SOURCE: “Emerson's ‘Domestic and Social Experiments’: Service, Slavery, and the Unhired Man,” in American Literature, Vol. 66, No. 3, September, 1994, pp. 485-508.

[In the following essay, Ryan outlines Emerson's ideas on abolition, examining the development of these views in the context of the writer's own domestic arrangements.]

I hope New England will come to boast itself in being a nation of servants, & leave to the planters the misery of being a nation of served.

—R. W. Emerson, Journal C (1837)

Len Gougeon has shown that Ralph Waldo Emerson traveled a long way between 1837, when he made his first “abolitionist” speech, and 1844, when he affirmed his opposition to chattel slavery. The first effort, Gougeon notes, disappointed Emerson's friends because it was more a defense of free speech than a denunciation of American slavery; indeed, the great idealist had recommended tolerance for slaveholders' views. Yet by 1844 Emerson made a stirring antislavery speech which, according to Gougeon, found him speaking “with an emotional as well as an intellectual appreciation” he had not demonstrated earlier. Gougeon explains this dramatic shift with reference to developments in Emerson's philosophy and sense of vocation.¹

Here, I propose another perspective on Emerson's decision to advocate abolition precisely when, and on the terms, he did. This perspective helps explain three related phenomena: how a series of “domestic & social experiments” helped shape Emerson's published views on American slavery; how hard reformers had to struggle against prevailing notions of mastery, domestic service, and the home; and how Emerson's slow conversion to antislavery was part and parcel of his dwindling enthusiasm for the once-feted Henry Thoreau.

The linchpin holding these phenomena together is Emerson's unphilosophical vexation with America's “servant problem.” That much-discussed concern was a response to, and affirmation of, changing social patterns in the industrializing Northeast. From Puritan days through the eighteenth century, servants had been understood as members, or almost-members, of the families in which they served. But by the 1820s, that time-tested trope looked less pertinent to domestic patterns in America's industrializing areas. One change was that industrialization separated home and work, a shift that made waged co-residents seem anomalous. Another was that altered legal structures gave waged domestic workers increased mobility, a freedom their disgruntled employers deplored as upsetting their hearths and homes. Third, and perhaps most worrisome, dense urban populations eroded many served Americans' sense that non-kin domestic workers were, or could be made, familial co-residents who could be trusted within their ostensibly “privatized” abodes.² Pinpointing these anxieties, Caroline Howard Gilman, an anti-abolitionist, wrote gleefully that a new waged servant was “a forlorn hope—one of those experiments that New-England ladies are so constantly obliged to make of the morals and dispositions of strangers.”³ Gilman's subtlety lies in her implicit comparison to the affectionate bonds supposed to exist between slaveholders and petted house chattel. The expression a “family white and black” usually included chattel field hands. But “family” feelings were thought especially likely among those house slaves who enjoyed long-term, intimate, and supposedly affectionate relationships with those they served. Those slaves, whom I call “chattel servants” or “house chattel,” were routinely praised as more loving, efficient, and loyal than the North's waged domestic workers.

Beginning in the 1830s, propagation of the notion of a “plantation family” invited middling homemakers of all regions to contrast the service relations extant on the two sides of the Mason-Dixon. In response to mounting abolitionist activity, proslavery propagandists boosted the idea that loving, childlike chattel, born and raised within sight of the Big House, would grow into more familial attendants than wage-hungry “strangers” ever could. These same writers also promoted the idea that affection foundered on waged relations. As everyone recognized, house chattel served without benefit of wages while waged servants were apt to leave if cash were not forthcoming. Under these circumstances, it was hard for wage-payers to claim “family” feeling, and proslavery writers were quick to seize the emotive edge. George Fitzhugh smirked: “we love our slaves, and we are ready to defend, assist and protect them; you hate and fear your white servants.”⁴ Much of Fitzhugh's popularity was due to such canny thrusts: this jibe reproduced exactly many wage-payers' own anxieties and envies.

Today, of course, Fitzhugh's claims appear disingenuous, rhetorical posturing in aid of repugnant political goals. But in the early years of the nineteenth century, many believed that slaveholders had found a better form of service. Those wage-payers who had never owned chattel servants, such as Waldo Emerson, would have been especially likely to believe that an extended and nonwaged “family” was the best model yet devised for providing comfortable and mutually beneficial service relations.

Emerson did not hope to reinstitute slavery in Massachusetts. But he did try, between 1837 and 1844, to establish “family-style” domestic service, as if to show that slaveholders were not the only ones who could create or maintain familial bonds. Only after a series of experiments had been tried and found wanting did he accede to friends' pleas to oppose slavery publicly. Then, like most antislavery speakers, he had most to say about the field hand. But it is noteworthy that when he did turn his attention to chattel servants, Emerson was particularly impressed by the “silent obedience” he thought those workers would supply.

Demands for silence were far from Emerson's mind when he first set up housekeeping at Bush, a large private home in Concord, in 1835. Before that date, Emerson did not recognize a servant problem, probably because, during his first marriage, he had “boarded out.” But when he married for a second time, Emerson was forced to confront the domestic workers he had once paid landladies to manage. By 1838, he thought the issues agitating American society to be: “War, Slavery, Alcohol, animal food, Domestic hired service, Colleges, Creeds, & now at last Money.”⁵ By 1840, he would come to see servants and slaves as more closely related; in his lecture “Religion,” given that same year, he publicly praised those who worked for “the freedom of the servant and the slave.”⁶ Later still, Emerson would retreat from this radical conflation: by the late 1840s, waged domestic servants were accepted as fixtures in the Emersons' home.

It is the interim period that interests me here, the years during which Emerson came to realize that waged relations offered savvy homemakers certain advantages. Lidian Emerson had always thought so: though an early and unwavering advocate of antislavery, she was happy to employ domestic assistants. Thus she had written in 1822: “I don't see how you can get along with so many ‘to make & mend for’ and bad help. I see but one remedy against being hurried all the time out of your wits, and that is to hire work enough done to enable you to get along easy. What is expense in comparison with the comfort of one's life and the improvement of ones mind.”⁷ Lidian did not share her husband's dis-ease with waged domestics. Indeed, she was willing to contend, acerbically, with a neighbor she thought had “stolen” a servant promised to the Emerson home.⁸

Servants, she recognized, were simple necessities, at least in a home as large and hospitable as Bush. But they were also encumbrances, especially for an inexperienced bride. According to Ellen Tucker Emerson's memoir of her mother, the erstwhile religieuse predicated her agreement to marry on her suitor's realization that she had not been trained to run a home. “[S]he foresaw,” wrote Ellen Emerson, “that with her long life wholly aside from housekeeping she should not be a skillful mistress of a house and that it would be a load of care and labour from which she shrank and a giving up of an existence she thoroughly enjoyed and to which she had become exactly fitted, and she could not undertake it unless he was sure he loved her and needed her enough to justify her in doing it.”⁹ Waldo inevitably replied that he was sure, and the reluctant housekeeper accepted his hand, his home, and the management of his mother's servants.

