It is rare to find the very home where a beloved feminist author penned her most famous work, Little Women—a novel that has never been out of print for over a century and has been translated into more than 50 languages. Rarer still is to find that home still preserved just as she and her family left it, filled with their personal belongings. Add to that a rich history spanning centuries, and you have Louisa May Alcott’s Orchard House in Concord, Massachusetts.
In September of 1837, as criticism of his Temple School grew, Transcendentalist philosopher and educator Amos Bronson Alcott received a lifeline: a lengthy correspondence from an English admirer. Having learned of Bronson’s grand experiment through the reading of Record of a School (written by Bronson’s assistant, Elizabeth Peabody), James Pierrepont Greaves had created his own Temple School, naming it Alcott House. Following the closure of his Temple School in 1841, Bronson traveled to London in 1842 to visit Alcott House, returning six months later with a partnership and a vision. While in England, Alcott met Charles Lane, an English Transcendentalist, disciple of James Pierrepont Greaves, and admirer of Bronson Alcott. Together, the two men founded their utopian community in America, beginning in Concord in October 1842. Nine months later, the group moved to the Wyman Farm in Harvard, purchased by Lane. Alcott, his wife and four girls along with Lane and his son, joined a handful of followers at Fruitlands on June 1, 1843.
In the mid-1830’s, a new word entered the American lexicon; Transcendentalism. It was a word that was vague and confusing, a word that seemed mystical, spiritual, and possibly even blasphemous. Even today, 170 years later, Transcendentalism is still misunderstood, and many people have a hard time explaining what it was and what it means.
Lexico.com defines Transcendentalism as
“an idealistic philosophical and social movement which developed in New England around 1836 in reaction to rationalism. Influenced by romanticism, Platonism, and Kantian philosophy, it taught that divinity pervades all nature and humanity, and its members held progressive views on feminism and communal living. Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau were central figures.” Simply put, it is the idea that God is present in all things, that we are surrounded by divinity. All of nature is divine, and therefore, since man is a part of nature, we have the capability to be divine as well.
