SOURCE: Gleason, William. “Re-Creating Walden: Thoreau's Economy of Work and Play.” American Literature 65, no. 4 (December 1993): 673-701.

[In the following essay, Gleason examines the influence of the influx of Irish immigrants on Thoreau's writing. Gleason finds that Thoreau's anxiety about immigrants and how they might change the character of the nation is reflected in his varied, sometimes contradictory treatment of Irish characters in Walden.]

It is in obedience to an uninterrupted usage in our community that, on this Sabbath of the Nation, we have all put aside the common cares of life, and seized respite from the never-ending toils of labour. …

—Charles Sumner, The True Grandeur of Nations

On 4 July 1845, as Thoreau (“by accident”) “took up [his] abode in the woods,”¹ Charles Sumner exhorted Sabbath-seizing Bostonians to honor the “venerable forms” of the “Fathers of the Republic” in his Independence Day oration. “Let us imitate what in them was lofty, pure and good,” declared Sumner. “Let us from them learn to bear hardship and privation.”² Although in one sense Thoreau was engaged in precisely the opposite project—rejecting the “wisdom” of his “Mentors” (W [Walden], 9) by beginning (on the national day of rest) his own “experiment” (W, 84) in living “sturdily and Spartan-like” (W, 91)—he might have approved Sumner's subsequent call for national introspection: “It becomes us, on this ocasion, … to turn our thoughts inward, as the good man dedicates his birth-day, to the consideration of his character and the mode in which its vices may be corrected and its virtues strengthened. Avoiding, then, all exultation in the prosperity that has enriched our land, … let us consider what we can do to elevate our character … and to attain to that righteousness which exalteth a nation.”³ How to “elevate our character” had become a national preoccupation for 1840s America. Thoreau biographer Robert Richardson suggests that Longfellow's Harvard lectures on Goethe and William Ellery Channing's 1838 speech on “Self-Culture” helped spur this concern in New England. Critics have long read Walden as a record of Thoreau's attempt at self-cultivation. Richardson, echoing Sherman Paul, asserted in 1986 that “self-culture became a major concern, perhaps the major concern of [Thoreau's] life, and increasingly he tried to reach behind the metaphor of cultivation to the reality.”⁴

What Thoreau critics insufficiently acknowledge, however, is Walden's more complex social and cultural heritage.⁵ For Thoreau's ostensibly private retreat involved him in a series of very public debates over the cultivation of not only the individual self but also the “self” of the nation. At midcentury the United States was struggling to cope with profound changes in traditional economic and social arrangements brought on by the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy. Along with other cultural critics such as Channing and Catharine Beecher—although typically in opposition to them—Thoreau was trying to articulate a new conception of the relationship between labor, leisure, and self-culture in the face of this emergent industrial society. We can see this attempt even in the earliest draft of Walden, begun at the pond late in 1846. But after 1846 the pace of change quickened dramatically, and a crucial accelerating factor was the massive influx of cheap farm and factory labor in the form of destitute Irish immigrants. In the eyes of many “native” Americans, these immigrants were welcome as useful hands but considerably more suspect as whole bodies. Seen as a demoralizing influence on the health and the very self or character of the nation, the Irish were simultaneously ignored and exploited, and sometimes even deported.

However much we tend to think of Thoreau as transcending the petty prejudices of his neighbors, the final version of Walden betrays a considerable anxiety about the Irish, particularly about their impact on Thoreau's reconception of the relationship between work and play. That economic pressures of another sort (namely, the poor sales of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers) forced Thoreau to revise Walden several times between 1847 and 1854—the peak years of Irish immigration and nativist anxiety—is in this instance fortunate, for it makes Walden an excellent test case for measuring the strain that midcentury Irish immigration could put not merely on social critics but on their very texts. Anxiety about the Irish might manifest itself in unusual ways; for Thoreau, it meant that while on the one hand (or, we might say, with one hand) he could in private write a letter for an Irishman “sending for his wife in Ireland to come to this country,”⁶ on (or with) the other he could later that year publish as a central chapter in Walden the distressingly nativist-sounding “Baker Farm.” What follows is an exploration of the social and rhetorical tensions that surround Thoreau's careful reshaping of the mature but undeniably troubled text of Walden.

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Early in Channing's 1838 speech he defines self-culture as “the care which every man owes to himself, to the unfolding and perfecting of his nature.” This linking of economic (“owes”) and organic (“unfolding”) metaphors recurs throughout the talk. Every man must “cultivate himself,” Channing says, to discover “within him capacities of growth which deserve and will reward intense, unrelaxing toil.”⁷ Despite the physical and financial resonance of “growth,” this self-development for Channing is principally intellectual, moral, and religious. Thoreau himself had worked similar tropes into his Harvard commencement address a year earlier to caution against the rising spirit of business in the United States: “Let men, true to their natures, cultivate the moral affections, lead manly and independent lives; let them make riches the means and not the end of existence, and we shall hear no more of the commercial spirit.”⁸

Although both Channing and Thoreau encourage a “manliness” that seems metaphorically grounded in physical strength—Channing urges his audience to “build up” their “strength of mind” and “enlarge” themselves through “vigorous purpose” (WEC [The Works of William E. Channing, D. D.], 17, 20)—each man at first resists making actual physical development a meaningful component of self-culture. Yet in the 1840s Thoreau began to expand his earlier notion of a “manly” and “independent” life to include a healthy body. “I never feel that I am inspired,” he punned on 21 June 1840, “unless my body is also—It too spurns a tame and commonplace life. … The body is the first proselyte the Soul makes” (PJ [Journal 1: 1837–1844, Journal 2: 1842–1848], 1:137-38). Six months later, near the end of January 1841, Thoreau turns this feeling into a directive: “We should strengthen, and beautify, and industriously mould our bodies to be fit companions of the soul.—Assist them to grow up like trees, and be agreeable and wholesome objects in nature” (PJ, 1:232). “Industriously mould our bodies” explicitly transforms Channing's earlier exhortation in “Self-Culture” to “strenuously … form and elevate our own minds” (WEC, 14), with Thoreau's bodies/trees subtly “elevated” by growing “up.” Thoreau was gradually coming to insist in his Journal that physical culture was a vital element of self-culture. By February 1841 he could further pun, “The care of the body is the highest exercise of prudence” (PJ, 1:272).

