Henry David Thoreau
Page 76
Transcendentalism, 61, 75, 86–88, 97, 98, 112, 113; the Dial, 110–11; founding of, 77–78, 88; in New York, 155, 157–58. See also Alcott, A. Bronson; Brownson, Orestes A.; Channing, Ellery (William Ellery Channing II); Emerson, Ralph Waldo; Fuller, Margaret; Parker, Theodore; Peabody, Elizabeth Palmer; Sanborn, Franklin B.
Trask, Oliver B., 328
Trinitarians, 47–48, 176; and radical abolitionists, 142, 316
Truth, Sojourner, 346
tuberculosis, 157, 266; brought death to HDT’s father, 436; to HDT, 475–80, 491–99
Tubman, Harriet, 447
Tuckerman’s Ravine (White Mountains, NH), 432, Fig. 39
Tudor, Frederic, 230
Tufts, Marshall, 63–64, 518n28
Tyndale, Sarah, 394
Tyngsboro, NH, 107
Umbedegis, Lake (ME), 223, 225
Uncle Tom and Eva, as abolitionist symbol, 319, 548n14
Underground Railroad in Concord, 215; Thoreaus’ home a station of, 215–16, 318–19
Union Magazine, 246, 260
Unitarianism, 48, 58; old-school, 113
utopian communities, 74, 119, 120
Van Anglen, Kevin P., 520n50, 526n17
vegetarianism, 204
Very, Jones, 61, 112, 116
Vestiges of the Creation (R. Chambers), HDT dismisses, 565–66n38
Vigilance Committee, 315, 316
Virgil, Georgics, xiii
Virginia Road house (Concord), 28, 30, 33, 35, 515n24, Fig. 11
Vose, Henry, 62, 77, 80, 86
Wabanaki (Indian peoples), 338–39, 371
“Wachusett” (HDT poem), 117, 122, 135
Wachusett, Mount (MA), 135; HDT climbed with Blake, Cholmondeley, and Foster, 364–65
Walden (HDT), 196–97, 205–6; disparaged by Pillsbury in time of war, 479; as scripture, 355. See also under Thoreau, Henry David: Principal Works
“Walden” (HDT poem), 189
Walden house, HDT’s, 187–90, 197–98, 203; final disposition of, 236
Walden Pond, 44, 121, 182, Fig. 20, Fig. 44; glacial origin of, 10–11; HDT moved to, 187–92; HDT’s survey of, 205–6, 535n63; origin of name, 7, 415; railroad “deep cut” at, 164, 328; shanties of Irish at, 163–64, 187; “sweet solitude” and “speaking silence” of, 37; waters sensitive to weather, 344
Walden Woods, 7, 99; earlier inhabitants of, 199–200; exploited and ruined by commerce, 237; HDT’s time at (1846–47), 187–207, 228–31; hunting and trapping in, 373; RWE’s land purchases in, 182; wildfires in, 171–74, 236
Waldo, Giles, 152, 159, 160; wilderness experiment, 183
walking, 273–74, 278–79; as meditation, 305; “synonymous with writing,” 175–76, 304
“Walking, or, The Wild” (HDT), 317, 367, 397; popularity of, 318
“Walk to Wachusett, A” (HDT essay), 117; as “epic revelation,” 135; as HDT’s first published work, 137
Walpole, NH, 391
Walton, Isaak, HDT likened to, 132–33, 255–56
Wampanoag language, 66–67, 92
Ward, George, 152
Ward, Prudence (Bird), 90–91, 93, 104
Ward, Prudence (Prudence B.’s daughter), 90–91, 93, 104, 106, 107, 112, 139, 150; as boarder at Thoreaus’, 90; and HDT’s Lyceum talks on Walden, 245
Ward, Samuel Gray, 104
Ware, Dr. Henry, Sr., 58, 64, 70, 76
War of 1812, 32
Washburn, Ichabod, 371
Washington, George, 279
Washington, Mount (NH), 430; HDT climbed with E. Hoar, 430–31
Washington Square (NYC), 154
Waterbury, CT, 476
water-lily, “emblem of purity” for HDT, 324, 347, 551n90
Watson, Edward W. (Marston’s “Uncle Ned”), 310, 404
Watson, Marston, 121, 138, 228, 301, 364, 404, 423, 429; a founder of Natural History Society (Harvard), 68, 310; invited HDT to speak at Plymouth, 327. See also Russell, Mary
Webster, Daniel, 315, 317, 414, 497
Webster, Lake (north Maine woods), 414
Webster, Prof. John, 67–68, 77; murder trial of, 68
Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, A (HDT), 196, 372, 498; “blasphemy” in, 263, 264, 271–72; as elegy and creation story, 266, 270; reviews and reactions, 256, 264–65; theme of time in, 269–70
Weiss, John, 62, 64, 65
“Wellfleet Oysterman, The” (HDT), 279
“Wendell Phillips Before the Concord Lyceum” (HDT), 185
