¹ U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1980 Census of Population, Vol. 1: Characteristics of the Population, Chap. C: “General Social and Economic Characteristics,” Pt. 23: “Massachusetts” (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1983), p. 18Google Scholar; Wheeler, Ruth R., Concord: Climate for Freedom (Concord, Mass.: Concord Antiquarian Society, 1967)Google Scholar. Note also the title of Scudder, Townshend history of the town, Concord: American Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947)Google Scholar.

² Van Wyck Brooks, , The Flowering of New England (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1952), pp. 261–63, 283, 286–87Google Scholar, and Miller, Perry, Consciousness in Concord: The Text of Thoreau's Hitherto ‘Lost Journal’ (1840–1841), Together with Notes and a Commentary (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1958), pp. 51–54Google Scholar.

³ U.S. Bureau of Census, Sixteenth Census of the United States: 1940, Population. Vol. 1: Number of Inhabitants (Washington, D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1942), p. 10Google Scholar. For discussions of urbanization and suburbanization see Blouin, Francis X. Jr, The Boston Region 1810–1850: A Study of Urbanization (Ann Arbor, Mich.: UMI Research Press, 1980)Google Scholar; Jackson, Kenneth T., “Urban Deconcentration in the Nineteenth Century: A Statistical Inquiry,” in Schnore, Leo F., ed., The New Urban History: Quantitative Explorations by American Historicans (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), pp. 110–42Google Scholar; Pred, Allan R., Urban Growth and the Circulation of Information: The United States System of Cities, 1790–1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1973)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Pred, , Urban Growth and City-Systems in the United States, 1840–1860 (Cambridge. Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1980)Google Scholar; and Weber, Ferrin Adna, The Growth of Cities in the Nineteenth Century: A Study in Statistics (New York: Ronald Press, 1938)Google Scholar.

⁴ In developing the idea of suburban vision, I have drawn on the following works: Bender, Thomas, Toward an Urban Vision: Ideas and Institutions in Nineteenth-Century America (Lexington, Ky.: The Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1975)Google Scholar; Jackson, Kenneth T., “The Crabgrass Frontier: 150 Years of Suburban Growth in America,” in Mohl, Raymond A. and Richardson, James F., eds., The Urban Experience: Themes in American History (Belmont, Calif.: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 1973), pp. 196–221Google Scholar; Schmitt, Peter J., Back to Nature: The Arcadian Myth in Urban America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1969)Google Scholar; Strauss, Anselm L., Images of the America City (New York: The Free Press of Glencoe, 1961)Google Scholar.

⁵ Morton, and White, Lucia, The Intellectual versus the City: From Thomas Jefferson to Frank Lloyd Wright (New York and London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1977), pp. 24–35Google Scholar.

⁶ Emerson, Ralph Waldo, Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, ed. Spiller, Robert E. and Ferguson, Alfred R. (Cambridge, Mass, and London: The Belknap Press of Harvard Univ. Press, 1979), pp. 10, 13, 21Google Scholar; Orth, Ralph L. et al. , eds., The Journal and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson (16 vols; Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960–1982), 7, 288Google Scholar [hereafter referred to as JMN]; Cowan, Michael H., City of the West: Emerson, America, and Urban Metaphor (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1967), p. 186Google Scholar. Cowan's work, which lays out Emerson's visions of ideal and actual cities in antebellum America, has provided the starting point for my analysis. Cowan maintains (p. 215) that far from fleeing the city in his removal from Boston to Concord, Emerson always wanted to reap the advantages of both rural and urban life. “The continuing attempt to find a way to ‘have both,’ in spite of the almost impossible difficulties involved,” Cowan remarks, distinguishes not only Emerson but American literature of the time. I agree. This essay attempts to go beyond Cowan by locating Emerson in the concrete context of a changing Concord, by treating Emerson's ambition to reconcile city and country as a distinctive suburban vision, and by viewing that vision as a significant contribution to the developing ideology of the Northern middle class.

⁷ Emerson, , “The Transcendentalist,” in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 208Google Scholar.

⁸ Quoted in Cowan, , City of the West, p. 15Google Scholar.

