Bronson Alcott

American educator and social reformer

• Born: November 29, 1799
• Birthplace: Wolcott, Connecticut
• Died: March 4, 1888
• Place of death: Concord, Massachusetts

Alcott was a teacher and a prominent member of New England’s Transcendental community. His educational methods focused on moral, spiritual, and imaginative development and encouraged independent thought. He also founded a short-lived utopian community called Fruitlands. However, he is perhaps most famous as the father of author Louisa May Alcott.

Early Life

Amos Bronson Alcott was the eldest of eight children in a Connecticut farming family. He attended Wolcott’s local district school and displayed, from the start, a fondness for literature and elegant rhetoric. When he reached the age of thirteen, his father sent him to study with his mother’s brother, the Reverend Tillotson Bronson, who was principal of the Cheshire Academy. It was hoped that Alcott might enter the academy and eventually become a clergyman, but, overcome by homesickness, he returned home within a month.

The following year, Alcott was sent to nearby Plymouth, Massachusetts, to learn clock making. Again he was unhappy, this time depressed by the monotony of the work, and again he returned home. A few months’ study with the local pastor completed his formal education, but his trade was still unsettled. The idea of teaching appealed to him, and he received a license to teach. However, he was not hired by any of the local schools, so he became a peddler. Alcott enjoyed the life of an itinerant salesperson, which allowed him to set his own hours. Furthermore, the changing landscapes and the people he met both stimulated and educated him. Alcott stated years later that peddling had been his university.

After initially working the New England countryside, Alcott embarked on a southerly trek. In Virginia, the planters who gave him lodging were charmed by his good looks and civilized speech. Alcott was likewise taken by the southerners’ elegance and easygoing warmth, which was a far cry from the austerity of New England. They opened their homes and libraries to the intellectual young peddler, and it was from them that Alcott (who, around this time, began going by the name Bronson Alcott) acquired one of his most remarked-upon characteristics: an elegant, royal manner that some would later refer to as his princely air. On a more substantial level, he also gained the vision of a way of life that valued ideas and pleasures as much as pious hard work.

Further south, in North Carolina, Alcott found himself trading among Quakers. These people were certainly less pleasure-loving and flashy than the Virginia planters, but their ideas—at least as contrasted with New England Calvinism—were radical. The Quakers emphasized the essential goodness of the human soul and the primacy of a personal relationship to God. Their libraries yielded William Penn, Robert Barclay, and George Fox, whose ideas would form the basis of Alcott’s budding Transcendentalism. The Quakers also gave Alcott his first brief taste of school teaching. At the age of twenty-four, Alcott returned out of this “university” to Connecticut. He was transformed not only in name but also in philosophy and was determined to be a teacher.

Life’s Work

Over the next five years, Alcott taught in the areas around his native Wolcott. His cousin William was already an established teacher in the region and served as a mentor to the younger Alcott. William was intelligent and hardworking and was known for the absolute discipline he maintained in his classrooms. Alcott also insisted on complete silence and attention in his classroom (this was by no means the norm in rural nineteenth century schools), but the two young men, although congenial, had very different emphases. Although William had a reputation as a “smart” teacher, Alcott was emerging as a visionary—and a heretic.

Alcott’s aims were lofty: an education that addressed not only the intellectual but also the physical, emotional, and moral aspects of each child. Believing that a child learned better in a beautiful environment than in a plain one, he decorated his classrooms with fine art and busts of great thinkers and philosophers. His curriculums incorporated organized games and calisthenics, singing, and group discussions; they were contrived to make learning fun, not arduous. He rarely resorted to corporal punishment, as he did not want any of his students to associate learning with pain. His classes operated largely on an honor system. Such radical restructurings were enough in themselves to create distrust. To exacerbate matters, Alcott’s spiritual beliefs were also suspect.

To his earlier philosophic pastiche Alcott had added the ideas of English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Plato. His Transcendental beliefs were becoming more pronounced. Alcott believed, as did most Transcendentalists, that physical reality—including human souls—was an emanation of the mind of God and that physical, intellectual, and spiritual principles operated by congruent laws. He also espoused a belief in the preexistence of the soul. Although he declared himself a staunch admirer of the tenets of Christianity, he stopped short of calling himself a Christian. This amounted, in nineteenth century New England, to a declaration of moral war. Despite his talents, he repeatedly lost teaching posts—he was either let go or simply not rehired.

On May 23, 1830, Alcott married Abigail May, a clergyman’s sister. The union produced four daughters (the second-born was Louisa May Alcott, who would become a well-known children’s author) and complicated the young philosopher-teacher’s lot: He was the sole and inadequate support of a growing family.

These mounting responsibilities drove Alcott to try teaching once again, and, in 1834, he leased a room in the Masonic Temple in Boston and opened the Temple School. Its form and philosophy—a strong emphasis on moral and religious inquiry—were even more radical than anything Alcott had tried before. Sharp public censure ensued. When two books—The Record of a School, Exemplifying the General Principles of Spiritual Culture (1835) and Conversations with Children on the Gospels (two volumes, 1836 and 1837)—published by Alcott revealed that the topics under discussion included religion and human reproduction, he was declared a public menace in more than one respected newspaper. Alcott still garnered praise for his visionary methods (from James Freeman Clark and Ralph Waldo Emerson, among others), and the school struggled on in one location or another and in the face of falling enrollments and mounting debts for several more years. It closed in 1839 when Alcott’s attempt to racially integrate the school met with overpowering resistance.

