Thoreau in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates

Introduction

[xi] Introduction Our woods and waters will always be different because of this man. —edward emerson Thoreau had a manifest reason for living. —william ellery channing “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 .”1 So did Henry Thoreau, at age thirty, unwittingly spawn what became the time-honored assessment of his standing—he was an author and many other things as well. Indeed, more than other Transcendentalists, Thoreau embodied the full complement of the movement’s ideals and vocations— author, advocate for self-reform, stern critic of his society, abolitionist, philosopher, naturalist. Regardless of how whimsical he may have been in laying out these assorted vocations in response to a Harvard alumni questionnaire , Thoreau’s legacy in the nineteenth century and since has always been enmeshed with multiple identities. In our own time, of course, Thoreau has inspired generations to step to the beat of “a different drummer,” to “advance confidently in the direction of . . . [their] dreams,” “to live the life . . . [they have] imagined,” to “beware of all enterprises that require new clothes,” to “simplify, simplify.” He’s taught us that “the universe is wider than our views of it,” that “there is more day to dawn,” that “in Wildness is the preservation of the world.”2 He has been cited as not only the founding tree-hugger but the inspirer of civil disobedience acts large and small, whether antiwar protests on a global scale or gay rights sit-ins at local high schools. Thoreau authority Walter Harding noted decades ago that “there is hardly an ism of our times that has not attempted to adopt Thoreau.”3 But these Thoreaus did not UT Introduction [xii] exist in the nineteenth century. His audience had not achieved any consensus on his appeal, his worth, his legacy. If, as Robert Sattelmeyer surmises , the conundrum over how (or whether) to value Thoreau results from a “contrariness [that] is expressive of one-half of a deep-seated antiphony in American culture,” then this was a trend that most certainly began in Thoreau’s time. Not only did critics disagree over the genre, quality, and originality of his writing, they differed on how to classify Thoreau himself and considerably amplified his own list: poet, prose writer, naturalist, poet-naturalist, humorist, artist, scientist, “consecrated crank,” hermit, philosopher, stoic, cynic, transcendentalist, idealist, wild man, pantheist, misanthrope, heretic, disciple, “one of the Concord oddities,” “one of the eccentric literary geniuses who seem to swarm in Old Concord,” “one of the old Concord Mutual Admiration Society,” “a crooked genius,” “a wayward genius,” “an extraordinary ‘man of letters,’” and, most prophetically, “one of those singular characters about whom very sincere people will honestly differ.” To one or more of his contemporaries, Henry David Thoreau was all of these. For every critic who praised his humor in Walden, another lamented his lack thereof. For every resident who decried his reclusiveness, a townsman thought him “neighborly always.”4 Being revered most by ordinary readers, neighbors, and students—rather than critics or fellow authors—is a consistent thread in any study of Thoreau ’s reception. Few may have agreed with the Christian Register’s pronouncement in May 1862 that with Thoreau’s death “has passed away one of the most original thinkers our country has produced,” yet this paper’s tribute reflects the homage Thoreau had begun to receive from those who envied his example of leading an unconventional life. In the nineteenth century it was, not surprisingly, those who knew him personally, such as educator E. Harlow Russell, rather than contemporary literati, who most prized Thoreau’s example: “To have lived in the same age and country with Thoreau, and to have walked for more than thirty years—however far behind—in the effulgence of his genius,” wrote Russell, was one of his “greatest privileges.”5 Nonetheless, as Thoreau’s renown increased, many who had not known him well penned quite detailed accounts of their supposed relations with the man. In several nineteenth-century reminiscences concerning the major Concord authors—Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne†, and Ralph Waldo Emerson†—Thoreau appears frequently in familiar and sometimes apocryphal scenes: Emerson visiting Thoreau in jail, ortho- [xiii] Introduction dox neighbors rebuking Thoreau for going fishing rather than attending church, others ridiculing him for reversing the order of his first and middle names or...