Key Collecting Areas: Collecting Brook Farm

66.  George Ripley.  Autograph letter, initialed, to John Sullivan Dwight, November 4, 1847.

ALD Ripley to Dwight

Ink on paper.  Joel Myerson Collection of Nineteenth-Century American Literature, University of South Carolina.

Ripley, now living in New York City after Brook Farm's demise, expresses his concerns for the future of The Harbinger.  Dwight was a major participant in the Brook Farm community and wrote for The Harbinger.  Generally considered one of America’s earliest and best music critics, he edited Dwight’s Journal of Music from 1852 to 1881.

This letter shows the confluence of collecting and scholarly interests.  Joel Myerson describes his acquisition of it: “I bought the letter because of its superb content concerning Brook Farm, and because at that time I had no manuscripts by Ripley relating to the community.  As a scholar, I realized that it fit into a group of letters among Dwight’s papers at the Boston Public Library, and so edited the whole group of them in the Summer 1985 issue of Harvard Library Bulletin.”

 

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