John Thomas Codman Boston: Arena Publishing Co., 1894. Clifton Waller Barrett Library of American Literature.

Although many middle-class parents in the sixties feared the possibility that their daughter or son might decide to move into a commune, nothing could be more traditionally American than leaving conventional society behind to try to create a new community. Plymouth Plantation was the first commune. At the same time Thoreau moved alone to Walden, others chose to live outside the boundaries of conventional life, and closer to the truth, in radical communities. Brook Farm, founded in 1841 by George Ripley after he dropped out of the ministry, began as a Transcendentalist attempt to integrate the life of the mind with manual labor and ended six years later as a Fourierist phalanx. Codman went there in 1843, at the age of seventeen, and stayed almost till the end. Brook Farm was written half a century later, in large part to revive the memory of the experiment and inspire others to renew its attempt to better the world. He remembers that at Brook Farm he was entirely happy, living close to nature, working for the good of all, and "thinking of the unfortunate humanity who lived outside our charmed circle, [and] how much, how very much, of all our suffering comes from human ignorance only."

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