Henry David Thoreau

(1817–1862)

The material was pure, and his art was pure; how could the result be other than wonderful?

(“The Artist of Kouroo” in Walden)

A surveyor, farmer, musician, architect, ecologist, carpenter, mason, botanist, zoologist, and teacher, Henry David Thoreau of Concord, Massachusetts, changed the world—with his pen. He published only two of his seven books in his own lifetime, but he influenced Mohandas K. (Mahatma) Gandhi and many other activists, especially through his “Civil Disobedience” essay, and he inspired countless idealists to experiment with life as he recounted his sojourn in Walden.

Christened David Henry Thoreau (rhymes with furrow), he soon switched his two first names. Nathaniel Hawthorne described his neighbor memorably as “a singular character—a young man with much of wild original nature still remaining in him.... He is as ugly as sin, long-nosed, queermouthed, and with uncouth and somewhat rustic, although courteous manners” (Meltzer and Harding 91). Yet he charmed Hawthorne, LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, and the children he taught in his youth. When he died at only 44 of lung troubles exacerbated by his work with his father manufacturing pencils, Concord’s children piled flowers on his grave.

The third child of John and Cynthia Thoreau, he descended from French, English, and Scotch forebears. John, “a quiet mousey sort of man” (Harding 4), was an unsuccessful businessman, but he passed along to his son his love of the flute and of classical literature. Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia, in contrast to her small and quiet husband, was a tall, opinionated, and liberal-minded woman, active in such groups as the Concord Women’s Anti-Slavery Society. The mother of four passed along to Henry her passionate advocacy of reform and her love for roaming through the woods. Thoreau’s domestic education was broadened by the somewhat awkward stages of his formal schooling. At Mrs. Wheeler’s nursery school he stood apart from his little friends; in the public grammar school children called him “The Judge” or “the fine scholar with the big nose.” At age 11 David Henry entered Concord Academy, which, he said, “fitted or made [him] unfi t for college” (Meltzer and Harding 21). In 1833 Thoreau entered Harvard on money ($179 per year) scraped together by his older siblings, parents, and aunts. There he cut a broad swath through the library’s 41, 000 books, reading, for example, the 21 volumes of Chalmer’s English Poets and Eastern holy texts. He was a diligent student, and surprisingly conservative: Of the 63 young men in the class of 1837, young Thoreau was one of only 19 who had no disciplinary problems, eschewing even the food fight rebellion. The Harvard years put Thoreau in touch with the intellectual leaders of his and future days and ingrained such habits as keeping a commonplace book, or journal, that grew to number more than 5, 000 pages.

At Harvard, though he was still considered a little odd by his classmate John Weiss, he was also earning respect. Ralph Waldo Emerson, 15 years older, recognized his young friend to be a great thinker. Thoreau was small and homely; Emerson, tall and attractive. They differed also in family background: The Thoreaus’ colorful forebears had emigrated to America late in the 18th century from France and Scotland, while the long line of ministers in Emerson’s family originated long before the American Revolution. Thoreau was a practical man; Emerson was not. By the time Emerson met Thoreau, he had left the church and had begun a new career in a new kind of pulpit: the Lyceum Circuit, where his speeches (later, essays) reflected the new wave of transcendentalism.

Perhaps the most successful embodiment of such Emerson works as Nature was Thoreau’s experience at Walden Pond, but that would take place a number of years after his meeting with Emerson, who said, “I delight much in my young friend who has as clear and erect a mind as any I have known.” The famous story that Thoreau skipped the graduation at which Emerson delivered “The American Scholar” may be only partly true, but Thoreau, who had already learned of transcendentalism on a teaching stint with Orestes Brownson, had ready access to that talk and others: Emerson’s speeches circulated widely. The then-34-year-old orator/philosopher honed his speeches for publication (often after he had delivered them on multiple occasions), then printed them in the transcendentalist journal the Dial, and then in book form. Two times during his years at Harvard Thoreau withdrew Emerson’s Nature (1836) from the college library, and later he bought a copy for himself. By June 1837 Emerson knew his young neighbor well enough to write to President Quincy of Harvard, (unsuccessfully) recommending financial aid for his young friend.

The friendship had developed soon after Emerson and his second wife, Lydia (he called her Lidian), settled in Concord in 1835; established an impressive household; and had four children in seven years. Having inherited money from his first wife and in his marriage to Lidian, Emerson was able to help support his less fortunate neighbors. During Emerson’s many absences from his home, Henry David visited the Emerson’s so often that Lidian fixed a room for him. In the Emerson household Thoreau became the essential handyman/children’s companion. When his favorite, six-year-old Waldo, died on January 27, 1842, Henry grieved. That profound sadness followed an even more terrible loss, that of his brother and teaching colleague John. John had the charm and good looks that his younger brother lacked.

