Dwight at Brook Farm

Abstract With few professional prospects, Dwight settled at the socialist-utopian community of Brook Farm, located near Boston. The community attracted all sorts of personalities, and part of its lure was the arts, which were an important component of Brook Farm’s educational project. The arts were considered essential to the Farm’s success—for enjoyment, for moral uplift, and for simply keeping boredom at bay. Dwight was appointed as lead organizer of the Farm’s entertainments and designated “Chief of the Festal Series.” Given his own enthusiasms, many of the activities inevitably involved music; Dwight emphasized homegrown performances, classical repertoire, and guest artists. Dwight’s journalistic passions also emerged as he began to write essays about Beethoven’s symphonies, Handel’s Messiah, Mozart, and Haydn for James Russell Lowell’s literary periodical The Pioneer and New York’s U.S. Magazine and Democratic Review. All the while, Dwight was honing a new, personal literary style.