39. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden: An Expanded Edition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 11; Exc., 47, 54.
40. Rebecca Solnit opens with this point in her essay “Mysteries of Thoreau, Unsolved: On the Dirtiness of Laundry and the Strength of Sisters,” Orion, May–June 2013, 18–23. At the Thoreau boardinghouse, laundry was done by live-in servants, as was then standard; very few in the American middle classes did their own laundry.
41. Days of HT, 182.
42. David Wood, An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum (Concord, MA: Concord Museum, 2006), 10–13, 57–59; Mary Hosmer Brown, Memories of Concord (Boston: Four Seas, 1926), 95, 98.
43. Joseph Hosmer, in Hendrick, Remembrances, 140–42; PEJ, 3:22.
44. Walden, 242–43.
45. Ibid., 140; PEJ, 2:160.
46. PEJ, 2:176–77, 210–11.
47. Ibid., 207–9, 414–16; Walden, 261–62. Coyle died on October 1, 1845, on Walden Road at the foot of Brister’s Hill. Two days later, the Concord Freeman ran his obituary: “Mr. Hugh Coyle, a man of intemperate habits, residing in the vicinity of Walden pond, in this town, was found dead on the road near his house on Wednesday afternoon last. As he was seen on his way home a short time before he was found dead, with his features very much distorted and in a feeble state, he is supposed to have died in a fit of delirium tremens. He was an old campaigner and fought at the Battle of Waterloo.” Henry David Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, ed. Jeffrey S. Cramer (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 255
48. See Elise Lemire, Black Walden: Slavery and Its Aftermath in Concord, Massachusetts (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), 122–27.
49. Lemire, Black Walden, 162–63.
50. For the obituary of Zilpah White, see Thoreau, Walden: A Fully Annotated Edition, 248n15; Thoreau spelled her name “Zilpha” (Walden, 257). On the Freeman family, see Lemire, Black Walden, 163–71. John Freeman, Brister’s Freeman’s grandson and the family’s last survivor, died in 1822 of fever at the age of eight, “the last descendent of local slaves to reside in Walden Woods” (ibid., 181).
51. Walden, 258–61; Lemire, Black Walden, 162–63.
52. Lemire, Black Walden, 157.
53. Walden, 264.
54. PEJ, 2:159, 235–36 (emphasis in the original).
55. Ibid., 2:162; Joseph Hosmer repr. in Hendrick, Remembrances, 142; Marble, Thoreau: Home, Friends, Books, 120. See also Prudence Ward’s charming children’s story, “The Story of the Little Field Mouse,” in the Thoreau-Ward-Sewall Papers, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.
56. PEJ, 2:225–26 (“Jean Lapin”); cf. Walden, 281. The most extensive version is by Frederick L. H. Willis (the boyhood friend of Louisa May Alcott, memorialized as “Laurie” in Little Women): see Thoreau as Seen, 134, 150.
57. Thoreau as Seen, 183.
58. See John Hartigan Jr., Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 25.
59. PEJ, 2:159.
60. Walden, 59; PEJ, 2:177, 241.
61. PEJ, 2:242.
62. Ibid., 2:227, 166.
63. Patrick Chura, Thoreau the Land Surveyor (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2010), 30–44. When Thoreau prepared the original 1846 survey for publication, he simplified, or “reduced,” it by eliminating many of the soundings, reducing the scale, and reorienting his compass from magnetic north to his “True Meridian,” a significant reorientation to the North Pole, which took him several day’s painstaking work to ascertain; it was this “reduced plan” of 1854 that the engraver reproduced in professional style and formal lettering (ibid., 114–20).
64. JMN, 9:329, Walden, 287.
65. PEJ, 2:240; written between April 18 and May 3, 1846.
66. Walden, 98.
67. JMN, 9:430–31; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 686.
68. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 703; To Set This World, 52, 178n37.
69. Howe, What Hath God Wrought, 752. Estados Unidos Mexicanos, or the “United Mexican States,” was (and to the date of writing, remains) the nation’s formal name.
70. Edward Waldo Emerson interview with Sam Staples, Edward Waldo Emerson Papers, series 1, box 1, folder 17, CFPL. For a helpful article on the poll tax, see John C. Broderick, “Thoreau, Alcott, and the Poll Tax,” Studies in Philology 53.4 (October 1956): 612–26.
