Nathaniel Hawthorne

                             The Blithedale Romance

                                    Preface

In the »Blithedale« of this volume, many readers will probably suspect a faint
and not very faithful shadowing of BROOK FARM, in Roxbury, which (now a little
more than ten years ago) was occupied and cultivated by a company of socialists.
The Author does not wish to deny, that he had this Community in his mind, and
that (having had the good fortune, for a time, to be personally connected with
it) he has occasionally availed himself of his actual reminiscences, in the hope
of giving a more lifelike tint to the fancy-sketch in the following pages. He
begs it to be understood, however, that he has considered the Institution itself
as not less fairly the subject of fictitious handling, than the imaginary
personages whom he has introduced there. His whole treatment of the affair is
altogether incidental to the main purpose of the Romance; nor does he put
forward the slightest pretensions to illustrate a theory, or elicit a
conclusion, favorable or otherwise, in respect to Socialism.
    In short, his present concern with the Socialist Community is merely to
establish a theatre, a little removed from the highway of ordinary travel, where
the creatures of his brain may play their phantasmagorical antics, without
exposing them to too close a comparison with the actual events of real lives. In
the old countries, with which Fiction has long been conversant, a certain
conventional privilege seems to be awarded to the romancer; his work is not put
exactly side by side with nature; and he is allowed a license with regard to
every-day Probability, in view of the improved effects which he is bound to
produce thereby. Among ourselves, on the contrary, there is as yet no such Faery
Land, so like the real world, that, in a suitable remoteness, one cannot well
tell the difference, but with an atmosphere of strange enchantment, beheld
through which the inhabitants have a propriety of their own. This atmosphere is
what the American romancer needs. In its absence, the beings of imagination are
compelled to show themselves in the same category as actually living mortals; a
necessity that generally renders the paint and pasteboard of their composition
but too painfully discernible. With the idea of partially obviating this
difficulty, (the sense of which has always pressed very heavily upon him,) the
Author has ventured to make free with his old, and affectionately remembered
home, at BROOK FARM, as being, certainly, the most romantic episode of his own
life - essentially a day-dream, and yet a fact - and thus offering an available
foothold between