VIEWS OF THE NEW ENGLAND COUNTRYSIDE

Author: Date: SUNDAY, June 22, 1997

Page: N19

Section: Books

We think of the quaint village with its white-clapboarded church surrounding a town green and a cluster of shops as the core image of the New England colonial community. But in ``The New England Village'' (Johns Hopkins University Press, $39.95), Joseph S. Wood maintains that that icon was really a romantic 19th-century invention. The makers of colonial New England, writes Wood, envisioned ``dispersed settlement on freehold farms'' in towns where most of the land consisted of ``grasslands to support cattle.'' Only as commerce arose and the rural economy declined did the familiar compact villages arise. In a sense, then, the colonial community was more ``suburban'' than that of the 19th century. Wood teaches geography at George Mason University.

Fruitlands, Brook Farm, and Thoreau's ``community of one'' at Walden Pond were the three Transcendentalist social experiments of 19th-century Massachusetts. Famous as those places are, though, historian Richard Francis, who teaches at Manchester University in England, maintains in ``Transcendental Utopias: Individual and Community at Brook Farm, Fruitlands and Walden'' (Cornell University Press, $32.50) that they form a consistent worldview which has not been adequately explained. They were ``bridgers of duality'' between the autonomous self and the larger world. In their utopias, Francis writes, ``the Transcendentalists confronted . . . the central paradox of utopianism: that it acknowledges disorder (in its dissatisfaction with the status quo) while affirming order (in offering a millennial prospect.''

Last in this New England sampler is ``Common Lands, Common People: The Origins of Conservation in Northern New England'' by Richard W. Judd (Harvard University Press, $35). Judd, who teaches history at the University of Maine, explains how the ethic of conservation of natural resources arose among country people in northern New England long before it spread throughout America. It was not the creation of urban intellectuals (nor of nature-loving Transcendentalists), but of the people who had been close to Nature all along.

``In nineteenth-century New England,'' Judd writes, ``this land ethic absorbed a complicated mix of Christian theology, practical wisdom, economic incentive, and secondhand natural history. It inspired a penetrating search for the regularities and harmonies of nature, and it gave local land-use practices a definably moral cast.''