SUMMARY (Ridvan Askin, edited Deborah Madsen):

This is an epistolary utopian reform novel that engages primarily with the issue of gender relations. Nichols advocates for free love, in the historical sense that state and church authorities have no business in interfering with personal relationships, which can include several simultaneous intimate, though not necessarily sexual, relationships, and that women should have the right to self-determination and to choose their partners freely. The eponymous "Esperanza" is a utopian community in the far West that represents the hope for social reform. In the Introduction Nichols summarizes the plot:

The book is in the form of a series of letters, purporting to have been written by a young gentleman of the city of New York, who starts on a journey to the “Far West;” his object is to seek for a pleasant location for the future home of himself and “Clara,” his affianced.

    The first several letters bear date from various points on the line of the journey, the others are most of them written at Esperanza during the visit which he enjoyed there.

    The descriptive history of his journey begins at the depot of the New York and Erie Rail Road.

    The young gentleman enters the cars and finds them crowded. A lady passenger motions him to a seat beside her. In this early part of the acquaintance they find themselves both traveling west, and agree to bear each other company. He accepts an invitation to visit her home and her friends.

    They make the journey by way of Niagara, Buffalo, Cleveland, Columbus, Cincinnati, stopping for a day or two at some of these points. Various interesting incidents occur, yet the pleasure of reading the book must not be marred by naming them here. From Cincinnati they travel by steamboat down the Ohio river to the Mississippi, down that river a long distance, then up one of its tributaries to Esperanza, the beautiful home of Miss Elmore (iii-iv).

Overall, the Introduction continues, “[h]uman life, in purity, peace and love, is compared and placed in contrast with life in lust, discord and jealousy” (iv). The introductory note also voices concern that “[m]embers of the society who are living in such great harmony and happiness at 'Esperanza,' are some of them represented as having intimate relations of love, and sharing the responsibility of offspring with more than one of the opposite sex” (v). It also notes that, apparently, “the opinions and faith of the author” changed “in some respects” during the writing process (iv).

The protagonist, Frank Wilson, makes the acquaintance of an intriguing, free thinking thirty-year old woman (Miss Melodia Elmore) on the train headed west. From the start, they engage in conversation on diverse matters of social reform, from love and marriage to Abolition, women's rights, and politics more generally. At one point, Melodia lectures Frank:

“Social happiness has been sought in political liberty, and its result, in the present forms yet achieved, has been only to awaken men to a keener sense of unhappy conditions.

    “A few seek happiness in honors or wealth. Honors and wealth are beautiful and good; but not a social state in which they are the result of intrigue and injustice.

    “Property is plunder; position is an imposition; and power is usurpation. The world is a society of Ishmaels; every man has one hand upon his neighbor's throat and the other in his pocket. All are robbers and all are robbed, but the strongest and most cunning get most of the spoil. All are oppressors and all are oppressed; but the weakest, the ignorant, the women, and the negroes somewhat the worst. The picture is strongly drawn; but if you consider it, you will find it true” (51).

Esperanza, of which Melodia happens to be a resident and where Frank will take up residence, is the embodied counter to such a society. The question of veganism is broached early on. One of the first dinners they have together, Frank describes as follows:

Our dinner itself, was of little account. I have long been half a vegetarian, and the flesh of most dead animals disgusts me. It is but a modified cannibalism; and some of these dead bodies, set on our tables to be eaten, I know had better be in the cemetery. I am not satisfied with myself when habit, or some remnant of savageism in my nature, tempts me to eat food worthy only of a savage or a beast of prey. I could not imagine this pure and lovely woman, putting flesh between her lips. She quietly waved away the soup, declined fish, asked the waiter to remove the side dishes nearest us, and took a potatoe and some maccaroni; and afterward some pudding, and fruit. Of course, I followed her example. I could not have done otherwise, had I wished (32).

Of the pork trade, Melodia says that “the animal, in his filth, gluttony, diseases, and destiny, is a representative of the impure, sensual, selfish, and miserable lives of most of those who fatten, buy, sell, and eat him. O Moses and Mahommed! ye lived in ages of darkness, but ye knew better than to eat pork” (54).

Melodia's name echoes the “laws of harmony in music” that they “find to be those of social accord” (109-110) and according to which the community at Esperanza lives. The community follows a largely vegan diet: “the staples of consumption were the various preparations of corn and wheat, in bread, mush, and cakes, and fruits, fresh and preserved, or in marmalades and syrups” (111). On several other occasions, meals primarily consist of fruits and grains (119, 127, 173, 320). Esperanza also seems to have adopted, at least in some particulars, the principles of Orson Squire Fowler's octagon architecture, as a member's study is said to be “an octagon room with seven windows” with a “carved octagon table in the center of the room” (112, 114).

The principles of harmony at Esperanza include “[i]ndividual freedom,” freedom “from all prejudices and superstitions,” the rejection of “false gods,” “self-govern[ment],” and “physical purity, or health” through “pure habits, and the disuse of all diseasing aliment” (129).  Love relations need “no legal bond” (129). Work is organized as “general or communal labor” (147). Esperanza cannot welcome “a flesh-eater with his butcherings; a tobacco user, poisoning our atmosphere; a bigot with his persecuting spirit, willing to commence on earth the tortures he believes to be in store in future for all who are not of his creed; a domestic despot, holding property in a wife or husband” (131). Overall, Esperanza  operates on and promotes the principles of “self-ownership and self-governmnet [sic], and the mutual adaptation and responsiblity [sic] of each to all, and all to each” (132).

The community lives according to Nichols' own convictions and program concerning health, as expounded in his writings. One member of the community clarifies:

Health is the natural condition; disease the unnatural. Men earn their diseases. Even where there is malaria, or a poisoned atmosphere, one whose life is pure and true in all other respects, can resist a single cause of disease. People who eat no flesh of dead animals; who take no such poisons as opium, tobacco, hops, or whiskey; who do not exhaust their lives by any immoderate or unnatural indulgence; who are pure and chaste, have a vigor of life which triumphs over many evils. Harmony of the system is health; and where is each body and spirit so likely to be in harmony, as in a harmonic society? We have solved the question of disease (151).

Much of the novel is a panegyric to the many accomplishments of Esperanza, from personal relations to communal living, from labor and work to education, from the arts to physical and mental well-being. The major focus, however, is on free love which, often  “stigmatized by sensualists,”  for the residents of Esperanza is in fact synonymous with “harmonic life,” and the rights of women. At one point, Frank confesses that the

realization of the freedom of woman, opens to me as a new dispensation. In savagism, woman is a drudging slave. In barbarism, a slave of appetite and luxury. In civilization, still a slave, of fashion, custom, law, and the marriage institution, in which her most sacred life is crucified, and which is to her, so often, a hopeless bondage, full of constraint, deprivation, and often outrage. I have seen all this. Now I see woman free (196).

The novel ends with Frank's final letter home, just before he sets out to fetch his beloved so that they can both join the community at Esperanza.