Читать книгу A Journey Into the Transcendentalists' New England - R. Todd Felton - Страница 20

Boston, New England’s only real metropolis, was the center of the American literary landscape for most of the nineteenth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes dubbed Boston’s State House “the hub of the solar system,” and the phrase was quickly applied to the city as a whole by proud Bostonians, who had no doubt that their city was the center of the country. Situated on a peninsula jutting out into Boston Harbor, this growing city proved an ideal location for the publishing and distribution of many of America’s first and finest-literary works.

After the War of 1812, the city surpassed its neighbor to the north, Salem, as the leading port and shipping center of New England. By midcentury, the industrial revolution had brought both unbelievable wealth and an influx of poverty-stricken immigrants, which helped fuel the enormous changes taking place in the city. The well-ordered society of the Puritans and Calvinists soon became a hotbed for radical thought and theology, a fertile ground for social movements defending the oppressed and enslaved, and a bustling publishing center that gave the young nation much of its literature. Lectures, formal discussion groups, clubs, and planning societies debated and developed many of the ideas that were to make an indelible mark on American society. This was the Boston of the nineteenth century that helped introduce Transcendentalism to the world.