71. Initially published as “Resistance to Civil Government” (1849).
72. He was later found not guilty and released; Days of HT, 204. Jailer Sam Staples had been, for a time, manager of the Middlesex Hotel.
73. Fritz Oehlschlaeger and George Hendrick, eds., Toward the Making of Thoreau’s Modern Reputation (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1979), 199–201.
74. RP, 82–83; cf. PEJ, 2:262–64.
75. Oehlschlaeger and Hendrick, Thoreau’s Modern Reputation, 201; Edward Waldo Emerson interview notes with Sam Staples, box 1, folder 17, CFPL.
76. RP, 83–84. The description of a typical huckleberry party is taken from Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 107.
77. RP, 84. Thoreau refers to Silvio Pellico’s memoir (above, ch. 4, n. 37).
78. Quoted in To Set This World, 59; Edward Emerson interview notes with George Bartlett, box 1, folder 1, CFPL.
79. PEJ, 2:262–64.
80. ABAJ, 179 (May 4, 1846), 183.
81. JMN, 9:445–47.
82. LRWE, 3:340.
83. I am indebted to the excellent and detailed descriptions of this event in To Set This World, 60–62, and Randall Conrad, “Realizing Resistance: Thoreau and the First of August, 1846, at Walden,” Concord Saunterer 12/13 (2004–5): 165–93. There were other picnics at Walden as well (but Thoreau kept no records); for instance, Emerson mentions a “Young Concord” levee at Walden, held on July 5, 1847 (LRWE, 3:403).
84. Walden, 140.
85. See To Set This World, 61. Harding also points out that the antislavery movement was not respectable until after the Civil War—once the need for it no longer existed (Days of HT, 201).
86. Anna Whiting, “First of August in Concord,” Liberator, August 7, 1846.
87. Hayden’s address in Concord was not recorded; these words are from his address a year later to the American Anti-Slavery Society. See Conrad, “Realizing Resistance,” 181, 177–78.
88. Oehlschlaeger and Hendrick, Thoreau’s Modern Reputation, 143; Edward Emerson interview with Bigelow, box 1, folder 2, CFPL; To Set This World, 63–65, 18n59.
89. ABAJ, 190; Walden, 152; To Set This World, 62–63.
90. ABAJ, 193 (March 1847); PEJ, 2:167, 1:46.
91. PEJ, 1:172, 418. Emerson reported one such group in Concord in 1843: “Hither come in summer the Penobscot Indians, & make baskets for us on the river bank” (JMN, 8:385.) A group camped near Harvard in 1834 inspired Thoreau’s classmate Horatio Hale to write his short monograph on their language.
92. PEJ, 2:281. See Richard S. Sprague, “Companions to Katahdin: Henry David Thoreau and George A. Thatcher of Bangor,” in Thoreau Journal Quarterly 12.1 (January 1980): 41–65.
93. MW, 4; Thoreau’s source was Charles T. Jackson, the state geologist and Emerson’s brother-in-law, who had explored the Penobscot and climbed Mount Katahdin in 1837. Thoreau spells the name “Ktaadn.”
94. PEJ, 2:281–83, MW, 6.
95. PEJ, 2:284.
96. Ibid., 286–88.
97. Ibid., 289; MW, 14–16; PEJ, 2:293–94.
98. PEJ, 2:294–98; MW, 16–21.
99. PEJ, 2:298–302; MW, 21–26.
100. PEJ, 2:302–7; MW, 26–31.
101. PEJ, 2:307–10; MW, 31–35.
102. PEJ, 2:311–15; MW, 35–41.
103. PEJ, 2:315–20; MW, 41–45.
104. PEJ, 2:330–32, 278; MW, 53–55.
105. PEJ, 2:332�
��37; MW, 56–62. Katahdin’s true summit, Baxter Peak, was not visible from the river below; Thoreau sighted to South Peak instead.
106. PEJ, 2:338–40; cf. MW, 64–65.
107. PEJ, 2:278; MW, 70–71.
108. MW, 81–82; PEJ, 2:352–54.
109. PEJ, 2:175.
110. Ibid., 249–51; Corr., 1:284–88 (Horatio Storer and HDT, January 17 and February 15, 1847); the report’s author was Horatio’s father, David Humphreys Storer.
