Charles King Newcomb
Charles King Newcomb was a 19th-century Transcendentalist born in 1820 in Providence, Rhode Island. The son of a War of 1812 veteran, he was raised by his mother Rhoda, who had a significant inheritance that supported their family. Newcomb attended Brown University and became involved with a circle of intellectuals inspired by the Transcendentalist movement, notably through the influence of writer Margaret Fuller and later Ralph Waldo Emerson. He spent over four years at the Brooks Farm community, where he was known for his unique personality and fervent religious expressions. Despite a promising start with his story "The Two Dolons" published in Emerson's periodical *The Dial*, Newcomb became withdrawn and distanced himself from his literary peers, including Emerson, with whom he had a tumultuous friendship.
After returning to Providence and serving in the Civil War, Newcomb's literary output flourished in Philadelphia, where he kept extensive journals that included a significant number of erotic poems. However, he abruptly moved to Europe around 1871, and little is known about his later life. Newcomb passed away in 1894, and his journals were published posthumously in 1946, providing a glimpse into his complex inner world and literary ambitions.
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Charles King Newcomb
Nonfiction Writer
- Born: 1820
- Birthplace: Providence, Rhode Island
- Died: 1894
Biography
Charles King Newcomb, a little known Transcendentalist, was born in Providence, Rhode Island, in 1820, the son of Rhoda Newcomb and Henry S. Newcomb, a veteran of the War of 1812 who died in a shipwreck when his son was five years old. Rhoda Newcomb had a substantial inheritance from her father’s British West Indies plantation, allowing her to adequately care for herself and her six children. Newcomb attended a boarding school in Plainfield, Connecticut, and then attended Brown University from 1833 to 1837. Following his graduation from Brown, Newcomb joined a small group of Providence intellectuals who had come together in the 1830’s around the occasions of Transcendentalist writer Margaret Fuller’s appearances in Providence. Newcomb’s mother, always a key player in his life, encouraged Newcomb’s writing interests and introduced him to Fuller, who then introduced Newcomb to writer Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1840.
In the late spring of 1841, Newcomb joined the Brooks Farm community of writers in West Roxbury, Massachusetts, where he remained for four-and-a-half years, though he never officially joined the commune. While at Brooks Farm, Newcomb became known for his eccentricities and tendencies toward fervent religious outbursts. A bit of a dichotomy, Newcomb hung from his Brooks Farms bedroom walls engravings of Jesus and saints alongside an image of a popular exotic dancer.
Newcomb’s friendship with Emerson grew during Newcomb’s stay at Brooks Farm, and Emerson persistently encouraged Newcomb not only to write but also to submit his writings to The Dial, the periodical Emerson edited. So impressed was Emerson with his friend that he also frequently implored the young writer to move to Emerson’s home city of Concord so that they and other writers could live in close proximity to one another. When Newcomb finally succumbed to Emerson’s publication requests and submitted his mystical story “The Two Dolons” to The Dial, it would turn out to be Newcomb’s only publication in his lifetime. He afterward refused to submit anything more to Emerson’s periodical, including what was to be the second part of “The Two Dolons.” Newcomb withdrew from his literary friends and grew quiet, and Emerson became disillusioned with him; their friendship weakened, and the two quarreled over Emerson’s disappointment with Newcomb and Newcomb’s opinion of Emerson’s “intellectualness.”
Upon leaving Brooks Farm, Newcomb returned to his mother’s Providence home, where he would live until her death in 1865, except for the time he spent serving as a Rhode Island volunteer in the Civil War. Though he drifted apart from most of his Transcendentalist friends and colleagues, Newcomb remained in close contact with Fuller, with whom he exchanged frequent letters. Her death served to reestablish the friendship between Newcomb and Emerson, who enlisted Newcomb’s knowledge in writing Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli in 1852.
Newcomb moved to Philadelphia after his mother’s death. Although he had already been keeping a journal for nearly fifteen years, his journal writings became astoundingly more prolific while he was in Philadelphia between 1866 and 1871, and he composed most of the twenty-seven surviving journal volumes during that time. The journals include a series of more than one thousand erotic poems composed during Newcomb’s last three years in Philadelphia, poems that Newcomb had clearly intended for publication, even noting in his journals how they might be presented and organized in book form. His journal entries stopped in 1871, when the writer suddenly moved to Europe, much to the surprise of his contemporaries, Emerson included. Little is known about the remainder of Newcomb’s life, although it appears that he never returned to the United States. He died in 1894. The Journals of Charles King Newcomb were published in 1946.