Researching reform movements in the early 19th century and what Hawthorne thought of them was a lot harder than I thought. I only found one website - the rest of my sources were books or JSTOR.
From this research, I decided to switch my topic of researching philanthropy to researching reform movements, because philanthropy is too broad. While researching, I found that the most common reform movements of the time were abolitionism, temperance, utopian ideals, women's rights, and prison reform. Most of these found a place in The Blithedale Romance. In fact, most characters represent a reform movement: Zenobia and women's rights, Coverdale and utopian ideals, Hollingsworth and prison reform, and Priscilla and slavery. I will probably concentrate more on Hollingsworth because I wrote my reading paper on him, and I concentrated my research around prison reform.
I found out that most of these reform movements did not suceed. Prison reform was not strict enough to actually prevent crime. As we know, the women's rights movement started in the mid-19th century but women did not actually get the right to vote until the early 1900's. Other movements had different ideas on how to actually reform, so there was a lot of in-fighting. Thus, reform was not very actually very philanthropic during Hawthorne's time, and thus it is no wonder that he was not supportive of the different reform movements. Most of the characters "fail" in a sense. Zenobia commits suicide, Coverdale does nothing with his life, and Hollingsworth never achieves his dream. So, I think Hawthorne is trying to show how their specific reform movements also are going to fail.
One of my most interesting finds was an article from JSTOR, which specifically talked about Hawthorne and his thoughts on reform. Many reformers, Hawthorne claimed, had unrealistic or stupid goals that would really not help anybody. Hawthorne even tried to have an open mind with reform movements by going to Brook Farm, but even that failed and caused Hawthorne to become more disoriented with the movements of his time. Hawthorne concluded "that man's efforts to improve society will continue to accomplish nothing until the heart is purified" (704-705). So, Hawthorne was against the reformers themselves - and thus he portrays the characters in Blithedale as failures.
Turner, Arlin. "Hawthorne and Reform." The New England Quarterly 15 (1942): 700-714. JSTOR. Berkeley. 24 July 2008.
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It is really interesting how Hawthorne comments on all the reform movements of his time. I think a past post brought this up also. With Hawthorne commenting so much about reform it almost seems his writing is the like social criticism of his time. Like how you said the characters represent the reform and how they fail, much like how all those reform movements did not really succeed in his time either.
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