Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England (1883)

AUTHOR: Emerson, Ralph Waldo

PUBLICATION:  Lectures and Biographical Sketches. Centenary Edition: The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Vol. 10. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903-1904. 323-370
https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/emerson/4957107.0010.001/1:19?rgn=div1;view=fulltext

Originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in October 1883, the essay discusses early nineteenth-century Owenite and Fourierist social reforms and gives a sympathetic account of George Ripley's experiment at Brook Farm.

KEYWORDS: land usage, environmentalism, Transcendentalism

SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

Emerson gives an account of the formation of the Transcendental Club in Boston and the establishment of the journal The Dial as part of the contemporary reformist trend in New England: “These reformers were a new class. Instead of the fiery souls of the Puritans, bent on hanging the Quaker, burning the witch and banishing the Romanist, these were gentle souls, with peaceful and even with genial dispositions, casting sheep's-eyes even on Fourier and his houris. It was a time when the air was full of reform” (346). Emerson praises Owen and Fourier before presenting his criticism:

Yet in spite of the assurances of its friends that it was new and widely discriminated from all other plans for the regeneration of society, we could not exempt it from the criticism which we apply to so many projects for reform with which the brain of the age teems. Our feeling was that Fourier had skipped no fact but one, namely Life. He treats man as a plastic thing, something that may be put up or down, ripened or retarded, moulded, polished, made into solid or fluid or gas, at the will of the leader; or perhaps as a vegetable, from which, though now a poor crab, a very good peach can by manure and exposure be in time produced,—but skips the faculty of life, which spawns and scorns system and system-makers; which eludes all conditions; which makes or supplants a thousand phalanxes and New Harmonies with each pulsation (352).

He repeats once more his conviction that a proper polis, a good community, can only be constituted by self-reliant members, like Henry David Thoreau: “Thoreau was in his own person a practical answer, almost a refutation, to the theories of the socialists. He required no Phalanx, no Government, no society, almost no memory. He lived extempore from hour to hour, like the birds and the angels; brought every day a new proposition, as revolutionary as that of yesterday, but different: the only man of leisure in his town; and his independence made all others look like slaves” (356-357).

He ends his essay with a sketch of the Brook Farm experiment, established in 1841 by George Ripley. “The Founders of Brook Farm should have this praise, that they made what all people try to make, an agreeable place to live in. All comers, even the most fastidious, found it the pleasantest of residences. It is certain that freedom from household routine, variety of character and talent, variety of work, variety of means of thought and instruction, art, music, poetry, reading, masquerade, did not permit sluggishness or despondency; broke up routine. There is agreement in the testimony that it was, to most of the associates, education; to many, the most important period of their life, the birth of valued friendships, their first acquaintance with the riches of conversation, their training in behavior” (364).

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