Henry David Thoreau

by Laura Dassow Walls

  38. Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 205–6; in his Journal, Thoreau recorded obtaining the surveying equipment, “a leveling instrument and circumferentor combined” (PEJ, 1:197).

  39. Edward Waldo Emerson Papers, series 1, box 1, folder 8 (interview of EWE with Thomas Hosmer), CFPL.

  40. Corr., 1:49 (HDT to Helen Thoreau, October 6, 1838); diary of Edmund Sewall for March 28, 1840, American Antiquarian Society; Hendrick, Remembrances, 73–74.

  41. Hendrick, Remembrances, 74–76.

  42. Edward Waldo Emerson, interview notes with Benjamin Lee, series 1, box 1, folder 10, and with Benjamin Tolman, box 1, folder 18, CFPL; John S. Keyes quoted in Thoreau as Seen, 206.

  43. Edward Waldo Emerson Papers, series 1, box 1, folder 8 (interview of EWE with Thomas Hosmer), CFPL.

  44. Walden, 109–10.

  45. ABAJ, 127; PEJ, 1:172, 194; Thoreau Log, 59–60.

  46. PEJ, 1:38–39, 69–70.

  47. Ibid., 74 (June 22, 1839); “Sympathy,” J, 1:76–77 (June 24, 1839) and CEP, 524–25.

  48. Days of HT, 78–79; JMN, 7:230–31; Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Carlyle, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 1:246; LRWE, 2:244.

  49. Clayton Hoagland, “The Diary of Thoreau’s ‘Gentle Boy,’” New England Quarterly 28.4 (December 1955): 488.

  50. PEJ, 1:79–81. See also Shawn Stewart, “Transcendental Romance Meets the Ministry of Pain: The Thoreau Brothers, Ellen Sewall, and Her Father,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 14 (2006): 4–21.

  51. Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, IVJ: Ellen Sewall Papers, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.

  52. Two biographers who have famously explored this tension are Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), ch. 9, and Richard M. Lebeaux, Young Man Thoreau (1975; New York: Harper, 1978), esp. ch. 4 and 6.

  53. Thoreau Log, 47–48; Thoreau as Seen, 218; Elizabeth Hoar, undated letter to the Bowles family of Springfield, Massachussetts, TSB 138 (Winter 1977): 5.

  54. Week, 116.

  55. Ibid., 196.

  56. Ibid., 296.

  57. Ibid., 303; Days of HT, 92.

  58. Week, 215; Days of HT, 92.

  59. Week, 334.

  60. Ibid., 393.

  61. PEJ, 1:124–26, 134–37 (June 11–21, 1840).

  62. JMN, 7:238.

  63. Joel Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the “Dial”: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1980), 30–32.

  64. PEJ, 1:100; cf 1:209. Very was dismissed in 1838 and confined for a month at McLean Asylum; after his release, Emerson collected Very’s writings into Essays and Poems (1839).

  65. PEJ, 1:132; joint statement by Elizabeth Osgood Davenport and Louise Osgood Koopman, Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library; PEJ, 1:158.

  66. Tom Blanding, “Passages from John Thoreau, Jr.’s Journal,” TSB 136 (Summer 1976): 4–6. Very little of John Thoreau’s journal survives.

  67. PEJ, 1:193.

  68. Ellen Sewall to Prudence Ward, November 18, 1840, #28 in IVJ: Ellen Sewall Papers, Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.

  69. Diary of Ellen Sewall, March 8, 1841, #29 in IVJ: Ellen Sewall Papers, Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.

  70. The romance seems to have been, in Henry Seidel Canby’s words, “an experiment in the philosophy of love,” with little if any physical attraction (Thoreau, 121–22). Sophia’s oft-quoted statement comes down to us from Ellen’s granddaughter by way of her grandmother, by way of her mother—a long chain indeed! Louise Osgood Koopman, “The Thoreau Romance,” Massachusetts Quarterly 4.1 (Autumn 1962): 66; cf. Days of HT, 104.

  71. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 69–70; Hendrick, Remembrances, 72; PEJ, 1:149–50. “Van” referred to the Democratic incumbent, Martin Van Buren, who was widely blamed for the Panic of ’37 and lost his bid for reelection.