111. Christoph Irmscher, Louis Agassiz: Creator of American Science (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2013), 92–93; Corr., 1:290–91 (James Elliot Cabot to HDT, May 3, 1847).
112. Corr., 1:292–94 (HDT to James Elliot Cabot, May 8, 1847), 299–300 (Cabot to HDT, May 27, 1847), 303–4 (Cabot to HDT, June 1, 1847).
113. LRWE, 3:397 (May 4, 1847); Corr., 1:301n1.
114. LRWE, 3:288, 290, 293; PEJ, 2:256–57.
115. LRWE, 3:383; PEJ, 2:370–71, Walden, 297–98. See Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), 9–22; and Alan D. Hodder, Thoreau’s Ecstatic Witness (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), 212–13. Both scholars stress that the traffic Thoreau envisioned between India and Concord is not one-way but circular and reciprocal, a point Dimock makes in her analysis of Gandhi’s indebtedness to Thoreau (Through Other Continents, 20–22). As Stanley Cavell points out, “Like Walden, the Bhagavad Gita is a scripture in eighteen parts” that begins with the hero in despair and ends with the hero resolved in the way of action. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 117–18.
116. PEJ 4:275, 276; Walden, 323.
117. LRWE, 3:413, 415; Ellen Tucker Emerson, Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, 108. For Thoreau’s description of Emerson’s cramped stateroom, see Corr., 1:310 (HDT to Sophia Thoreau, October 24, 1847).
Chapter Six
1. ABAJ, 194; Corr., 1:308 (HDT to Henry Williams, September 30, 1847).
2. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 108 (“prophet’s chamber”); Corr., 1:316 (HDT to RWE, November 14, 1847). Lucy Jackson Brown was living in the main house while her new house next door was being built.
3. Corr., 1:313. Thoreau puns on Theodore Parker’s 1841 “Discourse of the Transient and Permanent in Christianity.” Thoreau frequently consulted the Emersons’ financial manager, Abel Adams.
4. Ibid., 313–14; LRWE, 3:455 (i.e., a father or a nice fellow in spite of himself).
5. Corr., 1:316, 325 (RWE to HDT, December 2, 1847).
6. Ellen Tucker Emerson, Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson 105, 107; Days of HT, 224–26.
7. Maria reported Henry receiving an “incoherent” letter from the reformer Sophia Foord asking him, interestingly, to join a society to ascertain the cause of shipwrecks; Thoreau had recently returned from witnessing the shipwreck of the St. John. Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, November 15, 1849, Thoreau-Sewall Papers, 1790–1917, HM 64936, Huntington Library, San Marino, California. See also Days of HT, 224–26; Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962), 66.
8. JMN, 10:116–17; Days of HT, 217.
9. LRWE, 3:411, 413.
10. ABAJ, 196–97; Maria Thoreau to Prudence Ward, September 25, 1847 (“I hope they will find as soft a landing place, one and all when they drop from the clouds,” she added). Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.
11. Corr., 1:314; ABAJ, 197.
12. Days of HT, 219; Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 300–301; LRWE, 3:411n; Walter Harding, “Thoreau in Emerson’s Account Books,” TSB 159 (Spring 1982): 1–3 [hereafter EAB]. Marston Watson liked Alcott’s summerhouse so much that in 1854 he commissioned Alcott to build one on his Plymouth property.
13. EAB, September 28, 1847; Corr., 1:338–39 (HDT to RWE, January 12, 1848). The farmer who bought Thoreau’s damaged house was James Clark, on the old Carlisle Road. For additional details, see Bradley P. Dean, “Rediscovery at Walden: The History of Thoreau’s Bean-Field,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 12/13 (2004–5): 97–102.
14. David Wood, An Observant Eye: The Thoreau Collection at the Concord Museum (Concord, MA: Concord Museum, 2006), 125; Walton Ricketson, visiting the ruin with Channing later in 1868, brought away a few fragments that are preserved in the Concord Museum. Days of HT, 224, has a somewhat different story.
15. Corr., 1:317 (HDT to RWE, November 14, 1847), 325 (RWE to HDT, December 2, 1847); LRWE, 4:110; Corr., 1:378 (HDT to RWE, May 21, 1848). On August 31, 1848, the Fitchburg Railroad Company paid Emerson fifty dollars in compensation. Corr., 1:381n5.
