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Fruitlands: The Alcott Family and Their Search for Utopia

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Description

This is the first definitive account of Fruitlands, one of history’s most unsuccessful—but most significant—utopian experiments. It used to be established in Massachusetts in 1843 by Bronson Alcott (whose ten-year-old daughter Louisa May, future writer of Little Women, used to be some of the members) and an Englishman referred to as Charles Lane, under the watchful gaze of Emerson, Thoreau, and other New England intellectuals.

Alcott and Lane developed their own version of the doctrine referred to as Transcendentalism, hoping to develop into society and redeem the environment through a strict regime of veganism and celibacy. But physical suffering and emotional conflict—particularly between Lane and Alcott’s wife, Abigail—made the community unsustainable.

Drawing at the letters and diaries of those involved, Richard Francis explores the relationship between the complex philosophical beliefs held by Alcott, Lane, and their fellow idealists and their day by day lives. The result is a vivid and regularly very funny narrative of their travails, demonstrating the dilemmas and conflicts inherent to any utopian experiment and shedding light on a captivating period of American history.

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