  72. LRWE, 2:311, 290.

  73. Joel Myerson, “A Calendar of Transcendental Club Meetings,” American Literature 44.2 (May 1972): 205.

  74. LRWE, 2:323–24n326, 315, 322.

  75. See Joel Myerson, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls, eds., The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), s.v. “The Dial,” by Susan Belasco, 373–79.

  76. Corr., 1:70 (Margaret Fuller to HDT, December 1, 1840), 1:93, (Margaret Fuller to HDT, October 18, 1841).

  77. “Sic Vita” appeared in the Dial 2.1, July 1841; “Friendship” appeared in the Dial 2.2, October 1841.

  78. Corr., 1:70 (Margaret Fuller to HDT, December 1, 1840).

  79. Ibid., 72 (HDT to “Mr Clerk,” January 6, 1841). The letter reads, in full: “Sir / I do not wish to be considered a member of the First Parish in this town. / Henry. D. Thoreau.” Since religious disestablishment in 1833, many others had also signed off.

  80. Hendrick, Remembrances, 131.

  81. PEJ, 1:277 (March 3, 1841); Corr., 1:72–73 (HDT to Samuel Gridley Howe, March 9, 1841).

  82. PEJ, 1:263, 291, 297; Ellen Sewall Diary, April 8, 1841, Thoreau-Ward-Sewall Letters, #29 in IVJ Ellen Sewall Papers, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library. The farm was the thirty-acre Hollowell place. Ellen’s entry for April 25 shows that, despite Henry’s bravado in Walden, the family recognized it was a genuine disappointment.

  83. PEJ, 1:301, 265, 273.

  84. Ibid., 295, 302.

  85. The Letters of Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1813–1843, ed. Thomas Woodson, L. Neal Smith, and Norman Holmes Pearson (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1984), 528–29 (Hawthorne to Sophia Peabody, April 13, 1841).

  86. LRWE, 2:389 (RWE to William Emerson, March 30, 1841).

  87. Ibid., 394 (RWE to Margaret Fuller, April 22, 1841).

  88. PEJ, 1:304 (April 26, 1841).

  89. E&L, 275; cf. JMN, 7:201, where the draft of this passage describes “my brave Henry.”

  90. Emerson and Carlyle, Correspondence, 1:300 (RWE to Thomas Carlyle, May 30, 1841); JMN, 7:454.

  91. PEJ, 1:311, 320; Letters of Margaret Fuller, ed. Robert N. Hudspeth, 6 vols. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983–), 2:210 (Margaret Fuller to Richard Fuller, May 25, 1841).

  92. Corr., 1:75 (RWE to HDT, June 7, 1841); “To the Maiden in the East,” Dial 3.2 (October 1842), 222–24; cf. CEP, 550–51.

  93. Charles Capper, Margaret Fuller: An American Romantic Life, the Private Years (Oxford University Press, 1992), 170.

  94. Corr., 1:94–95 (Margaret Fuller to HDT, October 18, 1841). The “good week” Fuller mentions in this letter (emphasis in the original) cannot have referred to Thoreau’s book, for he hadn’t yet outlined his plans to turn the voyage with John into A Week. Fuller’s tantalizing reference elsewhere in the letter to some great and unspoken shared “crisis” also remains mysterious.

  95. Corr., 1:79 (HDT to Lucy Jackson Brown, September 8, 1841); Elizabeth Hall Witherell, “Thoreau as Poet,” in Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Joel Myerson, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 57–70.

  96. The publisher, Rufus Griswold, never replied, and his volume made no mention of Thoreau. See Robert Sattelmeyer, “Thoreau’s Projected Work on the English Poets,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1980): 239–57. Thoreau was at Harvard from November 29 until December 10, 1841; as a “Resident Graduate” he had Harvard library privileges.

  97. PEJ, 1:337–38, 321.

  98. Ibid., 347, 354.

  Chapter Four

  1. Ellen Sewall Diary, April 27, 1841, Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, #29 in IVJ: Ellen Sewall Papers (transcript is misdated April 25), Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library; PEJ, 1:354–55.

  2. Letter to W. S. Robinson from an unknown correspondent, printed in Max Cosman, “Apropos of John Thoreau,” American Literature 12.2 (May 1940): 242; PEJ, 1:362 (January 8, 1842); THOT, 2.

>   3. Cosman, “Apropos,” 242. Even today, there is no cure for tetanus; treatment involves the administration of muscle relaxants to control the convulsions, and the nerve damage may be permanent.

