THOREAU'S EARLY YEARS
Henry Thoreau was born in 1817 in Concord, where his father, John, was
a shopkeeper. John moved his family to Chelmsford and Boston,
following business opportunities. In 1823 the family moved back to
Concord where John established a pencil-making concern that eventually
brought financial stability to the family. Thoreau's mother, Cynthia
Dunbar, took in boarders for many years to help make ends meet.
Thoreau's older siblings, Helen and John, Jr., were both
schoolteachers; when it was decided that their brother should go to
Harvard College, as had his grandfather before him, they contributed
from their teaching salaries to help pay his expenses, at that time
about $179 a year.
Harvard put heavy emphasis on the classics--Thoreau studied Latin and
Greek grammar or composition for three of his four years. He also took
courses in mathematics, English, history, and mental, natural, and
intellectual philosophy. Modern languages were voluntary, and Thoreau
chose to take Italian, French, German, and Spanish. He was never happy
about the teaching methods used at Harvard--Ralph Waldo is supposed to
have remarked that most of the branches of learning were taught at
Harvard, and Thoreau to have replied, "Yes, all of the branches and
none of the roots"--but he did appreciate the lifelong borrowing
privileges at Harvard College Library for which his degree qualified
him.
ASPIRING WRITER
He returned to Concord after his graduation in 1837 and took up the
profession of teaching, first at the district school and then in a
school he opened with his brother John. He had already begun to think
of himself as a writer, however, and when he and John had to close
their school in 1841 Thoreau accepted an offer to stay in with
neighboring Emerson's family and earn his keep as a handyman while he
concentrated on his writing.
Thoreau knew himself to be a writer from the time he graduated from
Harvard. He had begun keeping a journal in 1837 and had probably
started writing poetry earlier than that; he also wrote and published
essays and reviews. He soon found, however, that he would have to earn
his living in some other way.
GETTING A LIVING
For a steady income, he relied on two sources: the family pencil
business and his own practice as a surveyor. The Thoreau family became
involved in manufacturing pencils in the 1820s, and Thoreau used his
talent as an engineer to improve the product. He invented a machine
that ground the plumbago for the leads into a very fine powder and
developed a combination of the finely ground plumbago and clay that
resulted in a pencil that produced a smooth, regular line. He also
improved the method of assembling the casing and the lead. Thoreau
pencils were the first produced in America that equaled those made by
the German company, Faber, whose pencils set the standard for quality.
In the 1850s, when the electrotyping process of printing began to be
used widely, the Thoreaus shifted from pencil-making to supplying
large quantities of their finely ground plumbago to printing
companies. Thoreau continued to run the company after his father's
death in 1859. Characteristically, Thoreau put the business letters
and invoices associated with the company to a second use as scrap
paper for lists and notes, and drafts of his late unfinished natural
history essays.
Thoreau taught himself to survey; he had, as Emerson noted in his
eulogy, "a natural skill for mensuration," and he was very good at the
work. In addition to working for the town of Concord, he surveyed
house and wood lots around Concord for landowners who were having
property assessed and those wanting to settle boundary disputes with
their neighbors. In 1859, he was hired by a group of farmers who filed
suit against the owners of the Billerica Dam, claiming that the dam
raised the water level in the river and destroyed the farmers' meadow
lands. To help support the claim, Thoreau collected evidence from many
sources. He interviewed people with long experience of the river, took
extensive measurements of the water level at various points along its
course, and inspected all of the river's bridges. He recorded his
findings in a large chart and transferred appropriate information to
an existing survey of the river that he had traced. The dispute was a
bitter one, arousing ill-feeling in the town: Thoreau reported in his
Journal that one of those he interviewed testified in court that the
river was "dammed at both ends and cursed in the middle."
He also collected specimens for Louis Agassiz, who had brought the
study of natural history to Harvard after Thoreau graduated, but he
was not compensated for this work. He lectured several times a year at
lyceums and private homes from Maine to New Jersey. These lectures
were important in his process of composition--most of the ideas and
themes in his essays and books were first presented to the public in
lectures--but they were not lucrative.
