ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Palmer Peabody believed, more than any other reform-minded Unitarian living in Boston during the mid-nineteenth century, that a heaven on earth was possible. Her career as an educator, editor, and writer, which put her at the center of the Transcendentalist movement, is typified by a postmillennial optimism in human progress. This is especially evident in her defense of associationism, the Brook Farm Association in particular, on which she published three essays in the Transcendentalist journal The Dial between 1841 and 1843. She speaks on the communitarian ideal in “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” and her subsequent essays on the “Plan of the West Roxbury Community” and her criticism of “Fourierism,” reaffirm Peabody’s belief that an association would succeed only so long as it embraced Christianity.
Though she never joined herself to the association, Peabody was a friend and frequent visitor to Brook Farm. And it was through her writing on Brook Farm that Peabody expressed her own views of religion—how it should serve humanity in this life and in a world to come. She was perhaps the first religious writer to formulate the Unitarian ideal of “self-culture.” Later, Peabody would emphasize the millennial significance of what she calls the “social principle.” This chapter will compare Peabody’s religious views with some of her Transcendentalist contemporaries as they relate to the ideal life represented in the Brook Farm community—a place Peabody and her friends referred to as “heaven.”
