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The Old Peabody Pew: A Christmas Romance of a Country Church is a short novel written by the American author of children stories Kate Douglas Wiggin, who is remembered for her magnum opus Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. Being an agitator of Child labor, most of her novel themed around the welfare of children, notable among them are The Diary of a Goose Girl, The Village Watch-Tower, Mother Carey's Chickens, and A Child's Journey with Dickens.
The Old Peabody Pew is set in the Saco river bank village Edgewood and explores the women’s equal rights. The women of Edgewood forms a society named Dorcas Society for the purpose of renovating the Church premises. The Christmas seasons are in the cards, they speedup their work of renovation and on their way towards finishing touches of laying new carpets, mending the cushions, and washing the pews. This short novel narrates the women community of olden days and there is also a romance element in the church buildings.
The Old Peabody Pew: A Christmas Romance of a Country Church
Dedication
To a certain handful of dear New England women of names unknown to the world, dwelling in a certain quiet village, alike unknown:—
We have worked together to make our little corner of the great universe a pleasanter place in which to live, and so we know, not only one another’s names, but something of one another’s joys and sorrows, cares and burdens, economies, hopes, and anxieties.
We all remember the dusty uphill road that leads to the green church common. We remember the white spire pointing upward against a background of blue sky and feathery elms. We remember the sound of the bell that falls on the Sabbath morning stillness, calling us across the daisy-sprinkled meadows of June, the golden hayfields of July, or the dazzling whiteness and deep snowdrifts of December days. The little cabinet-organ that plays the doxology, the hymn-books from which we sing “Praise God from whom all blessings flow,” the sweet freshness of the old meeting-house, within and without—how we have toiled to secure and preserve these humble mercies for ourselves and our children!
There really
is
a Dorcas Society, as you and I well know, and one not unlike that in these pages; and you and I have lived through many discouraging, laughable, and beautiful experiences while we emulated the Bible Dorcas, that woman “full of good works and alms deeds.”
There never was a Peabody Pew in the Tory Hill Meeting-House, and Nancy’s love story and Justin’s never happened within its century-old walls; but I have imagined only one of the many romances that have had their birth under the shadow of that steeple, did we but realize it.
As you have sat there on open-windowed Sundays, looking across purple clover-fields to blue distant mountains, watching the palm-leaf fans swaying to and fro in the warm stillness before sermon time, did not the place seem full of memories, for has not the life of two villages ebbed and flowed beneath that ancient roof? You heard the hum of droning bees and followed the airy wings of butterflies fluttering over the gravestones in the old churchyard, and underneath almost every moss-grown tablet some humble romance lies buried and all but forgotten.
If it had not been for you, I should never have written this story, so I give it back to you tied with a sprig from Ophelia’s nosegay; a spring of “rosemary, that’s for remembrance.”
K. D. W.
August, 1907
The Old Peabody Pew: A Christmas Romance of a Country Church Dedication To a certain handful of dear New England women of names unknown to the world, dwelling in a certain quiet village, alike unknown…
Edgewood, like all the other villages along the banks of the Saco, is full of sunny slopes and leafy hollows. There are little, rounded, green-clad hillocks that might, like their scriptural sisters,…
The old Meeting House wore an animated aspect when the eventful Friday came, a cold, brilliant, sparkling December day, with good sleighing, and with energy in every breath that swept over the dazzlin…
Justin Peabody had once faithfully struggled with the practical difficulties of life in Edgewood, or so he had thought, in those old days of which Nancy Wentworth was thinking as she wiped the paint o…
It was Saturday afternoon, the twenty-fourth of December, and the weary sisters of the Dorcas band rose from their bruised knees and removed their little stores of carpet-tacks from their mouths. Thi…
At this precise moment Justin Peabody was eating his own beans and brown bread (articles of diet of which his Detroit landlady was lamentably ignorant) at the new tavern, not far from the meeting-hous…
These were the reasons that had brought Justin Peabody to Edgewood on the Saturday afternoon before Christmas, and had taken him to the new tavern on Tory Hill, near the Meeting-House. Nobody recogniz…
Justin Peabody silently closed the inner door, and stood in the entry with his head bent and his heart in a whirl until he should hear Nancy rise to her feet. He must take this Heaven-sent chance of …
“Ring out, sweet bells, O’er woods and dells Your lovely strains repeat, While happy throngs With joyous songs Each accent gladly greet.” Christmas morning in the old Tory Hill Meeting-House was felt …
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