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Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia. By Sterling F. Delano. (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xviii, 428. $29.95.)
Brook Farm, although a well-known community much featured in broader studies and documentary works, has lacked its own recent, book-length historical account. Sterling F. Delano, author of The Harbinger and New England, Transcendentalism (1983), on the intellectual and publishing activities of the Brook Farmers and their colleagues, is well qualified to fill the gap. Readable and accessible, Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia is sure to become the standard starting point for all readers interested in the community and in its links with transcendentalism and Fourierism.
Delano relates the emergence of Brook Farm, a Utopian community established in 1841 in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, from the religious crises of its founder George Ripley and others in the 18305 and from the activities of the transeendentalist circle. He describes the setting up and development of the community site and buildings, the emergence of a distinctive way of life among the first members, Nathaniel Hawthorne's early participation, Ralph Waldo Emerson's skepticism and refusal to join, and Margaret Fuller's ambivalence. Intellectual life and education soon came to be at the heart of community activity: by 1842 Brook Farm's most important source of income was its school. Delano shows how intellectual ferment and financial aspirations combined to point the community in new directions, tracing its growing engagement with...