⁹ Emerson, , “The American Scholar,” in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, pp. 67–68Google Scholar; Cowan, , City of the West, pp. 13–25Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Cowan, , City of the West, pp. 5–7, 10–13, 151, 248Google Scholar; Leyda, Jay, The Years and Hours of Emily Dickinson (2 vols.; New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1960), 1, 29–30Google Scholar; Harding, Walter and Bode, Carl, eds., The Correspondence of Henry Thoreau (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 73, 105–07, 141–42Google Scholar; Thomas Dew, quoted in Rosenthal, Bernard, City of Nature: Journeys to Nature in the Age of America Romanticism (Newark, Del.: Univ. of Delaware Press, 1980), p. 173Google Scholar.

¹¹ Emerson, “The American Scholar,” p. 65; Emerson, , “Wealth,” in Emerson, Edward Waldo, ed., The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson (12 vols.; Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1903–1904), 6, 85Google Scholar.

¹² Emerson, “Wealth,” pp. 92–93; Mowatt, Anna Cora, Fashion; or, Life in New York, excerpted in Grimsted, David, ed., Notions of the Americans 1820–1860 (New York: George Braziller, 1970), p. 167Google Scholar; Cowan, , City of the West, pp. 5, 55–56, 228–29Google Scholar. For evidence on social change in Boston and the responses of leading intellectuals and religious leaders see Cayton, Andrew R. L., “The Fragmentation of ‘A Great Family’: The Panic of 1819 and the Rise of the Middling Interest in Boston, 1818–1822,” Journal of the Early Republic, 2 (1982), 143–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cayton, Mary K., “‘Sympathy's Electric Chain’ and the American Democracy: Emerson's First Vocational Crisis,” New England Quarterly, 55 (1982), 3–24CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Rose, Ann C., Transcendentalism as a Social Movement, 1820–1850 (New Haven and London: Yale Univ. Press, 1981), pp. 1–28Google Scholar. On the idea of culture in Western Romanticism see Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1958), pp. 30–48Google Scholar.

¹³ Emerson, , “Nature”, in Nature, Addresses, and Lectures, p. 7Google Scholar; Orth, et al. , eds., JMN, 4, 335Google Scholar; Neufeldt, Leonard N., “‘The Fields of My Fathers’ and Emerson's Literary Vocation,” American Transcendental Quarterly, 31 (1976), 3–9Google Scholar; Cole, Phyllis, “‘The Quiet Fields of My Fathers’: Emerson in Concord”(unpublished paper delivered at the conference, “Seeing New Englandly,” Univ. of Southern Maine,April 1980)Google Scholar; Emerson, Edward Waldo, Emerson in Concord: A Memoir (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1889), p. 51Google Scholar.

¹⁴ Rusk, Ralph L., ed., The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson (6 vols.; New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939), 1, 435Google Scholar; Emerson, Ellen Tucker, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Carpenter, Delores Bird (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), pp. 50, 63–64, 76Google Scholar.

¹⁵ Cowan, , City of the West, p. 2Google Scholar; Brown, Richard D., “The Emergence of Urban Society in Rural Massachusetts, 1760–1820,” Journal of American History, 56 (1974), 29–51CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Wood, Joseph, “Origins of the New England Village” (Ph.D. diss., Pennsylvania State University, 1978), pp. 26–33, 203–85Google Scholar; Brooke, John Ludlow, “Yeomen, Gentry, Dissenters and the Uses of the Dead: An Historical and Archaeological Ethuography of the Massachusetts Near Frontier in the Revolutionary Era” (Ph.D. diss., University of Pennyslvania, 1982), ch. 8Google Scholar.

