33.   Photograph of Bronson Alcott, from photographic print.
 

   Educator, philosopher, lecturer, poet, essayist, diarist, and reformer Amos Bronson Alcott (1799-1888) was Emerson’s close friend for more than forty-five years.  Emerson valued Alcott from their first acquaintance.  Long after he had realized Alcott’s impracticality, he was still invigorated by the man’s idealism.

   Judging Alcott a “world-builder” and “Genius,” Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller in May, 1837: “ … he has more of the godlike than any man I have ever seen and his presence rebukes & threatens & raises.  He is a teacher.  I shall dismiss for the future all anxiety about his success.  If he cannot make intelligent men feel the presence of a superior nature the worse for them—I can never doubt him.  His Ideal is beheld with such unrivalled distinctness, that he is not only justified but necessitated to condemn & to seek to upheave the vast Actual and cleanse the world.”

   Even though he was sometimes skeptical of the efforts into which Alcott threw his energies, Emerson supported him emotionally and often financially through periods of turmoil and despondency.

   Born at Spindle Hill near Walcott, Connecticut, Alcott was largely self-educated.  As a young man, he made his living as a peddler in New York and Pennsylvania.  He traveled south, where he observed slavery first-hand.  In 1823, he began teaching in Connecticut, in 1828 moved to Boston, and in 1830 married Abigail May.  The couple moved to the Philadelphia area, where their first two daughters, Anna and Louisa, were born.

   Back in Boston in 1834, Alcott—with the help of educator and reformer Elizabeth Palmer Peabody—established a progressive school in the Masonic Temple building.  At the Temple School, rather than attempting to impose knowledge on his students, he employed the Socratic conversational method to draw from them the spiritual and moral truth that he felt they possessed innately.  With Elizabeth Peabody and (later) Margaret Fuller as his assistants, he operated the school until 1838.  Its closing was forced by the withdrawal of students by parents alarmed at his teaching methods and at some of the subjects he broached.  The publication of Alcott’s Conversations with Children on the Gospels (1836-1837)—Alcott’s edited record of his dialogues with his pupils—had made him a target for criticism.

   In 1840, Alcott moved his wife and growing family into the “Dovecote,” a Hosmer family cottage in Concord.  His plan was to support the family by farming and day labor.  Emerson paid Edmund Hosmer the rent.  That year, his “Orphic Sayings”—described by Emerson as “a string of Apothegms”—appeared in The Dial.  Emerson had mixed feelings about them,” but nevertheless found merit in some, and felt they should be published.  On April 8, 1840, he wrote Margaret Fuller of the “Orphic Sayings,” “ … what he read me this P.M. are not very good.  I fear he will never write as well as he talks.” 

   Late in 1840 and into early 1841, the Emersons gave some thought to having the Alcotts live with them, but—probably for the best—nothing came of the idea.  In January, 1841, Alcott was jailed for nonpayment of his poll tax, a form of protest against slavery for which Thoreau also was later jailed.  In 1842, Alcott traveled to England, where he found support for his educational theories.  The trip was financed largely by Emerson.  Alcott returned to America with reformer Charles Lane, with whom he founded Fruitlands, a utopian community in Harvard, Massachusetts, in 1843.  The Alcotts moved there in June.

   The Fruitlands experiment focused on manual labor, vegetarianism, religious harmony, education, and the balanced development of the individual.  Relying on highly idealistic, relatively ineffective methods of farming, the reformers found it difficult to sustain the community, in consequence of which Mrs. Alcott and her children suffered considerable hardship.  Moreover, Lane’s subordination of individual to community did not sit well with Bronson Alcott’s Transcendental individualism and conflicted with the needs of his family.  The Alcotts left Fruitlands in January, 1844.  Bronson was deeply depressed over its failure.

   In 1845, partly with funding provided by Emerson, the Alcotts bought a house in Concord, on Lexington Road.  They called it Hillside.  (Later, under Nathaniel Hawthorne’s ownership, it would be renamed Wayside.)  Alcott made repairs and improvements to the old place and, together with Thoreau, built Emerson a Gothic summerhouse.  The Alcotts remained at Hillside until 1848, when they moved to Boston, where Bronson offered conversational series and Abba did missionary work among the urban poor.  They returned to Concord in 1857 and settled in the Orchard House.  Bronson’s particular talents were locally recognized between 1859 and 1865, when he served Concord as Superintendent of Schools.

   In the mid-1850s, Alcott began to make conversational tours out west and to receive some of the positive public attention that had eluded him.  He wrote and published volumes of prose and verse, including Emerson (1865).  The success of his daughter Louisa as a popular author finally provided some financial stability for the family.

   Bronson Alcott founded the Concord School of Philosophy in 1879.  Held summers between 1879 and 1888, the school was managed with the assistance of Frank Sanborn and William Torrey Harris, who ran it after Alcott suffered a debilitating stroke in 1882.  In 1884—two years after Emerson’s death—the program of lectures was devoted in part to Emerson’s thought and work.  Alcott died in 1888.

   Emerson never lost his appreciation of the best in Alcott.  He wrote of Alcott in a letter to Emily Mervine Drury on November 23, 1853: “ … there are few persons so well worth seeing.  I am very sensible of the defects of his genius & character, but he is a rare piece of nature, and is a man who stands in poetic relations to his friends & to the whole world.”

No image in this online display may be reproduced in any form, including electronic, without permission from the Curator of Special Collections of the Concord Free Public Library.

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