(1813-1893)
John Sullivan Dwight was born in Boston, Massachusetts, May 13th,
1813. After graduation at Harvard in 1832, he studied at the Divinity
School, and for two years was pastor of a Unitarian church in
Northampton, Massachusetts. He then became interested in founding the
famous Brook Farm community, which furnished Hawthorne with the
background for 'The Blithedale Romance'; and he is mentioned in the
preface to this book with Ripley, Dana, Channing, Parker, etc. This
was a "community" scheme, undertaken by joint ownership in a farm in
West Roxbury near Boston; associated with the names of Hawthorne,
Emerson, George William Curtis, and C.A. Dana,--a scheme which Emerson
called "a perpetual picnic, a French Revolution in small, an age of
reason in a patty-pan." This community existed seven years, and to
quote again from Emerson,--"In Brook Farm was this peculiarity, that
there was no head. In every family is the father; in every factory a
foreman; in a shop a master; in a boat the skipper; but in this Farm
no authority; each was master or mistress of their actions; happy,
hapless anarchists."
Here Mr. Dwight edited The Harbinger, a periodical published by that
community; taught languages and music, besides doing his share of the
manual labor. In 1848 he returned to Boston and engaged in literature
and musical criticism; and in 1852 he established Dwight's Journal of
Music, which he edited for thirty years. Many of his best essays
appeared in the Atlantic Monthly, and he contributed to various
periodicals.
He was one of the pioneers of scholarly, intelligent, original, and
literary musical criticism in America, and he possessed fine general
attainments and a distinct style. It is because of his clear
perception of the indispensableness of the arts--and especially of the
art of music--to life, and because of his clear statement of their
vital relationship, that his work belongs to literature.