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A Journey into Transcendentalists' New England
Video, News, and Reviews


News

R. Todd Felton’s latest book, Walking Boston (Wilderness Press), is due out this summer. In January, an online guide to Boston that he wrote was published by National Geographic Traveler as part of its Places of a Lifetime Series. His profile of Buffalo will appear in an upcoming print version of National Geographic Traveler. On July 13, Todd will be participating in a “Poetry in the Garden” event at the Homestead in Amherst (Emily Dickinson’s house); in September, the Irish Center at Elms College in Chicopee will feature an exhibition of photographs from his Irish book (he is also author of the ArtPlace book A Journey into Ireland’s Literary Revival).

Reviews

• “Highly recommended.” (Library Journal)
• “This is a beautiful book.” (American Transcendentalism website)
• “Engaging without being intrusive, offering insights to both native New Englanders and tourists who might use the book as a travel guide.” "New England Watershed magazine"
• “Make(s) the place come alive.” (Ink19.com)
• “Traveling with this book (will) infuse the places mentioned.” (Get Lost Books)

Library Journal
The third title in the ArtPlace series continues the publisher’s mission to incorporate biography, art and history into travel guides. This well-researched volume opens with an overview of Transcendentalism and introduces the major figures of the movement and their writings. As Transcendentalism was inextricably tied to its place of origin – New England – the major centers of the movement are also discussed. The remainder of the book consists of chapters devoted to cities such as Boston, Cambridge, and Concord; each chapter contains a wealth of historical information accompanied by archival photographs. Sidebars help the reader further understand the significance of the movement, and maps sprinkled throughout identify the present-day locations of historical sites referenced in the text. The unique subject matter – New England plus Transcendentalism and its followers – will appeal to a wide audience. Some travelers might carry this volume along while sightseeing; others may wish to use it for travel research. Armchair travelers and even those without much wanderlust will want to read this for pure pleasure. Highly recommended.

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American Transcendentalism Website [Link]
If you are a fan of any of the Transcendentalists, or even interested in the making of American thought and literature, then this is your book. Chances are that you will soon find yourself planning a trip to Massachusetts, for you will understand the intimate ties between the place and these people. This may also be the beginning of a greater journey into yourself.

First, this is a beautiful book, as one in an ArtPlace Series might be expected to be. It is filled with pictures, past and present, as well as current maps of key places. But more important, this is an excellent introduction to these writers and the impact their idealism has had on Americans. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Amos Alcott, George Ripley, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Emily Dickinson are placed firmly in their historical, social, philosophical, and literary contexts. But the most important context of all was their varying relationships with each other, for this is one group in which the friction of ideas generated even more.

Each of these writers also resides firmly in his or her chosen places, primarily Boston, Concord, Salem, Brook Farm, and Amherst, places which still speak of their accomplishments to some degree. And the careful reader of this book will know just where to track them. Details can be important. For example, the description of Emerson's writing table (now in a Concord museum), "a spinning circular table with drawers fitted into the sides," a kind of "lazy Susan" of ideas, does much to illuminate his circular yet almost haphazard literary style. Likewise, visualizing Walden Pond and the woods or Brook Farm helps bring Walden and The Blithedale Romance to life.

I did find it rather odd that Felton pays so much attention to Hawthorne, one of the cleverest critics of the transcendentalists, and Dickinson, who never met any of them except on the page. But his journeys to Salem and Amherst justify their inclusion. However, I would have liked to have seen more of Margaret Fuller and something of Walt Whitman, who credited his birth as a poet to Emerson (though he was of New York, not New England). There is much here for any reader, whether one beginning a journey into the writing of the Transcendentalists or an experienced scholar. The descriptions of their thought and works are clear and enlightening. The author sends the reader on a journey without intrusion, like the best of guides, and the cost of the ticket is quite reasonable. Any student of American thought and literature should be sure to consult this guide before making the journey, whether physically or in the imagination.

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New England Watershed magazine
R. Todd Felton, an Amherst, Massachusetts, writer and prize-winning photographer, has faced a formidable challenge in A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England. Not only is he researching and writing about places in mid-19th century New England as diverse as Salem, Amherst and Boston, but he is also investigating authors who have “an original relation to the universe” and not infrequently an original relation to one another. Their “loose affiliation” and idiosyncratic adoption and adaptation of the central tenets of transcendentalism—an intuitive spirituality based on communication with nature, an attack on getting and spending, an electric and eclectic social activism—make it difficult for the author to highlight explicit common denominators. Writers who espouse radical individualism don’t easily fall into “groups” or commingle into a “movement.”

To his credit, Felton does not (with a few exceptions) tamp revolutionary thinkers into any preconceived mold. He reminds a reader on many occasions that the Transcendentalists did not subscribe to any creed or dogma, preferring to let their ideas evolve organically through lyceum lectures, discussion groups, clubs, symposiums and debates. Rather than dogma, he argues that Transcendentalism takes its inspiration from “place”—from specific towns, utopian communities, villages and landscapes, a “fifty-mile half-circle radiating out from Boston, between 1828-1854.” The investigation of this “half-circle” journey is vivified through striking, four-color photographs, archival prints, detailed street maps and succinct biographies. Felton’s narrative style is engaging without being intrusive, offering insights to both native New Englanders and tourists who might use the book as a travel guide.

