Henry Peterson

Henry Peterson combined editing, publishing, poetry, fiction, and drama in a career rooted in nineteenth-century Philadelphia. He became editor and part owner of the Saturday Evening Post. He also wrote novels, poems, and plays, while his wife Sarah Webb Peterson edited The Lady’s Friend. Faire-Mount appeared in 1874 as a short poetic work whose title uses an older form of the name Fairmount. That name connects the book to a prominent Philadelphia landscape shaped by the hill, waterworks, and park beside the Schuylkill River. The work therefore sits naturally within Peterson’s long engagement with the city where he lived and worked. Faire-Mount also belongs to a bibliography wider than his editorial identity alone, including Pemberton, The Twin Brothers, and Confessions of a Minister. His surviving manuscript plays further show that print journalism never displaced his interest in imaginative literature and performance.