In 1842, Alcott, in search of direction and inspiration, decamped from his struggling family and sailed to England, where a group of fellow Transcendentalists had opened a school founded on his principles and named after him: Alcott House. He stayed in England for six months; when he returned to the United States, he brought three of the British mystics with him: Henry Wright, Charles Lane, and Lane’s son, William.

Cooperative agrarian communities were not uncommon during the mid-nineteenth century. Many of these were fueled by a revulsion against the increasing industrialization that was quickly transforming social and economic landscapes. Alcott combined his slim resources with those of his compatriots, and together they acquired a one-hundred-acre farm near the village of Harvard. They named their enterprise Fruitlands and, in June, 1844, moved themselves, Alcott’s wife and children, and several followers onto the land.

Most of the communal experiments of Alcott’s time failed, but the failure of Fruitlands was on a scale comparable to the genius of its founders. Fruitlands’ heroic principles clashed with the pragmatics of survival: No animals were used for either food or labor, and the Fruitlanders subsisted on a diet of fruit, grain, vegetables, and water. Alcott and his friends were well meaning but dilatory. They loved talk more than labor, and theory more than action. A disproportionate part of the actual running of the place devolved upon the capable but increasingly Protestant Abigail Alcott and her daughters. Winter came, starvation threatened, and by January of 1845, Fruitlands was abandoned.

Thereafter, from 1845 until 1868, when Louisa May’s literary success improved her family’s fortunes, the Alcotts were supported by the women of the family, who variously taught, mended, and went out as servants. Alcott eventually developed a series of lectures that he plied with some popular (as opposed to monetary) success throughout the Northeast. In 1859, he was appointed superintendent of the dozen schools in Concord, Massachusetts, where he was at last able to apply many of his earlier innovations on a larger scale, albeit in diluted form. In 1879, he founded the Concord Summer School of Philosophy and Literature, which was dedicated to the furthering of Transcendental thought. Alcott was directly involved with this school until 1882, when he was stricken with paralysis while writing. He never fully recovered and died in March, 1888.

Significance

The central puzzle of Bronson Alcott’s career is how, with such talent, intelligence, and capability at his command, he managed to make so much trouble for himself and so little money: He was usually in debt and was often the object of public censure. The trouble seems to have lain in his idealistic inflexibility. His educational philosophies were radical, and he was seemingly unable to temper them no matter how much they upset the parents of his pupils. Thus, although talented and capable, he was often unemployed. Alcott’s imprint upon educational theory and practice, however, is considerable. Most of his reforms that were rejected by his contemporaries—physical education, sex education, flexible classroom design, free discussion, and racial integration—are now standard practice.

Ironically, even Alcott’s impracticality and improvidence may have proved, in the end, unexpectedly influential. It was in good part the want of money and a fierce determination to lighten her mother’s burdens that fueled Louisa May Alcott’s literary ambitions and may have helped ensure her success.

Bibliography

Baker, Carlos. Emerson Among the Eccentrics: A Group Portrait. London: Viking Press, 1996. Baker provides an indispensable overview of the complex and shifting intellectual community in which Alcott moved, with individual portraits of Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and others.

Barton, Cynthia H. Transcendental Wife: The Life of Abigail May Alcott. Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1996. Biography of Bronson’s wife, and Louisa May’s mother, describing how her life with Bronson led her to advance the cause of women’s rights.

Brooks, Geraldine. Orpheus at the Plough: The Father of “Little Women.” The New Yorker 80, no. 42 (January 20, 2005): 58-65. Biography of Alcott, focusing on his experiences at Fruitlands.

Dahlstrand, Frederick C. Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography. Rutherford, N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1982. A full-length biography of Alcott, written by a history professor at Ohio State University at Mansfield.

McCluskey, Dorothy. Bronson Alcott: Teacher. New York: Arno Press, 1969. Sympathetic and subjective look at Alcott, focusing on his teaching career. Contains numerous excerpts from his journals and notebooks.

Sears, Clara Endicott. Bronson Alcott’s Fruitlands. Philadelphia: Porcupine Press, 1975. A fascinating account of Alcott’s short-lived utopian community. Includes journal accounts by Louisa May Alcott and many others associated with Fruitlands, correspondence, photographs, and a fictionalized account of Fruitlands by Louisa May called “Transcendental Wild Oats.”

Shepard, Odell. Pedlar’s Progress: The Life of Bronson Alcott. Boston: Little, Brown, 1937. A comprehensive biography of Alcott, providing a detailed look at the man and his times.

Stoehr, Taylor. Nay-Saying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau. Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1979. Focuses on the political, philosophical, and personal relationships between the three Transcendentalists and the impact they had on their times. The author compares the Transcendental movement and the counterculture movements of the 1960’s.