  4. Corr., 1:107 (HDT to Isaiah Williams, March 14, 1842); THOT, 2, letter, Lidian Jackson Emerson to Lucy Jackson Brown, January 11–12, 1842.

  5. “Mr. Frost’s Sermon on the Death of John Thoreau Jr.,” Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.

  6. LRWE, 3:4 (RWE to William Emerson, January 24, 1842); Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 26; PEJ, 1:237.

  7. LRWE, 3:6–8; 9 (RWE to Margaret Fuller, February 2, 1842).

  8. JMN, 8:165–66.

  9. PEJ, 1:364–66 (February 20–21, 1842).

  10. Ibid., 365, 369 (February 20, 1842).

  11. CEP, 595–96; The Collected Poems of Henry Thoreau, ed. Carl Bode (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1965), 316. Thoreau sent the mournful version to Helen soon after he moved to Staten Island, making it disturbingly self-referential.

  12. Corr., 1:102 (HDT to Lucy Jackson Brown, March 2, 1842), 105–6 (HDT to RWE, March 11, 1842).

  13. E&L, 473; Corr., 1:107 (HDT to Isaiah Williams, March 14, 1842). See also PEJ 1:369.

  14. JMN, 8:375 (1843). Emerson chose to immortalize this comment in “Thoreau,” in The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, ed. Ronald A. Bosco and Joel Myerson, 10 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 416.

  15. PEJ, 1:368, 393.

  16. LRWE, 3:47 (RWE to Margaret Fuller, April 10, 1842), 75 (RWE to Margaret Fuller, July 19, 1842).

  17. Exc., 3–28. Fink details Thoreau’s natural history writing as the way he reached a broader audience. Steven Fink, Prophet in the Marketplace: Thoreau’s Development as a Professional Writer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992), allusion to p. 43. For a penetrating analysis of this essay as a pivotal moment in Thoreau’s struggle for cultural power, see Kevin P. Van Anglen, “True Pulpit Power: ‘Natural History of Massachusetts’ and the Problem of Cultural Authority,” Studies in the American Renaissance (1990): 119–47.

  18. ABAL, 88; Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1932, 1960, 1972, 355.

  19. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Emerson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 71, 79–80. Emerson reveled in all the company; as he wrote to Newcomb, urging him to move from Brook Farm to Concord, “Those of us who do not believe in Communities, believe in neighborhoods & that the kingdom of heaven may consist of such” (LRWE, 3:51).

  20. “The Old Manse,” in Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1982), 1145–47.

  21. Days of HT, 137; Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 353–54.

  22. Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 356–57; Thoreau as Seen, 88–89; William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 257.

  23. Richard Fuller, “Visit to the Wachusett, July 1842,” TSB 129 (Fall 1972): 2.

  24. Corr., 1:94 (Margaret Fuller to HDT, October 18, 1841).

  25. Exc., 29–46.

  26. Sophia, John, and Henry D. Thoreau, “Nature and Bird Notes,” Berg Collection, New York Public Library. Robinson remarks, tellingly, that Thoreau reacted to the physical universe as “a creative mind at work, expressing itself in the events and physical details of nature” (David N. Robinson, Natural Life: Thoreau’s Worldly Transcendentalism [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2004], 26); here one sees the dawning of that powerful insight.

  27. PEJ, 2:378; Exc., 405. See Kevin P. Van Anglen, “Thoreau’s Epic Ambition: ‘A Walk to Wachusett’ and the Persistence of the Classics in an Age of Science,” in The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age, ed. Kevin P. Van Anglen and James Engell (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, forthcoming).

  28. LRWE, 2:253; Emerson, “New Poetry,” Dial 1.2 (October 1840): 222.

  29. LRWE, 3:41, 571; Corr., 1:153–54 (Ellery Channing to HDT, April 6, 1843), 157 (Ellery Channing to HDT, May 1, 1843).

  30. JMN, 8:352; Robert N. Hudspeth, “Dear Friend: Letter Writing in Concord,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 11 (2003): 84.

  31. Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches, 1141; Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 357.

  32. Robert N. Hudspeth, Ellery Channing (New York: Twayne, 1973), 139.

  33. ABAJ, 164.

  34. LRWE, 3:96, 7:517; Ward quoted in Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 470–71.

  35. Liberator, September 28, 1838; Edson L. Whitney, American Peace Society: A Centennial History, 3rd ed. (Washington, DC: American Peace Society, 1929), 44; Days of HT, 142.