Thoreau's growing appreciation for bodily health mirrors the efforts of avant-garde educators who had been supplementing their otherwise traditionally intellectual and theological curricula with new forms of exercise and physical activity since the 1820s. In the Prospectus for the progressive Round Hill School in Northampton, Massachusetts, for example, founders George Bancroft and Joseph Cogswell announced that they were “deeply impressed with the necessity of uniting physical with moral education,” and they incorporated calisthenics, tumbling, and long walking trips into the daily schedule of the academy. Reform-minded scholars, especially emigrés familiar with the latest European educational practices, gradually established gymnasia and exercise programs in other schools and communities. The gym at Harvard, for example, was founded in 1826 by German scholar Charles Follen, a professor of literature and close friend of Channing. The German gymnastic method was particularly hailed as an appropriate model for an American educational system already devoted to the study of classical literature and showing the influence of German idealism. “Look at Germany,” one 1830s educator urged. “The same necessity which sent Plato and Aristotle to the gymnasium after severe mental labor, still exists with the hard students of our day.”⁹

Although the formalized physical training associated with German gymnastics was waning in popularity when Thoreau attended Harvard in the mid-1830s,¹⁰ taking its place were the nascent forms of more playful, game-oriented sports such as football, baseball, and cricket. And while Thoreau not surprisingly preferred the more solitary pursuit of energetic walking to the team sports breaking out at places like Harvard, his early writings show an enthusiasm for play that matches his growing interest in physical culture. Indeed, of all the Transcendentalists, Thoreau seems most concerned with play. Orestes Brownson, with whom Thoreau lived for a short time, did lecture on the “Necessity and Means of Physical Education” in the 1830s. And Emerson frequently incorporates metaphors of sport and gaming into his writing. “Be a football to time and chance,” he exhorts in his journal in 1837; “the world-spirit is a good swimmer, and storms and waves cannot drown him,” he writes at the end of “Montaigne.” But even Emerson acknowledged that Thoreau put into more vigorous and playful action what the senior writer of Concord thought and felt: “In reading him,” Emerson notes, “I find the same thought, the same spirit that is in me, but he takes a step beyond, and illustrates by excellent images that which I should have conveyed in a sleepy generality. ‘Tis as if I went into a gymnasium, and saw youths leap, climb, and swing with a force unapproachable,—though their feats are only continuations of my initial grapplings and jumps.”¹¹

One of Thoreau's “initial grapplings” with the relationship between work and play came during his 1837 commencement speech. After voicing somewhat commonplace phrases about the “commercial spirit” in America, Thoreau described his ideal inversion of the weekly calendar: “The order of things should be somewhat reversed,—the seventh should be man's day of toil, wherein to earn his living by the sweat of his brow, and the other six his sabbath of the affections and the soul” (EEM [Early Essays and Miscellanies], 117). Not quite Sabbaths of the body—but just as Thoreau explored metaphors of physical culture in the early 1840s, so too did he begin to cultivate tropes of play. “Like overtasked schoolboys,” he wrote in January 1841, “all my members, and nerves and sinews, petition thought for a recess,—and my very thigh bones itch to slip away from under me, and run and join the meleè—I exult in stark inanity, leering in nature and the soul” (PJ, 1:231). The image here is less childlike (or schoolboyish) than madly (and lasciviously) adolescent. The sly and almost sacrilegious malice of Thoreau's leer, however, yields at year's end to a decidedly less inane but still quite vigorous observation: “These motions every where in nature must surely [be] the circulations of God. The flowing sail—the running stream—the waving tree—the roving wind—whence else their infinite health and freedom—I can see nothing so holy as unrelaxed play and frolic in this bower God has built for us” (PJ, 1:350). In this last sentence Thoreau specifically challenges Channing's pronouncement in “Self-Culture” that it is “intense, unrelaxing toil” which deserves reward. Through his seeming oxymoron, “unrelaxed play,” Thoreau defends unceasing play as infinitely more rewarding—because sanctioned by God—than unceasing labor. “The suspicion of sin,” Thoreau explains, “never comes to this thought” (PJ, 1:350).

In one sense, Thoreau's linkage of the physical and ludic dimensions of self-culture recalls the metaphoric thrust of Longfellow's lectures on Goethe to Harvard undergraduates. According to Longfellow, Goethe's pursuit of self-culture made him “like the athlete of ancient story, drawing all his strength from earth. His model was the perfect man, as man; living, moving, laboring upon earth in the sweat of his brow.”¹² And yet Thoreau, who even published his own translation of Pindar's Olympic Odes in the Dial in 1844, would soon challenge Longfellow's tropes—much as he challenged Channing's—as part of Walden's fundamental reconception of the relationship between work and play. “It is not necessary that a man should earn his living by the sweat of his brow,” Thoreau will declare in “Economy,” “unless he sweats easier than I do” (W, 71).