¹⁶ Wood, “Origins of the New England Village,” pp. 147, 271; Gross, Robert A., The Minutemen and Their World (New York: Hill and Wang, 1976), pp. 4–7, 175–76, 189–90Google Scholar; Joseph Hosmer, “Concord in Ye Olden Time,” Adams Toman Newspaper Scrapbook Collection, Special Collections, Concord, Mass., Free Public Library. The rate of population in Concord provides one measure of the town's changing fortunes over the first half of the nineteenth century. As shown below, from 1790 to 1830 population grew each decade (with the exception of the Embargo and War era) at an accelerating pace, peaking in the 1820s, on the eve of Emerson's removal to the town. Thereafter, although Concord's numbers continued to increase, the rate of change steadily declined, until the town reached a condition of zero population growth in 1850–60. (Year), 1790, (population) 1,590, (percentage change) 0; 1800, 1,679, 5·6; 1810, 1,633, — 2·7; 1820, 1,788, 9·5; 1830, 2017, 12·8; 1840, 2,149, 6·5; 1850, 2,249 4·6; 1860, 2,246, 0·0. The population figure for 1840 has been estimated, since the total reported by the U.S. census-taker in that year was drastically under-counted. For an explanation of my methods, see Gross, Robert A., “Lonesome in Eden: Dickinson, Thoreau and the Problem of Community in Nineteenth-Century New England.” The Canadian Review of American Studies, 14 (1983), 14–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The 1860 population is reported in Wright, Carroll D., comp., The Census of Massachusetts: 1865, Vol. 1: Population and Social Statistics (Boston: Albert J. Wright, 1876–1877), 742–43Google Scholar.

¹⁷ Gross, , Minutemen, pp. 171–76, 189–90Google Scholar; Keyes, John Shepard, “Concord,” in Hurd, Duane Hamilton, ed., History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts, with Biographical Sketches of Many of the Pioneers and Prominent Men (Philadelphia: J. W. Lewis, 1890), p. 588Google Scholar; “Concord Directory, containing the names of the legal voters and householders in town with the occupations, offices, etc. for the year 1830,” New England Historic Genealogical Society, Boston, Mass.; [Concord] Yeoman's Gazette, 17 November 1827.

¹⁸ Gross, , Minutemen, pp. 17, 173Google Scholar; Concord Yeoman's Gazette, 30 December 1826; Hendrick, George, ed., Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1977), p. 16Google Scholar; Torrey, Bradford and Allen, Francis H., eds., The Journal of Henry David Thoreau (14 vols. bound as 2; New York: Dover, 1962), 3, 127Google Scholar. In 1773, the middle school district accounted for 39 percent of the assessed wealth in town; by 1825, that share had risen to 51 percent. Unfortunately, no list of taxpayers, arranged by school districts, survives for 1826, so that it is impossible to check the accuracy of the newspaper's claim that the center district's share had swollen to some two-thirds of the whole. For the sources used in these calculations, see 1773 and 1825 school money lists, Concord Archives, Concord Free Public Library.

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²⁰ Orth, et al. , JMN, 7, 197, 376Google Scholar; Jarvis, Edward, “Houses and People in Concord, 1810 to 1820” (unpublished manuscript, Concord Free Public Library, 1882), pp. 324–25Google Scholar.

²¹ Emerson, , “Historical Discourse at Concord,” in Emerson, , ed., Complete Works, 11, 23–85 (quotations, pp. 46–47, 83)Google Scholar; Neufeldt, “‘Fields of My Fathers,’” pp. 4–6; Cowan, , City of the West, pp. 169–70, 173–77Google Scholar; Green, Eugene, “Reading Local History: Shattuck's History, Emerson's Discourse, and Thoreau's Walden,” New England Quarterly, 50 (1977), 304–06CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²² Gross, , Minutemen, 188–89Google Scholar; Scudder, Townshend, Concord: American Town (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1947), pp. 163–64Google Scholar; Concord Freeman, 12 September 1835. The distribution of assessed weath for (1826) and 1830 is as follows: top 10% (47·1), 46·0; top 20% (67·4), 67·6; mid 40% (30·5), 31·1; bottom 40% (2·1), 1·3. I calculated the distribution for 1826 from the town assessment list, Town Clerk's Vault, Concord Town Hall. The figures for 1830 were likewise derived from the town assessment list by Weintraub, Richard N., “Wealth Distribution and Mobility in Concord, Massachusetts 1770–1830” (senior honors thesis, Brandeis University, 1973), p. 78Google Scholar.