Newly arrived at Bush, Lidian gushed to her sister, Lucy Jackson Brown, “This Nancy of the Emerson's is indeed a treasure. I will when I have time write you particulars concerning her—such a rare blessing as wise and faithful help, is worth writing about” (SL, 34). Unfortunately, relations with Nancy Colesworthy did not run smoothly for long. Though Lidian gained confidence in housekeeping as she grew accustomed to staff management, Waldo recorded his wife's confession, in 1838, that “when she gives any new direction in the kitchen she feels like a boy who throws a stone & runs” (JMN, 5:479).

Waldo was alternately charmed by his wife's efforts and irritated by poor household management. In a genial mood, he could write: “The common household tasks are agreeable to the imagination: they are the subjects of all the Greek gems”; though another day would find him wishing: “my housekeeping should be clean & sweet & … it should not shame or annoy me” (JMN, 7:242 and 229). He usually vented his impatience on the servants whom he saw as causing the distress, but he could also indict his wife's incompetence. According to Waldo, “literary men” who marry should take a “shrew for a wife, a sharp-tongued notable dame who can & will assume the total economy of the house, and having some sense that her philosopher is best in his study suffers him not to intermeddle with her thrift” (JMN, 7:420).

Most advice manuals supported a husband's distance from servant problems.¹⁰ But when that husband was a clergyman, he was even less obliged to do household work: at least two advice books of the 1830s taught that domestic servants should minister to ministers. In one, a reluctant waged serving maid is persuaded that a servant is not “a low and a mean thing to be,” since “if there were no mechanics and no servants, then preachers and writers, and all such as have gained a good education, would have to get their own food and clothes, and do housework for themselves. And that would keep them busy all day long, and every day; so that they would not have time to preach and write books, and spread knowledge and religion, however fit and able they might be to do it; so there would be little or no good done.” “Yes,” this fictional servant-to-be concludes happily, “I see that servants help to get the gospel taught.”¹¹

Her ideas were seconded by William Andrus Alcott, a popular and prolific writer of domestic advice manuals and, not incidentally, Bronson Alcott's cousin. In The Young Woman's Guide to Excellence, Alcott offered his own version of the preceding story, with his anecdote of a servant whose labors rivaled that of any missionary. “She is an ordinary domestic—and no more,” Alcott wrote, but because her employer is a teacher, her influence extends unto the multitude. “And if ninety millions,” he perorated, “or even one tenth that number of citizens should, in the course of the next two centuries, reap the benefit of his labors, and become lights in the world, is it too much to say that she has been an important aid in accomplishing the work?”¹²

Considering the popularity of this notion, Waldo Emerson may be excused for thinking devoted service his due. But he would also have known that most households did without servants and that many considered reliance on waged servants enervating, anti-Christian, and unrepublican. Despite these fears, Alcott admitted servants to selected homes, especially those with sick inmates and those which entertained frequently. This last condition may have soothed Waldo's doubts about his home's reliance on waged non-kin: in the early years of his second marriage, he kept open board for his admirers.

Of course Southerners were famous for hospitality, too. The difference in the South, at least in proslavery literature, was that domestic staffs were assumed to be always present, willing, and numerous, qualities sometimes lacking in the staff at Bush. With Swallow Barn (1832), Sheppard Lee (1836), and other plantation fantasies much in evidence, Emerson must have succumbed to a few sideways glances: that is, his views on slavery would have affected his dawning sense of a “servant problem” just as much as his gripes about waged service influenced his thoughts on chattel labor. With portraits of a loving, immobilized plantation “family” being promoted on all sides, any American homemaker could have found restless co-residents disturbing. But the point was particularly acute for the lecturer who proclaimed that the “constant progress of Culture is to a more interior life, to a deeper Home.”¹³ Obviously, with waged co-residents coming and going just as they pleased, this desideratum was out of step with most domestic employers' realities. William Gilmore Simms probed this wound succinctly in 1837. “Envy of the North by the South!” he snorted. “The boot is on the other leg, perhaps.”¹⁴

The progress of Emerson's thought suggests that Simm's mockery was well founded: during the period in which he abstained from abolition, Emerson directed his energies toward establishing a waged domestic staff as familial and immobilized as any slaveholder could boast. To accomplish the goal of a family-like serving force would have been a home-lover's triumph in a day when great spiritual value was attributed to a stable and stabilizing domestic realm. Emerson accepted these values: in his lecture “Home,” he grieves over the family in which a homemaker “had supposed a perfect understanding and intimate bonds subsisted,” only to find “with surprise that in proportion to the force of character existing all are in a degree strangers to and mutually observant of each other's acts” (EL, 32). To counteract domestic strangeness, this harried householder suggests that men become more involved in the domestic sphere: “He is not yet a man,” this same lecture asserts, “if he have not learned the Household Laws, if he have not learned how in some way to labor for the maintenance of himself and others” (EL, 33). This struggle to fit men into domestic life (still ongoing in some American homes) had its roots in the same home/market split that gave rise to the “servant problem.”

For if home was essentially woman's sphere, then where did men or servants fit within its sacralized boundaries? It is much to Emerson's credit that he tried to find himself domestic duties; it is much to his credit, too, that he saw servants' position in a non-kin family as ripe for reform. But his greatest imaginative leap was to see what most domestic employers refused to consider: that waged domestic service was not wholly different from Southern slavery.

In “Reforms,” another pre-Brook Farm lecture, this thinker reveals the conceptual proximity of waged and chattel service. “[I]n a community where labor was the point of honor,” he claims, “the vain and the idle would labor. What a mountain of chagrins, inconveniences, diseases, and sins would sink into the sea with the uprise of this one doctrine of labor. Domestic hired service would go over the dam. Slavery would fall into the pit. Shoals of maladies would be exterminated, and the Saturnian Age revive” (EL, 264).¹⁵ By 1839, then, Emerson was arguing that, in a better world, both forms of service would disappear. He expected, as did his friends George and Sophia Ripley, that the rethinking or revaluing of menial labor would put an end to both these abuses against the home.

