Literary Concord Uncovered: Revealing Emerson, Thoreau, Alcott, Hawthorne, and Fuller

By Xlibris US

Why did Concord, Massachusetts, the small inland farming village,
twenty miles northwest of Boston, become the center of Americas intellectual life in the mid 1800s? And why did celebrated authors Henry D. Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Margaret Fuller all live and write at that same time in Concord?
Literary Concord Uncovered provides a wonderful introductory overview of Concords classic authors and their creations. It reveals some of the secrets that enabled these brilliant American authors to write their pioneering works, which include Thoreaus Walden, Emersons Self Reliance, Alcotts Little Women and Hawthornes The Scarlet Letter.
This book will help readers gain a deeper understanding and experience greater enjoyment from reading extraordinary and exciting books by many of Concordsand Americas--greatest authors.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: Jul 15, 2014
• ISBN: 9781499039863

Book preview

Copyright © 2014 by Joseph L. Andrews.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

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Rev. date: 07/10/2014

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CONTENTS

Introduction: Why Concord?

Chapter 1: Wild in Walden Woods: Henry David Thoreau

Chapter 2: Nature’s Naked Eye: Ralph Waldo Emerson

Chapter 3: Running Girl; Working Woman: Louisa May Alcott

Chapter 4: A Puritan’s Progress: Nathaniel Hawthorne

Chapter 5: Woman Interrupted…: Margaret Fuller

Some Concluding Thoughts

Appendix A: Transcendentalism

Postscript: Literary Concord Today

Appendix: B Concord Area Web Sites

Acknowledgments

Bibliography

About Literary New England and Concord

Books about Concord, Massachusetts

For: Lesley, Joe, Michael and Garrett Andrews

Jennifer, Adam, Aaron and Pete Burke

Sara K. Andrews

*

For: The Paxton, Kotzen and Eldridge Families

*

For Elaine Inker

*

In Loving Memory of:

Margareta Langert Andrews

Katherine New Andrews & Joseph Lyon Andrews Sr.

Ann Andrews Paxton

Lynn Andrews Kotzen

*

PHOTOS AND ILLUSTRATIONS FOR

LITERARY CONCORD UNCOVERED

Front Cover: Central Part of Concord Village, 1839.

Concord Authors (left to right): Thoreau, Emerson, Alcott, Hawthorne, Fuller.

Concord Center (north side), before 1865.

Courtesy of Concord Free Public Library

Walden Pond, Summer. Taken by Joseph L. Andrews, 2008

Central Part of Concord Village, 1839,

after a wood engraving by John Barber.

Henry David Thoreau, 1854. Crayon Portrait by Samuel W. Rowse. Courtesy of Concord Free Public Library

Thoreau Birth House on Virginia Road, Concord.

Photo by Author, 2013.

Title-Page, Walden, or, Life in the Woods by Henry D. Thoeau. (Boston: Ticknor And Fields, 1854.)

Courtesy of Concord Free Public Library

Thoreau Cabin Replica at Walden Pond.

Statue of HenryThoreau. Photo by Author, 2013

Ralph Waldo Emerson

Emerson Standing Portrait, Mens’ Room,

First Parish Church. Author, 2011.

Emerson’s House, Cambridge Turnpike, Concord.

Photo by Author, 2011

Louisa May Alcott c. 1858.

Courtesy, Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.

Order of Indoor Duties for the (Alcott) Children, Hillside, 1846. Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association

Title-Page from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott. Illustration

by May Alcott. (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1869)

Courtesy of Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.

The Alcott Family in front of Orchard House c. 1865.

Courtesy of the Louisa May Alcott Memorial Association.

Nathaniel Hawthorne

The Old Manse, home to Emersons and Hawthornes.

Photo by Author, 2011

The Wayside, formerly called Hillside; home to Alcotts and Hawthornes. Photo by Author, 2011

Margaret Fuller.

Map of Concord. Update of map by David A. Niles

in Concord ’75—Bicentennial Celebration. (Concord Town, 1975),

published in Revolutionary Boston, Lexington & Concord:

The Shots Heard ‘Round the World! (Second Edition)

by Joseph L. Andrews (Concord: Concord Guides Press, 1999.)

012_a_reigun.JPG

Drawn by J.W. Barber, 1839; Engraved by J. Downes, Worcester.

CENTRAL PART OF CONCORD, MASS.

The above is a northern view in the central part of Concord village. Part of the Court – House is seen on the left. Burying – ground Hill (a post observation to the British officers in the invasion of 1775) is seen a short distance beyond. The Unitarian Church and Middlesex Hotel are seen on the right.

012_a_reigun.JPG

Central part of Concord village, 1839,after a wood engraving by John Barber.

Introduction

Why Concord?

