Henry David Thoreau

It was pencils that provided the Thoreau family with a degree of financial and emotional stability. After years wandering through professions–at various times a farmer, storekeeper, teacher, and traveling salesman specializing in trade with Native Americans on Massachusetts’ fringes–in 1823, John Thoreau Sr. returned permanently to Concord and his wife and children to become a maker of pencils.

His son David Henry was six years old at the time, the third of John’s four children, born July 12, 1817, and by all accounts called Henry by his family. Day after day Henry Thoreau left the house where both his family and the pencil factory lived to attend Concord’s public primary school and then Concord Academy. He was not an extraordinary student in any regard. It could be that the mind that would create some of the most influential writings on freedom was unwilling to conform to the 1820s, authoritarian New England education system.

Yet at 16, Thoreau was accepted to Harvard, and, through a combination of Yankee frugality, family contributions, a minor scholarship, and a program allowing financial aid students to take semesters off for work, he graduated in 1837, 19th out of 44 students. That graduation day marked perhaps the most notable thing about Thoreau’s time at Harvard, having nothing to do with his, frankly, unremarkable scholastic endeavors and everything to do with a speech given by Ralph Waldo Emerson.

Perhaps this speech served as the initial spark of the two men’s friendship. The exact details of their actually meeting remain a mystery, but Thoreau and Emerson struck up a friendship that year. Emerson was 34 years old. He admired the younger Thoreau who seemed to live out so many of Emerson’s own Transcendental ideals.

Thoreau returned to Concord in 1937 and was offered a teaching position. He decided to accept–on one condition: he would not implement any form of corporal punishment. Despite their bargain, the school board did not agree with their new young teacher’s alternative ideas. Thoreau left after only two weeks, instead working on pencils in the back wing of the family house. But Thoreau felt called to teach. He couldn’t ignore it. When a job in Maine opened up and he wasn’t hired, Thoreau and his older brother John took matters into their own hands. They started a school. In 1838, the Thoreau house became not only home and pencil shop but also classroom.

Their use of nature walks and discussions rather than memorization and corporal punishment became popular to many parents around Concord who wished a different sort of education for their children, so popular the school outgrew the Thoreau house. The brothers moved the school to the grounds of the then-defunct Concord Academy.

Despite the removal of the school, the Thoreau family home was far from idyllic solitude. Add to the pencil-making operation not only several aunts and boarders but a hotbed of abolitionist activities–Thoreau’s mother and two sisters all founding and active members of the Concord Women’s Anti-Slaver Society in 1837. (Not surprisingly, there are accounts that Thoreau himself was active in the Underground Railroad. ) (Cain, p. 65).

Somehow, between teaching, pencil-making, and other odd jobs around Concord, Thoreau took nearly daily walks, perhaps as much out of need to hear himself think as “a sort of crusade, preached by Peter the Hermit in us, to go forth and reconquer [sic] this Holy Land from the hands of Infidels,” something Thoreau wrote in “Walking,” (Finch & Elder, p. 180). Thoreau’s eyes observed as he walked, and his hands wrote, both his observations of natural history and his commentaries on society–the start of a long-kept practice.

In 1839, a boat on the Concord River rocked as Thoreau and John stepped into it, the start of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, Thoreau’s first book, his passionate account almost tangible and absolutely infectious.

Thoreau was too busy in the years following the trip to write and publish the book. Instead, in the same year, he delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum, one of many active facets of the Transcendentalist movement in mid-1800s’ greater Boston area. He also worked with Emerson on The Dial, a Transcendental publication, and continued to teach with John.

Tragedy in January 1842 closed the school when John died of lockjaw. Thoreau had moved into the Emerson household as a tutor, gardener, and intellectual companion when John’s health declined. Then, perhaps to cope with his grief, he moved to Staten Island to tutor Emerson’s relatives. But Thoreau returned to Concord in 1843, more tied to his family and the Transcendentalists in Concord than any other place he visited during his ramblings and rovings throughout New England.

During a river trip in April 1844, a cooking fire started in a stump got wildly out of control, burning 300 acres of forested land. The guilty party remained anonymous in the Concord newspaper’s report of the incident, but there was little doubt in the townspeople’s mind who was responsible. Thoreau, the guilty party, espoused personal responsibility, freedom, and respect for the natural world above all else; this fire was a wake-up call to his own potential impact on the world around him. Thoreau wrote of the fire and the loss of the woodlands, saying “I felt that I had a deeper interest in the woods, knew them better, and should feel their loss more, than any or all of them.” (Derleth, p. 53)

Thoreau built his famous cabin on the shores of Walden Pond a year later. He moved to the woods to “live deliberately,” as he says in Walden. His two years there as a lone woodsman/philosopher scrapping out a living in the wilderness, pausing occasionally to write down his observations, is a myth. In reality, Thoreau lived on the edge of settled Concord and maintained frequent, if not daily, contact with friends and visitors–Walden Pond was no hermitage.

