A Death in Utopia (24 page)

George and Sophia Ripley
moved to New York in 1847 where George Ripley joined the staff of Horace Greeley's newspaper the
New York Tribune
. He remained there for the rest of his career, usually as book editor, and died in 1880. Sophia converted to Catholicism
soon after the couple moved to New York, but her life was cut short by breast cancer and she died in 1857.

Lydia Maria Child
continued to write and lecture throughout her long life. In both fiction and nonfiction she supported the abolitionist movement and protested the mistreatment of American Indians by settlers and the government. She died in 1880.

Elizabeth Peabody
maintained her influential bookstore in Boston until 1852. Later she became interested in German educational theories and in 1860 opened the first kindergarten in North America. Her writings on education inspired generations of American teachers. She died in 1894.

Margaret Fuller's
best-known book,
Women in the Nineteenth Century
, was one of the foundations of the feminist movement and inspired leaders including Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. She became a journalist and foreign correspondent for the
New York Tribune
, but her career was cut short by her death in a shipwreck at the age of 40 in 1850.

Bronson Alcott
, perhaps best remembered as the father of Louisa May Alcott, was also an educator, a lecturer, and writer. He founded a short-lived communal group, Fruitlands, which espoused a more radical lifestyle than Brook Farm, including a vegan diet and a ban on using farm animals for labor. In later years he continued to give lectures and write about his philosophical theories. He died in 1888.

Charles Dana
, like Ripley, moved to New York and worked for Horace Greeley. He served as a foreign correspondent for the
New York Tribune
in Europe. During the Civil War he was appointed Assistant Secretary of War. Later he bought the
New York Sun
and built it into an important newspaper. He died in 1897.

John Sullivan Dwight
lived in New England all of his life. His marriage to Mary Bullard, another Brook Farmer, was a happy one, but unfortunately she died young and he never remarried. As the founder and editor of
Dwight's Journal of Music he
became the foremost American music critic of the nineteenth century. He died in 1893.

Nathaniel Hawthorne
lived briefly at Brook Farm but found the commitment to farm labor was not compatible with his desire to write nor with his desire to marry Sophia Peabody (Elizabeth Peabody's sister). Eventually he sued the community in a vain attempt to get back some of the money he had invested in the project. Hawthorne's novel
The Blithedale Romance
is said to be based in part on his memories of Brook Farm.

Sources of Quotations

"There's Nothing True But Heaven"
(1829) From Thomas Moore's
Sacred Songs
. This was a favorite hymn sung at Brook Farm.

"The Barrow Girl"
from Collection of ballads, songsheets. 2 vols. London: J. Pitts, 1805-1840

Wit and Wisdom of the Rev
. Sydney Smith
by Sydney Smith p. 70 (Google books)

"A Nation Once Again"
An Irish Rebel Song, written by Thomas Davis.

"Ode to Autumn"
by John Keats

"Must not a woman be..."
by John Keats "Ode to Fanny"

"We'll drink to-night with hearts as light"
, by Charles Fenno Hoffman "O Fleeting Love"

"Cape Cod Girls"
http://shanty.rendance.org/lyrics/showlyric.php/capecod

"Berrying"
by Ralph Waldo Emerson

An old Irish lament
translated into English by Charlotte Brooke in
Reliques of Irish Poetry
(1789)

Other Books about Brook Farm and its Friends

Baker, Carlos.
Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait
. New York: Viking Press, 1996.

Codman, John Thomas.
Brook Farm; Historic and Personal Memoirs
. Boston: Arena publishing company, 1894.

Curtis, Edith Roelker.
A Season in Utopia; the Story of Brook Farm
. New York,: Nelson, 1961.

Delano, Sterling F.
Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia
. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2004.

Fasick, Adele.
Margaret Fuller: An Uncommon Woman
. San Francisco. MonganBooks, 2012.

Karcher, Carolyn L.
The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child
. New Americanists. Durham: Duke University Press, 1994.

Orvis, Marianne.
Letters from Brook Farm, 1844-1847
. The American Utopian Adventure. Philadelphia,: Porcupine Press, 1972.

Swift, Lindsay.
Brook Farm
. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1900.