Almost paradise

IN BOSTON MAGAZINE'S 2004 "Best Places to Live" issue, Concord ranked a dismal 91st in the "Best Bang for Your Buck" category, and was singled out as an example of how a town's historical cachet can make its real estate absurdly expensive. Back in 1842, however, writes Lexington-based independent scholar Philip McFarland in his new book, "Hawthorne in Concord" (Grove) a portrait of Nathaniel Hawthorne and the network of Boston-area philosophers, social reformers, and slacker intellectuals he counted as friends Concord came "as near to approximating Utopia on earth as any community in America before or since."

Asked in a telephone interview to justify this lofty claim, McFarland offered an authoritative source: social philosopher Lewis Mumford's seminal study "The Story of Utopias" (1922). "Mumford's analysis of what makes for the best community to live in involves a town's modest size, its autonomy, its rural beauty, and the distinctiveness of its humanity," McFarland told Ideas. "Concord at the time Hawthorne first lived there, from 1842 to 1845, had about 2,000 people, it was near Boston yet self-reliant, and Emerson had assembled around him there, in that beautiful spot, a little society of poets, thinkers, and conversationalists. I can't think of any other place, casting my mind over America's history, that would compare with it."

Yet Hawthorne, as McFarland's biography makes clear, wasn't perfectly content in Concord primarily because the 38-year-old author of "Twice-Told Tales," who'd spent several years measuring cargoes of coal and salt in the Boston customhouse, found it impossible to make a living as a writer.

"It was a utilitarian time in America, and those few who had the leisure or inclination to read fiction preferred British novelists like Dickens," explained McFarland. "Hawthorne admired neighbors like Bronson Alcott and Emerson's handyman Harry Thoreau, both of whom refused to hold down steady jobs, but when his first child was born in 1844, he took steps to assure himself of an income."

What did he do? In the fall of `45 Hawthorne removed his family to his hometown of Salem and started angling for a civil service job. The rent in Utopia, it seems, was too high.