American Transcendentalism

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by Philip F Gura


  21 John Thomas Codman, Brook Farm: Historic and Personal Memoirs (Boston: Arena Publishing Company, 1894), 79–81.

  22 See “The Hopedale and Brook Farm Communities,” The American Socialist (June 22, 1876), 102.

  23 Codman, Brook Farm, 177–78.

  24 Jonathan Beecher, Charles Fourier: The Visionary and His World (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 56. Beecher’s is the standard biography.

  25 Charles Fourier, Oeuvres complètes, 12 vols. (Paris: Éditions Anthropos, 1966–68), 10:17; also cited in Jonathan Beecher and Richard Bienvenu, eds., The Utopian Vision of Charles Fourier: Selected Texts on Work, Love, and Passionate Attraction (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 1.

  26 Sophia Ripley to Ralph Waldo Emerson, July 5, 1843, cited in Delano, Brook Farm, 121–22.

  27 Emerson, JMN, 8:392.

  28 Walt Whitman, “New York Dissected, V. Street Yarn,” Life Illustrated, August 16, 1856, reprinted in New York Dissected, eds. Emory Holloway and Ralph Adimri (New York: R. R. Wilson, 1936), 129.

  29 Marianne Dwight, Letters from Brook Farm, 1844–1847, ed. Amy L. Reed (Poughkeepsie, N.Y.: Vassar College, 1928), 84.

  30 Albert Brisbane, “On Association and Attractive Industry,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 10 (June 1842), 566.

  31 In an unpublished lecture on Fourier, George Ripley explained this pun; see David A. Zonderman, “George Ripley’s Unpublished Lecture on Charles Fourier,” Studies in the American Renaissance, 1982 (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1982), 207.

  32 “Editorial Notice,” Phalanx 1, no. 23 (May 23, 1845), 354–55.

  33 Amelia Russell, “Home Life of the Brook Farm Association,” Atlantic Monthly 42 (July–December 1878), 458–66 and 556–63; Henry W. Sams, Autobiography of Brook Farm (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1958), 220–21.

  34 See Catalogue of a Select Private Library … to Be Sold at Public Auction … November 5, 1846 (Boston: Alfred Mudge, 1846).

  35 Grodzins, American Heretic, 496.

  36 Orestes Brownson, “Transcendentalism, or the Latest Form of Infidelity,” Boston Quarterly Review 2 (July 1845), 310.

  37 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883), in Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 10:331, 333.

  38 Donald C. M’Laren, Boa Constrictor or, Fourier Association Self-Exposed as to Its Principles and Aims (Rochester, N.Y.: Printed by Canfield & Warren, 1844), 13, 17.

  39 Emerson, JMN, 9:50; “Historic Notes on Life and Letters,” Complete Works, 10:333.

  40 Victor Hennequin, Love in the Phalanstery, trans. Henry James (New York: DeWitt and Davenport, 1849), v–vi.

  41 Ibid., 2.

  42 New York Observer, October 7, 1848, p. 162.

  43 Emerson, JMN, 9:100.

  44 Fuller’s essay is in Dial 4, no. 1 (July 1843), 1–47.

  45 Margaret Fuller to Orestes Brownson, January 28, 1844, in Letters of Fuller, 3:174–75.

  46 Margaret Fuller, Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845; reprint, New York: W. W. Norton, 1971), 20, 33.

  47 Ibid., 37.

  48 Ibid., 122–23.

  49 Ibid., 123–24.

  50 Ibid., 124–25.

  51 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Caroline Sturgis, February 1, 1845, LRWE, 8:5–6.

  52 Ibid., 8:4–5, note 13.

  53 Ibid.

  54 Franklin B. Sanborn, Recollections of Seventy Years, 2 vols. (Boston: R. G. Badger, 1909), 2:349.

  55 Ralph Waldo Emerson to Caroline Sturgis, February (?) 8(?), 1845, LRWE, 8:8.

  56 Emerson, JMN, 9:191.

  57 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “English Reformers,” Dial 3 (October 1842): 227–28, 242. The Alist; a Monthly Magazine of Divinity and Universal Literature, edited by Francis Barnham. The title comes from “the Hebrew title of God, Alah”; see Dial 3, 233, note.

