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Brook Farm, a transcendentalist utopian experiment, was put into practice by transcendentalist former Unitarian minister George Ripley at a farm in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, at that time nine miles from Boston. The community, in operation from 1841 to 1847, was inspired by the socialist concepts of Charles Fourier. It was based (as many later utopias would be) on the concept of self-reliance, which powers much of the utopian movement. The actual farm they lived on was influential to many writers like Thoreau as they rejected civilization and its injustices and desired to be secluded. The Brook Farm utopia was intended to rely on agriculture, whereas the moderately more successful utopia of the Oneidas was based on consumerIn economics, consumers are individuals or households that "consume" goods and services generated within the economy. Since this includes just about everyone, the term is a political term as much as an economic term when it is used in everyday speech. goods like furnitureFurniture is the collective term for the movable objects which support the human body (seating furniture and beds), provide storage, and hold objects on horizontal surfaces above the ground. Storage furniture is used to hold or contain smaller objects suc.Agriculture was never very successful at Brook Farm, which in fact was sited on land not very suitable for agriculture. Brook Farm also was an educational enterprise, and ran schoolA school is any place designated for learning. The range of institutions covered by the term varies from country to country. In the United Kingdom, the term school refers primarily to pre- university institutions, and these can for the most part be divides at all levels from primary to preparation for collegeA college ( Latin collegium can be the name of any group of colleagues; originally it meant a group of people living together under a common set of rules con "together" + leg "law"). As a consequence members of colleges were originally styled " fellow" an. These, in fact, were the financially profitable part of Brook Farm's operations.
Nathaniel HawthorneNathaniel Hawthorne ( July 4, 1804 May 19, 1864) was a 19th century American novelist and short story writer. He was born in Salem, Massachusetts and died in Plymouth, New Hampshire. Hawthorne's father was a sea captain and descendant of John Hathorn, one spent time at Brook Farm and presented a fictionalized portrait of it in his novel, The Blithedale RomanceThe Blithedale Romance ( 1852) was the third of the major romances of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Henry James (in Hawthorne 1879) called it "the lightest, the brightest, the livelist" of Hawthorne's "unhumorous fictions. Much of the action of the novel is set at. (He acknowledged the resemblance in his introduction, saying "in the 'Blithedale' of this volume, many readers will probably suspect a faint and not very faithful shadowing of Brook Farm, in Roxbury, which (now a little more than ten years ago) was occupied and cultivated by a company of socialists.") Some have seen a resemblance between Margaret FullerSarah Margaret Fuller ( May 23, 1810 June 19, 1850) was a journalist, critic and women's rights activist. Fuller was born in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Her father, Timothy Fuller, a lawyer, gave her a vigorous classical education which was testing enough t and Hawthorne's fictional character Zenobia. In the novel, a visitor—a writer like Hawthorne—finds that hard farm labor is not conducive to intellectual creativity:
- We had pleased ourselves with delectable visions of the spiritualization of labor.... [but] the clods of earth, which we so constantly belabored and turned over and over, were never etherealized into thought. Our thoughts, on the contrary, were fast becoming cloddish. Our labor symbolized nothing, and left us mentally sluggish in the dusk of the evening. Intellectual activity is incompatible with any large amount of bodily exercise. The yeoman and the scholar—the yeoman and the man of finest moral culture, though not the man of sturdiest sense and integrity—are two distinct individuals, and can never be melted or welded into one substance.
During its later years, the Brook Farm community became more and more committed to Fourierist theories, and committed itself to building an ambitious communal building known as the "Phylanstery." When this building caught fire and burned to the ground in 1846Events January 5 The United States House of Representatives votes to stop sharing the Oregon Territory with the United Kingdom February 5 The Oregon Spectator becomes the first newspaper on the Pacific coast of the United States. February 10 Many Mormons, the community's hopes perished with it.
