Transcendental Club

Frederic Henry Hedge, Ralph Waldo Emerson, George Ripley, and George Putnam (1807–1878; the Unitarian minister in Roxbury) met in Cambridge, Massachusetts on September 8, 1836, to discuss the formation of a new club; their first official meeting was held eleven days later at Ripley's house in Boston.

[1] Other members of the club included Amos Bronson Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker,[2] Henry David Thoreau, William Henry Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Convers Francis, Sylvester Judd, Jones Very, and Charles Stearns Wheeler.

[7] Hedge wrote: "There was no club in the strict sense... only occasional meetings of like-minded men and women".

[9] One early review of Emerson's poetry, for example, warned readers that his poems "are not sacred chants; they are hymns to the devil.

In 1843, then business manager Elizabeth Peabody counted only two hundred subscribers and that its income was not covering production costs.