This whole experiment of “Life in the Woods,” the subtitle of Walden, rose out of friendship. With Emerson’s encouragement, Thoreau pursued his deliberate life in the woods on Emerson’s land. While the cabin was in a grove of trees, Concord and its surrounding lands had long been settled and farmed–this was more edge-of-the-pasture than edge-of-the-wilderness. Thoreau was certainly alone at Walden much of the time, but his sauntering jaunts around the countryside and journal entries are nearly as much social observation as they are natural history. Along with his own visitors, including the Concord Women’s Anti-Slavery Society in the summer of 1846, Thoreau frequently played visitor himself, returning home often for meals and company.

In June 1846, inspiration for his famous essay “Civil Disobedience” was born in a jail cell–where Thoreau spent a night for refusing to pay his poll tax. This act and essay went on to inspire people as varied as Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Daniel Ellsberg, as noted in the 2006 film Life with Principle: Thoreau's Voice in Our Time.

The same summer, Thoreau traveled to Maine where the country surprised him. It was somewhat rougher than his Concord and reminded him of “the creations of the old epic and dramatic poets, of Atlas, Vulcan, the Cyclops, and Prometheus,” (Finch & Elder, p. 206). High praise indeed for the oft-overlooked Appalachian Mountains. His writings about Maine and New Hampshire eventually were published after his death in The Maine Woods. In fact, Thoreau saw only two of his books published, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, dedicated to the memory of his brother, in 1848 and the less well received 1854 Walden, or, Life in the Woods.

A productive life after Walden Pond began after the eventful summer of 1846. The pencil factory fell into Thoreau’s hands after his father’s death in 1857. He continued to write and study the world around him, focusing on freedom, almost as if his time in quasi-solitude in the woods gave him greater empathy for the plight of those not free. He wrote an essay in defense of the militant abolitionist John Brown following Brown’s execution in 1859.

Thoreau continued his careful and ecstatic observations of Concord’s wild places. Caught in this spirit, Thoreau stayed out in the chilly December of 1860 counting tree rings in the Walden woods. But this study of succession of trees soon turned to illness. Thoreau, plagued by tuberculosis since adolescence, never fully recovered from this bout. Yet, even as his health declined, Thoreau kept on, investigating forest succession, observing natural history, and writing politics. Thoreau died on May 6, 1862, Concord his last resting place.

“The country knows not yet, or in the least part, how great a son it has lost” (Derleth, p. 202). Despite their long friendship, Thoreau and Emerson had several intellectual fall-outs. Yet the deep respect they retained for each other are evident in Emerson’s words on Thoreau’s death, a prophetic eulogy–it is only since his death that Thoreau’s great voice for wildness and wilderness has been heard as such.

Many seen as defenders of wilderness often use sweeping language and images to inspire thoughts of wild places untrammeled by humans, places almost sublime in their beauty. Thoreau is most noted for his ability to transcend this idea, instead focusing on the human need for freedom in the beauty of ordinary places. His language is dramatic, but the scenes he described are on a scale smaller than most wilderness writers. He found epic drama and wildness in ordinary, overlooked corners, in the lives of even ants and mice. Those not familiar with New England are often taken aback when they realize, Thoreau’s wild places were not akin to Muir’s Yosemite or Abby’s Arches. They were, instead, his neighbors’ apple orchards and berry patches. Thoreau’s talent for highlighting wildness both in the natural world and as a right for humanity were revolutionary. With the triumphant vitality of his words, Thoreau carved his writeful place among philosophers, politicians, naturalists, and writers who all claim him as their own.

References

Cain, W.B., (Ed.) . (2000). A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau. New York: Oxford University Press. 

Derleth, A. (1962). Concord Rebel: A Life of Henrey David Thoreau. Philadephia & New York: Chilton Company. 

Finch, R., & Elder, J. (Eds.) . (2002). The Norton Book of Nature Writing. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. 

Melvyn Hopper Production (Producer). (2006). Life with Principle: Thoreau's Voice in Our Time. [DVD recording]. Concord, MA: The Thoreau Society 

The Thoreau Project. (2008). A Chronology of Thoreau's Life, with Events of the Times.

Thoreau, H.D. (1993 ed.) Walden and Other Writings. New York: Barnes & Noble Classics.