Yet neither rethinking nor revaluing would help Lidian with what she dubbed the “Martha-like care of wine & custards” (SL, 62). Idealists could say that housekeeping itself was the real problem: hence Waldo's scorn of domestic fripperies and repeated calls for simpler housekeeping. But it is easy to imagine Lidian's reaction to such dreamy heights: her housekeeping was not arduous by choice. The more practical option, therefore, especially as one's family grew, might be to make servants seem more like kin.

This strategy explains why Waldo Emerson began, in 1840, a series of domestic reforms intended to make waged servants extended “family.” Only after these efforts failed did Emerson agree to speak out against slavery. In other words, he did not commit his energies to abolition until he had found, for himself, that servants could not be immobilized or made less disturbing simply by employers' treating them as members of one united household. It suggests a nice sense of honor—or bullheadedness—that Emerson refrained from attacking Southerners' domestic service while he tried to devise better labor arrangements within his own home.

Lidian, already committed to antislavery, thought at least one of her husband's domestic proposals “a wild scheme.”¹⁶ Her pragmatic scorn—or nineteenth-century gender roles—may explain why her husband most often discussed service reforms in the voice of the first person singular. For instance, in the letter expressing his half-apologetic decision not to join Brook Farm, Waldo tries to let the Ripleys down lightly, claiming to be “so ignorant & uncertain in my improvements that I would fain hide my attempts & failures in solitude where they shall perplex none or very few beside myself.”¹⁷ He adds, as if his wife played no part in such domestic efforts, “The ground of my decision is almost purely personal to myself” and “I think that all I shall solidly do, I must do alone” (Letters, 2:369-70).¹⁸

But the best explanation for Emerson's self-portrayed solitude is that his experiments were all attempts to establish more fully the so-called privatized home. Brook Farm was no solution, then, for the theorist of the single-family hearth. “I think,” suggests one version of this important apologia, “that my present position has even greater advantages than yours would offer me for testing my improvements in those small private parties into which men are all set off already throughout the world” (Letters, 2:370). This same letter makes it clear that service relations are the rub. “The principal particulars in which I wish to mend my domestic life,” Emerson declares, “are in acquiring habits of regular manual labor, and in ameliorating or abolishing in my house the condition of hired menial service. … But surely I need not sell my house & remove my family to Newton in order to make the experiment of labor & self help. I am already in the act of trying some domestic & social experiments which my present position favors” (2:370). This refusal of communitarian living includes the substitution of the words “ameliorating or abolishing” for the original “discontinuing.” There is little practical difference between “discontinuing” and “abolishing,” though the latter obviously echoes antislavery rhetoric. But there is a good deal of room between “ameliorating” and “abolishing,” and Emerson's real movement was toward the former.

Yet it is easy to see why the Ripleys thought the Emerson family a likely candidate for Brook Farm: in the late 1830s, Waldo was wont to proclaim the beauties of communal labor. In “Domestic Life,” a lecture delivered during these servant-conscious years, he sounds egalitarian and even gender-neutral, when he scoffs that “this voice of communities and ages, ‘Give us wealth, and the good household shall exist,’ is vicious, and leaves the whole difficulty untouched. It is better, certainly, in this form, ‘Give us your labor, and the household begins.’ I see not how serious labor, the labor of all and every day, is to be avoided.” Going further, he advises his audience that “the reform that applies itself to the household must not be partial. It must correct the whole system of our social living. It must come with plain living and high thinking; it must break up caste, and put domestic service on another foundation.”¹⁹ This sentiment, no doubt well intended, proved deceptive: as the Ripleys would find, this thinker preferred to mind his own hen-coop.²⁰

Within that confined space, Emerson's first foray was the “hiring” of Alexander McCaffery, younger brother of a servant employed at William Emerson's home. In mid-March 1840, Emerson decided to “make the experiment for a few months. If we find that he is not good help for us, we can let him come back” (Letters, 7:375). Precisely why he calls this employment an “experiment” is not clear: it was common practice to hire from the family of an already familiar servant as a shortcut to establishing appropriate relations within one's home. Emerson's sense of risk may have resulted from McCaffery's youth, gender, or religious training. He advised Lidian that McCaffery was “to go to Church with us, & to Sunday School,” but does not mention who set these terms (Letters, 7:375).

But Emerson's sense of an “experiment” could also have been due to the fact that McCaffery's “hiring” was difficult to place within the usual categories of service. The boy was nothing if not a domestic servant, since most of his work was with Lidian and the Emerson children.²¹ On the other hand, he apparently spent most of his time at school, and was not paid: “I have made no other bargain with his sister,” Emerson wrote, “than that I will board & clothe him at present” (Letters, 7:375). Just how the Emersons viewed this arrangement is unclear, but it is close to the pattern of the “bound orphan” and thus a variation on that estate, the condition of human chattel.

Though the Emersons would have been horrified at the suggestion that they had “bought” McCaffery, the terms of the boy's co-residence had much in common with slaves' estate. A master's obligation to offer his slaves religious training marks one similarity; so does McCaffery's limited remuneration. From Emerson's point of view, though, McCaffery's co-residence was probably a blow against chattel conditions and a challenge to abolitionists' importunings. In one of his most famous essays, Emerson could have been talking about McCaffery when he disparaged much-publicized reform efforts as so much self-righteous obfuscation. The quotation is now well known: “If an angry bigot assumes,” he writes in “Self-Reliance,” “this bountiful cause of Abolition, and comes to me with his last news from Barbadoes, why should I not say to him, ‘Go love thy infant; love thy woodchopper … and never varnish your hard, uncharitable ambition with this incredible tenderness for black folk a thousand miles off. Thy love afar is spite at home.’”²² These lines admit the extent to which “self-reliance” depended on hired workers; they also suggest that when McCaffery arrived, Emerson hoped to love this woodchopper—that is, to make him part of the Bush “family.” If he could do so, this quotation suggests, he would have shown up Northern abolitionists' outcries as wrong-headed, self-aggrandizing, and remarkably blind to problems in their own backyards—or kitchens.

