Title: John Sullivan Dwight correspondence regarding Brook Farm, 1840-1848
Arrangement
Arranged chrolologically.
Administrative/Biographical History
Founded by George Ripley (1802-1880) in 1841, the Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education was a Transcendentalist community located in West Roxbury, Massachusetts. Brook Farm was an experiment in communal living that sought to create a harmonious society wherein both men and women shared the labor which in turn provided them with more time to pursue their intellectual and artistic interests. Residents were stockholders in the Farm. Another important element of Brook Farm was its school which provided a progressive education, and was its main source of income. In 1844, the Farm converted to the ideas of Charles Fourier, who advocated for a society that was divided into cooperative communities of small self-sustaining groups called phalanxes. With the conversion came a new constitution and the name Brook Farm Association for Industry and Education. From 1845-1847, the Harbinger, the Fourierist magazine, was published at Brook Farm and edited by Ripley. A fire in 1846 destroyed the central building (the Phalanstery) and together with financial difficulties, contributed to the dissolution of the community in 1847. Among the residents of Brook Farm were Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) who wrote The Blithdale Romance (1852), a novel about life on the Farm, Charles A. Dana (1819-1897), and John Sullivan Dwight (1813-1893). Among the frequent visitors were Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882) Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Bronson Alcott (1799-1888), and Elizabeth Peabody (1804-1894), in whose bookshop the first conversations about Brook Farm took place, and Theodore Parker (1810-1860).
John Sullivan Dwight corres...