Together John and Henry had successfully collaborated in what would be Henry’s third teaching venture. In addition to the work with Brownson in his Harvard years, he had another teaching post in his own former school, the Concord public grammar school. Rather than beat any of the 52 children in his care there, as he had been instructed, he quit. In contrast, the school that he and John ran, much like Bronson Alcott’s educational experiment, respected children and stressed “learning by doing, ” especially exploring the natural world. For three years, John taught English and mathematics; Henry taught Latin, Greek, French, physics, natural philosophy, and natural history. The school closed because of John’s poor health, probably the result of the family scourge, tuberculosis. Henry then arranged a vacation with John on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in spring 1839. Their travels were later memorialized by Thoreau in his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, a harbinger of Walden.

After the school closed, Thoreau worked on the Dial. He also worked on wooing, first Ellen Sewall, who later regretted having rejected him for his better-looking brother. He also formed a close friendship with a female in-law of Emerson’s who was many years older than he, and later one with an appropriately young woman named Mary Russell. Because he never married and because he devoted a chapter in Walden to the values of chastity (“Higher Laws”), Thoreau has been the subject of inquiry about his sexual identity. However ascetic, even misogynistic, he may have appeared in later years, in his twenties he seems to have been susceptible to sweet, bright women—and several of them to him. To the amusement of some of his family, the embarrassment of Henry, and the grief of the lady involved (there was rumor that she considered suicide), Thoreau received a proposal of marriage from Sophia Ford. The marital strike-outs took place during the period Thoreau endured two losses that proved much more desperate and sad than the school failure or his disappointments with women.

The death of Henry’s appealing brother, John, occurred two weeks after the death of Waldo Emerson. Although he had been ill for a long time, it was a grotesque accident that killed John, a cut that led to the excruciating pain of lockjaw. John died in his brother’s arms. For two days after John’s death Henry was gravely ill, his symptoms appearing identical to his brother’s. Afterward, Henry needed solace, friends, an occupation, and a home. The need for friends was met partly by the newly married Hawthornes, who filled in for the still-grieving Emersons, supplying skating parties. He and Emerson also encouraged Thoreau’s writing. Regarded now as one of the greatest prose stylists of the English language, Thoreau began with small essays for the new Dial. A reflective essayist since his Harvard days, in the Dial he further honed his early style with its concrete, surprising metaphors and tone of the wise, amused, passionate observer of his world. Emerson also helped Thoreau with his other need: a place to live. He did this first by arranging a position for Thoreau in Staten Island tutoring the three sons of his brother, William Emerson. On tutoring breaks Thoreau met such leading lights as Henry James, Horace Greeley, Lucretia Mott, Bronson Alcott (later a Concord neighbor), and Walt Whitman. Interesting as it all was, when Emerson invited him to return to Concord to give a lecture, he moved back for good. What he moved to was not only a new house but the material for his two major works, Walden and “Resistance to Civil Government.”

Emerson lent Thoreau part of his lot on the wide banks of Walden Pond. There he began an “experiment.” On the Fourth of July 1845, when his countrymen were expressing their patriotism and supporting the war with Mexico, Thoreau declared his own independence from an act he could not support and from an economic system of which he did not approve by moving into the little house he had made with the white pine he had cleared. Using his own labor and a little less than $29 for supplies, Thoreau built the most famous little house in American history. In his 10-by-13 foot space, he had, as he said, a bed, some wood, a table, and three chairs, “one for solitude, two for friendship, and three for society”. Most of his daytime hours were spent on the front stoop of that house. There, as he tells us in the book, he would publish seven years later, he hoed (hoer is an anagram of hero); from there he sauntered (the word he links, semifacetiously, to “saint a terre”); on its grounds and from the banks of its pond (actually closer to a lake) he observed nature—as a scientist and as a philosopher. There he read widely and entertained whimsically. Most importantly, there he wrote.

His writing goal was to complete the book that would honor his brother, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. In many ways the book is a preview to Walden, which he was also writing (though he did not necessarily know it) by entering daily observations and thoughts in his journal. On their own the more than 2 million words of the journals have provided material for a musical setting by Philip Glass and numerous books excerpting portions for general readers, providing a glimpse into Thoreau’s mind and writing practices. In themselves they contained finished essays in which Thoreau’s “subjects are literal, his vision metaphorical”, but they also show the first draft of the finished great books. The entry for his decision to leave Walden states: “But why I changed? Why I left the woods? I do not think that I can tell.... To speak sincerely I went there because I had got ready to go; I left it for the same reason”. In the years between 1845 and 1854 he crafted that entry into the most familiar passage from Walden: “I left the woods for as good a reason as I went there. Perhaps it seemed to me that I had several more lives to live, and could not spare any more time for that one” and the stirring paragraphs that follow.

