ine power was at work which was the fundamental reality of the self and which linked the self to the outer world.
Alcott wrote a number of books detailing his theory and practice of education, and these works attracted men like Emerson and William Ellery Channing. They also made Alcott a number of enemies, and he lost a number of pupils because their parents saw his ideas as dangerous and improper. Temple School did well until it was reviewed by Harriet Martineau in her Society in America:
Mistress of a harsh and vituperative style, she turned it in all its strength upon the Alcott experiment. She gave voice to a current of antipathy which had previously existed but had found no spokesman. The criticism was strengthened by Alcott's unfortunately publishing at just this time his Conversations with Children on the Gospels, regarded as an irreligious and obscene book.
During this time, young Louisa did not attend her father's school but was taught by him at home. The family moved first to concord and then to England after the closure of the school, and they returned in the 1840s. Bronson Alcott fell in then with a group of mystics and made plans for a cooperative community, leading to an ill-fated experiment at Fruitlands, a transcendental, communal, vege
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