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Most Americans probably did sweat more easily than Thoreau, if contemporary reports about the general fitness of the population are reliable. Americans have “spare forms and pallid complexions,” Harriet Martineau observed with alarm in Society in America, written during her 1834-1836 tour of the States. “The feeling of vigorous health is almost unknown. Invalids are remarkably uncomplaining and unalarmed; and their friends talk of their having ‘a weak breast,’ and ‘delicate lungs,’ with little more seriousness than the English use in speaking of a common cold.” In 1855 Catharine Beecher lamented that American children had become “feeble, sickly, and ugly.” She also claimed that of all the married women she knew in America—and she had been to “all portions of the Free States”—only ten could be considered healthy. The “active and industrious” Americans of Jefferson's first administration, as praised by Henry Adams in his History of the United States of America, had degenerated into consumptive weaklings.¹³

Although both Beecher and Martineau offered more complex analyses of America's ill health, most commentators blamed an increasingly excessive devotion to business as the chief cause. “Americans work too much and play too little,” complained Harper's New Monthly Magazine, “and would that it were only with the usual effect of making Jonathan a dull boy. The result, however, is worse than this, for it tells very seriously against his health and vigor.” “Look at our young men of fortune,” Harper's continued. “Were there ever such weaklings? An apathetic-brained, a pale pasty-faced, narrow-chested, spindle-shanked, dwarfed race—mere walking manikins to advertise the last cut of the fashionable tailor!” “We are fast becoming,” Harper's warned, “a nation of invalids.”¹⁴

Certainly the quickened pace of urbanization after 1830, which brought more and more men and women into the burgeoning cities seeking employment, contributed to what the Harper's columnist assailed as the growth-stunting devitalization of American bodies. And although Bruce Laurie usefully reminds us that the monumental shift from rural to urban forms of labor in the mid-nineteenth century did not empty America's farms overnight—as late as 1860 eight out of ten people still lived on the land and “more wage earners worked in farmhouses and small workshops than in factories”—we cannot downplay the impact on American labor of what Daniel Rodgers has rightly called the “startling transformation” between 1815 and 1850 from “an essentially agricultural to a commercial economy.”¹⁵ As both Rodgers and Laurie report, the “expansive energy” of the antebellum economy increased production primarily in what Thoreau's contemporaries called the “household factory.”¹⁶ Families in country, town, and city spaces became increasingly enmeshed in the world of the market, and often with zeal, not regret. As one immigrant to America concluded in 1837 after ten years in Boston: “Business is the very soul of an American: he pursues it, not as a means of procuring for himself and his family the necessary comforts of life, but as the fountain of all human felicity … it is as if all America were but one gigantic workshop, over the entrance of which there is the blazing inscription, ‘No admission here, except on business.’”¹⁷

Of course American cities were growing apace; urban population increased by more than sixty percent in the 1830s and more than ninety percent in the 1840s. And urban workers, particularly in northeastern cities like Boston, were increasingly offered alternative “fountains” of “felicity” to occupy their nonwork hours. Market forces cousin to those revolutionizing American labor nurtured in urban centers “a booming enterprise in commercial amusement,” as evidenced not only by “the tremendous growth of the theater, the music hall, the dance hall, [and] the museum, … but also by the stunning popularity of amusement apostles such as P. T. Barnum.”¹⁸ Midcentury moralists like Channing and Catharine Beecher's younger brother Henry denounced many of the proliferating forms of urban leisure (especially such lower-class amusements as cockfights, rat pits, and gambling tables) as desperate dissipations, more harmful to the body and the soul than chronic overwork. Channing, whose original “Self-Culture” lecture was written for and designed to uplift a working-class audience of Boston's manual laborers, particularly inveighed against intemperance, which he felt “prostrates” the drunkard's “rational and moral powers” as thoroughly as it bloats his face and palsies his limbs (WEC, 100). Thoreau's pronouncements in Walden that the common American is neither “alert” nor “healthy” and that an “unconscious despair is concealed even under what are called the games and amusements of mankind” (W, 8) echo Channing's concern that play could be as dispiriting an indulgence as work for many Americans.

By contrast, Americans visiting Canada or Europe were surprised by how much more healthy their citizens seemed. “Certainly no one can visit Canada,” declared Thomas Wentworth Higginson in his vituperative 1858 essay “Saints, and their Bodies,” “without being struck with the spectacle of a more athletic race of people than our own. On every side one sees rosy female faces and noble manly figures.” Emerson was similarly struck by the virility of the English. They are “the best stock in the world, broad-fronted, broad-bottomed,” he wrote in English Traits. “Round, ruddy, and handsome,” the men in particular partake of “vigorous health.” “It was an odd proof of this impressive energy,” Emerson remarked, “that in my lectures I hesitated to read and threw out for its impertinence many a disparaging phrase which I had been accustomed to spin, about poor, thin, unable mortals;—so much had the fine physique and the personal vigor of this robust race worked on my imagination.” At times Emerson was almost wistful: “Other countrymen look slight and undersized beside them, and invalids. They are bigger men than the Americans.”¹⁹

At home, personal and national anxiety about the soundness of the “American” body moved in two related yet distinct directions. On the one hand, health and fitness reformers such as Sylvester Graham and William Alcott campaigned broadly to encourage people to eat more healthful foods (more bran bread and less salt pork), get more fresh air (through better ventilation and increased exercise), and drink more pure water. On the other hand, native alarmists sought and found a more human culprit, targeting America's own “foreign” population, particularly the Irish immigrant laborers who came to the United States in record numbers in the 1840s and 1850s, as lazy and sinful breeders of disease and vice which threatened the larger population. If Americans were slow to follow Graham's and Alcott's advice (and evidence suggests that this was the case),²⁰ they were even slower to recognize that ill health was as much a labor issue for the working poor, whose abysmally low wages prevented them from moving out of the pestilent slums, as it was for the “young men of fortune” growing pale in the nation's counting houses. Few citizens were ready to acknowledge with Boston census interpreter Lemuel Shattuck that health care was a social and not merely personal responsibility and that as much attention had to be paid to systematic improvements in building construction, street maintenance, sewage systems, cesspools, and privies as to diet and exercise.