The book is divided into geographic chapters: Boston, Cambridge, Concord, Walden
Pond, Salem, Amherst and the utopian communities of Brook Farm and Fruitlands—focusing, in each instance, on how “place” and “imagination” interact. Felton is particularly adept at creating a context for the heat and light of Emerson’s intellectual combustion, particularly in his incendiary addresses to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837 on the American scholar and to the Harvard Divinity School graduates in 1838 on the state of Christianity. In a deft understatement, he notes quietly that after those lectures, Emerson was barred from speaking at Harvard for 30 years.

He is less successful when painting Nathaniel Hawthorne with the Transcendentalist
brush. While Hawthorne invested in and even worked for a time at the Brook Farm commune, he was also capable of mocking Emerson’s followers as “a variety of queer, strangely-dressed, oddly-behaved mortals, most of whom took upon themselves to be important agents of the world’s destiny, yet were simply bores of a very intense water.” Puritan-haunted Hawthorne seems more often to have his head and heart in the 17th, rather than the 19th, century. To a writer who habitually employed irony to undercut the ego-driven missions of any century, some Transcendental puffery must have presented a tempting target.

Emily Dickinson, who had a genius for ducking affiliations, labels and groups, is even harder to snare. Though Felton claims “Emerson was her Transcendentalist idol,” he concedes that she didn’t walk next door to meet him when he visited Amherst in 1857, staying at her brother Austin’s house, the Evergreens. Her literary models—beyond the Bible—were predominantly British, not American: Shakespeare and Milton, the Brownings, the Brontes. With Dickinson lacking explicit ties to Transcendentalism, Felton must look to her poems, where an emphasis on the imaginative power of nature or a shucking off of the old forms and traditions supplies the Transcendentalist signature. But who can fix and formulate Emily Dickinson—that elusive moth always sailing beyond the reach of any net? What Felton does capture beautifully is the hustle and bustle of mid-19th century New England life in certain pulsating communities, places where commerce included not only manufacturing and trade but also educational innovation and social reform. A Journey into the Transcendentalists’ New England immerses a reader in a time and place where intellectual debate was every bit as important as the Gross National Product.

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Ink19.com [Link]
This half-history, half-travel book is a bit like a loaf of bread from Whole Foods - tough and chewy, but ultimately good for you. Transcendentalism represented one of the first full-blown philosophy movements in the new United States. Rejecting the strict Calvinist and Unitarian interpretation of the Bible, Transcendentalists looked to nature as justification of God's existence. Salvation and eternity did not exist because a book said so, but because they spoke to your heart.

Transcendentalist writing ranges from the sublime to the unreadable, and with long New England winters that encouraged reflection, hundred-page critiques of sermons were more popular than one might imagine. The most famous writer is Thoreau with his sermon to simple living, Walden. So many hippies and idealists were moved to live off the land because of this book, but a close reading reveals that after about a year of eating beans and swatting mosquitoes, he moved back into cafe society. There's idealism, and then there's good plumbing.

The Transcendentalist movement centered on the Boston area, and its members are a Who’s Who of American letters - Hawthorn, Alcott, Thoreau, and Emerson are the biggies. Many of the buildings and locations associated with the movement still exist, and Felton's research not only highlights their location but the details of how they came to be and who owned what over the years. His strength is a detailed review of the movement's underpinnings, and while the buildings are secondary to the movement, they are what we can stand in front of and take pictures.

As a travel book, this is a very specialized item. All the locations are within an hour's drive of Logan airport, and all are well known in the standard tourist world. What you get with this book is a detailed background, with names, dates, romances, and impact. When standing in front of another ancient saltbox with a gift shop, this book can make the place come alive. There isn’t any of the standard "Where to Eat and Sleep" information, but the area is well-stocked with accommodations.

If you're not planning a historical drive through the Boston area, Transcendentalists' New England makes a fine historical reference for the armchair philosopher or a student in need of a term paper. There are only passing allusions to the reality of suburban Boston sprawl and traffic, and if you can put those out of mind, you're back in 1845, trying to change a world that men are just beginning to understand.

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Get Lost Books
This is an intriguing addition to the ever growing genre of literary guidebooks. It comes as part of a new series that includes Dorothy Parker’s New York and Steinbeck’s California. This particular volume is an exploration of the lives and geographies of the 19th century Transcendentalist movement. Different New England literary and cultural landmarks are highlighted in the context of the ideas and intellectual activity that occurred there. The chapter on the commune Brook Farm is particularly absorbing. This 19th century attempt at a ‘back to the land’ lifestyle fitted in with the Transcendentalists’ spiritual and somewhat mythic ideas of the human connection to the earth. The movement failed for many of the same reasons the hippy communes did: the inability of people to share the workload and truly co-operate with each other, and the difficult balance between the hard labor that farm work requires and the space needed to write and create. It is incredibly inspiring reading about prior attempts at creating imagined or intellectual idylls and ‘actual’ egalitarian utopias, especially in the context of the current political climate. “There are new lands, new men, new thoughts. Let us demand our own works and laws and worship.” (Emerson). I imagine that traveling with this book would infuse the places mentioned within with meaning that you just wouldn’t get from reading a mere commemorative plaque.

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