and is an earnest believer in woman suffrage, which movement she has aided by tongue and pen. Her hand is ever ready to help the needy. Her summers are spent in the old homestead, where she was born, and her winters in travel or in the city of New York.
PEABODY, Miss Elizabeth Palmer, educator, born in Billerica, Mass., 16th May, 1804. She is the daughter of Nathaniel Peabody, a well-known physician. Her sister Sophia became the wife of Nathaniel Hawthorne, and her sister Mary the wife of Horace Mann. Elizabeth was the oldest of a family of six children. She was a precocious child. She received a liberal and varied education, including the complete mastery of ten languages. At the age of sixty she learned Polish, because of her interest in the struggle of Poland for liberty. In early womanhood she put her attainments to use in a private school, which she taught in her home. In 1840 the family removed to Boston, where she opened a school. Her theory is that "education should have character for its first aim and knowledge for its second." She succeeded Margaret Fuller as teacher of history in Mr. Alcott's school. Her personal acquaintances included Channing, Emerson, Thoreau and other prominent men of the time. She has been identified with all the great movements of the day, and was prominent among the agitators who demanded the abolition of slavery. She was an attendant in the meetings of the Transcendental Club. She advocated female suffrage and higher education for women, and aided Horace Mann in founding a deaf-mute school. She is now living in Jamaica Plain, Mass. She is partially blind from cataracts on her eyes. Her literary productions include "Æsthetic Papers" (Boston, 1849); "Crimes of the House of Austria" (edited. New York, 1852); "The Polish-American System of Chronology" (Boston, 1852); "Kindergarten in Italy" in the " United States Bureau of Education Circular" (1872); a revised edition of Mary Mann's " Guide to the Kindergarten and Intermediate Class, and Moral Culture of Infancy" (New York, 1877); "Reminiscences of Dr. Channing" (Boston, 1880); " Letters to Kindergartners" (1886), and " Last Evening with Allston, and Other Papers" (1887). During the past five years she has written some, but her loss of sight and the increasing infirmities of great age have tended to make literary effort difficult to her. Her intention to write her autobiography has been frustrated. She was one of the most conspicuous persons in the famous literary and educational circles of Boston, and is now the only survivor of the persons who wrought so well for freedom, for light and for morality.
PEATTIE, Mrs. Elia Wilkinson, author and journalist, born in Kalamazoo, Mich., 15th January, 1862. Before she was ten years old, her father removed with his family to Chicago, Ill., where Mrs. Peattie grew to womanhood, was married, and spent most of her life.
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ELIA WILKINSON PEATTIE.
Very little of her education was acquired in the usual way. As a child she attended the public schools, but her sensitive originality unfitted her to follow patiently (he slow progress of regular instruction. At the age of fourteen years she left school, never to return. Judged by all ordinary rules, that was a mistake. Whether her peculiar mind would have been better trained in the schools than by the process of self-culture to which she has subjected it can never be known. From childhood she had an intuitive perception of things far beyond her learning and years. She was always a student, not merely of what she found in the books, but of principles. Her tastes led her to read with eagerness upon the profoundest subjects, so that, before she was twenty, she was familiar with English and German philosophy as well as with that of the ancients, and had her own, doubtless crude, but positive, views upon the subject of which they treated. She has always been an earnest student of history, more especially of those phases of it that throw light upon social problems. She has read widely in fiction, having the rare gift of scanning a book and gleaning all that there is of value in it in an hour. Her marriage, in 1883, to Robert Burns Peattie, a journalist of Chicago, was most fortunate. Nothing could have prevented her entering upon her career as a writer, but a happy marriage, with one who sympathized with her ambitions and who was also able to give her much important assistance in the details of authorship, was to her a most important event. From that time she has been an indefatigable worker. She began by writing short stories for the newspapers. taking several prizes, before securing any regular employment. A Christmas story published in the Chicago "Tribune" in 1885 was referred to editorially by that journal as "one of the most remarkable stories of the season," and as "worthy to rank with the tales of the best-known authors of the day." Her first regular engagement was as a reporter on the Chicago "Tribune," where she worked side by side, night and day, with men. She afterwards held a similar position on the Chicago "Daily News." Since 1889, she has been in Omaha, and is now chief editorial writer on the "World-Herald." As a working journalist she has shown great versatility. Stories, historical sketches, literary criticisms, political editorials and dramatic reviews from her pen follow one another or appear side by side in the same edition of the paper. Although her regular work has been that of a journalist, she has accomplished more outside of such regular employment than most literary