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If one book can be said to have shaped most strongly the course and discourse of health-related reform movements during the period, however, that text would be Catharine Beecher's A Treatise on Domestic Economy. The Treatise struck a responsive chord in 1840s America, offering a comprehensive program to restore national fitness and—importantly—national pride through both a systematic reorganization of domestic space and a complex of new attitudes toward domestic labor. First published in Boston in 1841, by 1843 the Treatise was in its fourth printing, had been adopted by Massachusetts for use in the public schools, and was being distributed nationally by Harper and Brothers. In all, the Treatise went through three editions and fifteen reprintings between 1841 and 1856. Beecher biographer Kathryn Kish Sklar notes that the Treatise established Beecher” as a national authority on the psychological state and the physical well-being of the American home.”²¹ Intended primarily, according to its title page, “for the use of Young Ladies At Home and At School” but articulating concepts that affected both genders, all ages, and all parts of the country, the Treatise's forty chapters comprise an exhaustive reference book on nearly every aspect of domestic life, from food, clothing, and shelter to charitable giving, exercise, and first aid.

The lengthy first four chapters (almost fifty pages) justify to Beecher's audience both the writing and reading of the book as well as speak to Beecher's recognition of not only the difficulty but also the necessity of her project. The first chapter, “Peculiar Responsibilities of American Women,” offers a sustained explanation of women's “exalted privilege of extending over the world those blessed influences, that are to renovate degraded man, and ‘clothe all climes with beauty.’”²² Beecher draws heavily from Tocqueville's Democracy in America to support her two main contentions. First, much as Channing had claimed in 1838 that self-culture would mitigate (though not materially alter) the social subordination of the working-class poor, Beecher argues that a strikingly similar process has already mitigated women's social subordination to men. For, she notes (quoting Tocqueville), “while [Americans] have allowed the social inferiority of woman to subsist, they have done all they could to raise her, morally and intellectually, to the level of man; and, in this respect, they appear … to have excellently understood the true principle of democratic improvement.” In no other country do women occupy “a loftier position” (T [A Treatise on Domestic Economy], 8).

Second, Beecher claims an exemplary status for America: “for ages, there has been a constant progress, in all civilized nations, towards the democratic equality attained in this country” (T, 10). “Already,” she continues, “the light is streaming into the dark prison-house of despotic lands” (T, 12). Thus “no American woman … has any occasion for feeling that hers is an humble or insignificant lot,” because American women's labor, properly imitated, amounts to no less than the “regeneration of the Earth” (T, 13-14). Beecher closes her exuberant opening chapter by declaring—in metaphoric language echoed in the “Conclusion” to Walden—that any woman, working at any labor, aids the greatest work ever committed to human responsibility: “It is the building of a glorious temple, whose base shall be coextensive with the bounds of the earth, whose summit shall pierce the skies, whose splendor shall beam on all lands, and those who hew the lowliest stone, as much as those who carve the highest capital, will be equally honored when its top-stone shall be laid, with new rejoicings of the morning stars, and shoutings of the sons of God” (T, 14).

In chapter two, “Difficulties Peculiar to American Women,” Beecher cites as impediments to the building of this temple both the lack of a ready class of domestic servants, who would not arrive in sufficient numbers until after 1845, and the susceptibility of American women to disease. The first difficulty, Beecher suggests in chapter three, “Remedy for These Difficulties,” is actually a disguised blessing. If American women have to do their own housework, they will eventually—unlike the “frivolous” and dangerously idle ladies of aristocratic countries—come to revalue labor as lady-like, not vulgar (T, 39). This becomes Beecher's chief goal in the Treatise: to redefine domestic labor as “refined and genteel” (T, 40). The stakes as she saw them were very high. If American women continue to view housework as drudgery, they will fail to elevate themselves, their husbands, and their families—thus also failing not only their own country but (according to her premises in the first chapter) all the civilized nations of the world. Beecher also works hard to persuade women of the magnitude of both their duties and their capabilities so that they will value their labor as much as men do. She continually figures women's work in the language of American economics. In her preface she refers to women's duties as their “business” (T, ix); elsewhere these tasks become “domestic employments” (T, 26). Compared with aristocratic ladies—who don't labor at all—American women have paradoxically not only “a loftier position” but “a more elevated object of enterprise” (T, 15). Thus Beecher not only explicitly rehabilitates domestic labor as at once genteel, democratic, and Christian but also implicitly endorses the midcentury, middle-class ethic of enterprise.

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It is against Beecher's complicated position that I would like to consider Walden, although not before I have detailed more carefully the affinities of Thoreau's text with the Treatise. “Our lives are domestic in more senses than we think,” Thoreau suggests sarcastically in “Economy” (W, 28); yet Walden endorses or extends many of Beecher's views, particularly on the proper care of the body. Except for their rhetorical style, several of the Treatise's pronouncements on health would not seem out of place in Thoreau's work. “Medical men … all agree,” Beecher asserts in “On Healthful Food,” “that, in America, far too large a portion of the diet consists of animal food. As a nation, the Americans are proverbial for the gross and luxurious diet with which they load their tables” (T, 77).²³ Not only does Walden's narrator—except for “a very little salt pork” and an occasional woodchuck—eschew animal food, in “Economy” he criticizes men who starve “for want of luxuries” (W, 61) and twice puns on the “gross[ness]” of American “groceries” (W, 12, 64). Thoreau would also likely applaud Beecher's plea for simple cooking; at one point she seems even to yearn for the ultimate in simplicity: “only one article of food, and only water to drink” (T, 71). And he, too, rejects what she terms “stimulating drinks,” such as coffee and tea (T, 85).

