foreign language journals and books from England and the Continent, and offering a circulating library of those materials for a reasonable subscription price. But the shop became much more than just a bookstore; it became a literary salon for an elite clientele, in which one might find on any given morning William Ellery Channing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, Nathaniel Hawthorne or Horace Mann – among many other illustrious names. Margaret Fuller held many of her famed Conversations for women here, and George and Sophia Ripley held gatherings to plan their Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education – a utopian experiment in communal living. Publication of the Transcendentalist journal The Dial (1840-1844), edited in turns by Margaret Fuller, George Ripley and Emerson, was transferred to Peabody herself under her own West Street imprint in November of 1841. “Desultory, dreamy, but insatiable in her love for knowledge and for helping others to it” (Higginson, Yesterdays 86), Peabody acted as a great social switchboard operator for the movement. Correspondence of her clients and customers reveals her role as postmistress for a vast network of shared literary materials and news; plans to drop letters, books and journals for friends “at Miss Peabody’s” percolate persistently 2 throughout their correspondence. Thomas Wentworth Higginson dubbed her book room “an atom of a shop.” In 1840, when the shop opened, one of the few major social issues that did not actively engage its Transcendentalist patrons was the abolition of slavery. Though Emerson and Parker would come later to the cause, at the turn of the next decade, their commitment to their respective reforms lay elsewhere. West Street, however, had not been slumbering before Ms. Peabody brought “the Newness” through her doors. By 1835, on the other side of No. 13’s eastern brick wall, another atomic reform center had already established itself. No. 11 West Street was the home of abolitionist Henry Grafton Chapman and his dynamic wife, Maria Weston Chapman. Maria in particular became the indispensable manager of William Lloyd Garrison’s branch of the antislavery cause, serving as his lieutenant from 1834 through the formal life of the Massachusetts Anti- Slavery Society after the Civil War. In league with her five unmarried antislavery sisters, who at turns resided with her, Chapman converted her home into the administrative and social center of Boston’s Anti-Slavery movement. Easy walking distance to Garrison’s Liberator and
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