Amos Bronson Alcott

Alcott’s friends and neighbours in Emerson’s transcendentalist circle also included Hawthorne and Thoreau. Emerson persuaded him to move to Concord, and later lent him the money to go to Britain (where he visited Carlyle, who admired him greatly although he couldn’t keep to one subject for long). Alcott’s ideas of peaceful resistance influenced Thoreau’s own thought. Fuller and Peabody helped him in one of his experimental schools, Peabody’s writings (and Martineau’s visit) helping spread the message. Whitman and he were mutual admirers, while his daughter Louisa May provided the financial security that had escaped him.