²³ Orth, et al. , JMN, 5, 422Google Scholar; Emerson, , Emerson in Concord, p. 146Google Scholar; Gross, , Minutemen, pp. 174–75Google Scholar; Jarvis, Edward, “Traditions and Reminiscences of Concord, Massachusetts, or a Contribution to the Social and Domestic History of the Town, 1779 to 1877” (unpublished manuscript, 1878, Concord Free Public Library), pp. 331–33Google Scholar; Concord Freeman, 11 February 1837. For the members of the Social Circle in 1839, when Emerson was admitted, see Memoirs of Members of the Social Circle in Concord. Second Series: From 1795 to 1840 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1888)Google Scholar and Third Series: From 1840 to 1895 (Cambridge, Mass.: The Riverside Press, 1907)Google Scholar.

²⁴ Rev. Reynolds, Grindall, “Concord” in Drake, Samuel Adams, History of Middlesex County, Massachusetts (2 vols.; Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1880), 1, 398–99Google Scholar; Keyes, “Concord,” pp. 593–94; Scudder, , Concord, pp. 190–91Google Scholar.

²⁵ Scott, Donald M., “The Popular Lecturer and the Creation of a Public in Mid-Nineteenth Century America,” Journal of American History, 66 (1980), 791–809CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Emerson, , Emerson in Concord, pp. 178, 184Google Scholar; Jarvis, “Traditions and Reminiscences,” pp. 355–56.

²⁶ Scudder, , Concord, pp. 196–98Google Scholar; Keyes, “Concord,” pp. 593–94; Bushman, Claudia L., “A Good Poor Man's Wife”: Being a Chronicle of Harriet Hanson Robinson and Her Family in Nineteenth-Centrny New England (Hanover, N.H. and London: Univ. Press of New England, 1981), p. 93Google Scholar.

²⁷ Torrey, and Allen, , eds., Journal, 3, 41–43, 6, 175, 10, 207–08Google Scholar; Seaburg, Alan, “Thoreau's Poetical Farmer,” The New-England Galaxy, 12 (1970), 29–38Google Scholar.

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²⁹ Emerson, , “Culture,” in Emerson, , ed., Complete Works, 6, 134, 148, 150–53, 155Google Scholar. Emerson was already incorporating the experience of commuting into his writing by the early 1850s. In the opening to his speech on “The Fugitive Slave Law,” delivered in New York City in 1854, he characterized “the readers and thinkers of 1854” as the men on the morning train into the city. “Look into the morning trains which, from every suburb, carry the business men into the city to their shops, counting-rooms, work-yards and warehouses. With them enters the car — the newsboy, that humble priest of politics, finance, philosophy, and religion. He unfolds his magical sheets — twopence a head his bread of knowledge costs — and instantly the entire rectangular assembly, fresh from their breakfast, are bending as one man to their second breakfast. There is, no doubt, chaff enough in what he brings; but there is fact, thought, and wisdom in the crude mass, from all regions of the world.” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” in Emerson, , ed., Complete Works, 11, 217Google Scholar.

³⁰ Emerson, , Emerson in Concord, pp. 144–45Google Scholar. For a critical view of such “urban pastorals” by one of Emerson's Concord neighbors, Nathaniel Hawthorne, see Machor, James L., “Pastoralism and the American Urban Ideal: Hawthorne, Whitman, and the Literary Pattern,” American Literature, 54 (1982), 329–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³¹ The aspiration of suburbanites to keep their personal encounters within carefully circumscribed limits has become the dominant factor of American social geography in the late twentieth century. For a survey of the evidence supporting this critical view of suburban life see Muller, Peter O., “Everyday Life in Suburbia: a Review of Changing Social and Economic Forces that Shape Daily Rhythms within the Outer City,” Ameriean Quarterly, 34 (1982), 262–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Not all Concordians, of course, blink away the unwelcome facts about life in the community. The Concord–Carlisle Human Rights Council has since 1978 organized conferences and public education programs to foster awareness of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity in the town and to promote an atmosphere of openness and tolerance. That effort was begun after racial fights broke out in the local high school between white students, resident in town, and black students, who were being bused into Concord as part of a voluntary integration program. See “Highlights of Human Rights Progress,” a chronology of recent events in town assembled by the Concord–Carlisle Human Rights Council (mimeo, 1980) and The Concord Journal, 10 December 1981.

³² Jackson, “The Crabgrass Frontier,” pp. 196–221.