But of course, there were significant differences between Alexander McCaffery and, say, the young Frederick Douglass—namely, each worker's legal mobility. The flaw in Waldo Emerson's plan to make McCaffery “family” was that a free worker could not easily be held to a given post. Emerson was not, finally, allowed to enact the benevolent “good” master of plantation literature: though he took his duties in loco parentis seriously, he could not prevent Mrs. McCaffery from removing her son from his place at Bush. Sounding more than a little peeved at his waged servant's mobility, Emerson groused that “boys must not be expected to come & go like sheets of lightning. … [W]e had intended to keep the boy” (Letters, 2:382).²³

In a more elevated tone, the philosopher admitted: “I should willingly have kept him & made him a partaker of what new experiments we shall try,” and Lidian thought him “my idea of what we should desire in a servant-boy, being quick & skilful as well as pleasant and orderly” (Letters, 2:386; SL, 86). Their contentment was not shared by McCaffery's mother, who preferred her son to learn a trade. Unfortunately for the Emersons' domestic comforts, she had the right to reclaim her offspring. Alexander's thoughts on his removal are not recorded.

Almost as soon as McCaffery was gone, Emerson tried another domestic “experiment,” this time an attempt to heal class divisions between servers and served. In March 1841, he expressed a yearning for family-style intimacy by inviting the cook and “second girl” to share his family's table. The impetus for such a gesture is suggested by related anecdotes. In one, Waldo Emerson expressed discomfort with the sense that servants and masters lived parallel lives within one “family” residence. Thus he noted with chagrin in 1837 that Nancy Colesworthy had felt the need to apologize for using the front door to go to church (JMN, 5:338). A few years later, when his first son was just a toddler, the concerned father recognized that class consciousness developed early. Asked one day to stay at home with a domestic servant, Waldo Jr. cried and refused. Ellen Emerson's memoir quotes the young boy as wailing: “‘I do not want to go with Mrs Hill! Because she has red on her face and red on her arms, and she eats at a table which is not painted [that is, not mahogany] and she is not beautiful’” (Life, 78-79). In Waldo Emerson's journal, a very similar tale has Waldo Jr. refusing to accompany a servant to church “because,” he reportedly told her, “you live in the kitchen” (JMN, 7:541).²⁴

Waldo Jr.'s reference to separate dining arrangements must have smote his father's idealism: the great shibboleth of America's “servant problem” was that servants were not welcome (to sit) at their employers' tables. In the “old days,” liberal Americans liked to recall, waged and indentured servants had eaten with those they worked for and with; by the 1840s, though, genteel authorities forbade that practice. The realization that his young son had already noted and affirmed such class divisions likely influenced Emerson's thoughts on co-residential service. But as if unwilling to confront this thought too directly, he explained the famous invitation to his servants to share the family table (which coincided with the Ripleys' move to Roxbury) with reference not to labor reform but to a happier past. That is, he explained his second “experiment” in domestic service as an attempt to turn servants back into the familial workers associated with a rural age:

You know Lidian & I had dreamed that we would adopt the country practice of having but one table in the house. Well, Lidian went out the other evening & had an explanation on the subject with the two girls. Louisa accepted the plan with great kindness & readiness, but Lydia, the cook, firmly refused—A cook was never fit to come to table, &c. The next morning Waldo was sent to announce to Louisa that breakfast was ready but she had eaten already with Lydia & refuses to leave her alone.

(Letters, 2:389)

This account is not supplemented, unfortunately, by any records from Lydia or Louisa, yet its testimony is suggestive of in-house workers' different status and even power. For instance, while Lidian and the affectionate Louisa apparently concurred with this reform, the cook—a worker with much more clout—did not.

Though the ill-fated invitation is often recounted with a snicker, it provides important evidence that Emerson was trying to make non-kin servants seem familial. This was no easy task in a privatized home, where only one person could be master. Though Emerson admired communal imagery—“We are all boarders at one table,” notes a journal entry from July 1840, “White man, black man, ox and eagle, bee, & worm”—his son's tears remind us that, at this time, he maintained two tables in his own home (JMN, 7:382).

Emerson noted the contradiction but thought that abolitionists generally did not. “My dear little abolitionist,” he wrote in late October 1841, “do not puff & swell so; I am afraid our virtue is a little geographical and that there are sins nearer home that will one day be found of the self-same dye as this scarlet crime of the Virginians” (JMN, 8:138). His next attempt to deal with one of those sins would have consequences for American letters: this time, Emerson chose a servant who shared his own philosophy and who enjoyed an unusually excellent education. While the strategy was still to relieve ruling-class anxiety by making servants familial, new issues arose when the servitor was a thoughtful Harvard man who was also remarkably handy about the house.²⁵

In April 1841, only a few weeks after McCaffery left and less than a month after the Ripleys moved to Roxbury, Emerson crowed: “Henry Thoreau … may stay with me a year. … [H]e is to have his board &c for what labor he chooses to do: and he is thus far a great benefactor & physician to me for he is an indefatigable & a very skilful laborer & I work with him as I should not without him. … Thoreau is a scholar & a poet & as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree” (Letters, 2:402). As this praise indicates, Thoreau, who moved into Bush as an adult and a disciple, was not called a servant. Nonetheless, he took on gardening, home repairs, and child care, jobs that Waldo Emerson professed to enjoy but found little time to do.

Thoreau's duties were not those of the ordinary servant. Instead, resident in the Emersons' home, responsible for duties they and their female staff could not manage, Thoreau was expected, biographer Robert Richardson writes, “to look after things while Emerson was away on his now-frequent lecture tours. … His was a very special position, the friend who is closer than many members of the family, an addition to the inner family group, certainly not a ‘hired man’ or a ‘boarder.’”²⁶ I would argue, though, that Richardson's implied “mere” indicates the extent to which many still want relations within the home to rest on familial affection. For of course, Thoreau was a boarder, if not a hired hand: receiving only room and board, he was closer, as Sherman Paul asserts, to “the status of a poor relation.”²⁷ Considering, though, that mentor and student preferred to dispense with wages, and that Thoreau was not really kin, one way to explain the younger man's presence is within the terms of “disciple service,” serving one's mentor without wages.²⁸

Disciple service would explain a point every biographer questions: the puzzle of why Thoreau did not just live at home and walk to Bush as needed.²⁹ On Emerson's side, the answer would seem to lie in his desire to inculcate family-like relations among all the residents of his home, coupled with his self-image as a patron for younger Transcendentalists. For Thoreau, the advantages were somewhat different: as Sherman Paul has pointed out, his journals of this period “are full of passages on the desire to serve.”³⁰

It was during this period, of course, that Thoreau essayed the fumbling inquiry called “The Service.” Margaret Fuller, editing the Dial in December 1840, rejected this essay, despite Emerson's praise. Twentieth-century scholars have agreed with her assessment: the essay does not represent Thoreau's greatest literary skill. But when Thoreau's willingness to live at Bush is considered alongside his juvenilia, it is plain that the young man was groping for a life mission, one he viewed in terms of dignified self-abnegation. “The Service” was one attempt to determine what that mission might be. The braver attempt, a term at disciple service in a sage's home, was typically Thoreauvian in its insistence that the explorer not write about, but experience, a serving life.