16. Walden, 191–92. By 1854, little more than 10 percent of the forest surrounding Walden Pond was still standing. Lawrence Buell, “Thoreau and the Natural Environment,” in The Cambridge Companion to Henry David Thoreau, ed. Joel Myerson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 173.
17. Corr., 1:345 (HDT to RWE, February 23, 1848), 2:27 (HDT to Ellen Emerson, July 31, 1849). The Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge was a vehicle for popular natural history.
18. LRWE, 4:40–41.
19. Lidian Emerson to RWE (May 17, 1848), in THOT, 3; LRWE, 4:80–81.
20. LRWE, 4:33.
21. PEJ, 3:17–18, 125–26; see also 44–46.
22. Ibid., 2:245–46, 3:7; EEM, 275. Thoreau echoes Margaret Fuller’s description of the highest, or “religious,” kind of marriage in her essay “The Great Lawsuit”: the couple will attain “more and more glorious prospects that open as we advance” (32–33). See also PEJ, 3:211, where Thoreau imagines a love “quite transcending marriage,” and most interestingly, Thoreau’s essays “Love” and “Chastity & Sexuality,” which he composed and sent to H. G. O. Blake in September 1852 (EEM, 268–73, 274–78).
23. Emerson, “Thoreau,” 415, 416–17.
24. Walden, 219–21; EEM, 274.
25. EEM, 277; Emerson, “Thoreau” 767n5.
26. Walden, 79 (Thoreau is quoting the classic Persian poet Saadi). Walter Harding lays out the extensive evidence for Thoreau’s same-sex attraction in “Thoreau’s Sexuality,” Journal of Homosexuality 21.3 (1991): 23–45. Harding concludes, as had others whom he cites, that Thoreau’s creativity sprang from a sublimated homoeroticism. Discussions of Thoreau’s (homo)sexuality were quite active for some years, starting in the late 1970s; the subject is today ripe for reexamination. See George Whitmore, “Friendship in New England: Henry Thoreau. I.,” Gai Saber 1.2 (Summer 1977): 104–11; Whitmore, “Friendship in New England: Henry Thoreau. II.,” Gai Saber 1.3–4 (Summer 1978): 188–202; Michael Warner, “Walden’s Erotic Economy,” in Comparative American Identities: Race, Sex, and Nationality in the American Text, ed. Hortense Spillers (New York: Routledge, 1991), 157–74; Warner, “Thoreau’s Bottom,” Raritan 11.3 (Winter 1992): 53–79; and Henry Abelove, “From Thoreau to Queer Politics,” Yale Journal of Criticism 6.3 (1993): 17–27.
27. Corr., 1:357 (H. G. O. Blake to HDT, before March 27, 1848).
28. Corr., 1:359–62 (HDT to H. G. O. Blake, March 27, 1848). For the complete Thoreau-Blake correspondence in a single volume, see Henry David Thoreau, Letters to a Spiritual Seeker, ed. Bradley P. Dean (New York: Norton, 2004).
29. Corr., 1:332 (HDT to RWE, December 29, 1847).
30. EEM, 232, 224, 264–65.
31. Ibid., 243, 250–51, 254, 257 (emphases in the original).
32. Corr., 1:365–66 (Horace Greeley to HDT, April 17, 1848), 372–73 (Greeley to HDT, May 17, 1848); Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Thomas Carlyle, The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater, 2 vols (New York: Columbia University Press, 1964), 1:422 (Carlyle to Emerson, May 18, 1847).
33. Corr., 1:286 (Greeley to HDT, February 5, 1847); J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of “Walden,” with the Text of the First Version (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 106; cf. PEJ, 2:142. Thoreau apparently gave t
his lecture first in Lincoln, on January 19, 1847; see TL I, 148–50.
34. LRWE, 3:378; THOT, 5; Days of HT, 187–88.
35. Shanley, Making of “Walden,” 153.
36. Corr., 1:339 (HDT to RWE, January 12, 1848); Alcott quoted in TL I, 153.
37. Shanley, Making of “Walden,” 141.
38. Corr., 1:350 (HDT to James Elliot Cabot, March 8, 1848), 366 (Greeley to HDT, April 17, 1848).
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