  58 Ibid., 237; on Fruitlands see Richard Francis, Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands, and Walden (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1997).

  59 Channing reprinted this essay in the Present 1 (1843): 110–21 in English Fourierist Sophia Chichester’s translation.

  60 Ibid., 110–11.

  61 Lane’s letter is also found in Clara Endicott Sears, Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands, comp. by Clara Endicott Sears; with Transcendental Wild Oats, by Louisa M. Alcott (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1915), 41–52, from which I cite it, p. 44. Also see “The Consociate Family Life,” New Age 1 (November 1, 1843), 120; New-York Daily Tribune, September 2, 1843; and Herald of Freedom, September 8, 1843.

  62 Emerson, JMN, 9:26.

  63 Charles Lane, “Fruitlands,” Dial 4, no. 1 (July 1843), 135–36.

  64 See Sears, Fruitlands, passim.

  65 Emerson, JMN, 8:433.

  66 Ibid., 8:250–51.

  7: VARIETIES OF TRANSCENDENTALISM

  1 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Historic Notes on Life and Letters in New England,” Lectures and Biographical Sketches (1883), in Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin, 1903–04), 10:308, 311.

  2 Octavius Brooks Frothingham, Transcendentalism in New England: A History (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1876), 105–06.

  3 Margaret Fuller to Ralph Waldo Emerson, November 9, 1841, in Robert N. Hudspeth, ed., Letters of Margaret Fuller, 6 vols. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983–94), 2:251.

  4 The standard account of French influence on American Transcendentalism is Walter L. Leighton, French Philosophers and New-England Transcendentalism (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1908).

  5 The main biographical sources for Greene are George Willis Cooke, A Historical and Biographical Introduction to the “Dial,” 2 vols. (1902; reprint, New York: Russell and Russell, 1961), 2:117–28; and Joel Myerson, New England Transcendentalists and the Dial: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1980), 155–56. Also see Philip F. Gura, “Beyond Transcendentalism: The Radical Individualism of William B. Greene,” in Conrad Wright and Charles Capper, eds., The Transient and Permanent in American Transcendentalism (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2000), 471–96.

  6 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of the Rev. William Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), 435–45.

  7 Ibid., 435.

  8 William B. Greene, [The Incarnation,] A Letter to the Rev. John Fiske, D.D. (West Brookfield, Mass.: Merriam and Chapin, 1848), 20; and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Cheerful Yesterdays (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1898), 106.

  9 On Buchez see especially D. G. Charlton, Secular Religions in France, 1815–1870 (London: Oxford University Press, 1895), 182–84; Edward Berenson, Populist and Left-Wing Politics in France, 1830–1852 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984); and François-André Isambert, Politique, religion et science de l’homme chez Philippe Buchez (Paris: Cujas, 1967).

  10 On Leroux see especially Robert Flint, The Philosophy of History in Europe, 2 vols. (Edinburgh and London: Blackwood, 1884), 1:252–58; David Owen Evans, Social Romanticism in France, 1830–1848 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1951); Charlton, Secular Religions in France, 82–87; and Jack Bakunin, Pierre Leroux and the Birth of Democratic Socialism (New York: Revisionist Press, 1976).

  11 [William B. Greene,] Remarks on the Science of History: Followed by an A Priori Autobiography (Boston: William Crosby and H. P. Nichols, 1849), 37; Peabody, Channing, 439–40; also see Greene, The Incarnation, 28–29.

  12 [William B. Greene,] “First Principles,” Dial 2 (January 1842), 281.

  13 William B. Greene, The Doctrine of Life and Some of Its Theological Applications (Boston: B. H. Greene, 1843), 57–58, 74; Peabody, Channing, 364.

  14 William B. Greene, Transcendentalism (West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke and Company, 1849), 12–14.

  15 Ibid., 6, 18.

  16 Ibid., 21–22, 32, 41.

  17 Greene, The Incarnation, 25–27.r />
  18 Ibid., 41–43.

  19 Ibid., 25–27.

  20 William B. Greene, Equality (West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke and Company, 1849), 32. Also see Mutual Banking (West Brookfield, Mass.: O. S. Cooke and Company, 1849).