Like Beecher, Thoreau also saw no more need for clothing than to “cover nakedness” and “retain the vital heat” (W, 21). Beecher warns strongly against over-clothing the body, just as Walden's speaker derides the “luxuriously rich” who are “not simply kept comfortably warm, but unnaturally hot” (W, 14). Thoreau's own morning baths and habit of early rising follow Beecher's example, although he attributes his regimen to more distant inspirations: “I have been as sincere a worshipper of Aurora as the Greeks. I got up early and bathed in the pond; that was a religious exercise, and one of the best things which I did” (W, 88). What for Beecher was a prudent matter of cleanliness became in Walden ritual and spiritual renewal. Yet a daily full-body bath was something very few Americans took.

Finally, an intriguing connection between Walden and the Treatise is the correlation between Thoreau's description of building his shelter and the detailed floor plans Beecher provides in chapter 25, “On the Construction of Houses.” In some ways this is an odd chapter in the Treatise. In mid-nineteenth-century America, generally speaking, “Young Ladies At Home and At School” did not build houses. But their husbands did. And so Beecher explains to women how to explain to their husbands what kinds of houses best suit American families. She lists “five particulars, to which attention should be given, in building a house” (T, 268). First, strive for “economy of labor”: your house should fit your needs. “If a man is uncertain as to his means,” Beecher suggests, “it is poor economy to build a large house” (T, 269). For Thoreau, a ten-by-fifteen-foot house of old board sufficed, and if a man were “hard pushed,” he could as well take up residence in a railroad laborer's tool box (W, 29). Second, writes Beecher, seek “economy of money”: prefer simplicity over ornamentation; avoid what Thoreau called “the gewgaws upon the mantel-piece” (W, 38). Third, attain “economy of health,” which to Beecher primarily meant proper “ventilation of sleeping-rooms” (T, 273). Thoreau, too, bragged (like a chanticleer) that the wide chinks in his boards made his house “airy” and “auroral” (W, 85). Fourth, provide for “economy of comfort,” by using the biggest rooms for common use. Large kitchens, for Beecher, were especially desirable. Thoreau liked to cook in the biggest room of all—outdoors. Last, show good taste. There is propriety, Beecher noted, in proportion.

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The foregoing is not meant to suggest that Thoreau threw in his lot with the reformers whose disparate positions Beecher collates and systematizes. On the contrary, he often ridiculed their projects. Thought in demonstrable ways Walden adopts a reformist posture, particularly in “Economy,” Thoreau perceived the lameness that too often afflicts reform. As David Reynolds has shrewdly argued, Thoreau “became the most compelling reform writer of nineteenth-century America” precisely because he “recognized both the promise and the perils of contemporary reform movements.”²⁴ I won't reassemble here Walden's invective against “half-witted” reformers (W, 151); instead I will return to the implicit question deferred at the beginning of the last section: how does Walden challenge Beecher's rehabilitation of American labor?

First, Thoreau would have been highly skeptical of several of Beecher's positions. He would have rejected, for example, her uncritical endorsement of the ethic of enterprise. As Leonard Neufeldt has shown, “the speaker of Walden manipulates the language of enterprise so as to acknowledge, parody, and counter the current language and behavior of America, to define his vocation with a logic of opposition, and to justify his art and life with the principle of ‘extravagance’ (standing outside the circle of extravagant enterprise).” Although one might hesitate to see Catharine Beecher within this “circle of extravagant enterprise,” Sklar notes that despite Beecher's emphasis on domestic thriftiness, the Treatise actually encourages “the consumption of goods as a means of promoting the national economy.”²⁵ In “On Giving in Charity,” for example, Beecher defends the use of “superfluities” in distinctly un-Thoreauvian terms:

Suppose that two millions of the people in the United States were conscientious persons, and relinquished the use of every thing not absolutely necessary to life and health. It would instantly throw out of employment one half of the whole community. The manufacturers, mechanics, merchants, agriculturists, and all the agencies they employ, would be beggared, and one half of the community not reduced to poverty, would be obliged to spend all their extra means in simply supplying necessaries to the other half. The use of superfluities, therefore, to a certain extent, is as indispensable to promote industry, virtue, and religion, as any direct giving of money or time.

(T, 161)

Walden's speaker, then, who wished “to front only the essential facts of life” (W, 90)—and who charged that “there is another alternative than to obtain the superfluities” (W, 15)—would have been glad to know he was threatening the national enterprise.

Second, Thoreau would likely have ridiculed Beecher's jingoistic designation of America as “the cynosure of nations” (T, 12). Walden's narrator notes with dismay the “popgun” echoes of gala day guns and the “distant hum” of martial music urging Americans to a war with Mexico he does not support (W, 160). In the “Conclusion” Thoreau flatly dismisses such mindless champions of country: “Patriotism,” he says, “is a maggot in their heads” (W, 321). To Thoreau, who had used the same image in “Economy” to describe heedless (headless?) followers of Fashion, the “ruts of tradition and conformity” are to be avoided at all costs (W, 323). Thus where Thoreau's “essential” narrator threatens the enterprise of the nation, Beecher threatens what Neufeldt has aptly called Thoreau's more individualistic “enterprise of self-culture.”

Third, Thoreau would probably have blanched at the twinned ideologies of deference and standardization underlying much of the Treatise. As I suggested earlier, Beecher accepts social subordination on the grounds that women are potentially equal to men intellectually and morally. In a sense, however, Beecher urges women to give up their claim to social power as a prerequisite for obtaining it. For not only would each woman, by assuming responsibility for raising her family the proper way, surreptitiously gain social authority within her immediate household, all American women—acting independently, but in ideological concert—would exert a massive social influence. Beecher's book became quite literally a text-book, a blueprint for an insistent systemization of American domestic practice. No longer would each housewife need to discover for herself the most expedient, productive, or frugal methods of household management. Transcending region and class, Beecher's rules would provide authoritative and programmatic responses to foreseeable events.

