| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 110.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Sterling F. Delano. Brook Farm: The Dark Side of Utopia. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. 2004. Pp. xvii, 428. $29.95.

Why no comprehensive, scholarly history of the most celebrated American utopian community has appeared until now is a puzzle. Because Brook Farm was linked to the circle of New England Transcendentalists that gathered around Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller, some account of it appears in most histories of the antebellum era. Sources for a full-scale study have long sat in archives, and in recent decades various editions of Brook Farmers' letters and memoirs have been published by Joel Myerson and others. Lindsay Swift's elegant portrait in Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars and Visitors (1900) may have cowed later writers. More likely, Brook Farm fell victim to a divide between literary and historical scholars. Literary chroniclers of the "American Renaissance" share Emerson, Fuller, and Nathaniel Hawthorne's bemused attitude toward Brook Farm but like them lose interest once the community adopts the French utopian Charles Fourier's theories. Historians, on the other hand, tend to submerge Brook Farm's Transcendentalist identity in the broader communitarian movement of the 1840s. What one of Brook Farm's patrons called an "unnatural union" of Transcendentalists and utopian socialists produced scholarly commentators who split into disciplinary camps partial to one or the other.

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