Make yourself necessary to somebody. Do not make life hard to any.
Conduct of Life lectures, 1860

Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)

Perhaps America’s best known thinker,  Ralph Waldo Emerson led a renaissance in American ideas in the 19th Century: a search to realize the high potential of the individual person, to understand the proper role of the individual in society, and to discover and celebrate the interrelation and sacredness of all life.  He was a pragmatist and an idealist, a lecturer, a prolific writer and a poet.

In July 1835 Ralph Waldo Emerson purchased his Concord home, proclaiming it was “the only good cellar that had been built in Concord.”  Along with the house, there was a sizable barn, on two acres of land.  In addition to housing various animals, the barn was used for over a year as a schoolroom for Miss Foord’s school. The Emerson children attended the school along with Lizzy and Abby Alcott, Lizzy and Barry Goodwin and Caroline Pratt, all from Concord.

What’s New

The Washington Post book reviewer Ron Charles and his wife Dawn recently visited Emerson House (Photo by Ron Charles/The Washington Post). He posted the following after their visit:

“Sunday, we carved out time to drive down to Concord and visit Mr. Emerson’s house. Alas, he wasn’t in. (I assume he was becoming a transparent eyeball somewhere in the woods.) But his home is well-preserved and lovingly maintained. It was magical to see Emerson’s walking stick, the room where Margaret Fuller agreed to edit the Dial, and the dollhouse that Henry David Thoreau built for the Emerson children. I felt ‘bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space’.”

After he purchases his house a relieved Emerson writes to his brother William:

Concord 27 July 1835
Dear William

Has Charles told you that I have dodged the doom of building & have bought the Coolidge house in Concord with the expectation of entering it next September. It is a mean place & cannot be fine until trees & flowers give it a character of its own. But we shall crowd so many books & papers & if possible, wise friends, into it that it shall have as much wit as it can carry.

Waldo E

The house Emerson brought his bride Lidian to on September 15, 1835 became that "sylvan" home where they would live together for the next forty-seven years.  The Emersons had four children.  Their home became not only a place for Emerson's study and writing, but a literary center for the emerging American Transcendentalist movement.

In the early years the Emersons referred to their home as Coolidge Castle, a reference to the Boston Coolidges, who had it built as a summer house.  In the family the house became known as Bush, and it remained Emerson's "home front" for the rest of his life. 

When I bought my house, the first thing I did was plant trees.

In November 1836, after the birth of his son Waldo, Emerson planted six hemlocks.  In 1837 he planted thirty-one pine and chestnut trees. The chestnuts fronted the house, the last one coming down in a storm in 2012. In 1838 he wrote to Thomas Carlyle, "I set out on the west side of my house forty young pine trees."   Soon the two acres grew to nine and in 1847 Emerson had enough land to plant 128 apple, pear and plum trees.

The house contains Emerson’s original furniture and objects, much as he left it. The Ralph Waldo Emerson Memorial Association (RWEMA), formed in 1930 by family members and others associated with Emerson’s library and work, owns the Emerson House and the Emerson family papers, and is responsible for maintaining the house and for promoting interest in Emerson’s literary works. The RWEMA is a private non-profit 501(c)(3) corporation.

Donations for the Museum are most welcome.

The Wide World

Margaret Fuller

(Sarah) Margaret Fuller was America’s mid-nineteenth’s century foremost intellectual. Rigorously educated in a curriculum then reserved for privileged boys, Fuller could boast —and lament—that she knew “all the people worth knowing in America, and I find no intellect comparable to my own” (qtd in Memoirs).

Fuller first met Ralph Waldo and Lidian Emerson when she visited their home for two weeks in July 1836. Her invitation had been arranged through mutual friend, Transcendentalist educator Elizabeth Palmer Peabody. Emerson and Fuller’s reputations among their social network had preceded their meeting.  Their relationship was that of peers rather than protege to celebrated mentor, as it is often portrayed. Fuller, in fact rather had the advantage, excepting her gender and finances.  Emerson, at thirty-three years old, was not yet well-known as an iconoclast thinker or a famed essayist. He was a minister, who had resigned his pulpit, begun a local lecturing career, and was writing his first essay, Nature, which Fuller read in manuscript and commented on during her visit. Twenty-six-year-old Fuller was already a published author and had translated Goethe from German.

