THE BLITHEDALE ROMANCE

Boston: Ticknor, Reed and Fields, 1852. First American edition, first issue, binding A, earliest dated ads (April). 8vo, in the original Ticknor style A brown cloth, lettered in gilt on spine and with all-over decorative work in blind on the covers. 288, [4 ads. bound at the front] pp. An especially fresh and bright copy, the text-block very clean and fresh, the binding tight and strong, the gilt work unusually well preserved. A lovely copy. FIRST EDITION AND FIRST ISSUE, and a very scarce Hawthorne title in such fine condition. An uncommonly bright and fresh copy.
Hawthorne's "romance' was based on Brook Farm, a community farm near Boston. It examines what progress, if any, has been made to the human animal. Blithedale, like Brook Farm, was a would-be modern Arcadia along the lines of the anti-capitalist ideals of Charles Fourier, but in spite of the lofty ideals falls pray to the self-interested behavior of its members. Though this concept for a work of fiction may sound a bit heady, Henry James called it "the lightest, the brightest, the liveliest" of Hawthorne's "fictions." Hawthorne’s claim that the characters of the novel are “entirely fictitious” has been widely questioned and many suggest that Bronson Alcott, Emerson, Horace Mann , Margaret Fuller and Hawthorne himself can all be found in this novel.