The small inland farming village of Concord, Massachusetts, became the epicenter of a great creative surge in American literature in the mid-1800s, known widely as the flowering of New England and also as the American Renaissance.

Essayist and naturalist Henry Thoreau; lecturer, essayist, and poet Ralph Waldo Emerson; novelist and short story writer Louisa May Alcott; novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne; and essayist and journalist Margaret Fuller, all lived and wrote in Concord simultaneously. They lived side by side as neighbors, frequently met informally at each others’ houses to discuss literary, religious, philosophical, and political ideas, tramped the woods together, played with each others’ children, and sometimes even read each others’ daily journal entries.

The Concord authors’ creations were notable for their originality and their topical and stylistic departures from most of their European and American predecessors. Their best literary achievements include Thoreau’s Walden and the lecture that he turned into his essay Civil Disobedience, Emerson’s essays Nature and Self Reliance, Alcott’s autobiographical novel Little Women, Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The House of Seven Gables, and Fuller’s Women in the Nineteenth Century. Today these master works are still held in great esteem by readers, teachers, and literary critics, both in America and around the world.

One contemporary author, Susan Cheever, hypothesizes in American Bloomsbury that this extraordinary nexus of creativity was due to the fact that in the nineteenth century, Concord was a village inhabited by a cluster of geniuses. Although few readers and literary critics agree completely with this theory, the question still remains: why did so much literary creativity occur in this small New England farming village?

Why was the town of Concord the intellectual vortex of America in the mid nineteenth century? What were the characteristics of this community of roughly 2,000 souls (according to an 1830 census), twenty miles northwest of Boston, that encouraged some of America’s most talented authors to live and to write there? There are numerous varied theories put forward by literary historians, but I have found no better explanation than that of Van Wyck Brooks’s, who wrote this explanation in his book The Flowering of New England: Plain, low, quiet, the village had no obvious distractions. The enterprising Yankee passed it by. It had no port, no trade, no water power, no gold, lead, coal, oil, or marble. As wood and grass were its only staples, Emerson advised his fellow townsmen to manufacture school teachers and make them the best in the world. The village air favored this, as it favored meditation and contemplation. The hills and woods, not too exciting, afforded a gentle stimulus to genial and uninterrupted studies… Emerson found it so in his woodland walks. Once he had left his study, only in the fields with the lowing cattle, the birds, the trees, the waters, the satisfying outlines of the hills and ponds, he seemed to come to his own and made friends with nature. He found health and affinity there—no petulance, no fret, but eternal resource, a long tomorrow, rich as yesterday.

Thoreau had expressed similar thoughts when he wrote in his Journal in 1841 at age twenty-four: "I think I could write a poem to be called ‘Concord.’ For argument I should have the river, the woods, the ponds, the hills, the fields, the swamps, and the meadows, the streets and the buildings and the villagers. Then morning, noon, and evening, spring, summer, autumn, and winter night, Indian summer, and the mountains in the horizon."

Contemporary author John Mitchell writes insightfully in Walking Towards Walden: "More than any other community in America, Concord, Massachusetts, evokes what the Hopi people call tuwanasaapi, the centering place, the place where you belong, the spiritual core of the universe. The town is among those fast-disappearing communities that actually have real main streets with shops and local gossip… Because of an accident of history, or geography, or some mystical, as yet unidentified force, things have happened in the place that is now called Concord. For five thousand years the local Native Americans would congregate in the area at the confluence of the Assabet and Sudbury rivers, which is located more or less in the present geographical center of the town. The tract was the first inland community to be settled by Europeans. It was the place where the world’s first war of independence began; it was the place where American literature first flowered; and it is a place that to this day attracts writers of one species or another—some four hundred have lived or worked here in the town’s short history."

Concord literary historian, Tom Blanding, summarizes how features of the town that Concord authors wrote about have become not just local but also universal symbols for both national and international visitors: The Concord authors—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry D. Thoreau, Bronson and Louisa May Alcott, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and others—left a legacy not only in literature, but also in landscape. They intentionally transformed the features of the town, such as the North Bridge and Walden Pond, into universal symbols of cherished American values. It is this enduring symbolic identity that attracts ever-increasing numbers of pilgrims to Concord from all over the world.

After I moved to Concord in 1995, I discovered that these classic Concord authors’ creations and lives are still very much alive in the hearts and minds of many of today’s Concordians. I discovered an abundance of literary lectures, book signings, workshops, exhibits, courses, seminars, meetings of named author societies, visits to the authors’ homes and the publication annually of a new crop of critical books about the Concord authors, all occurring over 170 years after these famous Concord sages ceased to write.

Why are the creations of these nineteenth century Concord authors still relevant to today’s readers? As we