Emerson was, at first, put off by Fuller’s eagerness and social awkwardness. He had assumed her visit was to befriend his wife. But the two quickly became close friends, who relied on one another to provoke and inspire their individual personal and intellectual growth. Fuller particularly challenged Emerson’s thoughts on interpersonal relationships, wanting to draw him out of his reserve. He said she made him “laugh more than he liked” with her high-spirited wit and satirical humor (Recollections).

Fuller frequently made long visits to the Emerson family, staying —as she did during her visit— in the “Red Room” across the front hall from Emerson’s study, which the family kept as a guest bedroom. Fuller enjoyed access to Emerson’s study and the side door out into nature. She became very fond of the family, particularly the Emerson’s eldest child, Waldo, who was born a few months after she met the Emersons. During Fuller’s second Concord visit, she joined the predominately male “Transcendentalist Club.”  

As Emerson’s reputation and fame grew through the late 1830s and 1840s, Fuller, struggling with chronic health issues (particularly debilitating headaches), worked as a teacher to support her family following her father’s death. In addition to her position in various schools, she held adult German literature course in Providence and “conversations” in Boston—  an adult education series especially intended for women. She published German translations, and accepted position as editor of the Transcendentalist Club’s new literary magazine, The Dial. The periodical never made enough to compensate Fuller, and Emerson eventually took over the editorship, in which he published Fuller’s feminist manifesto “The Great Lawsuit” (later revised and republished as Woman in the Nineteenth Century), in which Fuller argued for gender equality, and remarkably in contrast to the “separate spheres” ideology of her time), for gender fluidity. Her 1844 travelogue Summer on the Lakes reflected her travels through the Great Lakes and western frontier, and her work as the New York Tribune’s “star” journalist brought Fuller to a broader, national audience. For the Tribune,  Fuller went abroad as the first female international correspondent, covering the Italian Revolution.

Returning from Europe in 1850, Fuller, her romantic partner Giovanni Ossoli, and their two-year old son Nino perished in a hurricane shipwreck off the shore of Fire Island, New York. When Emerson read the news a few days later, he grieved her had “lost his audience,” referring to Fuller not only as a receptive reader, but also as his creative stimulus, inspiration, and collaborator. 

Emerson wanted to keep Fuller’s literary legacy and memory alive. He sent Henry David Thoreau to Fire Island to recover Fuller’s last manuscript and the family’s remains. The search was unsuccessful. With collaborators James Freeman Clarke and William Henry Channing, Emerson edited Fuller’s Memoirs; a project that has been much criticized by modern scholars for its reduction of Fuller’s legacy, but which was intent on safeguarding and furthering her literary significance.

 Works Cited:

Channing, Clarke, and Emerson.  “Self-Esteem, ”Memoirs of Margaret Fuller Ossoli, Volume I. Project Gutenburg, https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/13105/pg13105-images.html. Accessed 11/2/2024.

Greeley, Horace. Excerpt from Recollections of Margaret Fuller. The Walden Woods Project, https://www.walden.org/the-margaret-fuller-society-collection/margaret-fuller-from-recollection-of-a-busy-life-by-horace-greeley/ Accessed 11.2.2024.

Recommendations for Further Reading:

Cole, Phyllis.“The Nineteenth–Century Women’s Rights Movement and the Canonization of Margaret Fuller,” ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, (No. 27, 1998): 1-28.

Marshall, Megan. Margaret Fuller: A New American Life. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2013.

Matteson, John. The Lives of Margaret Fuller. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2012.

Kristi Lynn Martin, PhD

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Donations for the Museum are most welcome.