AceHistoryDesk – Today in History – On November 29, 1799, Amos Bronson Alcott, educator, philosopher of American Transcendentalism, and father of the original “Little Women”—Anna, Louisa, Elizabeth, and May Alcott—was born in Wolcott, Connecticut. The son of a poor flax farmer, Alcott was almost entirely self-educated. As a young man, Alcott worked as a peddler and handyman. As an individual, I work as both a writer and a gardener, pursuing courses that I have personally selected of readings in English and German literature and philosophy.

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Father of the “Little Women”

Louisa May Alcott, the second daughter of Amos Bronson Alcott, teacher and transcendentalist philosopher, and Abigail May, social worker and reformer, was born in the “disagreeable month” of November, just like her literary creation Jo March, the rambunctious heroine of Little Women.

In 1830, Alcott journeyed to Boston to attend a series of lectures on abolition. There he met Samuel Joseph May, Unitarian minister, and his sister Abigail “Abba” May, a teacher and social worker. On May 23, 1830, Alcott and Abba May were married. During the next several years, the Alcotts were forced to move several times, as Bronson’s experimental schools were abandoned as financially unsuccessful.

Woman…is helping herself to secure her place in a better spirit and manner than any we [men] can suggest or devise,…it becomes us to take, rather than proffer Consels [sic], readily waiting to learn her wishes and aims, as she has so long and so patiently deferred to us.

Letter from A. Bronson Alcott to Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Concord, Massachusetts, May 4, 1869. The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott. (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1969), p. 471.none

During this period, the couple’s four daughters were born and Alcott continued to develop his lifelong habit of journal-writing, chronicling the daily events in the development of his children. At the basis of his educational theory was his belief that “early education is the enduring power” in the formation of the imagination and moral life of the human being.

On September 22, 1834, Alcott opened his famous Temple School, located in the Masonic Temple on Tremont Street in Boston, where he put into effect many of his innovative educational theories.

His assistant, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, who went on to found the first kindergarten in the United States, published the plan of the school the next year in her book Record of a School.

Alcott believed that learning should be a pleasant experience for children, and that the classroom environment should be beautiful. He built the classroom furniture himself and allowed the children to decorate the room with pictures and plants and to arrange their desks in a manner pleasing to themselves.

Alcott emphasized the cultivation of the virtues of self-discipline, self-expression, and charity. A form of democratic classroom government was instituted. His curriculum included physical education, dance, art, music, nature study, and daily journal-writing. He acquired a juvenile library and also encouraged the children to read classic adult works such as Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, Spenser’s Faerie Queene, Milton’s Paradise Lost, and the poems of Wordsworth and Coleridge.

The school was, at first, very successful, and attracted a number of well-connected students. However, Alcott’s inability to compromise on his ideals eventually led to its failure as well. In 1835, the last remaining pupils were withdrawn from the school due to Alcott’s insistence on permitting the attendance of a black child.

With the financial assistance of Ralph Waldo Emerson, the Alcotts moved to Hillside House in Concord, Massachusetts. Emerson also paid for Alcott’s trip to England to visit a school founded upon his theories. Alcott returned with a new friend, Charles Lane, a mystic transcendentalist, with whom he embarked on a new experiment, that of communal living at the farm they purchased, Fruitlands, an early eighteenth-century farmhouse.

The experiment in communal living was Alcott’s least successful adventure and proved a great hardship to his wife and children. The experience was later satirized by his daughter Louisa in her story, “Transcendental Wild Oats.” After the farm’s complete failure, the Alcotts returned to Concord, where the family renewed congenial friendships and developed a happy family life, in spite of their constant struggle with poverty.

I have had some faithful readings, during these January days—all of Carlyle including his translations—all of Goethe that came within my reach…. I have found refreshment, too, in Conversing with some little Children who pass the day in my study.… there is begotten in me the liveliest sense of my…duty of Teaching again.

A. Bronson Alcott, Letter to Charles Lane, January 1846. The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott. (Ames, Iowa: Iowa State University Press, 1969), p. 124.none

Always notable for his humility, modesty, and his serene and happy spirit, Alcott continued to develop his educational ideas, teaching his children at home, and giving occasional “conversations.

These talks were directed parlor seminars in which he led a Socratic form of dialogue, in return for a small stipend. Eventually, Alcott’s seminars gained a popular following. They were especially well-attended on his tours in the West.

In his later years, Alcott’s daughter Louisa’s financial success as a writer enabled the family to purchase not only necessities, but a few luxuries as well.

The family moved to Orchard House where Alcott established the Concord Summer School of Philosophy in a converted barn on the property. Alcott’s School of Philosophy was a gathering center for the Transcendentalists and flourished until shortly after his death in 1888.

Learn More

• Bronson Alcott maintained friendships and correspondence with a variety of influential people of his time, including Librarian of Congress Ainsworth Spofford. Search Today in History for features on the reformers, philosophers, writers, and artists that formed Alcott’s circle, including:
  • Elizabeth Palmer Peabody
  • Ralph Waldo Emerson
  • Henry David Thoreau
  • Walt Whitman
  • John Burroughs
  • Elizabeth Cady Stanton
  • Daniel Chester French (A native of Concord, Massachusetts, the sculptor who created the Minute Man Statue and the Statue of Lincoln in the Lincoln Memorial received his early art instruction from Bronson Alcott’s daughter May Alcott Nieriker.)
• Search on Bronson Alcott in the collection Making of America to find Alcott’s book Ralph Waldo Emerson; an Estimate of His Character and Genius in Prose and Verse and Record of Mr. Alcott’s School, Exemplifying the Principles and Methods of Moral Culture, written by Alcott’s assistant Elizabeth Palmer Peabody.
• Search the Library’s collection of Selected Digitized Books to find books written by Bronson Alcott, Louisa May Alcott, Elizabeth Palmer Peabody, and many of their contemporaries.
• The collection Pioneering the Upper Midwest: Books from Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin, ca. 1820 to 1910 includes the full text of a book of meditations, Summer on the Lakes, in 1843, written by transcendentalist Margaret Fuller, a friend of Alcott’s.
• Search on Concord Massachusetts in the Detroit Publishing Company collection to see more photographs of the town that was home to the Alcotts and other members of the Transcendentalist movement.
• Two of the Alcott homes in Concord are now museums. Visit the websites for The Wayside, formerly called “Hillside,” and for Orchard House, the home that Louisa May Alcott purchased for the family with the earnings from her writing.

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