In 1847, responding to a request from the secretary of his Harvard
class, he described his various employments: "I am a Schoolmaster--a
Private Tutor, a Surveyor--a Gardener, a Farmer--a Painter, I mean a
House Painter, a Carpenter, a Mason, a Day-Laborer, a Pencil-Maker, a
Glass-paper Maker, a Writer, and sometimes a Poetaster." He
generalized about the advantage of making just enough money to supply
his limited needs in the essay "Life without Principle": "Those slight
labors which afford me a livelihood, and by which it is allowed that I
am to some extent serviceable to my contemporaries, are as yet
commonly a pleasure to me, and I am not often reminded that they are a
necessity" (Reform Papers, p. 160).
TRANSCENDENTALISM
Thoreau and the Transcendentalist movement in New England grew up
together. Thoreau was nineteen years old when Emerson published
Nature, an essay that articulates the philosophical underpinnings of
the movement. Transcendentalism began as a radical religious movement,
opposed to the rationalist, conservative institution that Unitarianism
had become. Many of the movement's early proponents were or had been
Unitarian ministers, Emerson among them.
They had found Unitarianism wanting both spiritually and emotionally,
and, beginning in the late 1820s, had expressed the need for and
conviction of a more personal and intuitive experience of the divine,
one available to every person. "The foregoing generations beheld God
and nature face to face;" wrote Emerson in Nature, "we, through their
eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the
universe? Why should not we have a poetry and philosophy of insight
and not of tradition, and a religion by revelation to us, and not the
history of theirs?"
The Transcendentalists assumed a universe divided into two essential
parts, the soul and nature. Emerson defined the soul by defining
nature: "all that is separated from us, all which Philosophy
distinguishes as the NOT ME, that is, both nature and art, all other
men and my own body, must be ranked under this name, NATURE." A belief
in the reliability of the human conscience was a fundamental
Transcendentalist principle, and this belief was based upon a
conviction of the immanence, or indwelling, of God in the soul of the
individual. "We see God around us because He dwells within us," wrote
William Ellery Channing in 1828; "the beauty and glory of God's works
are revealed to the mind by a light beaming from itself."
This conviction of immanence enabled Thoreau to write, in "Civil
Disobedience," "the only obligation which I have a right to assume, is
to do at any time what I think is right," and it supported his intense
and particular interest in nature, in which the divine force is also
revealed" (Reform Papers, p. 65). As a reflection of God, nature
expressed symbolically the spiritual world that worked beyond the
physical one. Transcendentalism can be seen as the religious and
intellectual expression of American democracy: all men had an equal
chance of experiencing and expressing divinity directly, regardless of
wealth, social status, or politics.
Initially because of Emerson's presence, Concord was a significant
intellectual and cultural center in Thoreau's time. Nathaniel
Hawthorne and Bronson Alcott lived there, as did William Ellery
Channing the Younger. Margaret Fuller visited Emerson often, and
Franklin Sanborn boarded with the Thoreau family in the 1850s.
Theodore Parker, George Ripley, Thomas Wentworth Higginson, and Horace
Greeley were also members of the circle of friends.
Thoreau was respected within this circle, but he was always a prickly
individualist. He cared little for group activities, whether political
or religious, and even avoided organized reform movements until the
moral imperative of abolition commanded his attention. In eulogizing
Thoreau, Emerson said "there was somewhat military in his nature, not
to be subdued, always manly and able, but rarely tender, as if he did
not feel himself except in opposition."
INDIVIDUALISM
In "Civil Disobedience," Thoreau expressed his belief in the power
and, indeed, the obligation of the individual to determine right from
wrong, independent of the dictates of society: ". . . any man more
right than his neighbors, constitutes a majority of one . . ." (Reform
Papers, p. 74). While many of his contemporaries espoused this view,
few practiced it in their own lives as consistently as Thoreau.
Thoreau exercised his right to dissent from the prevailing views in
many ways, large and small. He worked for pay intermittently, he
cultivated relationships with several of the town's outcasts, he lived
alone in the woods for two years, he never married, he signed off from
the First Parish Church rather than be taxed automatically to support
it every year.
Thoreau encouraged others to assert their individuality, each in his
or her own way. When neighbors talked of emulating his lifestyle at
the pond, he was dismayed rather than flattered.