Before moving into the Emersons' home, this stalwart had written: “All those contingences which the philanthropist, statesman, and housekeeper write so many books to meet are simply and quietly settled in the intercourse of friends.”³¹ One such “contingence” was the masterservant relationship, which Thoreau hoped to realize and improve upon through friendship. This aim Emerson would no doubt have applauded. Unfortunately, the homemaker's ideals could not keep pace with his need for service—nor, perhaps, with his taste for domestic mastery.

This lapse was not entirely Emerson's fault: he could not have known how swiftly his neighbor would come to find service uncomfortable, nor that reigning cultural notions of service would infect even Thoreau's independent mind. Nor, in all likelihood, could Emerson have fully realized how much his expectations had been shaped by a desire for non-kin coresidents who knew and kept their “place.” If either man was susceptible to reigning notions of his day—and it seems quite likely that both were—then good intentions were unlikely to paper over the unpalatable truth that one of the two was the servant, and one the master.

Relations no doubt looked placid enough on the surface: “Henry Thoreau,” Emerson wrote in early 1842, had been “one of the family for the last year” (JMN, 8:165). But Thoreau himself seems to have been troubled: “I want to go soon,” he had written, a few weeks earlier, “and live away by the pond” (JHDT, 299). One source of his dis-ease is suggested by Emerson's letters home, which do not demonstrate the equal friendship Thoreau had moved in to find. Not that Emerson ignored his unhired man: indeed, he was punctilious about sending Thoreau his regards. If those regards sometimes sound like the slaveholder's “Howdy to the servants,” that patronizing echo is pertinent. So is the paucity of reference to Thoreau's happiness or housework, though Emerson probably did not intend a slight. As Paul has noted, the Harvard-trained servant was quickly “taken for granted, superserviceable, the perfect transcendental handy man.”³² According to the domestic advice guides of the day, invisibility was desirable: “good” servants were prized for their near-ectoplasmic attendance. This was one of the reasons many wage-payers imagined slaves made better servants (while those with first-hand experience of chattel servants had their doubts). But the more important reason to consider chattel unintrusive was that, like disciple servants, they did not bring waged relations into the home.

“Sisters & brothers,” Emerson opined to Caroline Sturgis, “must not pay each other money, must they?” (Letters, 7:481). His decision to “adopt” rather than employ Thoreau was based on this same credo; what's more, his disciple fully agreed, at least in principle. One of Thoreau's favorite mottos from the Hindu teacher Menu was that the pure man “must avoid service for hire.”³³ So it was not oppression or exploitation that caused Thoreau to be less remunerated than most chattel servants. On the contrary, his unhired status was undoubtedly a mutual decision, pleasing both to the servant-conscious Emerson and the service-conscious Thoreau. It was precisely because this wagelessness helped Emerson to conceive of his disciple as poised somewhere between “servant” and “family member,” paid employee and class equal, that Thoreau could seem to “solve” his guru's servant problem. He did not solve Lidian's staffing troubles: she continued to employ waged domestic servants the whole time Thoreau served at Bush. More to the point, he did not solve his own. In fact, it seems to have been his uncertain siting that most bothered Thoreau about disciple service.

The doubts began almost immediately. In a journal entry written on his first night at Bush and headed “At R. W. E.'s,” Thoreau wrote: “the civilized man has the habits of the house. His house is a prison, in which he finds himself oppressed and confined, not sheltered and protected. He walks as if he sustained the roof; he carries his arms as if the walls would fall in and crush him, and his feet remember the cellar beneath. His muscles are never relaxed. It is rare that he overcomes the house, and learns to sit at home in it” (JHDT, 253). The resentment, verging on fear, of this startling passage indicates more than first-night jitters. As Thoreau's letters and journals of this period indicate, his uneasy position continued to irritate: soon, he would dissociate himself from his menial post. Writing to Lidian's sister, Lucy Jackson Brown, he planned to erect barriers: “I shall hold the nobler part at least out of the service.”³⁴

Of course, Thoreau was not everyone's idea of an easy co-resident. As another neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne, noted, “Mr. Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate. It may well be that such a sturdy and uncompromising person is fitter to meet occasionally in the open air, than to have as a permanent guest at table and fireside.”³⁵ The observation should be taken with a grain of salt: Hawthorne was a man so devoted to his privacy that he might have projected his insularity onto Emerson. Yet it is true that Emerson began to question Thoreau's “buds of promise” during the very period he turned the erstwhile apple tree into a servant. This was not because Thoreau worked badly or shirked: when Waldo set out for Europe in 1847, Lidian asked that Henry return to Bush, though this time in the dignified role of secretary. She must have known about the discomfort he denied to Waldo Emerson; she probably recognized, too, that things would run more smoothly if the mentor were too far away to ruffle his disciple's feathers.³⁶

For whatever Thoreau told Emerson—“I am well and happy in your house,” the disciple wrote—the Sage was not able to help his neighbor investigate the ideal friendship much on Thoreau's mind in his serving days (Correspondence, 84). Emerson probably thought he did, but Thoreau himself held a different view: in writings intended for other readers, he portrayed himself as a god forced to serve a king.³⁷

Apollonian imagery could have been a laconic joke, but its implication of cosmic imbalance strongly indicates Thoreau's dis-ease. At the same time, of course, Apollonian imagery is rather arrogant, the consequence, perhaps, of seeing through inflated illusions. “I am constrained,” Thoreau wrote Lucy Jackson Brown, “to live a strangely mixed life” in which “all I hear about brooms and scouring and taxes and house keeping [reminds me that] even Valhalla might have its kitchen” (Correspondence, 76). Such a room in the Emerson home should not have surprised the practical Thoreau; that it did so suggests the degree of glamor with which he had once invested a servant's role. The glamor soon faded, though Thoreau served faithfully for over a year. When he left, he published two accounts of disciple service while living far from the precincts of Valhalla.³⁸

The first account was a mocking review of J. A. Etzler's The Paradise Within the Reach of All Men, Without Labor, by Powers of Nature and Machinery. As might be expected, Thoreau scorns those who evaded labor, even when the servant-surrogates were not human. “We saw last summer,” the essay recalls, “a dog employed to churn for a farmer's family, travelling upon a horizontal wheel, and though he had sore eyes, an alarming cough, and withal a demure aspect, yet their bread did get buttered for all that.”³⁹ Dismissing Etzler's claims that, with proper technological design, “kitchen business” could be simplified to reduce domestic staff, the erstwhile Apollo suggests that those who would eat should cook for themselves. Calling for moral, not mechanical, reform, Thoreau spoke highly of manual labor, and insisted that fuzzy dreamers knuckle down to practical work.