In a sense, by turning his back on Concord and heading for the pond, Thoreau, too, divested himself of social authority in order later to claim that authority in Walden, which is both an exuberant record of his story and an urgent wake-up call for his neighbors/readers. And yet Beecher's goal of subsuming “individual diversity in order to build a commonality of culture”²⁶—of forging, that is, an American identity by promoting nationally homogenous cultural forms—was no doubt a frightening prospect to the Thoreau who hoped that there might be “as many different persons in the world as possible” (W, 71), who insisted that each of his readers pursue “his own way” (W, 71; original emphasis), and who reveled in the “myriad” of forms created by the branching streams on the thawing banks of the railroad's deep cut (W, 307).

Finally, where Beecher seeks to transform “vulgar” labor into “noble” work and “aristocratic” leisure into “democratic” industry, Thoreau attempts a fundamentally more radical reconception of the relationship between labor and leisure. Throughout Walden he insists that the healthiest approach to life is to make one's work and one's play as alike as possible. To Thoreau this did not mean sacrificing either the rigor of work or the spontaneity of play but rather combining them. This prescription flew in the face of midcentury warnings against idleness; but for Thoreau leisure was anything but idle. “Men labor under a mistake,” he asserts at the beginning of “Economy” (W, 5). And the mistake is that they don't take leisure seriously enough. The midcentury laboring man, toiling six days a week to earn his daily salt pork, molasses, and coffee, has neither time for leisure nor “leisure for a true integrity” (W, 6). What Thoreau attempts in Walden is to show each of his readers how to turn the waste of “idle work” (W, 57) into the profit of “free labor” (W, 78), how, in other words, to convert life's “hardship” into its “pastime” (W, 70).

These are no mean feats. But there is a significant pattern of just such reconfigurations beneath the surface of Walden. Thoreau rehearses over and over in this text a whole series of unexpected transformations of work into play not merely to demonstrate that in his own life labor and leisure were undifferentiated but expressly to counter the standardized, collective model of “regeneration” offered by popular writers like Catharine Beecher. Consider again, for example, the image of the thawing sandbank in “Spring.” The activity Thoreau describes on the bank represents not only a myriad of forms but a process of creation—of work—that is at its heart play: “When I see on the one side the inert bank,—for the sun acts on one side first,—and on the other this luxuriant foliage, the creation of an hour, I am affected as if in a peculiar sense I stood in the laboratory of the Artist who made the world and me,—had come to where he was still at work, sporting on this bank, and with excess of energy strewing his fresh designs about. I feel as if I were nearer to the vitals of the globe” (W, 306). The deliberate juxtaposition of God's “work” and his “sporting,” separated by only a tenuous comma, represents Thoreau's narrowing of the semantic gap between the two activities. In the next few paragraphs, in fact, the very word “labor” itself nearly dissolves, much like the famous sandbank itself. Thoreau deftly exposes the multiple meanings of “labor,” stopping just short of revealing that the word actually conceals its opposite meaning (W, 306). For in Latin the noun “labor, laboris,” means “work, labor, toil, effort.” But the verb “labor, labi, lapsus sum” means literally “to glide, slide, fall down, slip” and figuratively “to glide by, fall away, decline, make a mistake.” Thus “labor” means work, but it also means play or glide—just as Thoreau playfully skates across the pond gathering firewood in “House-Warming.” And Thoreau's unmasking of “labor” also makes us see that assertion from “Economy”—“men labor under a mistake”—a little differently. Men have labored under a mistake; men have played under a mistake; men have mistaken both labor and play.

.....

But Thoreau's linguistic sleight of hand can conceal neither his anxious desire that his project succeed nor the fact that he is trying to dissolve the distinctions between work and play at precisely the moment in American history when these activities were becoming more, not less, rigidly demarcated. One of the most striking results of the midcentury shift from the more seasonal work rhythms of pre-industrial agricultural toil to the day-in, day-out wage-driven shifts of American industrial society was the stricter and stricter separation of “work” and “play” hours. I don't mean to idealize—as Thoreau often did—the preindustrial laborer as a self-sufficient worker entirely in control of his or her own time. As Robert Gross has carefully shown, only the very wealthiest of antebellum farmers in Concord (and by extension in most of America) were able to achieve the sort of independence we have come to assume characterized every yeoman landowner.²⁷ I do mean to suggest that Walden betrays its anxiety about the obstacles to its project even more than we have recognized. More specifically, we can locate the source of this anxiety at the very human nexus—in midcentury American culture and in Walden—of the troubling issues of labor, leisure, health, and national identity that I have been tracing: the sudden and overwhelming rush of impoverished Irish immigrants to the shores of America.

The period during which Thoreau experienced life at the pond and then recreated that life in Walden covers exactly the years when the Irish presence in America triggered national concern. Between 1846 and 1855, the unprecendented years of famine emigration, at least 1.6 million Irish immigrants came to the United States. An overwhelming number of these settled in Boston; by 1855 between one-third and one-half of all Bostonians were Irish immigrants.²⁸ Without adequate means or labor skills, the Irish were routinely exploited by employers. To survive, the new arrivals took backbreaking jobs digging ditches, laying railroad track, running spinning mules in textile mills, or cleaning the homes of Boston's middle and upper classes. Even in Thoreau's Concord, the Irish who weren't grading railroad beds were, like John Field in “Baker Farm,” spading up boggy meadow land for local native farmers who wanted to grow English hay for the market.²⁹

One aspect of the massive Irish immigration which might have alarmed Thoreau was the defining role played by the Irish in accelerating the separation of work time from play time, which Thoreau was so anxious to undo. The sudden availability of cheap unskilled labor was the crucial goad to Boston's urban and industrial growth. Before the arrival of the Irish, Boston's “rigid labor supply had made industrialization impossible,” argues Oscar Handlin. “It was the vital function of the Irish to thaw out the rigidity of the system. Their labor achieved the transition from the earlier commercial to the later industrial organization of the city.” The presence of the Irish also helped bring to pass what Gross has called “the revolution in the countryside”: the ascendancy in places like Concord of modern agricultural capitalism—the large scale production of agricultural commodities for city markets—without which “the creation of an urban-industrial society would have been impossible.”³⁰ Each year between Thoreau's departure from the pond to become a “sojourner in civilized life again” (W, 3) and the publication of Walden, more and more Irish laborers accepted jobs antithetical to Thoreau's idiosyncratic vision of “free labor.”