I would not have any one adopt my mode of living on any account; for,
beside that before he has fairly learned it I may have found out
another for myself, I desire that there may be as many different
persons in the world as possible; but I would have each one be very
careful to find out and pursue his own way, and not his father's or
his mother's or his neighbor's instead. The youth may build or plant
or sail, only let him not be hindered from doing that which he tells
me he would like to do. It is by a mathematical point only that we are
wise, as the sailor or the fugitive slave keeps the polestar in his
eye; but that is sufficient guidance for all our life. We may not
arrive at our port within a calculable period, but we would preserve
the true course. (Walden, p. 71)
If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because
he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he
hears, however measured or far away. (Walden, p. 326)
Thoreau also believed that independent, well-considered action arose
naturally from a questing attitude of mind. He was first and foremost
an explorer, of both the world around him and the world within him.
Be a Columbus to whole new continents and worlds within you, opening
new channels, not of trade, but of thought. (Walden, p. 321)
Thoreau's celebration of solitude was a natural outgrowth of his
commitment to the idea of individual action. His neighbors frequently
saw him heading out for his regular afternoon walk which took him to
every stream and meadow in Concord and the surrounding towns.
Contemporaries attest that Thoreau was gregarious, and he left an
extensive correspondence which demonstrates the depth and perseverance
of his friendships. And although he had many visitors at Walden, much
of the time he was alone, a condition he savored.
I never found the companion that was so companionable as solitude.
(Walden, p. 135)
The man who goes alone can start to-day; but he who travels with
another must wait till that other is ready. (Walden, p. 72)
MATERIALISM
Allying himself with an ancient tradition of asceticism, Thoreau
considered the ownership of material possessions beyond the basic
necessities of life to be an obstacle, rather than an advantage. He
saw that most people measured their worth in terms of what they owned,
and stood this common assumption on its head.
I see young men, my townsmen, whose misfortune it is to have inherited
farms, houses, barns, cattle, and farming tools; for these are more
easily acquired than got rid of. Better if they had been born in the
open pasture and suckled by a wolf, that they might have seen with
clearer eyes what field they were called to labor in. (Walden, p. 5)
A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can
afford to let alone. (Walden, p. 82)
Thoreau proposed to determine what was basic to human survival, and
then to live as simply as possible.
By the words, necessary of life, I mean whatever, of all that man
obtains by his own exertions, has been from the first, or from long
use has become, so important to human life that few, if any, whether
from savageness, or poverty, or philosophy, ever attempt to do without
it. (Walden, p. 12)
Most of the luxuries, and many of the so called comforts of life, are
not only not indispensable, but positive hinderances to the elevation
of mankind. (Walden, p. 14)
My greatest skill has been to want but little. (Walden, p. 69)
He grew some of his own food, including beans, potatoes, peas, and
turnips. He ate wild berries and apples, and occasionally a fish that
he had caught, and once killed and cooked a woodchuck that had ravaged
his bean-field. He so arranged his affairs that he had to work only a
little at a time for his upkeep, and he kept a broad margin to his
life for reading, thinking, walking, observing, and writing.
For more than five years I maintained myself thus solely by the labor
of my hands, and I found, that by working about six weeks in a year, I
could meet all the expenses of living. The whole of my winters, as
well as most of my summers, I had free and clear for study. (Walden,
p. 69)
It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of
his brow, unless he sweats easier than I do. (Walden, p. 71)
TECHNOLOGY AND PROGRESS
Thoreau, himself an inventor and an engineer of sorts, was fascinated
by technology, and the mid-nineteenth century saw a series of
inventions that would radically change the world, such as power looms,
railroads, and the telegraph. But these inventions were products of a
larger movement, the industrial revolution, in which Thoreau saw the
potential for the destruction of nature for the ends of commerce. In
Thoreau's view, technology also provoked an excitement that was
counterproductive because it served as a distraction from the
important questions of life.
Perhaps we are led oftener by the love of novelty, and a regard for
the opinions of men, in procuring it, than by a true utility. (Walden,
p. 21)
Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys, which distract our
attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an
unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at;
as railroads lead to Boston or New York. We are in great haste to
construct a magnetic telegraph from Maine to Texas; but Maine and
Texas, it may be, have nothing important to communicate. (Walden, p.
52)
The railroad was made the symbol of technology, and its effects in
Walden and the language Thoreau uses to describe it expressed his
ambivalence.