It was a most Thoreauvian message, and one with which Emerson might have agreed. Yet the veiled criticism of the young man's next essay might have raised hackles back at Bush. In “The Landlord,” it is clearer that non-kin co-residence could have inspired resentment in a servant's breast, for in this essay, published in October 1843, Thoreau portrays the great-souled hero as one characterized by his welcoming home. Whether “The Landlord” is a Transcendentalist is open to question, but he is certainly one who dissolves social rankings in his all-encompassing bonhomie.

The ideal landlord, wrote the Emerson's ex-boarder, “is a man of more open and general sympathies, who possesses a spirit of hospitality which is its own reward, and feeds and shelters men from pure love of the creatures.”⁴⁰ So far, this sounds like the man Emerson wanted to be: in fact, it is easy to imagine the Sage reading this and feeling pleased at such graceful praise. But “such universal sympathies” could have their drawbacks for co-residents, when “so broad and genial a human nature … would fain sacrifice the tender but narrow ties of private friendship to a broad, sunshiny, fair-weather-and-foul friendship for his race.” As Thoreau could have learned from his time at the Emersons', “the farthest-traveled is in some measure kindred to him who takes him into the bosom of his family,” while “he treats his nearest neighbor as a stranger.”

Since Thoreau was one of Emerson's nearest neighbors, both spiritually and geographically, this sentiment hints at grievances based on overwork or neglect. In one of the ironies of the Emerson marriage, Waldo Emerson's calls for a simpler, more private domestic life were contradicted by the open board he kept during the hectic period Lidian called “Transcendental times.” In fact, both Lidian and her domestic staff were exhausted by his hospitality: Nancy Colesworthy, one of the most obstreperous Bush servants, once threatened to post a sign saying, “This House is not a Hotel” (Life, 71-72). Thoreau, who was not obstreperous, may have posted his version of the sign for her and let him who had eyes to read it, read.

Though he does not mention it in “The Landlord,” Thoreau's own home (that is, his parents'), often took in boarders. So he may have been referring to his kinfolk's virtues when he described the ideal home as one in which all guests were welcomed by a host whose hands are callused. Emerson's hands, despite good intentions, were not hardened by manual labor. Nor was his home a place in which a “traveler steps across the threshold, and lo! he too is master,” at least not if that traveler was a Concord rambler abruptly transformed into a servant.⁴¹ But if the threshold was not a servant's place, the once-surprising kitchen might be. “[W]hy,” this essay asks, “should we have any serious disgust at kitchens? Perhaps they are the holiest recess of the house.”

Back at Bush, where Emerson may not have been privy to the “Valhalla” sentiment, there is no sure evidence that the householder read his disciple's essays as an attack. But we do know that the two men's friendship began to decline between 1842 and 1843 and that Emerson was wont to remark that his neighbor did not live up to early promise.⁴² What is less frequently noted is that Emerson was changing, too, perhaps most significantly by resolving to appear in public as an abolitionist. In his 1844 speech on the emancipation of West Indian slaves, delivered only a few months after the appearance of Thoreau's Etzler review and “The Landlord,” Emerson openly sympathizes with the slave. He shows a good deal less fellow-feeling for the waged domestic servant: according to this homemaker, waged service relations are “precarious.”⁴³

He was as grudging, privately, in his attitude toward abolitionists: he described them, in a journal entry, as “an altogether odious set of people, whom one would be sure to shun as the worst of bores & canters” (JMN, 9:120). Nor was he persuaded that antislavery had solved the servant question: “Two tables in every house!” he groaned, in an entry from 1844. “Abolitionists at one & servants at the other! It is a calumny that you utter” (JMN, 9:127). But he seems to have been convinced, after Thoreau's departure, that he himself could do no better, an admission that could have helped push him, albeit reluctantly, into supporting abolition. In the speech that announced that support, Emerson argued from expediency, stating that it was “cheaper to pay wages than to own the slave.”

Obviously, moral punning is important: the “wages” indicated here are not to be equated with mere money. In part, Emerson meant to indicate a surcease of guilt: “Whilst we sit here talking & smiling,” he noted, after Thoreau's departure, “some person is out there in field & shop & kitchen doing what we need, without talk or smiles” (JMN, 9:127). At the same time, though, the more grievous cost could have been to this reserved man's self-esteem or public persona. This personal exaction suggests that, when Emerson publicly extolled “the picturesque luxury of [chattel] vassalage … their silent obedience, their hue of bronze, their turbaned heads,” aesthetic pleasure is only one advantage slaves provide. The other, perhaps more important to a middling householder, was that he thought well-treated chattel provided “silent” service.

Whatever his racist tendencies, Emerson could not have been referring here to legal strictures on slaves' ability to testify in court. More probably, he was alluding to his era's demand for ideally inaudible domestic staff. Thoreau was unlikely to have been so unobtrusive while he lived at Bush; more to the point, he had been noticeably chatty after he left. Depending on how Emerson viewed his one-time co-resident, the Etzler piece, and especially “The Landlord,” were either Transcendental roman à clef, like The Blithedale Romance, or that bane of the private household, an airing of backstairs gossip. Either way, Thoreau's decision to broadcast his views of the erstwhile “master” could well have offended and alarmed the notoriously reserved, even standoffish, Waldo Emerson. But what could the outraged homeowner have done to protect his privacy? Because wages had not passed between Thoreau and those he served, there was far less moral ground on which to chastise the one-time “servant” for publicizing domestic relations within the Emersons' “private” home.