Walden ’s high rhetoric is blended with straightforward specific Anglo-Saxon language. Its first chapter, “Economy, ” begins simply with a series of prepositional phrases that situate Thoreau in his world and introduce the reader to his central concern: “When I wrote the following pages, or rather the bulk of them, I lived alone, in the woods, a mile from my neighbor, in a house which I had built myself, on the shore of Walden Pond, in Concord, Massachusetts, and earned my living by the labor of my hands only”. Thoreau itemizes expenses, but what Thoreau really means by “Economy” is at the heart of his experiment. Economy, in Thoreau’s sense means how much “of what I will call life”—drudgery and dollars—is required to pay for a deeper, richer life of meaning. In this experiment Thoreau was not exactly a hermit. Frequently he sauntered up the path to hear the news of the village. Much of that news worried the young man, who had rung the church bells to advertise an Emerson speech and defended his invitation of the prominent abolitionist Wendell Phillips. Thus, when the war with Mexico started on May 8, 1846, Thoreau took action. Although the causes of the Mexican War were complex, for Thoreau the most important cause was slavery: It might increase the slave states through the annexation of Texas. One month after the war was declared, Thoreau went to jail—and changed the history of the world. He was not the first to commit the crime that sent him to jail, a refusal on principle to pay taxes (Alcott, for example, had done the same), but he was the one who most memorably articulated the reasons for his civil disobedience, inspiring in words and action future generations to fight perceived injustice in a peaceful way.

Because the night Thoreau spent in jail has become a successful play (in 1970 by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee), most people know that some time during the night an unknown person “interfered” and paid his tax bill, depriving him of what seemed to be a pleasant experience. Who did so—Thoreau’s sister Sophia and his aunt Maria are suspects—is unknown, but Walter Harding suspects the jailer, Sam Staples, who was eager to clean up the books on the brink of his own retirement. The oft-told story about Thoreau’s asking Emerson why he was not in jail is apparently apocryphal. Emerson was out of town. More than a year after his by-then-famous night in jail, Thoreau explained his dramatic action to a Lyceum full of curious villagers. Voting and paying taxes, he explained, were the occasions on which he (or any citizen) was face to face with his government, and he wanted his government to know that he did not support an unjust war. He woke up his Lyceum audience and most future readers with the shocking call to chaos and anarchy: “That government is best which governs not at all”. Having attracted the attention of his audience and readers, Thoreau reversed course and modified the radical statement. He went on to say that governments are indeed necessary machinery for the safety and help of any civilization, but there may be a time when an individual must get in the way of the machine: “If the injustice is part of the necessary friction of the machine of government, let it go.” However, if the injustice “requires you to be the agent of injustice to another, then I say break the law. Let your life be a counter friction to stop the machine”. Clearly Thoreau, a few years later a defender of the martyred troublemaker John Brown, believed that his little bit of tax money and the continuation of the immense and tragic institution of slavery were connected. Elizabeth Peabody invited Thoreau to publish the speech in the new journal Aesthetic Papers, where she published it as “Resistance to Civil Government.” When the essay was included in the posthumously published Yankee in Canada with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers (1866), it was called “Civil Disobedience.” Other than a review in a London journal praising the “meatiest portions, ” the 1849 publication of the essay that was to be crucial to the world “produced scarcely a ripple”. It became famous when Gandhi republished the essay in India in 1907.

Having sent off the essay to Miss Peabody, Thoreau went on with his own busy life. Between his night in jail and the publication by Peabody, Thoreau had helped his father build on a lot on Texas Street and experiment with improvements in pencil making. Much time, too, was spent on science. Thoreau had been conducting such precise scientifi c observations that a great deal of literary and nonliterary scholarship focuses on Thoreau’s botanical, geological, agrarian, zoological, and ecological studies. For example, Thoreau’s last manuscript, “Faith in a Seed, ” showed his well-informed lover’s quarrel with the scientific community, and the foreword by Robert Richardson reviews for the layman Thoreau’s reaction to the new concepts of the Harvard professor Louis Agassiz, who was attempting to classify American plants. Thoreau became “a member of Boston’s new and energetic Society of Natural History” in 1850, and in 1859 he was a member of Harvard’s Visiting Committee in Natural History. Approaching death, Thoreau wrote that “if I were to live, I should have much to report on Natural History generally”, but, in fact, he had been reporting on it virtually all of his life. Sometimes his investigations were in far-flung spots. One particularly challenging adventure was his trip to Maine in August 1846, a month after the night in jail. Via boat, rail, and coach, Thoreau, a cousin, and two friends, carrying enough supplies—including blankets, pots and pans—for six men for a week, had to portage their boats and then pull themselves up the side of perpendicular falls of over 20 feet by roots and branches. The next year (1849) Thoreau took another trip, the first of three to Cape Cod, about which he would write another (posthumously published) book. He also spent a rugged week in Canada with Ellery Channing in 1859. Finally, in 1861 he asked the 17-year-old Horace Mann, Jr., son of the late educator and Mary Peabody Mann (sister of Elizabeth and of Sophia, wife of Hawthorne), to accompany him on a trip to Minnesota. Thoreau’s curiosity about the rivers, lakes, homesteaders, and, most of all, Indians led him to the Minnesota adventure.

