R. W. Emerson. Two ladies, Margaret Fuller and Elizabeth P. Peabody, and possibly others, were admitted.
Mr. Emerson in his chapter called "Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England," in Lectures and Biographical Sketches, speaks of the Dial magazine as perhaps the most important result of these very informal meetings, which continued until about 1840. Perhaps eight years later a new attempt was made to supply the want of a literary club. Mrs. Ednah Cheney says,1 1.1 "A certain almost forgotten institution, the Town and Country Club, where Concord and Boston were expected to meet and exchange the wisdom of the world and Nature, was established by Mr. Alcott about 1848, and Mr. Emerson and others heartily joined in the scheme." Mrs. Cheney tells elsewhere of the grievance that the club decided against the admission of women, influenced by Mr. Emerson's urgency on this subject, though it appears that they were admitted to its open meetings. Mr. George W. Cooke says in his book on Emerson: "The Town and Country Club was mainly organized by the efforts of Alcott. Emerson gave it its name, and he read before it the first essay to which it listened, on Books and Reading. This was May 2, 1849. Among its members were Garrison, Parker, W. H. Channing, W. E. Channing [of Concord], Alcott, Phillips, Hedge, Howe, King, Lowell, Weiss, Whipple, Higginson, Very, Pillsbury and Thoreau." It may well be doubted whether Thoreau joined, though Mr. Emerson would have been sure to have urged his doing so.
In his own village Mr. Emerson belonged to a club of a very different kind, the Social Circle, lineal descendant of the Committee of Safety during the Revolution, its avowed purposes
