Transcendental Club Guide, Meaning , Facts, Information and Description
The Transcendental Club was a group of New England Transcendentalist intellectuals of the early-to-mid-19th century. The club was established in the Cambridge, 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.