Wentworth, Lowell, 430; causes fire in Tuckerman’s Ravine, 431–32
West Branch (Maine river), 217
Westminster Review, review of Walden, 360
West Roxbury, MA, 95, 118
“What Shall It Profit?” (HDT lecture, retitled “Life without Principle”), 367; final form, 496; successful in Nantucket and Boston, 371, 449; unsuccessful in Providence and New Bedford, 268–69
Wheeler, Charles Stearns, 59–60, 183; death of, 159–60; HDT’s classmate, 59–60, 62, 72, 77, 123; HDT’s eulogy of, 160; as student in Germany, 147; as Transcendentalist, 78, 123
Wheeler, Miss Phoebe (day care provider for little HDT, John, Jr., and Sophia), 45
Whelan, Hugh, 191, 233; and Walden house, 231
White, Deacon John, 26–27
White, Peregrine, 311
White, Zilpah, 199–200, 205
“White Lotus of the Good Law” (Nepalese Buddhist sutra), 145–46
White Mountains (NH), 109, 430
Whiting, Anna Maria, 213–14; helped rescue Sanborn, 464
Whiting, Col. William (Anna’s father), 464
Whitman, Walt, 170, 241, 556n99; impression of HDT, 395, Fig. 44; visited by HDT and Alcott, 393–94
Whitney, Giles Henry, 64; defended by HDT, 64–65
Whittier, John Greenleaf, 149
Wicasuk (Wickasuck) Island (MA), 107
“widow’s third” custom, 32
“Wild Apples” (HDT), 271, 460–61
wildlife, HDT “kindred” to, 201–3
wildness, 123, 222, 318; and “invisible companion,” 398; on Katahdin as on Cape Cod, 278; “near to good,” 276; “the preservation of the world,” 496
Wiley and Putnam (publisher), 256
Willard, Simon, 13–14, 398
Williams, Henry, 318; HDT aided his escape, 318–19
Willis, Frederick L. H., 535n56
Wilson, Prof. Horace, 489
“Winter’s Walk, A” (HDT), 158; criticism of, by editor RWE, 158
Woman in the Nineteenth Century (M. Fuller), 170
women’s rights, 142; and abolitionism, 142–43
Wood, David, 550n68
woodchucks, 203–5
Woodstock, NH, 109
Worcester, MA, 241, 397, 453, 476, 481; testing ground for HDT’s lectures, 262
Wordsworth, William, 123
Wright, Henry, 139, 154
writer: double consciousness of, 4; HDT as, 4, 9; new practice of, 304
writing, 283–84, 289, 303–4, 321, 343, 359–60, 437, 475; as farming, 118, 255, 331–32; HDT and John, Jr.’s teaching of, 100–101; as “material to mythology,” 305
Wyman, John and son Thomas, 199; Wyman Field, 182, 199
“Yankee in Canada, A” (HDT), 301–3; bowdlerized by G. Curtis, 302; a potboiler, 301
Year without a Summer (1816), 33–35; cause of, 34; farmers ruined by, 33–34
Yellow House (Thoreaus’), 284–85, Fig. 14; HDT’s best and last home, 285
Yeoman’s Gazette, 99
“Young America” group, 149
“Young American, The” (RWE lecture), 167
Young Men’s Society for Mutual Improvement, 54
Zoroastrianism, 145
Figure 1: Herbert W. Gleason, “Autumn view down river from Fair Haven Hill, Concord, Mass. October 15, 1903.” Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 2: Henry Thoreau’s father, John Thoreau Sr. (1787–1859). Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 3: Henry Thoreau’s mother, Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau (1787–1872); this silhouette is the only known image of her. Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 4: Helen Thoreau (1812–49), shortly before her death. No known authenticated portrait exists of John Thoreau Jr. (1815–42). Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 5: Henry David Thoreau (1854), crayon portrait by Samuel Worcester Rowse. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 6: Sophia Thoreau (1819–76), in 1849. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 7: Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882), photograph by J. W. Black. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 8: Lidian Jackson Emerson (1802–92), holding the Emersons’ young son Edward, ca. 1847. Edward, the Emerson’s only surviving son and a particular favorite of Henry Thoreau, grew up to defend Thoreau’s reputation to the world. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 9: “Central Part of Concord, Mass.” (engraving, 1839). This view from the front porch of the Thoreau family’s town square house shows, from left to right, the Courthouse, the top of the Old Hill Burying Ground, the Reverend Ezra Ripley’s First Parish (Unitarian) Church, and the Middlesex Hotel. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 10: “Map of Concord, Massachusetts,” by Herbert W. Gleason, 1906; detail showing Concord Center and immediate environs, including Walden Pond and the Fitchburg Railroad.
Figure 11: The Wheeler-Minott farmhouse, 341 Virginia Road, in which Henry Thoreau was born. This photograph by Alfred Winslow Hosmer was taken after the house was moved down the road from its original site; the building, which still stands, is now the headquarters of the Thoreau Farm. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 12: The original Thoreau House on Concord’s town square (the building on the right); once a popular boardinghouse run by Henry Thoreau’s aunts Elizabeth and Sarah Thoreau, the building is now part of Concord’s Colonial Inn. Photograph by Alfred Winslow Hosmer. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 13: The Texas House, on Belknap Road by the railroad tracks, in which Henry Thoreau’s family lived from 1845 to 1850; Henry planted the apple trees still visible in this undated photograph. This house no longer exists. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 14: The Thoreau family’s “Yellow House” on Main Street, in which Henry Thoreau lived from 1850 until his death. Photograph by Alfred Winslow Hosmer. Courtesy Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 15: Two of the elegant blue boxes in which “Thoreau Superior Graduated Drawing Pencils” were sold and displayed, with a sampling of Thoreau pencils showing various labels, kinds, and grades. Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 16: A page from Thoreau’s Journal, written on Saturday, July 5, 1845—his first full day on Walden Pond: “Yesterday I came here to live . . .” Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 1302.8. Purchased by Pierpont Morgan with the Wakeman Collection, 1909.
Figure 17: Three of Thoreau’s Journal volumes, with a bundle of the Thoreau pencils that allowed him to write in the field. Courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library, New York. MA 6069.
Figure 18: United States Magazine and Democratic Review of October 1843, with Thoreau’s signature from Staten Island; the November issue featured his essay “Paradise (To Be) Regained.” The journal’s motto, “The best government is that which governs least,” prompted the opening to his essay “Civil Disobedience.” Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 19: The Thoreau family’s copy of the Liberty and Anti-Slavery Song Book (1842). Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 20: Herbert W. Gleason, “Fitchburg Railroad Train with Walden Pond in Background”; this photograph was taken from the shore closest to Thoreau’s house. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 21: Henry Thoreau’s original survey of Walden Pond (1846). Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 22: “Walden Pond: A reduced Plan” (1846) as Thoreau published it in “The Pond in Winter,” Walden (1854).
Figure 23: The title page of Walden, showing the drawing by Sophia Thoreau of her brother’s house together with his motto: “I do not propose to write an ode to dejection . . .” Wiki Open Source.
Figure 24: Henry David Thoreau (1856), daguerreotype taken in Worcester, Massachusetts, by Benjamin D. Maxham; this is the copy Thoreau gave to his friend Theo Brown. Courtesy of the Thoreau Society and the Walden Woods Project.
