Transcendental Club - Definition and Overview

The Transcendental Club was the group of New England intellectuals of the early-to-mid-19th century which gave rise to Transcendentalism.

The club was established in the Boston, Massachusetts home of George Ripley, on September 8, 1836, by Frederick Henry Hedge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Orestes Brownson, Bronson Alcott, James Freeman Clarke, and Convers Francis. Other regular male members included William Henry Channing (whose uncle Dr. William Ellery Channing also attended once), Theodore Parker, Christopher Pearse Cranch, John Sullivan Dwight, Cyrus Bartol, and Caleb Stetson; the group's female members included Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody.

The club was a meeting-place for these young thinkers and an organizing ground for their idealist frustration with the general state of American culture and society at the time, and in particular, the state of intellectualism at Harvard and in the Unitarian church.

References

• Perry Miller, The Transcendentalists (Harvard University Press, 1966). ISBN 1567312152, ISBN 0674903307, ISBN 0-674-90333-1.

External links

• A brief history (http://www.vcu.edu/engweb/transcendentalism/ideas/club.html) of the Club from Transcendentalism Web