The search for utopia is always bound to be futile. Some glimpse that elusive "no place" from afar but, on getting closer, realise it was only a mirage. And on the way they inevitably realise that the "crooked timber" of humanity isn't the right material with which to create perfection. But the stories of people's searches are always illuminating, especially when it all goes spectacularly wrong, as it did at Fruitlands, the farm run by the Alcott family, and a few hangers-on, for a six-month period between June 1843 and January 1844.

The New England intelligentsia was, in the mid-19th century, entranced by transcendentalism. Bronson Alcott combined its tenets with the theories of the Swiss educational reformer Johann Pestalozzi to arrive at a bizarre philosophy that included strains of anarchism, veganism, celibacy and spirituality. Verbose and persuasive, he gathered around him a few idealists and drifters, some from Britain, who went to live on a farm in the belief that, through abstaining from sex and meat, they could recreate the Garden of Eden. Richard Francis's absorbing book provides an object lesson in everything that can go wrong in an experimental community. There was, if not exactly a love triangle, certainly a battle for the attentions and affections of the visionary founder. And Alcott was always borrowing other people's money. His trip to find recruits in England was financed by Ralph Waldo Emerson. The money for the farm was put up by an Englishman, Charles Lane. As Emerson ruefully wrote: "Their whole doctrine is spiritual, but they always end with saying, give us much land and money."

There was great tension, as often occurs, between the nuclear family  the Alcotts  and the universal family. Alcott and his acolytes were often away on research trips and lecture tours while his wife was left on the farm with children and strangers, surviving  just  on raw vegetables. The passages from Abigail Alcott's diary are illuminating: "We have always been too crowded up," she writes. "We have no room to enjoy that celestial privacy which gives a charm to connubial and domestic intimacy." Of the idealistic, vegan men, she complained that "they spare the cattle, but they forget the women and children." The austerity of the experiment bordered on cruelty. A nearby community, Brook Farm, was criticised as "miserably joyous". Meals were dull and sexual relations were prohibited, or  according to one commentator, William Oldham  allowed once every two or three years.

The most illuminating parts of the book are the contemporary observations on the experiment: such luminaries as Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller and Thomas Carlyle all cast a critical eye on Alcott's "sequestered dell", either from close up or from afar. As such, the book becomes much more than the sorry tale of a doomed utopia, but an amusing intellectual history of the mid-19th century, capturing all the conflicts and aspirations of the age.

Emerson, in particular, was both scathing and generous. "You may associate on what grounds you like," he wrote, "for economy, or for good neighborhood, for a school, or for whatever reason, only do not say that the Divine Spirit enjoins it. Do not gloze [gloss over] and prate and mystify." As Francis notes, Alcott's error was always "confusing personal whims with instructions from on high".

The trouble was that Alcott could "prate" with the best of them. And when criticised and parodied, he took it as a further sign that he was a prophet: "Great is the man," he wrote modestly, "whom his age despises, for transcendent excellence is purchased through the obloquy of contemporaries; and shame is the gate of the temple of renown." Francis notes that Alcott's "capacity for not being ironic seems almost infinite".

Francis brilliantly dissects it all: the diction, the false hopes, the sheer naivety. He quotes their dippy ditties and "orphic sayings" and recreates the whole sorry masquerade. But he somehow manages to be admirably even-handed, acknowledging that many of Alcott's ideas  regarding the environment, diet, feminism and civil disobedience  were more than a century ahead of their time. For all his eccentricities, Alcott was on the side of progress and progress, as Oscar Wilde famously wrote, "is the realisation of utopias".