Thomas Hughes, author of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, was born on this date in 1822. In addition to writing the definitive fictional treatment of the boys’ public school experience in Victorian England, he also started a Utopian community in the mountains of Tennessee called Rugby, named after Dr. Thomas Arnold’s school for boys that is the subject of Tom Brown’s Schooldays.

It was to be a cooperative, class-free, agricultural community for younger sons of English gentry and others wishing to start life anew in America. At its peak, some 350 people lived in the colony. More than 70 buildings of Victorian design graced the East Tennessee townscape.

I am quite interested in intentional comunities, even those of the nineteenth century which rarely seemed to last as established communities. In fact, we were discussing these types of communities and the religious groups that started them in our American Literature discussion group today as we discussed Emerson, Thoreau, and the Transcendentalists. I would like to do a study of Utopian and planned communities and what causes them to fail or succeed or perhaps become manipulative cults.