  21 Greene, Equality, 71–73.

  22 William B. Greene, The Blazing Star; with an Appendix Treating of the Jewish Kabbala (Boston: Rand, Avery, & Frye, 1872), 80.

  23 [George Wood], Peter Schlemiel in America (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1848), 244.

  24 Ibid., 255.

  25 See Boston Transcript, February 29, 1881, p. 1, for her obituary.

  26 Cooke, Historical and Biographical Introduction, 2:109.

  27 Ibid., 2:101–103. Her verse appeared in Dial 2 (July 1841) and 3 (July 1842).

  28 Charles A. Dana, review of Studies in Religion, Harbinger 1, no. 23 (November 15, 1845), 362.

  29 Frederic Henry Hedge in Eliza Thayer Clapp, Essays, Letters, and Poems (Boston: privately printed, 1888), ix–x. On Clapp see Cooke, Historical and Biographical Introduction, 2:101–12; and Myerson, New England Transcendentalists and the Dial, 125–26.

  30 Cooke, Historical and Biographical Introduction, 2:110–11.

  31 Ibid., 2:111, and Dana, “review of Studies in Religion,” 362.

  32 [Eliza Thayer Clapp,] Studies in Religion, by the Author of Words in a Sunday School (New York: C. Shepard, 1845), 11–16.

  33 Ibid., 75.

  34 Ibid., 27–31, 34.

  35 Ibid., 84, 86.

  36 Ibid., 115, 123–24.

  37 Ibid., 168, 218.

  38 Cooke, Historical and Biographical Introduction, 2:111.

  39 Ibid.

  40 Judith Mattson Bean and Joel Myerson, eds., Margaret Fuller, Critic: Writings from the New-York Tribune, 1844–1846 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 335–36. The earlier notice is ibid., 210.

  41 Cited in Philip Judd Brockway, Sylvester Judd (1813–1853): Novelist of Transcendentalism (Orono, Maine: University Press, 1941), 79. Also see Richard D. Hathaway, Sylvester Judd’s New England (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981).

  42 Arethusa Hall, Life and Character of the Rev. Sylvester Judd (Boston: Crosby, Nichols, and Company, 1854), 74, 77–78.

  43 Hall gives generous excerpts from Judd’s “Cardiagraphy” in Life and Character of Judd, 80–103.

  44 Ibid., 131.

  45 Brockway, Judd, 24, 26.

  46 Hall, Life and Character of Judd, 112.

  47 Ibid., 353–54.

  48 Ibid., 354.

  49 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “A Glimpse of Christ’s Idea of Society,” Dial 2 (October 1841), 214–28.

  50 Hall, Life and Character of Judd, 357.

  51 Ibid., 356; review of Margaret, Southern Quarterly Review 9 (April 1846), 507–22.

  52 Frederic Dan Huntington, review of Judd’s Margaret, Christian Examiner 39 (November 1845), 418–20. It was also reviewed by W.B.O. Peabody in the North American Review 62 (January 1846), 102–40.

  53 James Russell Lowell, review of Kavanagh: A Tale, in North American Review 69 (July 1849), 209.

  54 Orestes Brownson, The Works of Orestes A. Brownson, collected and arranged by Henry F. Brownson, 20 vols. (Detroit: T. Nourse, 1882–1907) 6:113–15, and passim.

  55 Hall, Life and Character of Judd, 364–69.

  56 Andrew Preston Peabody, review of Philo, North American Review 70 (April 1850), 434, 440. It was also reviewed in William Henry Channing’s Spirit of the Age; see 2, no. 5 (February 2, 1857), 76.

  57 Hall, Life and Character of Judd, 456.

  58 Henry David Thoreau, Journal, John C. Broderick, general editor, 7 vols. to date (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1981–), 1:277–78.

  59 Henry Thoreau to Mrs. John Thoreau, June 8, 1843, in Walter Harding and Carl Bode, eds., The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau (New York: New York University Press, 1958), 141.

