The Blithedale Romance takes place in the 19th century in Massachusetts, outside Boston. Hawthorne based the setting on a utopian farming commune called Brook Farm, of which he was a founding member (as he explicitly specifies in the Preface). Like Brook Farm, Blithedale was "occupied and cultivated by a company of socialists." It is first described in Chapter 2 (titled "Blithedale"):
[...]there can hardly flicker up again so cheery a blaze upon the hearth, as that which I remember, the next day, at Blithedale. It was a wood-fire, in the parlor of an old farm-house, on an April afternoon[...] The staunch oaken-logs were long ago burnt out. Their genial glow must be represented, if at all, by the merest phosphoric glimmer[...] Around such chill mockery of a fire, some few of us might [...] talk over our exploded scheme for beginning the life of Paradise anew.
This description of an old farmhouse gives the reader a good sense of Blithedale. It is not fancy or luxurious, and its potential to flourish rather depends on the action of its inhabitants. The narrator intentionally opens his description of Blithedale with this hearth fire, which symbolizes the fleeting hope of everyone in the commune that it would work out. But the phrase "exploded scheme" hints at the eventual failure of the project.