  36. Corr., 1:124 (HDT to RWE, January 24, 1843); ABAJ, 151. Staples’s saying made the rounds: see Caroline Ward Sewall to Edmund Sewall [Sr.], January 25, 1843, Thoreau-Ward-Sewall Letters; and Edward Emerson interview notes with Sam Staples, box 1, folder 17, CFPL.

  37. Corr., 1:125 (HDT to RWE, January 24, 1843); Barry Kritzberg, “The Mr. Spear Who Ought to Have Been Beaten into a Ploughshare,” TSB 183 (Spring 1988): 4–5. Pellico’s book My Prisons detailed the Italian patriot’s imprisonment in Austria for ten years. Charles M. Spear was a founding member of Garrison’s New England Non-Resistance Society and would become a fierce opponent of capital punishment and an advocate of prison reform.

  38. Charles Lane, “State Slavery—Imprisonment of A. Bronson Alcott—Dawn of Liberty,” Liberator, January 27, 1843, 16.

  39. LRWE, 3:230 (RWE to Margaret Fuller, December 17, 1843).

  40. For an annual fee of $2.50, members could read such local, national, and international newspapers and journals as the London Phalanx, the New-York Tribune, the Dial, the National Anti-Slavery Standard, and the Boston Miscellany, all of which Thoreau and Emerson donated together: see Keith Walter Cameron, Transcendentalists and Minerva, 3 vols. (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1958), 1:290–95.

  41. Quoted in Days of HT, 143; Walter Harding, “Thoreau and the Concord Lyceum,” TSB 30 (January 1950): 2.

  42. LRWE, 3:129; Days of HT, 143–44; THOT, 3; Corr., 1:135 (HDT to RWE, February 10, 1843).

  43. For further details, see To Set This World, 26–30.

  44. Ibid., 30–32.

  45. LRWE, 3:39; Hawthorne, American Notebooks, 361–62; LRWE, 3:90–93.

  46. LRWE, 3:90–91n334; JMN, 8:257.

  47. Corr., 1:272 (Daniel Waldo Stevens to HDT, May 24, 1845); Kevin P. Van Anglen, introduction to Translations, 218; PEJ, 1:436 (“the sweetness of sugar merely”).

  48. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Veeshnoo Sarma,” Dial 3.1 (July 1842), 82–85. See Arthur Versluis, American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), ch. 2 and 3; Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), ch. 5; and Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), esp. 106–9, 204–7.

  49. Richardson, HDT: Life of the Mind, 107; EEM, 128–29, 130, 139; PEJ, 1:427. The Laws of Menu was Thoreau’s shorthand for Manu, Institutes of Hindu Law, or The Ordinances of Menu, According to the Gloss of Culluca, trans. Sir William Jones, new edition, collated with the Sanscrit text, by Graves Chamney Haughton, 2 vols. (London: Rivingtons and Cochran, 1825).

  50. EEM, 141, 148; PEJ, 1:426.

  51. Corr., 1:245 (HDT to RWE, October 17, 1843), 2:43 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, November 20, 1849).

  52. PEJ, 1:447; Corr., 1:117–18 (HDT to Richard Fuller, January 16, 1843); Lidian Emerson in THOT, 3.

  53. Corr., 1:123–14 (HDT to RWE, January 24, 1843); LRWE, 3:75; Ellen Tucker Emerson, Life of Lidian Emerson, xlv; Corr., 1:126n6.

  54. Corr., 1:145–46n6; 120 (HDT to Lucy Jackson Brown, January 24, 1943).

  55. Corr., 1:138–39 (RWE to HDT, February 12, 1843), 141 (HDT to RWE, February 15, 1843).

  56. Joel
Myerson, The New England Transcendentalists and the “Dial”: A History of the Magazine and Its Contributors (Cranbury, NJ: Associated University Presses, 1980), 83; Corr., 1:147 (Elizabeth Peabody to HDT, February 26, 1843); LRWE, 3:165. Emerson changed publishers, moving from Peabody to James Munroe in hopes of better distribution; see Myerson, New England Transcendentalists, 90.

  57. Corr., 1:149 (HDT to RWE, March 1, 1843); LRWE, 3:158.

  58. Days of HT, 10 (the editor was Epes Sargent); Corr., 1:124 (HDT to RWE, January 24, 1843).