Anna Neima's illuminative and deftly researched Practical Utopia: The Many Lives of Dartington Hall—a “small scale story about very big ideas” (4)—provides an informed and multifaceted window into the activities of Dorothy and Leonard Elmhirst at Dartington Hall in Devonshire, England, focusing on their efforts at community building and philanthropy from the interwar years to the 1960s. The kaleidoscope of activities on Dartington's country estate has been examined from a variety of perspectives, and Neima is not the only writer to become fascinated with the progressive optimism and wide-ranging activities of Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst, an enormously rich American heiress, and her second husband, Leonard Elmhirst, a Yorkshire squire interested in agrarian reform and rural regeneration. Together, and in concert with numerous artists, reformers and idealistic schemers, the Elmhirsts pursued an array of experiments in education, the arts, agriculture, and social organization, sustained with their enthusiasm for communitarian living and “learning by doing” (9).
Leonard was deeply influenced by Rabindranath Tagore's grassroots rural reconstruction activities at Sriniketan in Bengal, India, and spent a good deal of time there communicating with Tagore following their meeting in New York in 1921. Indeed, Tagore's focus on rural reconstruction and views on “life in its completeness” (100) was a shared goal of the Elmhirsts, coloring many of their activities during the decades they resided at Dartington. Whether a “utopian experiment” (4) is an accurate label for their varied ventures in community living and supports for counterculture, Dartington was nevertheless a special place, open to a fascinating variety of radical ideas, innovations, and visiting artists and personalities. Supported by Leonard's optimistic view that there was no such thing as a failed experiment and sustained by Dorothy's immense wealth and extensive connections with progressive influential families in the United States, the estate took shape around a collection of eclectic enterprises and social experiments.
Neima divides her focus on Dartington Hall into three periods—1925 to the early 1930s; the decade of the 1930s; and the post-World War II years—as she traces a jigsaw of activities during (and across) each of these periods in the domains of education, creativity (dance, music and drama), and agriculture and rural life. First, however, she addresses the social and spiritual questing of the Elmhirsts themselves and their experiments with new forms of religiosity unmoored from the safe anchorage of conventional Protestantism that had framed their earlier lives. When Dorothy remarried and made England her home she maintained her well-practiced obligations of social reform, but she did so in the relative isolation of Dartington Hall. Even so, the Elmhirsts’ efforts to educate their growing family and work with a wide variety of others as agencies of social change were increasingly frustrated by a changing world. They had hoped that Dartington could succeed in its goals without resorting to a great deal of organization, though as it grew and diversified it became clear it could not. Poor management and never-ending experimentation meant the estate hemorrhaged money, and antagonism swirled among those who sought patronage for their various artistic or educational visions, especially during the earlier years of the experiment.
Neima pays special attention to how the Elmhirsts emerged from the brutality of World War I unmoored from their orthodox Christian faith but with their ethos of public service largely intact. One approach was to experiment with new forms of religiosity, spiritual quests, pacifism, the arts, and social service, reinfusing daily life with alternative socio-spiritual frameworks provided by Tagore and visitors such as Gerald Heard and his friends Aldous and Julian Huxley. Heard, for example, was a particular influence on the Elmhirsts. Partly psychological, partly mystical, the meditation group or “generating cell” (66) he established at Dartington focused on encouraging isolated individuals to participate meaningfully in community with one another.
A great deal has been written about educational experiments on the Dartington estate, especially during the interwar years. Neima might have provided a more detailed analysis of the Elmhirsts’ shifting pedagogical ambitions and their somewhat confused efforts to follow various plans and define what a progressive education should look like and how it might incorporate their wider mission of rural regeneration. The appointment of Bill Curry as headmaster to the Dartington school in 1931 served to temper Leonard's early ambitions for an experimental school governed largely by the interests of its students. Curry argued for a school that was a model for the world one would desire, more like a research station for both students and teachers (though he hardly modeled this in his personal behavior). In fact, notes Neima, he softened Dartington School's radicalism during the 1930s by catering to an elite subculture and providing a shop window for progressive education. His management did not thrive in the decades following World War II, and a demoralized Currie was forced to resign in 1957.
Dorothy nurtured art, especially creative expression, and Neima's discussion on creativity parallels a number of other more substantive works detailing Dartington's pre–World War II accommodation of refugee artists fleeing Nazi aggression, among them choreographers and dancers Kurt Jooss, Sigurd Leeder, and Rudolf Laban. Arriving from Russia, actor-director Michael Chekhov had a particularly strong artistic influence on Dorothy, who not only became his devoted pupil at Dartington but went with him when he moved to the United States, returning only upon the threatened outbreak of World War II.
What then, argues Neima, was the afterlife of this “practical utopia,” planned by a couple with extraordinary privileges to steer community development “towards commercialized feudalism” (238) while living a lavish lifestyle of comfort and international travel? In many respects, they were advocates for the people, though not of them, and perhaps for the Elmhirsts this was indeed “life in its completeness” (100). They showed no sign of regretting the use they made of their lives even though their theoretical enthusiasm for grassroots democracy was accompanied by an ambivalence about it in practice that ultimately did as much to shape the Dartington estate as did those they hired to promote healthy industry and agriculture in the countryside, experimental schools, and the planning of social reform.