Thoreau's neighbors, too, were alarmed, if for somewhat less noble reasons. Not only were the Irish believed to be physically unsound—threatening the native population with vice, disease, and ignorance (particularly, Protestants felt, in the form of Catholic doctrine)—they were seen as fiscally unfit as well, an unwelcome drain on the public charities.³¹ Anti-Irish sentiment escalated as “prejudice, discrimination, and explosive collisions” became “the order of the day” in midcentury America. In 1851, the peak antebellum year for Irish immigration, the General Court of Massachusetts passed aggressive legislation creating in effect a “frontier guard” against emigrants who might enter the state by land, thereby avoiding the services tax levied at the docks; those who “appeared likely candidates for public support” were denied admission and eventually deported. In the words of Boston mayor Theodore Lyman, the Irish were “a race that will never be infused into our own, but on the contrary will always remain distinct and hostile.”³²

To what degree did Thoreau share the nativist sentiments of his neighbors? Did his desire for “as many different persons in the world as possible” include the midcentury Irish? The few critics who have looked in any detail at Thoreau and the Irish differ in their assessments of his attitude toward them. Frank Buckley concluded some years back that while Thoreau's portrayal of the immigrants in his journal, letters, and published writings is free “from religious and political bias,” Thoreau himself could not be considered “a consistent friend and defender of the Irish.” George Ryan, on the other hand, has asserted more recently that, despite Thoreau's frequently derisive commentary, “time and increased exposure … improved Thoreau's attitude toward the Irish, an ethnic group he could not, at first, quite fully understand.” Particularly after 1850, Ryan argues, Thoreau—who not only “performed works of charity among the immigrants” but wrote letters for them and solicited funds “with which to bring family members out to America”—was, as Walter Harding put it, “one Yankee” that the Irish “could depend on.”³³

Rather than retry Thoreau here in an effort to settle the debate between Ryan and Buckley, I will focus on the historical and literary circumstances which seem to allow each critic to be, in a sense, correct. Granting Ryan's conclusions about the post-1850 Thoreau (ninety percent of all Thoreau's “propitious remarks” about the Irish occur between 1850 and 1857),³⁴ doesn't Walden—taken by itself—support Buckley's position? In other words, if we know that Thoreau's attitude toward the Irish changed significantly for the better after 1850—during precisely the years in which he was dramatically revising the text of Walden—why does Walden's attitude toward the Irish remain at best inconsistent? If the longest “Irish” entries in Thoreau's Journal after 1850 concern young Johnny Riordan, whom Thoreau not only observed with sensitivity and respect but helped clothe during the chill winter of 1851-52, why doesn't Johnny seem to make any impression on the multiple drafts of Walden? Why are James Collins (in his dank shanty), John Field (and his boggy ways), and Hugh Quoil (with his DTs) the text's most prominent Irish figures? Why, to paraphrase Thoreau's famous query near the beginning of “Brute Neighbors,” do precisely these objects make Walden's world? Or to put it another way: why does Thoreau make Walden say John Field instead of Johnny Riordan?³⁵

.....

The answers to these questions take us to the heart of both the larger project of Walden and the construction of Thoreau's rhetorical identity within the text. We need first to consider the nature of the additions and revisions which Thoreau made with respect both to the Irish and to relevant questions of labor and leisure during what Robert Sattelmeyer has classified as the second major phase of the composition of Walden, namely the four successive drafts written between 1852 and 1854.³⁶ In general, Thoreau's changes during this period work in two directions at once. To “Economy,” whose initial Irish references are generally derisive, Thoreau added several passages which more thoughtfully critique the contemporary practices responsible for the conditions his first draft had mocked. For example, as though to mitigate the 1847 manuscript's description of Collins's “uncommonly fine” shanty—which was “dark, … dank, clammy, and aguish,” reminding Thoreau of a “compost heap” (W, 43)—and its brief anecdote of the treacherous neighbor/nail thief Seeley, “an Irishman” (W, 44), Thoreau added in 1852 this lengthy passage:

It is a mistake to suppose that, in a country where the usual evidences of civilization exist, the condition of a very large body of the inhabitants may not be as degraded as that of savages. I refer to the degraded poor, not now to the degraded rich. To know this I should not need to look farther than to the shanties which every where border our railroads, that last improvement in civilization; where I see in my daily walks human beings living in sties, and all winter with an open door, for the sake of light, without any visible, often imaginable, wood pile, and the forms of both old and young are permanently contracted by the long habit of shrinking from cold and misery, and the development of all their limbs and faculties is checked. It certainly is fair to look at that class by whose labor the works which distinguish this generation are accomplished.

(W, 34-35)

Here Thoreau indicts the exploitive labor practices that create shanties like the one whose boards he had condescendingly purchased from James Collins. Playing somewhat on the false hierarchy of terms like “civilized” and “savage,” Thoreau more explicitly puns on the passage's two central descriptive terms. First, the Irish are “degraded,” shaved ruthlessly down, just as they themselves grade the slopes for the railroad; second, they are “permanently contracted,” not merely shrunken by cold and want but locked into rapacious labor agreements.³⁷ These are the other “works” that “distinguish” Thoreau's “generation,” which, he will remind us in another 1852 addition to “Economy,” has witnessed “the fall from the farmer to the operative,” a fall as “great and memorable as that from the man to the farmer” (W, 64).

