Brook Farm was planned in her bookstore; hosted Margaret Fuller’s “conversations;” published the Dial; “discovered” Jones Very
Franklin Sanborn, 1831–1917
Best known as: educator, writer
Connections: taught the Emersons’ children; friend of Bronson Alcott
While the writings of these seekers could and would be appreciated as far away as India and Russia, most were penned within a fifty-mile half-circle radiating out from Boston, Massachusetts, between 1828 and 1854. Transcendentalism’s trajectory began in that former Puritan city with the rise of Unitarianism, continued in Cambridge with Emerson’s major orations, and settled in Concord, where Emerson and his circle made their homes. Walden Pond, in a sense, gave the world Thoreau, just as Hawthorne could never really leave Salem. The Transcendentalist utopian societies, and Emily Dickinson in her western Massachusetts paradise of Amherst, built their new worlds upon the old ideas “cast into the mould of these new times.”
Inspiration from the Land: Transcendentalist Geography
Transcendentalism so fitted New England that it could be said to have sprung from the rocky soil itself. The region’s heritage of religious orthodoxy, its belief in education, and the ruggedness of its landscapes make the New Englander a breed apart. Raised on lengthy orations from the pulpit and indoctrinated with the ideals of independence, the men and women of nineteenth-century New England were practical, well educated, and imbued with a belief in individual conscience. They wanted to know how to improve their lives but were leery of overbearing authority. They listened to their local ministers, joined social movements, and attended lyceums.
Boston’s centrality to both the commerce and the culture of early-nineteenth-century America made it the crossroads of Transcendentalism. The Transcendental Club met here, as did the founders of the Brook Farm utopian community. The publishers responsible for introducing the world outside of Boston to the ideas of the Transcendentalists were here. Innumerable lectures, “conversations” (discussion groups led by a paid moderator), and educational ventures allowed Bostonians to witness firsthand the quest of the Transcendentalist seekers and to draw inspiration from their journeys.
Just across the river from Boston, Cambridge provided a training ground and launching pad for Transcendentalism. Home to Harvard College, this city and the college helped develop the young minds of the seekers before sending them out, frequently to the Unitarian pulpits of Boston and beyond. The college also hosted two Emersonian orations that set the direction for the Transcendentalist movement, “The American Scholar” in 1837 and the “Divinity School Address” in 1838.
Once the movement started, the small village west of Boston called Concord became its heart and soul. Although only Henry David Thoreau among the Transcendentalists was born in Concord, Emerson’s return in 1834 to the town of his ancestors created a center of gravity there that drew in almost all of the Transcendentalists at one point or another. In addition to Emerson and Thoreau, the mystic and educational reformer Bronson Alcott, the reclusive novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, the social reformer Franklin Sanborn, and the poet Ellery Channing (nephew of the minister) all made their homes in Concord. The list of frequent Transcendentalist visitors is equally as impressive: the feminist and Transcendental critic Margaret Fuller; Salem’s mystic poet Jones Very; Brook Farm founder George Ripley; the impassioned Boston preacher Theodore Parker; Transcendental publisher and educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody; and even Walt Whitman ventured out to Concord.
The environs of Concord also provided an ideal location for the best-known example of Transcendentalist living, Walden Pond. This popular swimming and fishing hole hosted Thoreau’s two-year experiment in living “deliberately,” and has since become a shrine that is both secular and sacred. While it was his day-to-day living at the pond from 1845 to 1847 that brought Thoreau closer to an “original relation to the universe” than any of his fellow seekers, that experience cannot be separated from the account he chose to give the world in 1854: Walden; or, Life in the Woods.
While most of the Transcendentalists were turning their backs on the rigid orthodoxy of their Calvinist past, one writer chose to pick through the ruins of his Puritan ancestry in order to develop his own relation to the universe. Salem, a seafaring port just north of Boston, provided Nathaniel Hawthorne with ample sins of the past to grapple with in his fiction. The city of the famous witch trials, fallen on hard times in the nineteenth century, was a perfect place for the writer of The Scarlet Letter to develop his mind and ideas. The town’s proximity to Boston also allowed two other natives—Elizabeth Palmer Peabody and Jones Very—to embark on their own Transcendentalist quests.
It was precisely the flawed societal structures of their predecessors that many of the Transcendentalists felt held them and others back from their quest. Two of the largest and best-known attempts at forming transcendent communities were George Ripley’s Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, in the Boston suburb of West Roxbury, and Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane’s Fruitlands, just west of Concord. Although neither of these communities lasted long enough to be deemed truly successful, their attempts to bring society into better alignment with Transcendentalist philosophies were admirable for their optimism, if not for their practicality.
The Lyceum Movement
The lyceum movement in America began in 1828 in Millbury, Massachusetts, when a man named Josiah Holbrook began to organize a series of lectures for adults. The lectures were so popular that the idea spread, and by the mid-1830s there were several thousand lyceum programs across the nation. Many were in small towns, although New York and Boston also had active lyceum movements.
The audiences were usually mostly young and from the laboring and merchant classes. The lectures were hour-long expositions or demonstrations given by ministers, professors, scientists, reformers, or writers. Successful lecturers offered highly informative programs or a good laugh; the best were able to do both.
Nearly all the major Transcendentalist thinkers presented at lyceums. Emerson was the busiest on the circuit, giving some fifteen hundred speeches during his lifetime and one hundred in Concord alone. Thoreau delivered twenty orations in Concord and served as the curator and secretary of the Concord Lyceum in 1839, the only position in society he ever held. The novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne also served as the secretary of the Salem Lyceum for a season.
Unbeknownst to these communities, for her work would not appear in print until the end of the century, the western Massachusetts town of Amherst was home to a writer whose poetry would, in many ways, explicate the dreams of the Transcendentalists more clearly than any other. Secluded in her tiny paradise, Emily Dickinson spent the mid-nineteenth century quietly developing her own highly original relation to the universe. While she never visited Emerson in Concord nor rubbed elbows with the intelligentsia who frequented Elizabeth Peabody’s West Street bookstore in Boston, Dickinson is perhaps the ultimate example of the individualism that both inspired and limited the Transcendentalist movement.
The Right Time: The Historical Context
Although Emerson warned against endlessly searching “among the dry bones of the past” for humanity’s place in the universe, it is impossible to come to an understanding of Transcendentalism without taking into account its historical context. The chaotic changes during the first half of the nineteenth century greatly influenced the ideas of the Transcendentalists. The population of the United States was approaching twenty million by the middle of the century, and, with the exception of the financial panic of 1837, which closed the stock market for ten days, the economy continued to grow right up to the Civil War.
Inspired in many ways by the preaching of the Reverend William Ellery Channing, Boston—and indeed all of New England—was abandoning