Overall, then, whatever the drawbacks of waged attendance, Emerson had learned that wages kept masters masters. He did not advocate the enforced silence slaveholders visited upon their slaves. But he did believe in the maintenance of certain social ranks, such as those between a servant and the people in whose home he served. Emerson, in short, had come to see that payment of wages helped maintain hierarchies pertinent to privacy, mastery, and publication rights; that wages enforced distance, by insisting on the relative power of server and served; and that, at least for a capitalist, wages relieved guilt. Wages therefore offered a more moral, though still “precarious,” foundation for in-house service relations. To say so was to move a long way from the idealism of the 1830s. But it was also to foretell where Americans' thoughts on non-kin domestic service were headed.

Notes

1. Len Gougeon, Virtue's Hero: Emerson, Antislavery, and Reform (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1990), 46-57, 75.

2. These shifts are explained at greater length in my dissertation, “The Uneasy Relation of Domestics: Servants in the Nineteenth-Century American Family.” Briefly, though, I will point out that the split between “productive” and domestic labor is outlined in Jeanne Boydston, Home and Work: Housework, Wages, and the Ideology of Labor in the Early Republic (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1990); servants' mobility is explained in Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350-1870 (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1991). Finally, the best single study of waged domestic service in the American nineteenth century is Faye E. Dudden's Serving Women: Household Service in Nineteenth-Century America (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1983). All have been important in my formulations of antebellum thoughts on domestic service.

3. Mrs. Clarissa Packard [Caroline Howard Gilman], Recollections of a Housekeeper (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1834), 130.

4. Fitzhugh's claim appears in Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, ed. C. Vann Woodward (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960), 220.

5. See The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 16 vols. ed. William H. Gilman et al. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1960-1982), 7:115. Hereafter, journal citations appear parenthetically as JMN.

6. “Religion” was delivered in Boston on 22 January, and in Concord on 24 April 1840. See The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III, ed. Robert E. Spiller and Wallace E. Williams (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1972), 275. Volume III is hereafter abbreviated as EL.

7. The Selected Letters of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (Columbia: Univ. of Missouri Press, 1987), 7. Hereafter abbreviated as SL.

8. See her letters to William Whiting from February and March of 1848, in the Emerson Family Papers at the Houghton Library, Harvard University. The first is reprinted in SL, 139-41.

   Because this article treats both the public and the private Ralph Waldo Emerson and includes references to Lidian Emerson and other members of the family, I have used first names when referring to the actions of the Emersons in the private sphere and “Emerson” or “Waldo Emerson” when discussing the lecturer and public figure most familiar to scholars of American literature.

9. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson, ed. Delores Bird Carpenter (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1980), 48. Hereafter abbreviated as Life. I have amended an “of of” printed in Carpenter's text.

10. This point is most apparent in advisors' silence on husbands' household duties. But for a strong statement of the wives' domestic sway, see Charles Butler, The American Lady (Philadelphia: Hogan & Thompson, 1836), 218-19.

11. American Sunday-School Union, Ann Connover (Philadelphia: American Sunday-School Union, 1835), 20-21.

12. To keep social ranks in their proper position, Alcott concludes: “I will not, indeed, say that any thing like as much credit is due to her as to him; but I may say, and with truth, that she was an important auxiliary in producing the results that have been mentioned.” See William Alcott, The Young Woman's Guide to Excellence (Boston: Charles H. Peirce, 1847), 35-37.

    The book, written in 1836, was held back for eleven years; that is, neither Lidian nor Waldo were likely to have read it until after their experiments were concluded. I would argue, though, that its ideas were probably in circulation before Alcott published them, if only through friendly intercourse among the Alcott cousins and the Emersons.

13. Emerson delivered “Home” in Boston on 12 December 1838, and in Concord on 20 March 1839. See EL, 23, 31.

14. William Gilmore Simms, “The Morals of Slavery,” as reprinted in The Pro-Slavery Argument; as maintained by the most distinguished writers of the Southern States (Charleston: Walker, Richards & Co., 1852), 214. The essay, an attack on Harriet Martineau's comments about the South, appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837, and was reprinted as a pamphlet in 1838.

15. This lecture was delivered in Boston on 15 January 1840 and in Concord on 22 April 1840; see EL, 256. The last cited comment virtually quotes a Notebook “D” entry dated 28 June 1839; see JMN, 7:220.

16. Annie Russell Marble says that this was Lidian's judgment on the idea of boarding with the Alcotts, a hint that Abba Alcott's discomfort with Emerson's wife could have been returned, or at least perceived. See Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1902), 112.

17. Ralph Waldo Emerson to George Ripley, 15 December 1840, The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 9 vols., ed. Ralph L. Rusk and Eleanor Tilton (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939-1994), 7:437. Hereafter abbreviated as Letters.

18. Eleanor Tilton, editor of volume 7 of Letters, describes the Volume 7 version as an early draft of the letter finally sent, and suggests that Rusk's version, in Letters 2, may be closer to what the Ripleys finally received. I have used passages from both drafts because each provides a slant on Emerson's doubts about joining Brook Farm. Note that the “solidly do” sentence appears in both.

19. “Domestic Life,” The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 12 vols., (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1870), 7:116-17.

20. Glenna Matthews comments perceptively on what she calls Emerson's attempt “to combat the application of invidious caste distinctions to domestics.” She points out, for instance, that while there is much to praise in his intentions at this time, it is not at all clear how his “distinctions” are going to be dissolved. See Matthews's critique in “Just a Housewife”: The Rise and Fall of Domesticity in America (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1987), 37.

21. See Waldo's instructions to Lidian that the boy's chores were to be yardwork, carpentry, care of poultry and horses, and childminding (Letters, 7:375). Waldo expected “the girls,” that is the cook and maid, to do in-house chores while a part-time gardener did heavy work in the yard.

    In practice, Waldo's staff management was as uncertain as his wife's had been. One month after McCaffery arrived in Concord, Waldo admitted: “The cold weather until yesterday has given me at least no appetite for gardening & its preliminaries, so that I have still left him to the women, & have not summoned him to my side” (Letters, 2:279).

22. Works, 2:52-53.

23. Emerson's sense of ownership, or at least guardianship, was common among benevolent employers. See, for instance, the ways in which the Salem Female Charitable Society ignored its charges' parents as it thought best, in Carol S. Lasser, “A ‘Pleasingly Oppressive’ Burden: The Transformation of Domestic Service and Female Charity in Salem, 1800-1840,” Essex Institute Historical Collections 116 (July 1980): 156-75.