I watch the passage of the morning cars with the same feeling that I
do the rising of the sun, which is hardly more regular. Their train of
clouds stretching far behind and rising higher and higher, going to
heaven while the cars are going to Boston, conceals the sun for a
minute and casts my distant field into the shade, a celestial train
beside which the petty train of cars which hugs the earth is but the
barb of the spear. The stabler of the iron horse was up early this
winter morning by the light of the stars amid the mountains, to fodder
and harness his steed. Fire, too, was awakened thus early to put the
vital heat in him and get him off. If the enterprise were as innocent
as it is early! If the snow lies deep, they strap on his snow-shoes,
and with the giant plow, plow a furrow from the mountains to the
seaboard, in which the cars, like a following drill-barrow, sprinkle
all the restless men and floating merchandise in the country for seed.
All day the fire-steed flies over the country, stopping only that his
master may rest, and I am awakened by his tramp and defiant snort at
midnight, when in some remote glen in the woods he fronts the elements
incased in ice and snow; and he will reach his stall only with the
morning star, to start once more on his travels without rest or
slumber. Or perchance, at evening, I hear him in his stable blowing
off the superfluous energy of the day, that he may calm his nerves and
cool his liver and brain for a few hours of iron slumber. If the
enterprise were as heroic and commanding as it is protracted and
unwearied! (Walden, pp. 116-117)
NATURE
Thoreau was a dedicated, self-taught naturalist, who disciplined
himself to observe the natural phenomena around Concord systematically
and to record his observations almost daily in his Journal. The
Journal contains initial formulations of ideas and descriptions that
appear in Thoreau's lectures, essays, and books; early versions of
passages that reached final form in Walden can be found in the Journal
as early as 1846. Thoreau's observations of nature enrich all of his
work, even his essays on political topics. Images and comparisons
based on his studies of animal behavior, of the life cycles of plants,
and of the features of the changing seasons illustrate and enliven the
ideas he puts forth in Walden.
All day long the red squirrels came and went, and afforded me
much entertainment by their manoeuvres. One would approach at first
warily through the shrub-oaks, running over the snow crust by fits
and starts like a leaf blown by the wind, now a few paces this way,
with wonderful speed and waste of energy, making inconceivable haste
with his "trotters," as if it were for a wager, and now as many
paces that way, but never getting on more than half a rod at a time;
and then suddenly pausing with a ludicrous expression and a
gratuitous somerset, as if all the eyes in the universe were fixed
on him,--for all the motions of a squirrel, even in the most
solitary recesses of the forest, imply spectators as much as those
of a dancing girl,--wasting more time in delay and circumspection
than would have sufficed to walk the whole distance,--I never saw
one walk,--and then suddenly, before you could say Jack Robinson, he
would be in the top of a young pitch-pine, winding up his clock and
chiding all imaginary spectators, soliloquizing and talking to all
the universe at the same time,--for no reason that I could ever
detect, or he himself was aware of, I suspect. (Walden, pp. 273-274)
The grass flames up on the hillsides like a spring fire,--"et
primitus oritur herba imbribus primoribus evocata,"--as if the earth
sent forth an inward heat to greet the returning sun; not yellow but
green is the color of its flame;--the symbol of perpetual youth, the
grass-blade, like a long green ribbon, streams from the sod into the
summer, checked indeed by the frost, but anon pushing on again,
lifting its spear of last year's hay with the fresh life below. . .
. So our human life but dies down to its root, and still puts forth
its green blade to eternity. (Walden, pp. 310-311)
Once it chanced that I stood in the very abutment of a rainbow's
arch, which filled the lower stratum of the atmosphere, tinging the
grass and leaves around, and dazzling me as if I looked through
colored crystal. It was a lake of rainbow light, in which, for a
short while, I lived like a dolphin. If it had lasted longer it
might have tinged my employments and life. (Walden, p. 202)
The love of nature that is evident in Thoreau's descriptions in Walden
is one of the most powerful aspects of the book. The environmental
movement of the past thirty years has embraced Thoreau as a guiding
spirit, and he is valued for his early understanding of the idea that
nature is made up of interrelated parts. He is considered by many to
be the father of the environmental movement.