  60 Ibid., 111, for Brisbane.

  61 Ibid., 139.

  62 Henry Thoreau, “Paradise (to Be) Regained,” United States Magazine and Democratic Review 13 (November 1843), 451–63.

  63 Henry Thoreau to Ralph Waldo Emerson, June 8, 1843, in Correspondence of Thoreau, 112.

  64 For Etzler’s thought see John Hydahl, “Introduction,” The Collected Works of John Adolphus Etzler (Delmar, N.Y.: Scholars’ Facsimiles & Reprints, 1977), vii–xxxi.

  65 Henry David Thoreau, “Paradise (to Be) Regained” in Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973), 20, 22, 39–40, 42, 45–46.

  66 Ibid., 47.

  67 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Dial 3 (July 1842), 19.

  68 Henry Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” Dial 3 (July 1842), 19–40.

  69 Ibid., 27, 37. Also see Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971), 234–36 and 304–09.

  70 Thoreau, “Natural History of Massachusetts,” 39–40.

  71 Henry David Thoreau, “A Walk to Wachusett,” in Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 20 vols. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, 1906), 5:142.

  72 Ibid., 151.

  73 Henry David Thoreau, “A Winter Walk,” in Writings, 5:166, 167, 169.

  74 Ibid., 171.

  75 Thoreau, Walden, 19–20.

  76 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, eds. William H. Gilman et al., 16 vols. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960–82), 8:96.

  77 Caroline Healey Dall, Transcendentalism in New England: A Lecture (Boston: Sold by Roberts Brothers, 1897), 20–21.

  8: SELF AND SOCIETY

  1 Linck C. Johnson, “Reforming the Reformers: Emerson, Thoreau, and the Sunday Lectures at Amory Hall, Boston,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 37 (1991), 235–89.

  2 “Priestcraft,” Congregational Journal, February 29, 1844, p. 2.

  3 Ralph Waldo Emerson, “New England Reformers,” in Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 3, Essays, Second Series; Historical Introduction and Notes by Joseph Slater; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr; Textual Introduction and Apparatus by Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983), 149.

  4 Ibid., 154.

  5 Ibid., 155–57.

  6 Ibid., 157.

  7 Ibid., 167.

  8 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, Reminiscences of the Rev. William Ellery Channing, D.D. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1880), 371, 365.

  9 Helen R. Deese, ed., Selected Journals of Caroline Healey Dall, in Massachusetts Historical Society, Collections 90 (2006), 81, 217.

  10 Francis Bowen, “Locke and the Transcendentalists,” Christian Examiner 23 (November 1837), 184, 193.

  11 Simeon Doggett, Sermon on Transcendentalism (Taunton, Mass.: J.W.D. Hall, 1843), 6.

  12 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 2, Essays, First Series; Historical Introduction and Notes by Joseph Slater; Text Established by Alfred R. Ferguson and Jean Ferguson Carr (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1979), 27–29.

  13 Ibid., 30–31.

  14 Ibid., 44, 50–51.

  15 Ibid., 47, 36.

  16 Ibid., 47, 49.

  17 Theodore Parker, “Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson,” in The Collected Works of Theodore Parker, ed. Frances Power Cobbe, 12 vols. (London: Trüber, 1863–65), 10:203.

  18 Peabody, Channing, 373.

  19 Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, “Egotheism, the Atheism of Today” (1858), reprinted in Elizabeth Peabody, Last Evening with Allston and Other Papers (Boston: D. Lothrop, 1886), 245.

  20 New-York Daily Tribune, March 19, 1842, p. 3.

  21 Henry James, Moralism and Christianity; or, Man’s Experience and Destiny (New York: J. S. Redfield, 1850), 84.

  22 Bruce A. Ronda, ed., Letters of Elizabeth Palmer Peabody: American Renaissance Woman (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 1984), 246–47, 253.

  23 Helen R. Deese, ed., Daughter of Boston: The Extraordinary Diary of a Nineteen
th-Century Woman (Boston: Beacon Press, 2005), 138.

  24 Parker, A Sermon of the Perishing Classes in Boston (1846), in Collected Works, 7:58–59.

 

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