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All of the above elements and more are packed into Jackie Latham’s intriguing account of one such experiment, Alcott House, a community in England dating from 1838 and enduring in one form or another for ten years. Alcott House was located in existing buildings on grounds of four acres on one side of Ham Common, some ten miles to the south-west of London. It was one of a number of fashionable houses in the locality and in some ways an unlikely setting for an experiment designed to change the world. But it was also a spiritual community and its members did nothing in an outward sense to offend their ostensibly bourgeois neighbors (one of whom was, in fact, John Minter Morgan, who had himself flirted at one stage with Owenism and later promoted his own scheme for Anglican village communities).

Known also as the Ham Common Concordium, there were two related parts to the experiment, a working community and a progressive school. The community had at its most some thirty members, all subscribing to the common creed of reforming themselves from within. It was an austere environment, a world of cold baths, celibacy, a sparse vegetarian diet and minimal comforts. The monastic regime was governed by the ringing of bells to herald the various stages in the day, starting each morning at 5am. Visitors to the community invariably commented on the meager, largely uncooked meals, consisting of fruit, cold vegetables, bread, and water. Salt and spices, like meat, were avoided for fear they would enflame the passions.

In their search for the New Eden the participants experimented with various practices designed to improve bodily and spiritual health. Diet was at the heart of this but there was an appetite, too, for a wide mix of other pursuits that challenged convention: hydropathy (a treatment for ills based on the stimulant of cold water), mesmerism, phrenology, astrology, pacifism and celibacy. The men in the community grew long hair and beares, and wore loose trousers, shirts and blouses in what was later to become familiar in Tolstoyan communities. In defiance of convention, the women discarded the restrictive corset. Together, they grew their own fruit and vegetables, but it was the school that proved to be the mainstay of the community.

Alcott House (as the school was known, after the American educator, Bronson Alcott) catered for children from outside the community (usually the offspring of radical sympathizers) as well as from within. Although based on the Pestalozzian axiom of the spiritual goodness of the child, there was also a belief that the young had to be liberated from the corrupting influence of the sexual union from which they were formed. Under the tutelage in its first years of Henry Gardiner Wright, a remarkable diverse curriculum was developed with practical skills such as gardening and domestic economy as well as more cerebral subjects. But the aim was less on what was taught and more on the nurturing of a sense of moral wellbeing.

In a period when communitarian ideas flourished but also when few experiments endured, the Concordium with its ten-year history was something of a landmark. With considerable skill, the author has ranged widely to find archival sources that explain its varied provenance and influences. She points, in particular, to James Pierrepont Greaves, the inspiration for the scheme; to Sophia Chichester, the generous benefactor who supported Greaves; and to a critical trans-Atlantic influence, in the form of the American Transcendental movement with its key members, Bronson Alcott and Ralph Emerson.

Greaves himself was a dedicated individual, who spent the first part of his career conventionally enough in business, until, bankrupted and disillusioned, he turned to more spiritual ways. He looked at one stage to Owenism but rejected the materialism of that creed in favour of first transforming oneself. In using the term ‘sacred socialism’ he sought to identify with aspects of Owenism while giving due emphasis to the ‘divine in Man’. The watershed in Greaves’s life came in 1817, when he claims to have experienced a divine visitation, after which he shunned in dramatic fashion all worldly wants in favour of an ascetic existence. Rather than totally withdrawing he set out, with some success, to convert others to the wisdom of his beliefs; those who were so attracted described him as charismatic and spoke of his ‘magnetic eye’. Ironically, Greaves lived in the community that he promoted for only a short time, although he visited frequently and was to die there in 1842 after his famous cold water treatment failed to reverse a deteriorating condition.

His most important convert was Sophia Catherine Chichester (little known to modern readers before Latham’s research). Well connected in aristocratic circles but widowed at an early age she lived with her sister, Georgiana, in a large country house. She and her sister enjoyed a substantial income, derived partly through their former marriage but also through a family fortune amassed from sugar plantations in the Caribbean. In spite of their conventional backgrounds they both took a keen interest in radical ideas and causes. They were already familiar with the strange world of mystics and prophets before they met greaves, but it was to his cause that they were most closely drawn. They became the main sponsors for Alcott House, and to be close to the experiment even moved from their country resident to a house on Ham Common.

The third set of influences on the experiment derived from a strong association with the New England based Transcendentalists. Ralph Emerson encouraged his friend, Bronson Alcott, to visit England in 1842, amongst other things to see for himself the experiment named after him by Greaves. When he returned he was accompanied by Henry Wright and another member of the community, Charles Lane, together with the library of the recently deceased Greaves; this was the advance guard in plans to transport the entire community to America. Wright soon left the group, leaving Alcott and Lane to settle onto a ninety-acre farm that they renamed Fruitlands. Henry Thoreau was invited to join it but, as events showed, sensibly refused. In spite of its fertile land and idyllic setting the venture lasted just seven months, foundering on familiar grounds of fractious relationships and lack of practical commitment.

Latham has done well to bring together these diverse sources into a readable and, in many parts, hitherto little known account of an unusual experiment. She has succeeded in drawing a clear line between the ideas that underpinned Alcott House and the more materialist basis of Owenite experiments in the same period; in revealing how a woman like Sophia Chichester found a way to influence events at a time when public interventions were seen as unseemly; and in describing one of the many links that developed between the Old and New World searches for the New Eden. Simply as an account of an experimental community it will attract the attention of utopian scholars; in addition to this it points to a wider context of related ideas and experience.

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Photograph courtesy of Louise Dell-Bene Stahl © 2001