George Ripley

• George Ripley
• Born: October 3, 1802
• Died: July 4, 1880

Transcendentalist, Utopian socialist, editor, and literary critic, was born in Greenfield, Massachusetts, the ninth of ten children (six daughters and four sons) of Jerome Ripley, a well-to-do merchant of Puritan stock, and Sarah (Franklin) Ripley, a Bostonian.

Ripley attended Greenfield’s North Meadow Grammar School and prepared for college at an uncle’s school in Concord, Massachusetts. Yale was his first choice, but Harvard’s Unitarian leanings pleased his father, so the young scholar went there. He excelled, graduating at the head of his class in 1823. A year later he entered the Cambridge Theological School—his father’s preference over a Calvinist seminary in Andover—from which he emerged, in the spring of 1826, with liberalized views on religion.

A month after his ordination in November, he became minister of the Purchase Street Church, a newly formed Unitarian congregation in Boston. He married Sophia Willard Dana, a schoolteacher whose family had long been prominent in Massachusetts literary and political circles, in August 1827. They had no children.

The young minister took increasingly radical positions on religion and society over the next ten years. A broad study of the German idealists, especially the liberal theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, encouraged him to challenge orthodox Unitarianism, which Ripley and kindred spirits, among them his cousin Ralph Waldo Emerson, felt to be confining, cold, even hostile to religion and morality.

In November 1836 the Christian Examiner printed Ripley’s charge that Unitarianism neglected intuition and the presence of the divine in each individual. The charge prompted Professor Andrews Norton, Boston’s “Unitarian pope,” to accuse Ripley and other young ministers of a “leaning toward infidelity.” Ripley replied with his Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion (1836). Norton revived the debate four years later, and Ripley responded with Letters on the Latest Form of Infidelity (1840). “There is a class of persons,” Ripley wrote, “who desire a reform in the prevailing philosophy of the day. These are called transcendentalists,—because they believe in an order of truths which transcends the sphere of the external senses. … The truth of religion does not depend on tradition, nor on historical facts, but has an unerring witness in the soul.”

In September 1836 the Ripleys were host to the first meeting of the Transcendental Club, an informal gathering of Boston-area intellectuals who met frequently to discuss issues of common concern. Advocates of reform in many areas of society, the transcendentalists embarked on a search for a new religion, a new culture, and a new way of life. They looked to Europe for ideas, some of which they made available to American readers in Specimens of Foreign Standard Literature, a fourteen-volume series of translations of French and German writers that Ripley edited with Frederic Hedge. For a brief time in 1840 Ripley helped Margaret Fuller edit the transcendentalist monthly The Dial.

Ripley was unable to persuade his Purchase Street congregation to share his commitment to social reform, which had been nurtured by years of observing the suffering of working-class families who lived near his church. The panic of 1837 deepened their misery; and halfway through the six-year depression that followed, Ripley decided that the ministry was inadequate to the task of regenerating society. He left the church in March 1841, and on April 1, with his wife, his sister Marianne, and about twenty others, he began living on a farm nine miles from Boston in West Roxbury.

Thus began the famous Brook Farm Institute of Agriculture and Education, which Ripley and another Unitarian minister, William Ellery Channing, had been planning since the fall. At Brook Farm, Ripley hoped to create an exemplary social system that would allow individuals to develop free of the pressures of competitive institutions. Brook Farmers, who never numbered more than 100 at any given time, shared the manual labor and spent their free time in intellectual endeavors. Ripley farmed, lectured, wrote, and taught in the community’s school, which proved to be Brook Farm’s one profitable enterprise.

Ripley became a convert in 1843 to the ideas of the French socialist Charles Fourier, who advocated a “natural” social order based on cooperative agricultural communities known as phalanxes, and he turned Brook Farm into a Fourierist phalanx in January 1844. In 1845 Brook Farm took over the New York Fourierist journal Phalanx and renamed it the Harbinger. As editor, Ripley made the Harbinger a respected weekly journal and through it became the nation’s leading spokesman for Fourierism. In 1846 he helped create the American Union of Associationists and engineered the election of Horace Greeley as president. From his own position as head of the union’s board of directors Ripley was able to control the organization until 1847, when the dissolution of Brook Farm diminished his claim to authority.

