Annotations - Louisa May Alcott, "Transcendental Wild Oats" (1873)
John Pease
introduced as "a bland, bearded Englishman, who expected to be saved by eating uncooked food and going without clothes." (1569) This character represents Samuel Bower, a member of the Ham Common Concordium (of which he wrote a brief history) who, with Charles Lane, accompanied Alcott back to New England in 1842. An Owenite (utopian socialist), Bower was militantly opposed to private property and to government. He wrote for William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator and in that newspaper in September 1843 he expressed his conviction that "if the butcher be disarmed of his knife, the soldier cannot long retain his sword--if we can rid the kitchen of its horrors and keep our tables free from the mangled corse, private and public manslaying will soon be obsolete." (140) Bower is the author of two radical pamphlets published in Bradford, England, in 1838: The Peopling of Utopia; or The Sufficiency of Socialism for Human Happiness: Being a Comparison of the Social and Radical Schemes and A Sequel to the Peopling of Utopia; or The Sufficiency of Socialism for Human Happiness: Being a Comparison of the Social and Radical Schemes.