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Alcott’s assistant at the Temple School in Boston, where Margaret Fuller also taught.

       I had ... a Foreign Library of new French and German books, and then I came into contact with the world as never before. The Ripleys were starting Brook Farm, and they were friends of ours. Theodore Parker was beginning his career, and all these things were discussed in my bookstore by Boston lawyers and Cambridge professors. Those were very living years for me.

      Building on Elizabeth Peabody’s success offering “conversations” for profit to a women-only audience, Margaret Fuller convened a series of discussion groups tackling serious philosophical topics during the winters from 1839 to 1844. The groups would meet from noon to 2 p.m. on Wednesday afternoons, once a week for thirteen weeks. The format usually included assigned reading and a discussion moderated by Fuller.

      In an era when there were few educational opportunities for women, this was an unusual chance for women to exercise their intellect. Not surprisingly, the conversations attracted many of the finest female minds in the area. The first series focused on the differences between men’s and women’s educational opportunities, and later series covered mythology and the arts.

       Brilliant and dedicated, Margaret Fuller was one of Transcendentalism’s best conversationalists.

      Transcendentalist Women

      One of Transcendentalism’s greatest strengths, as well as a key to its success, was its embrace of progressive social causes, specifically abolition, natives’ rights, and the rights of women. Transcendentalist “feminism” (a term that would not be used until 1895), however, clearly succeeded in ways that the first two causes did not. While there were no blacks or Native Americans in the Transcendentalist circle, there were women—women whose opinions were sought and intellects were respected.

      Probably the most visible of the female Transcendentalists was Margaret Fuller. Although unable to attend Harvard—its “women’s annex,” Radcliffe College, wasn’t founded until the end of the century—Fuller did gain the right to use Harvard’s library, the first woman to do so. She was one of a handful of female members of the Transcendental Club, and served as editor of its journal, the Dial, until she handed off the role to Emerson. Later, she became one of the only women of the nineteenth century to serve as a foreign correspondent for an American newspaper, Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune. Her literary works, most notably a translation of Eckerman’s Conversations with Goethe and her magnum opus, Woman in the Nineteenth Century, met with critical acclaim.

      Another woman whose Transcendentalist activities helped her break new ground was Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. The first to hold “conversations” for women for profit, the first woman in Boston to be a publisher, the first to open a kindergarten in America, Peabody was endlessly energetic. A driving force in the Boston intellectual scene, she was responsible for hosting, supporting, or initiating many of the Transcendentalists’ activities throughout New England.

      Advocacy of women’s rights was not limited to the Transcendentalist women. Almost all the major educational endeavors connected with the Transcendentalists sought to equalize the balance of power between the sexes. One glaring exception was Bronson Alcott’s utopian community, Fruitlands. While the men sat around discussing and philosophizing, the majority of the farm work fell to Abba Alcott and her four girls. Fruitlands failed after only a few months.

      In addition to these serious intellectual inquiries, the bookstore hosted romantic events as well. Two weddings took place in the back rooms, where the Peabody family lived. The first was between a relatively unknown but strikingly handsome author from Salem, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Elizabeth’s equally striking sister, Sophia. The Hawthornes were married in July 1842 by the liberal Unitarian minister James Freeman Clarke. The second marriage was between the middle Peabody sister, Mary, and the educational reformer Horace Mann. Also presided over by Clarke, this ceremony took place in May 1843.

      Today the building might still be a lovely place for a small wedding. The books are gone; in 1878 Peabody donated them to the Concord Free Public Library, which still has 415 of the thousand volumes that went into the circulating collection. In their place now are wine glasses and white linen. After hosting a number of retail establishments over the years (and changing its street number from 13), 15 West Street is now home to the West Street Grille, an upscale restaurant where the young and stylish of Boston come to dine and mingle.

      Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore also made its mark in a more public way when she began publishing the Dial there. Evidence suggests that this made her the first woman publisher in Boston, and most likely in all of North America. She also published some of Hawthorne’s early work before he moved to Ticknor and Fields. In 1849 she began publishing a journal of her own, Aesthetic Papers. Although it lasted just one issue, it was particularly notable for publishing an essay by a still relatively unknown writer who had recently returned from a sojourn by a lake. The essay, “Resistance to Civil Government” by Henry David Thoreau, has become one of the best-known works of the period (under its later title, “Civil Disobedience”), and has certainly outlasted the fame of the magazine in which it first appeared.

      Field’s Failure

      For all of James T. Fields’s business acumen (he introduced the system of advances and royalties to American publishing, for instance), he made at least one notable mistake. When a young writer from Concord showed him her stories, Fields was not impressed. “Stick to your teaching,” he told her. “You can’t write.” He did, however, acknowledge the financial stresses that had pushed the young woman into publishing and gave her forty dollars to start a school.

      Undaunted by this rejection of her literary efforts, the young Louisa May Alcott kept at writing, producing more than thirty books and collections of stories during her thirty-four-year career. After Little Women had been published to tremendous success, Alcott mailed the forty dollars back to Fields with the note:

       Dear Mr. Fields

       Once upon a time you lent me forty dollars, kindly saying I might return them when I had made “a pot of gold.”

       As the miracle has been unexpectedly wrought I wish to fulfil my part of the bargain & herewith repay my debt with many thanks.

       Very truly yours

       L.M. Alcott

       An otherwise impeccable judge of literature, James T. Fields told Louisa May Alcott to “stick to your teaching ... you can’t write.”

      Another publishing house and hub was just a few blocks east, on the corner of Washington and School Streets. If Elizabeth Peabody’s bookstore and library introduced many American thinkers to writers from abroad, (4) the Old Corner Bookstore at 3 School Street introduced many Americans to their country’s own writers.

       This building, tucked in among the larger buildings of downtown, served as the center of the America’s literary world when Ticknor and Fields operated their publishing business here.

       The stunning glass and steel building is the twenty-first-century version of Ticknor and Fields.

      From their offices in the Old Corner Bookstore, publishers James T. Fields and William Ticknor brought out many of the major works of the nineteenth century, by authors who even now are some of the best-known names of American letters: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, James Russell Lowell, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But it was more than a catalog that made Ticknor and Fields such a powerhouse—it was the personal relationships that the men, especially

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