Figure 25: Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888). Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 26: Sarah Margaret Fuller (1810–50). Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 27: W. Ellery Channing (1817–1901), the Transcendentalist poet, was Thoreau’s close friend and first biographer. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 28: Ellen Sewall Osgood (1822–92), the only woman to whom Henry Thoreau proposed marriage. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.
Figure 29: Harrison Gray Otis Blake (1816–98), Thoreau’s Worcester friend, lifelong correspondent, and literary executor. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 30: Daniel Ricketson (1813–96), a Quaker from New Bedford who had built his own “Shanty” before reading Walden; Ricketson immediately sought out Thoreau and became a close friend. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 31: Ricketson’s sketch of Henry Thoreau on their first meeting, December 1854: “In my imagination I had figured [him] as a stout and robust person, instead of the small and rather inferior looking man before me.” From Daniel Ricketson and His Friends (Boston, 1902), facing p. 12.
Figure 32: The manuscript title page of Thoreau’s lecture “Walking”: “I wish, this evening, to speak a word for Nature . . .” The original 1851 lecture grew into the additional lectures “The Wild,” “Moonlight,” and “Life without Principle.” Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 33: A selection of Thoreau’s surveying instruments. The accuracy of his surveys and the exacting precision of his work as a draftsman became his hallmark. Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 34: “Plan of A. Bronson Alcott’s Estate,” Thoreau’s survey of September 22, 1857, when Alcott was in the process of purchasing it; soon the Alcotts were calling this property, which they liked for its many apple trees, “Orchard House.” Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 35: Thoreau’s furniture: In the summer of 1838, Thoreau had a carpenter make this green desk for his use as a schoolteacher; he used it for the rest of his life. The rockers on the chair were his addition, though he likely did not make them himself. He did make his bed, by adding legs and stretchers to a cane frame recycled from a Chinese sofa bed. All three items were with him at Walden. Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 36: Thoreau as natural historian: In March 1856, Thoreau began experimenting with collecting tree saps and boiling them up into sugar; he whittled this birch tree tap from a sumac branch. Thoreau’s skill with woodworking is evident from this box he made to hold geological specimens, a gift to Ellen Sewall Osgood’s husband Joseph Osgood. He purchased the spyglass (not without misgivings) for eight dollars on March 15, 1854; thereafter he carried it constantly. Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 37: “Joseph Polis (or Porus),” by Charles Bird King (1842). Polis, a Penobscot elder, was Thoreau’s guide on his 1857 excursion to Maine. From the collection of Gilcrease Museum, Tulsa, Oklahoma.
Figure 38: “Mt. Ktaadn” (1853), by Frederic Edwin Church. In 1846 Thoreau nearly summited Mount “Ktaadn,” as it was then spelled; in 1857, his hopes to climb it a second time were defeated. Courtesy of the Yale University Art Gallery.
Figure 39: “Tuckerman’s Ravine from Hermit’s Lake,” from William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque America (New York, 1872). Thoreau, Ed Hoar, H. G. O. Blake, and Theo Brown camped in Tuckerman’s Ravine, below the summit of M
ount Washington, for four nights in July 1858; it had a rim, wrote Thoreau, “somewhat like that of the crater of a volcano” (J, 11:33).
Figure 40: Horace Mann Jr. (1844–68), the son of Horace and Mary Peabody Mann, who accompanied Thoreau to Minnesota; upon his return, Mann studied botany with Asa Gray, although his life was cut short by tuberculosis. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.
Figure 41: “At the Mouth of the Wisconsin,” from William Cullen Bryant, ed., Picturesque America (New York, 1872). Thoreau and Mann passed this spot, just below Prairie du Chien, on May 24, 1861.
Figure 42: Henry David Thoreau (1861), by E. S. Dunshee. Daniel Ricketson had two ambrotypes taken after Thoreau returned from Minnesota; the second, which Ricketson gave to Sophia Thoreau as the better of the two, was stolen in 1910 and has never been seen again. Courtesy of the Concord Museum.
Figure 43: In April 1859, Thoreau replanted his old Walden beanfield with four hundred young pines; his pine forest lasted until it was largely destroyed by the Great New England Hurricane of 1938. Photograph by Alfred Winslow Hosmer. Courtesy of the Concord Free Public Library.