The Emerson Study

Emerson and the Early Years of the Concord Museum

The Concord Museum and the Emerson Family have enjoyed a long relationship; Ralph Waldo Emerson attended the first meeting that led to the creation of the Concord Antiquarian Society (now the Concord Museum) and his daughter Ellen Emerson was a charter member of the Society. The present-day Museum is directly across the Cambridge Turnpike from the Emerson House and was built on land provided by the Emerson Family.

In 1930 the R.W. Emerson Memorial Association determined that the year-long demand for visitation by pilgrims to Emerson’s doorstep was better met at the Concord Museum than at the house, and sent the Study’s contents across the street to an exact reproduction of the room. Since that time, the Museum has welcomed well over a million visitors from all over the world to view an icon of American letters that is perhaps without parallel—the Study of Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Significance of the Emerson Study

Ralph Waldo Emerson enjoyed an international reputation in his lifetime as the leading light among American intellectuals. The thinkers that he gathered around him in Concord made that small town the center of the Transcendentalist movement in the 1840s; generations of travelers and students subsequently made a special pilgrimage to visit the always-welcoming “sage of Concord.” Emerson's Study—the haunt of Henry Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody—was the center of much of the “great activity of thought and experimenting” that stirred New England in the 1830s and 40s. In his Study, he entertained a steady stream of visitors—from America and overseas, famous and infamous, and obscure—for forty years. Children especially were given a warm welcome, a tour of favorite paintings and sculpture and a pencil and paper for drawing.

For Emerson, his Study had always been more than just a room in his home. There he could hear “the voices which we hear in solitude” that “grow faint and inaudible as we enter into the world.” In the Study, Emerson not only read, but wrote, aiming to put his whole philosophy into words—published volumes, numerous lectures, journals and notebooks and extensive correspondence with friends and relations all over the world.

Highlights of the Furnishings of the Study

• The rocking chair branded by New Ipswich, N.H., chairmaker Abijah Wetherbee. In the only known photograph of Emerson in his study, he is seated in this favored chair. His daughter Ellen said of her father’s rocking chair that it was “the chair in which he really spent his whole indoor life.” Sitting in the rocking chair drawn up to the round study table, Emerson wrote on a pad held on his knees.
• The Study shelves housed a working library that changed over time. The books there now (approximately 1500 volumes) are those that were there in the 1870s. Included are books in English, German, French, and Latin, languages that Emerson read with comparative ease. Some of the books that Emerson had had since his student days (for instance, over twenty volumes of Latin translations of Plato) and some were added shortly before his death. Included are bequests from the libraries of friends and family, including Charles Lane (a Brook Farm participant), Charles Emerson, Bronson Alcott, and Henry Thoreau. Numerous volumes are inscribed gifts from authors who benefited from Emerson’s encouragement, either directly or through his writings. Areas of particular interest to Emerson are well represented in the Study library, including English poets, particularly Shakespeare, Coleridge, and Wordsworth; essayists Montaigne, Goethe, and Carlyle; works of Persian mystic poets; and Hindu sacred texts.
• The painting of “The Three Fates” painted by William Allen Wall after the sixteenth-century original in the Pitti Palace, Florence. Wall traveled with Emerson in Europe in 1833 and gave him this painting when he returned to America.
• The horsehair sofa that welcomed many a visitor to the Study, including Daniel Webster, Louis Agassiz, John Brown and Oliver Wendell Holmes, then tripped many of them as they took their leave.
• A painting of goldenrod and asters by May Alcott, sister of Louisa May Alcott, given as a Christmas gift to Emerson

History of the Study at the Concord Museum

When the Study was first installed in the Museum in 1930, a wallpaper similar to the original was hung and an unfigured carpet put down in place of the original. In 1996, an additional viewing area was opened and visitors now approach the Study as if from the Front Door of the Emerson House. Interpretive material, including an audio of comments of those who visited the study — Louisa May Alcott, Moncure Conway, a Harvard Divinity student and Margaret Fuller, Emerson's friend — was added and the Study became the center of the new Why Concord? history galleries. In 2003, in recognition of the bicentennial of Emerson’s birth, the Study was reinstalled with wallpaper and carpeting reproduced from newly-discovered surviving samples. A photograph of Emerson in his Study shows that its present arrangement and contents are as they were in his lifetime.

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