Fruitlands

In this authoritative history of the communal experiment Fruitlands, Richard Francis elucidates a significant moment in the Transcendentalist movement’s social turn in the 1840s. This “collective biography” (p. 11) offers a probing (and not flattering) portrait of Bronson Alcott during his most significant life crisis and sheds light on three little-studied English reformers who saw Alcott as a prophetic voice: James Pierrepont Greaves, Charles Lane, and Henry Gardiner Wright. But the star of the book is Abigail Alcott, whose emotional complexity, intellectual acumen, and force of will eventually shape the narrative. Greaves was the principle theorist behind the founding of Alcott House (1838), an experimental school near London inspired by Bronson Alcott’s Temple School in Boston. Responding belatedly to this monument, Alcott traveled to England in 1842, arriving a few months after Greaves’s death. He returned to Concord, Massachusetts, with Lane, Wright, and high utopian hopes. They established themselves first in the Alcott family cottage Concordia, cramped quarters indeed for the Alcotts, their four daughters, Wright, Lane, and his son William. In the summer of 1843 Lane purchased a farm near Harvard, Massachusetts, and they launched a utopian experiment in earnest

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• Careless raptures and Newhouse traps

  Tom Fels•The Sixties•2013

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