Scope and arrangement
This is a synthetic collection that includes correspondence, journals for the period 1833-1836, a diary for 1829, and an author-emended typescript of Louise Hall Tharp's "The Peabody Sisters of Salem." The journals include the "Cuba Journal", and leaves from an 1836 journal. The diary is Sophia Amelia Peabody Hawthorne's, kept in Boston, in 1829. The bulk of the collection is correspondence, dating from 1822 to [1853], written by Peabody to her sisters, Mary and Sophia [afterwards Mary Mann and Sophia Hawthorne] during the period 1833-1835, when they were in Cuba; the correspondence was designated by her as her "Cuba journal." The letters also include those to Lydia Sears [later Haven], Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, her brother George Peabody, as well as a letter from Gladys Brooks to [John Dozier] Gordan in 1957. There are letters to Peabody from Henry A. Bright, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Samuel Foster Haven, Elizabeth Manning Hawthorne, Julian Hawthorne, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sophia Peabody Hawthorne, Una Hawthorne, Mary Peabody Mann, her mother Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, U. W. Russell, and Samuel G. Ward, dating from 1822 to 1873.
The Elizabeth Palmer Peabody collection of papers are arranged in two series: