In The Flowering of New England, a Pulitzer Prize-winning history of 19^th century Boston, historian Van Wyck Brooks creates an American mythology of individuals. Falling somewhere between collective biography and literary narrative, the book tracks a flourishing of intellectual output concentrated in the Boston area between the War of 1812 and the end of the Civil War. Such figures as John Quincy Adams, Daniel Webster, William H. Prescott, and Ralph Waldo Emerson (among many, many more) emerge as participants in the birth and development of a uniquely American intellectual culture.

Although Richard Francis’ recent study of Bronson Alcott, Charles Lane, and their failed utopian experiment is clearly a work of scholarly research (The Flowering of New England, first published in 1936, is completely lacking in footnotes and citations), Fruitlands possesses the same narrative flow and love of character as its literary-historical forebear. As with Brooks’ masterful study of a region and a people, Francis does not merely describe the events that led to the creation and imminent collapse of the Fruitlands utopian community, established outside of Boston in 1843. Rather, he recreates a specific but critical component of American intellectual life in mid-19^th century New England, anchored by a wealth of characters that would have an enormous influence on this country’s intellectual and literary heritage.

The main character in this narrative is Bronson Alcott: a New England schoolteacher, American Transcendentalist, and woefully incompetent philosopher. In the book’s opening paragraph, Francis introduces Alcott with familiarity and an eye for detail. “In 1834,” he writes, “Amos Bronson Alcott arrived in Boston with his wife Abigail and their two small daughters, Anna and Louisa.”

He was a schoolteacher, at a time when formal qualifications were not needed for the profession, which was just as well, since he didn’t have any. He was a tall, lanky man, with fair hair and rather horsey features, restless and impulsive, with an extraordinary gift for talking.

Although a seemingly ordinary introduction, it is this type of easy and intelligent prose that distinguishes Fruitlands as both a work of history and a work of literature. Starting with observations of a confident but unqualified schoolteacher, a “restless and impulsive” philosopher with little literary abilities but “an extraordinary gift for talking,” Francis takes the reader from a single character into the story of his dysfunctional utopia as well as the intellectual culture of 19^th-century Boston to which he belonged. As the narrative of “one of history’s most unsuccessful utopias” unfolds, a series of mid-century intellectuals emerge as close friends, influences, and skeptics. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody, George Ripley, and even Thomas Carlisle all play important roles in this story, providing key historical context as well as literary interest in a rich cast of unique and influential individuals.

Fruitlands does not succeed as merely a story or a history: it succeeds as both, or as Katherine Powers put it in the Boston Globe: “Francis, who is not only an historian but also a novelist with an astute and appreciative eye for mixed character, is as sympathetic to Alcott as any sane man could be.” You can read more about the Fruitlands experiment at the Fruitlands Museum, which houses many documents and artwork from 19^th-century America, and if you’re in the area, Richard Francis will be at the Concord Bookshop this Sunday, November 21^st at 3pm to talk about his book.