Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia (published by Yale University Press in the USA in November 2010, and in the UK on 14 January 2011)
Fruitlands was the name given to a community set up in central Massachusetts near the village of Harvard (not to be confused with the university of that name) in June 1843. It came to an unhappy end just six months later, in January 1843.
The community was led by two individuals, the more famous of whom was Bronson Alcott, one of the so-called New England Transcendentalists (a literary and intellectual movement associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau). Alcott was the father of Louisa May Alcott, the writer, who was a ten-year-old child at the time of the experiment. The other leader was an Englishman called Charles Lane, the disciple of an obscure and extremely eccentric British philosopher by the name of James Pierrepont Greaves.
Other members of the community were Alcott’s wife Abigail and their four daughters (the ‘little women’), Lane’s son William, another Englishman called Samuel Bower, the former inmate of a lunatic asylum by the name of Wood Abraham, Joseph Palmer, a local farmer who had spent time in prison for wearing a beard, and a young man called Isaac Hecker, who went on to found the Catholic Paulist Fathers
The intention was no less than to create paradise on earth. The members believed that this would be achievable as long as they established the appropriate relationship with the environment. They were what we would call vegans, making no use of animal products and wearing only linen (cotton was forbidden because it was the product of slavery). Samuel Bower went one step further, advocating nudity as the way to be at one with your surroundings rather than insulated from them.
What makes the Fruitlanders’ ideas fascinating is their combination of anachronistic and forward-looking ways of thinking. They had a literal interpretation of the story of the Garden of Eden in Genesis; at the same time they were concerned with issues that worry us today – the exploitation of the natural world, the problem of pollution (and even climate change), the shortcomings of city life, the duty of civil disobedience. In some respects they were grim fundamentalists; in others, the ancestors of twentieth century hippies; and, even more relevantly, the precursors of today’s environmental activists.
The story of Fruitlands revolves round the conflict between family loyalty and social responsibility, the tension between the individual and the community. It is a tragic-comic tale of hapless blundering and high idealism, and my book tries to do justice to the strange texture of life in the community, its jealousies, antagonism and comedy, the austere values, the intellectual daring, and the glaring incompetence of the participants.
‘Engagingly written and brilliantly researched, Richard Francis’ Fruitlands takes its place as the preeminent work on Transcendentalism’s most poignant folly.’ (John Matteson, author of the Pulitzer Prize-winning Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father)
Fruitlands was launched at the Fruitlands Museums, Prospect Hill Road, Harvard, Massachusetts, on Saturday 13 November. I talked about it at the Boston Athenaeum on 16 November, and at the Concord Book Store on 21 November.
US Reviews (see News page for coverage in the UK media):
Wall Street Journal:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304173704575578761068904960.html
Boston Globe: http://www.boston.com/ae/books/articles/2010/11/14/search_for_utopia_fight_over_chocolate/
San Francisco Chronicle:
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?
New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/12/books/review/Price-t.html
Check if the book passes the Page 99 Test! http://page99test.blogspot.com/2010/11/richard-francis-fruitlands-alcott.html
Here is a link to a radio interview I gave on WBUR’s ‘Here and Now’ programme: http://www.hereandnow.org/
The book is featured in Failure Magazine! (a sign of success, I hope): http://failuremag.com/index.php/feature/article/fruitlands
[...] this day of amour, a particularly pause-worthy point discussed in Francis’ Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia, is that of self-imposed celibacy. Alcott, and his Fruitland co-founder, the British [...]
Many thanks, Bronson, for a great Valentine. And congratulations on your website, Tamworth Lyceum! Richard Francis
[...] this day of amour, a particularly pause-worthy topic from Francis’ Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia, is self-imposed celibacy. Alcott and his Fruitland co-founder, the British [...]
I would like to know when or IF Fruitlands will be available in paper back the book is listed on the Universal Unitarian Association Online bookstore for $30 I would like to be able to do it as a book discussion for church and 30 a pop for a book is WAY too much -
I have Audible.com and I Tunes that I download my books on
Yes, it will be coming out in paperback later this year. It is currently available as a kindle book for a little under the hardback price. I imagine that will go down to a little under the paperback price when that edition comes out. Yale University Press hasn’t yet told me the date or the price of the paperback edition. I hope you and your group enjoy it when you can finally buy copies.
Update: the paperback is now available in the UK, so I imagine it should also be on sale in the USA.
Dear Dr. Francis,
I bought Fruitlands for myself as a Christmas present last year and read it immediately; this is the letter I’ve been intending to write ever since. I have read several of the previous treatments of A. Bronson Alcott, including Odell Shepard’s biography and John Matteson’s book about Bronson and Louisa, as well as books that treated Alcott peripherally, like Carlos Baker’s Emerson Among the Eccentrics. Nothing I’ve read previously gave me as complete a sense of Alcott as your book. Thank you.
That said, I have to confess that A. Bronson Alcott puzzles me. Though he’s certainly an interesting character, I still can’t quite understand why personalities as perceptive as Emerson and Thoreau and Elizabeth Peabody took him seriously. Clearly not everyone did. Hawthorne seems to have mostly avoided him and I get the impression that Margaret Fuller considered him skeptically.
In my copy of Pedlar’s Progress, inscribed by Odell Shepard himself, he writes, “Alcott felt himself a foreigner in the midst of his own country.” If Shepard were inscribing his book today, I think he might have better written, “Alcott felt himself an alien on his own planet” because mere foreignness doesn’t really do justice to Alcott’s incomparable strangeness.
I’ve always suspected that, were I to encounter Alcott in person, I would find him to be a self-absorbed, delusional windbag. What about him am I missing?
Dear Bill
Thank you for taking the trouble to write. I’m so pleased you found the book helpful. I think your revision of Odell Shepard is pretty accurate. I suppose the basic problem with Alcott is that the quality his contemporaries responded to – his gift for the spoken word – is simply lost to us. Presumably had he been alive today he would have been a pundit on public radio or TV. Even at the time, his friends complained that his literary ability didn’t do justice to his ‘conversation’. In that respect he was a man ahead of his time, which he seemd to realise himself when he expressed a longing for the ability to catch a word on the wing. But even allowing for that, I think I would have found him extremely annoying. I really disapprove of the way he neglected his family and made use of his friends. But despite all his faults he anticipated so many of our later concerns – especially ecology and environmentalism. Perhaps his most important achievement was to inspire Thoreau, who I think was enormopusly influenced by him but who had a much greater talent for putting pen to paper. And even Alcott’s obstinacy is fascinating: Fruitlands invoilved taking an idea to an extreme, and there is a sort of heroism about that, though the fiasco was inevitable.
‘Self-absorbed, delusional windbag.’ I think that sums him up pretty well as a person. But as a phenomenon there is something more: a kind of instinct for picking up ideas with long-term implications.
Doesn’t Emerson seem intelligent and generous in his dealings with Alcott? One of the bonuses of writing the book was that I got to admire him more and more.