Elizabeth Peabody's Foreign Library

In the summer of 1840, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody opened her bookstore at 13 West Street in Boston; by October, she had added a circulating Foreign Library, offering subscribers access to books and periodicals that could otherwise be difficult to obtain in America. Its founding came at a time when the informal gatherings of the Transcendental Club were coming to an end just as The Dial published its first issue. Peabody assembled the library with this intellectual community very much in mind, creating, as Leslie Perrin Wilson suggests, another medium through which Transcendentalist thought and its sources could circulate. Through agents abroad, she sought what she described as a “choice selection” of the classic and contemporary literature of Europe, together with German, French, and English periodicals.