This, his last trip, is a gauge of Thoreau’s belief in the power of nature to heal; his passion for knowledge about plants, animals, and water formations; his interest in others, particularly the disenfranchised and marginalized; and his American westering spirit. It was, in fact, his only trip west of the Mississippi. By the time the two returned home, it was clear that Thoreau was worse, not better. What they did not foresee was that the exposure to Thoreau would also kill young Mann. Although he went on to Harvard and had a brief career as a botanist, Mann would die at 21 of tuberculosis, presumably contracted from Thoreau. Thoreau himself had only a little over a year left after his return east, during which he continued to write, edit, and cheerfully visit friends. To the end he kept his sense of humor, answering a friend who remarked on his lack of gray hair by crediting his virtue and lack of troubles, “But there is Blake [a friend]; he is as gray as a rat”.

Work and travel had been interrupted in 1849, when the family suffered the death of his sister Helen, victim of the family curse, tuberculosis. One wonders whether he could foresee his own mortality when, at Helen’s funeral, he played the music box his brother and the family had loved. Although he spent long periods meditating and silently observing nature, he packed an astonishing amount of vigorous life into his last 13 years, after Helen’s death. As he had explained to his friend and frequent correspondent Harrison O. Blake, “I have no designs on society—or nature—or God. I am simply what I am, or I begin to be that. I live in the present. I only remember the past—and anticipate the future. I love to live.” In another letter, he advises, “Aim above [commonly understood] morality. Be not simply good—be good for something”.

Along with taking occasional practical surveying assignments, Thoreau continued to lecture vigorously and to write. The book he went to Walden to write, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, was published the year of Thoreau’s sister’s death and of the publication of “Civil Disobedience.” In Walden Thoreau joked about his publishing debacle of that first book. He bragged, “I have now a library of nearly 900 volumes, over 700 of which I wrote myself”. Thoreau called “the peculiarity of my ‘Week’... its hypaethral character, to use an epithet applied to those Egyptian temples which are open to the heavens above, under the ether”. A Week’s poetic prose may be situated in the clouds, but the structure—a straightforward journey narrative broken into the seven days of a week—is simple and presages Walden ’s movement from summer to the following spring. However, the literary allusions, symbolism, digressions, and language of the book help to explain its failure in the marketplace. A Week cost him $290 and earned back only $15. Walden did a little better.

As did the Artist of Kooroo, Thoreau worked hard and long on his craft. Ten years separated the idyllic trip with the dying John from the printed Week (1839 and 1849); in similar manner, it took two years to live at Walden (1845–47) and seven more to complete the book and publish it (in 1854). The many cross-outs on the many drafts reveal Thoreau’s struggle toward perfection. Organized chronologically through the seasons, Walden is also organized by topics that overlap with and respond to each other. The two books published in his lifetime were only a small part of what he crafted during his life as a professional writer. Steven Fink’s study Prophet in the Marketplace makes the case that although Thoreau did not achieve financial success, “his involvement in his profession had a profound (and ultimately positive) effect upon both the man and his works.” Fink notes that just in the years between 1837, when Thoreau began his journal, and 1849, when he published his Week, he also published book reviews, verse translations, travel narratives, and informal essays, mostly but not exclusively in the Dial.

As he lay dying after that Minnesota trip, famous writers and simple townspeople paid visits. He rewarded them with such comments as this: “When I was a very little boy I learned that I must die, and I set that down, so of course I am not disappointed now. Death is as near to you as it is to me.” The family watched his peaceful end, which occurred on May 6, 1862, when his sister reported his saying, “I feel as if something very beautiful had happened—not death”. And indeed, as every student of American literature and most political activists around the world know, it had only been one kind of death. For years the site of the cabin in the woods was decorated with stones brought by faithful readers, but the real legacy would be in the means many would choose to right a world they saw as gone wrong.