24. It is tempting to read these two stories as versions of one incident; as far as I could learn, though, there is little evidence either way. In both, the proposed outing has to do with attending church, though in Ellen's tale the boy is left behind and in her father's the boy is being offered a chance to go. Additionally, two different servants are referred to in the incidents. Because Waldo Sr.'s account was written on or near the date of his son's tears, and Ellen's is obviously family legend, the former is probably the more reliable anecdote, but both, of course, are instructive.

25. An earlier attempt to accomplish the same end was the suggestion, broached just after Emerson wrote Ripley declining to join Brook Farm, that the Bronson Alcott family move in at Bush. It is no accident that this letter repeats phrases he used in writing to the Roxburyites: “I am quite intent on trying the experiment of manual labor to some considerable extent & of abolishing or ameliorating the domestic service in my household. Then I am grown a little impatient of seeing the inequalities all around me, am a little of an agrarian at heart and wish sometimes that I had a smaller house or else that it sheltered more persons. So I think that next April we shall make an attempt to find house room for Mr Alcott & his family under our roof.” Though the Alcotts were not invited to work as domestic servants, their presence was obviously expected to relieve Waldo's guilt about his comfortable living arrangements. For instance, Emerson planned to reduce his home's domestic staff from four or five to one full-time and one part-time worker, plus of course Abba May Alcott and Lidian Emerson. This scheme never got further than the planning stages, because Abba May had a “kink” against non-kin co-residence and perhaps no great liking for Lidian. See Letters, 2:371; and Madelon Bedell, The Alcotts: Biography of a Family (New York: Clarkson N. Potter, 1980), 160-61.

26. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 103.

27. See Sherman Paul, The Shores of America: Thoreau's Inward Exploration (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1958), 95. Paul cites Sanborn's comment that Thoreau lived at Bush like a “younger brother or a grown-up son,” a formulation that would probably have pleased Emerson. Thoreau's views, however, come across more clearly in the references to himself as Apollo, and in the texts he produced while living at Bush.

28. It may be this experiment that led Carl J. Guarneri to state that “Distrust of the cash nexus made [Emerson] forgo house servants.” Although it is clear that Emerson wished to do away with such workers in his home, this paper shows that his attempts to do so were short-lived. See Guarneri, The Utopian Alternative: Fourierism in Nineteenth-Century America (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1991), 48.

29. Annie Russell Marble claims that Thoreau moved to Bush to oblige the Emersons (92), and Walter Harding suggests that access to his mentor's library could have appealed to the voracious reader (The Days of Henry Thoreau [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966], 130). Sherman Paul proposes that it was an experiment in Transcendental friendship, but also a way to devise a freer schedule which gave greater scope to Thoreau's individualist nature (94).

30. Paul, 18.

31. See The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, Volume I, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (Salt Lake City: Peregrine Smith Books, 1984), 190. The abbreviation JHDT indicates Volume I.

32. Paul, 96.

33. He also liked Menu's caste-minded dictum that menial work could not humble a Brahmin, whose soul was “transcendently divine.” Thoreau's selections from this Asian code, or scripture, were published as “The Laws of Menu,” The Dial (January 1843): 331-40. Sherman Paul believes Thoreau had read Menu by December 1839—that is, as he was formulating “The Service” and before he went to Bush (71).

34. The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1958), 47. Hereafter cited in text and abbreviated Correspondence.

35. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The American Notebooks, ed. Randall Stewart (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1932), 176. Stewart suggests that Emerson was uncomfortable with Thoreau's brusque manner and points out places in which he lamented the same.

36. I would note, in passing, that this second stay found Thoreau somewhat bolder, at least in letters to the absent Waldo. Not only did he address his mentor by his first name, but he also essayed a rather pointed humor concerning the absent man's family circle. In one letter he boasts: “Lidian and I make very good housekeepers. … [and Edward, the Emersons' youngest son] very seriously asked me, the other day, ‘Mr. Thoreau, will you be my father?’. … So you must come back soon, or you will be superseded.” Though Waldo would have known, presumably, how to interpret Thoreau's wit, he would probably also have recognized, at some level, the pitfalls of affectionate co-residence.

    The cited letter is dated 14 November 1847; that is, while Waldo was in England, and unable to return “soon.” An earlier and milder jibe at Emerson's absences appears in a letter from Thoreau's first residence, in which the wandering affections are Edith Emerson's. See Correspondence, 189 and 76.

37. Walter Harding and Carl Bode call the story of Apollo and Admetus “one of Thoreau's favorite symbols,” but do not observe that he used it most frequently during his term as a domestic servant (see, for instance, Correspondence, 47 and 76). Note, too, Emerson's use of the imagery in 1836 (JMN, 5:208-09).

38. Thoreau was even less at ease in the Staten Island home of William and Susan Emerson. Part of his discomfort there was that he did not believe he aided his host-employers. “I do not feel myself especially serviceable,” he wrote to his mentor, “to the good people with whom I live, except as inflictions are sanctified to the righteous” (Correspondence, 112).

39. According to Wendell Glick, Thoreau reviewed the book at Emerson's request. The review, intended for the Dial, eventually appeared in the United States Magazine and Democratic Review in November 1843. See Glick, “Paradise (To Be) Regained: Textual Introduction,” Reform Papers (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1973), 275. Thoreau's remark about canine service appears on page 23.

40. Henry David Thoreau, “The Landlord,” The Writings of Henry David Thoreau, 20 vols. (Boston: Houghton and Mifflin, 1906), 5:153. Subsequent quotations from this essay appear on 154-56.

41. If that traveler were a fellow-boarder, the situation might be different: in 1846, the Emersons turned Bush into a boardinghouse under the management of Mrs. E. C. Goodwin. This final experiment was successful to the extent that relations with the new housekeeper were cordial during and after her co-residence, and that the Emersons shared their private home with assorted non-kin. It was noticeably less successful in relieving Lidian of household cares. Ellen remembered that “keeping the entries & doorsteps and parlour free from litter” somehow became her mother's duty, “for Mrs Goodwin with all her children and the boarders was very busy attending to the providing and the chambers.” See Life, 106-07 and Letters, 3:331, 398, 411, and 456.

42. Robert Sattelmeyer, “‘When He Became My Enemy’: Emerson and Thoreau, 1848-49,” New England Quarterly 62 (June 1989): 192. Sattelmeyer comments that the early rift simmered for several years, finally bursting into explicit conflict after Thoreau's second residence at Bush.

43. “Emancipation in the British West Indies,” Works 11:101. All quotations from this address are on page 101 of this edition.