The best-known account of the club is Holmes’s poem “At the Saturday Club,” published in the January 1884 Atlantic Monthly. In it, Holmes memorializes his club friends, including Hawthorne, Alcott, and Emerson:
Hawthorne: The great ROMANCER, hid beneath his veil Like the stern preacher of his sombre tale; Virile in strength, yet bashful as a girl Prouder than Hester, sensitive as Pearl.
Alcott: From his mild throng of worshippers released Our Concord Delphi sends its chosen priest, Prophet or poet, mystic, sage, or seer, By every title always welcome here.
Emerson: Ask you what name this prisoned spirit bears While with ourselves this fleeting breath it shares? Till angels greet him with a sweeter one In Heaven, on earth we call him EMERSON.
The Dial
Many of the Transcendental Club members sought an outlet for their ideas, an organ for publishing their views and inviting others to join them. At the suggestion of member Frederic Francis Hedge, the club began thinking about a journal. By the time the spring of 1840 had arrived, the club was serious about the undertaking and had appointed Margaret Fuller as the editor. Bronson Alcott provided the name, “The Dial,” and George Ripley agreed to be the assistant editor.
Ripley announced the journal in a prospectus published on May 4, and articles from Emerson, Thoreau, Fuller, Parker, Hedge, and Alcott were lined up for the first edition, which was published in July. Subscriptions to the quarterly cost a relatively expensive three dollars a year—close to a week’s salary for a mill worker.
Over the four years of its existence, the Dial published a number of important and powerful essays, including Emerson’s essay on Transcendentalism, Thoreau’s “A Natural History of Massachusetts,” and Elizabeth Peabody’s explanation of Brook Farm. The most controversial were Alcott’s “Orphic Sayings,” a catalog of obscure and often impenetrable statements that proved all too easy to parody. These three from the first edition of the Dial demonstrate some of Alcott’s murky prose:
Listen divinely to the sibyl within thee, saith the Spirit, and write thou her words. For now is thine intellect a worshipper of the Holy Ghost; now thy life is mystic—thy words marvels—and thine appeal to the total sense of man—a nature to the soul.
There is neither void in nature, nor death in spirit,—all is vital, nothing Godless. Both guilt in the soul and pain in the flesh, affirm the divine ubiquity in the all of being. Shadow apes substance, privation fullness; and nature in atom and whole, in planet and firmament, is charged with the present Deity.
Nature is quick with spirit. In eternal systole and diastole, the living tides course gladly along, incarnating organ and vessel in their mystic flow. Let her pulsations for a moment pause on their errands, and creation’s self ebbs instantly into chaos and invisibility again. The visible world is the extremist wave of that spiritual flood, whose flux is life, whose reflux death, efflux thought, and conflux light. Organization is the confine of incarnation,—body the atomy of God.
With only thirty subscribers for its first edition and never more than three hundred at any given time, the Dial was not a financial success. Neither Fuller nor Emerson earned money from editing the journal, and it finally ran out of funds and momentum in 1844.
Since then, the Dial has had a number of resurrections. The first was in 1880, when it was brought back as a “socially humanitarian” journal. This incarnation drifted into radicalism, however, and was on the verge of dying again when Scofield Thayer took it over in 1918. Thayer transformed it into a highly respected organ for some of the major voices of the early twentieth century including Sherwood Anderson, E.E. Cummings, Kenneth Burke, William Butler Yeats, Ezra Pound, Amy Lowell, Kahlil Gibran, Hart Crane, Marianne Moore, Carl Sandburg, and Van Wyck Brooks. Unfortunately, that version folded in 1929. No more was heard until 1961, when the publishers Russell and Russell brought out a four-volume set of the original Dial.
In addition to the lofty discussions, two major undertakings were planned at these meetings. The first was the creation of a quarterly magazine that would be a voice of the new progressive movement. After some searching, the members agreed on Margaret Fuller as editor, with George Ripley as assistant editor. Emerson and Thoreau also agreed to help. The Dial was launched in July 1840, after being conceived at a September meeting nearly a year earlier.
The club’s other significant undertaking was the dream of member George Ripley. He announced at the October 1840 meeting that he was resigning his ministry to begin a community called Brook Farm. In a follow-up letter to Emerson the next month, Ripley asked for his assistance in creating this “society of liberal, intelligent, and cultivated persons, whose relations with each other would permit a more simple and wholesome life, than can be led amidst the pressure of our competitive institutions.” Emerson politely declined to join but visited often and offered his encouragement.
Much of the detailed planning for the Brook Farm community took place at (3) Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore at 15 West Street. The bookstore, which was actually the front parlor of the Peabody home, served as a perfect meeting place for Boston intelligentsia. Its shelves were stocked with the books of foreign authors not found elsewhere—Kant, Hegel, Goethe, Plato, Swedenborg, Confucius—as well as Hindu texts such as the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads. The walls were hung with the work of a beautiful and talented painter—Sophia Peabody, the proprietor’s younger sister, who would later be known as Mrs. Nathaniel Hawthorne.
The bookstore’s owner, Elizabeth Peabody, was a dominant figure in New England literary circles. The eldest daughter of a dentist, she inherited much of her strong will and determination from her mother. Before starting the bookstore, Elizabeth had already started a school for girls, worked closely with Reverend Channing, and held her own series of for-profit “conversations.”
After hours, the bookstore served as a meetinghouse and gathering place. George Ripley would frequently hold forth on utopian ideals to an audience of young men such as Thomas Wentworth Higginson (later Emily Dickinson’s editor and friend) and James Freeman Clarke (who would later perform the marriage of Sophia Peabody to Nathaniel Hawthorne) from Harvard Divinity School. As Peabody described it, these were busy years:
Six Degrees of Separation
In the relatively small world of New England’s intelligentsia, coincidences are bound to occur, and the Transcendentalists are no exception. Start with Emerson: His grandfather’s house was home to two Transcendentalists (Emerson and Hawthorne) and ended up in the possession of the Reverend Samuel Ripley. A cousin of both Samuel Ripley and Emerson, George Ripley, founded Brook Farm and the Transcendental Club, and assisted Margaret Fuller in editing the Dial. The Dial was published by Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, whose younger sister, Sophia, married Hawthorne after he left Brook Farm, where he had lived with George Ripley, who then helped him rent the Old Manse,