The Ripleys moved to Flatbush, Long Island, New York, where George Ripley tried to keep the Harbinger alive while Sophia Ripley taught school. In 1849 he left the Harbinger and joined Horace Greeley’s The New-York Tribune as “literary assistant.” He supplemented his weekly salary of $5 (increased to $25 after three years) by writing for a dozen other publications. He wrote on everything from fashions to literature—even on reform, although his passion for changing society was cooling. Fourierism’s loss of momentum discouraged him, as did his belief that most workers were indifferent to reform.

Ripley helped found Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in 1850, and he edited its literary department while developing a reputation on the Tribune as the nation’s premier literary critic. As a critic he was both discriminating and fair, preferring “to set forth the merits of a good book than the faults of a bad one.” With Bayard Taylor he wrote A Handbook of Literature and the Fine Arts (1852), then turned, with Charles A. Dana, to the enormous task of editing the six-teen-volume New American Cyclopaedia (1858-63). The success of the Cyclopaedia, coupled with his position as one of the Tribune’s major stockholders, made him wealthy.

The demands of the Cyclopaedia helped Ripley deal with the loss of his wife, who died of cancer in 1861. In 1865 he married Louisa A. Schlossberger, a thirty-three-year-old widow who had been born in Germany and educated in Paris. In 1866 and in 1869-70 they traveled in Europe; at home, a mansion on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue, they entertained frequently—at least once for a party of 300.

Ripley was elected president of the Tribune Association every year from Greeley’s death in 1872 until his own in 1880. He was troubled in his last years by rheumatism, respiratory diseases, and angina pectoris. He died at home, at the age of seventy-seven, after a lengthy bout with influenza. He was buried in Woodlawn Cemetery, the Bronx, New York.

A former student at the Brook Farm school remembered Ripley as a “solidly-built man of medium height with brown hair and beard and the kindest eyes in the world.” Over the next twenty years, Ripley’s curly hair and beard grayed and his waist thickened, despite the long, daily strolls to which he credited his health.

During the final decades of his life, Ripley was a politically conservative, sentimental man of letters. Yet he retained his optimism about human nature and his religious radicalism to the end. He was consistent in another way, too: Through three distinct careers—as a minister, a Utopian socialist, and an editor and literary critic—he strove to call attention to personal and societal imperfections by pointing the way, through example, to a more enlightened, just, and humane world.

Ripley’s famous dispute with Andrews Norton had its origin in “Martineau’s Rationale,” Christian Examiner, vol. 21, 1836. Discourses on the Philosophy of Religion, Addressed to Doubters Who Wish to Believe (1836) was a response to Norton, as was Letters on the Latest Form of Infidelity (1840). A five-volume scrapbook owned by the Houghton Library of Harvard University contains most of Ripley’s journalistic writings after 1849. The Boston Public Library holds numerous letters by and to Ripley in its Dwight, Brook Farm, and Anti-Slavery collections. The Wisconsin Historical Society holds others, as does the Massachusetts Historical Society in its Frothingham Donation, Parker Papers, and Bancroft and Dana collections. Of four biographies of Ripley, three are unpublished doctoral theses: J. Wilson, “George Ripley, Social and Literary Critic,” University of Wisconsin (1941); L. Riggs, “George and Sophia Ripley,” University of Maryland (1942); and C. R. Crowe, “George Ripley, Transcendentalist and Utopian Socialist,” Brown University (1955). O. B. Frothingham, George Ripley (1882), is important chiefly because it reproduces letters from Ripley’s youth no longer extant. M. Dwight, Letters from Brook Farm 1844-1847, ed. by A. L. Reed (1928), and A. E. Russell, Home Life of the Brook Farm Association (1910), provide glimpses of Ripley the Utopian socialist, as do L. Swift, Brook Farm: Its Members, Scholars, and Visitors (1900), and E. Curtis, A Season in Utopia (1961). See also the Dictionary of American Biography (1935). In July 1880 The New-York Tribune published In Memoriam George Ripley, LL.D. (The New-York Tribune Extra, no. 63), essentially a twenty-four page obituary.