Replica of Thoreau House at Walden Pond
BEFORE AND AFTER WALDEN
Walden is Thoreau's best-known book, but other works of his written
both before and after Walden have met with favorable responses. All of
his writing except his poetry is expository--he wrote no fiction--and
much of it is built on the framework of the journey, short or long,
external or interior. A Week, The Maine Woods, Cape Cod, and the
essays "A Winter Walk," "A Walk to Wachusett," and "An Excursion to
Canada," for example, are all structured as traditional travel
narratives. The speaker--and it is useful to remember that almost all
of Thoreau's published essays and books were first presented as
lectures--sets out from home in each case, and the reader experiences
the wonders of each new place with him, sharing the meditations it
inspires, and finally returning with him to Concord with a deeper
understanding of both native and foreign places and of the journeying
self. Other essays take the reader on different kinds of
journeys--through the foliage of autumn ("Autumnal Tints"), through
the cultivated and wild orchards of history ("Wild Apples"), through
the life-cycle of a plot of land as one species of tree gives way to
another ("The Succession of Forest Trees").
Nature is Thoreau's first great subject; the question of how we should
live is his second. One series of his essays deals with issues of
personal exploration and renewal. In the 1830s and 1840s a wave of
reform movements of all kinds swept New England. The issues involved
ranged from women's rights to temperance, from education to religion,
from diet to sex. In general, Thoreau did not support reform
movements; after he was invited to join the model community at Brook
Farm, he wrote in his Journal, "As for these communities, I think I
had rather keep bachelor's hall in hell than go to board in heaven."
The one movement with which he finally could not resist an alliance
was abolitionism. Although he wrote in Walden,
I sometimes wonder that we can be so frivolous, I may almost say,
as to attend to the gross but somewhat foreign form of servitude
called Negro Slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters that
enslave both north and south. It is hard to have a southern
overseer; it is worse to have a northern one; but worst of all when
you are the slave-driver of yourself. (p. 7)
and was at first reluctant to speak at abolitionist rallies because
he felt he was expected to follow certain formulas, he later gave
several impassioned lectures in response to the enforcement of the
Fugitive Slave Law and in support of the activities of John Brown.
Considering his neighbors' dismissive responses to Brown at the news
of his death, Thoreau wrote,
I hear another ask, Yankee-like, 'What will he gain by it?' as if
he expected to fill his pockets by this enterprise. Such a one has
no idea of gain but in this worldly sense. If it does not lead to a
"surprise" party, if he does not get a new pair of boots, or a vote
of thanks, it must be a failure. 'But he won't gain any thing by
it.' Well, no, I don't suppose he could get four-and-sixpence a day
for being hung, take the year round; but then he stands a chance to
save a considerable part of his soul--and such a soul!--when you do
not. No doubt you can get more in your market for a quart of milk
than for a quart of blood, but that is not the market that heroes
carry their blood to. ("A Plea for Captain John Brown," Reform
Papers, p. 119)
Thoreau's most famous essay is "Civil Disobedience," published in
1849 as "Resistance to Civil Government." The incident that provoked
him to write it took place in July 1846, while he was living at
Walden. Coming into town to have a pair of shoes repaired, he was
arrested for non-payment of the poll tax assessed against every voter,
and spent a night in jail. He was released the next day, after one of
his relatives, probably an aunt, paid what was owed, but the event
gave him the impetus to attack the government in a classic anti-war,
anti-slavery piece that gave support to the passive resistance of
Mahandas Gandhi, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and other
twentieth-century conscientious objectors.
Some critics now consider Thoreau's Journal his most innovative and
exciting work. In it he was able to show his thoughts in their natural
relation to one another, not forced into a thematic arrangement, or
stretched or lopped to fit the constraints of formal exposition. The
natural alternation of observation and reflection provided a rhythm
that suited his temperament and style. He usually walked in the
mornings and, using field notes that were almost a shorthand to remind
him of what he had observed, wrote in the afternoons, although he
sometimes postponed the composition and wrote several days' entries at
once.
Thoreau's careful observations of the cycles of growing plants, of
water levels in the local rivers and ponds, of fluctuating
temperatures, and of many other natural phenomena are recorded in his
Journal. They became the basis for a series of lists and charts that
provided precise information for several essays in Transcendental
natural history that remained unfinished at his death, and that show
him developing another kind of writing--more scientific than his
excursions but no less poetic.
References to Walden are to: Walden, ed. J. Lyndon
Shanley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971). References to
Reform Papers are to: Reform Papers, ed. Wendell Glick (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1973).
URL http://libws66.lib.niu.edu/thoreau/bexhibit.htm
Contact: Elizabeth Witherell and Lihong Xie
Last modified: Tuesday, August 24, 1999 |
