English Reformers (1842)

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin & Deborah Madsen):

This essay was written shortly after A. Bronson Alcott's return from his visit to the reform community at Alcott House, or the Concordium, in Ham Common in Surrey, England in 1842. The essay discusses the ideas and practices of a handful of English reformers, including James Pierrepont Greaves, Mr. Heraud, Francis Barham, Charles Lane, Henry G. Wright, and Goodwyn Barmby:

Mr. Alcott, whose genius and efforts in the great art of Education have been more appreciated in England than in America, has now been spending some months in that country, with the aim to confer with the most eminent Educators and philanthropists, in the hope to exchange intelligence, and import into this country whatever hints have been struck out there, on the subject of literature and the First Philosophy. The design was worthy, and its first results have already reached us” (227).

He concludes that “This school [Ham Common] is founded on a faith in the presence of the Divine Spirit in man” (237). Emerson writes of the founder of Alcott House, James Pierrepont Greaves: “His active and happy career continued early to the seventieth year, with heart and head unimpaired and undaunted, his eyes and other faculties sound, except his lower limbs which suffered from his sedentary occupation of writing. For nearly thirty-six years he abstained from all fermented drinks, and all animal food. In the last years he dieted almost wholly on fruit” (229). Among the pamphlets and books mailed from England by Alcott to the US for Emerson and Thoreau, the pamphlet containing John Westland Marsten’s play, “The Patrician’s Daughter,” is compared to the rest as “this bright pamphlet [drawn] from amid the heap of crude declaration on Marriage and Education, on Dietetics and Hydropathy, on Chartism and Socialism, on grim tracts on flesh-eating and dram-drinking ...” (232). Alcott sent many papers from England to his friend in New England, including the theories that would guide the establishment of Fruitlands the following year: “Many of the papers on our table contain schemes and hints for a better social organization, especially the plan of what they call a ‘Concordium, or a Primitive House, which is about to be commenced by united individuals, who are desirous, under industrial and progressive education, with simplicity in diet, dress, lodging, &c., to retain the means for the harmonic development of their physical, intellectual, and moral natures.’ The institution is to be in the country, the inmates are to be of both sexes, they are to labor on the land, their drink is to be water, and their food chiefly uncooked by fire, and the habits of the members throughout of the same simplicity. Their unity is to be based on their education in a religious love, which subordinates all persons, and perpetually invokes the presepce of the spirit in every transaction” (239).

Emerson concludes by quoting in full a report by “a private correspondent” (presumably Alcott) on a convention held at Alcott House. Participants discussed three papers on a number of reforms. “We proposed reducing our wants to nature's simplest needs; but on due consideration, we perceived that the restrictions on food precluded our obtaining it, and we learned with dismay that the spirit, which monopolizes bread and other constituents of life, denounced from the bosom of society, ‘You shall not live a conscientious life’” (244). For Greaves, one way of “surrender[ing] to the spirit is to feed the “outward frame” on better foods:

Together with pure beings will come pure habits. A better body shall be built up from the orchard and the garden. The outward frame shall beam with soul; it shall be a vital fact in which is typically unfolded the whole of perfectness. As he who seizes on civil liberty with the hand of violence would act the tyrant, if power were entrusted to him, so he whose food is obtained by force or fraud would accomplish other purposes by similarly ignoble means. Tyranny and domination must be overcome, when they first take root in the lust of unhallowed things. From the fountain we will slake our thirst, and our appetite shall find supply in the delicious abundance that Pomona offers. Flesh and blood we will reject as "the accursed thing." A pure mind has no faith in them (247).

Last updated on March 1st, 2024

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