It is fitting that Thoreau's observations of the Irish laborers take place during his daily exercise, for Walden's attitude toward contemporary leisure also comes into focus during these years. For example, 1852 marks the first appearance in Walden of Thoreau's indictment of the “unconscious despair” beneath the so-called games of mankind (W, 8). And in 1853 he introduces into “Higher Laws” his preference for “the more primitive but solitary amusements of hunting fishing and the like” (W, 211). But between 1852 and 1854 Thoreau also added to Walden some of the more objectionable assertions about immigrants in general and the Irish in particular. In 1852, for example, the same year Thoreau critiqued the degradation inflicted on the poor, he added a fairly uncomplimentary passage about the Irish who “have built their sties” by the pond (W, 192), seeming to blame them along with the railroad instead of distinguishing them from it. And in 1852 and 1853 Thoreau worked into the text his largely unflattering description of Quoil—the prototypical Irish ditch-digger and drunk, with his “carmine” face and his tick-ridden garden (W, 262)—as well as the potentially offensive naturalist/nativist reflections in the opening to “Baker Farm” about the “halo of light” that after a rain appears around the shadows of everyone except “some Irishmen” (W, 202).

“Baker Farm,” in fact, is a crucial chapter to decipher in regard to the Irish, for the passages on John Field and his seemingly hopeless family constitute the most detailed and most negative treatment of immigrants in Walden. This chapter is also a vexing one: nearly every leaf on which these specific passages probably appeared is missing from the original 1847 manuscript. Yet we can make some judgments of Thoreau's probable development of and plans for the chapter by consulting the 23 August 1845 Journal entry recording his original encounter with the Fields. In that entry, Thoreau's description roughly matches the published text of Walden, from his seeking fish and getting caught in a downpour to his taking refuge in the Fields' hut and hearing John's naively cheerful “story” of hard labor for subsistence wages (PJ, 2:176). While the largely negative descriptions of Field as “shiftless,” his wife as “greasy,” and their infant as “wrinkled” and “sibyl-like” do appear in the Journal, one significant addition to that record (which may or may not have been made in the 1847 text) reads: “There we sat together under that part of the roof which leaked the least, while it showered and thundered without. I had sat there many times of old before the ship was built that floated this family to America” (W, 204). This addition is telling because it epitomizes the recurrent tension between proximity and distance which structures the chapter. The first sentence suggests a certain closeness engendered by shared adverse circumstances: Thoreau sits within the hut, huddled “together” with the Fields, trying to stay dry. But the second sentence, its accents falling on “many times of old” and “this family,” seems suspiciously proto-nativist, metaphorically separating Thoreau from the Fields, almost imaginatively returning them to Ireland.

Then, in a long section also added to the Journal, Thoreau tries to collapse what he perceives as the source of the gap between himself and the Fields by narrating his own “experience.” If the Fields could only approach life more like Thoreau himself, they would become his “nearest neighbors” in the most welcome sense (W, 205). But after the lengthy enumeration of what food and drink to exclude from their diet and why—an able critique of the complicity between market economies and political economies that reintroduces an insistent theme from “Economy”—Thoreau snidely despairs of ever communicating the fundamental assumptions of his project to such men as John Field. “But alas!” he exclaims. “The culture of an Irishman is an enterprise to be undertaken with a sort of moral bog hoe” (W, 205-06). Even though such a remark effectively stiff-arms Field as a would-be convert to or reader of Thoreau's program—a few pages later Thoreau “trust[s]” that Field “does not read this” (W, 208)—this sentence, like the one about the ship, begins in sympathy (“But alas!”) before retreating into sarcastic remoteness. After one more brief run at the family's methods of getting, Thoreau fairly runs from the hut itself back into the woods.

It is during this retreat from the Fields that Thoreau experiences a brief but intense moment of doubt as to the wisdom of his chosen course of life. For an “instant” his own boggy ways appear “trivial” for someone “who had been sent to school and college.” But Thoreau, “with the rainbow over [his] shoulder, and some faint tinkling sounds borne to [his] ear through the cleansed air,” overcomes this doubt precisely by putting as much distance between himself and John Field as possible. Go “farther and wider,” Thoreau's “Good Genius” tells him. “Take shelter under the cloud, while they [presumably people like John Field, or even Thoreau at the beginning of the chapter] flee to carts and sheds. Let not to get a living be thy trade, but thy sport” (W, 207). Even when John Field rematerializes at the end of the chapter, having decided to join Thoreau and fish instead of bog, Thoreau emphasizes the irreducible gap between them. They angle from the same boat but not the same philosophy; thus Thoreau catches “a fair string” while Field only a “couple of fins”—even when they swap seats—as though they were in separate boats or on separate ponds (W, 208). And that mid-expedition seat-switching, which closes the chapter, mocks in its ineffectiveness not only Field's attempt to get closer to Thoreau but also the very careful, cooperative effort that an exchange of places in a small boat inevitably requires.³⁸

Why indeed would the Thoreau whose attitudes toward the Irish were broadening in the 1850s not only retain passages like these but intensify them? At a minimum, Field's persistent presence in the text—from the Journal to the 1847 manuscript to the final edition—suggests that Thoreau saw the bog farmer from the start as something of an emblematic foil, someone against whom to construct his narrator's identity as, in the words of his Good Genius, a “free” person bound to “seek adventures,” not markets (W, 207). The decision to intensify the encounter—to turn a single Journal entry into an elaborate set piece in which the narrator invests so much of himself in attempting to aid the Fields that his failure occasions serious self-doubt—was probably made as early as 1847. We know, for example, that Thoreau added to that manuscript the sentences which describe the narrator's doubt and link the Good Genius's instructions explicitly to that sudden sense of failure. We can then surmise that Thoreau simultaneously expanded the encounter with the Fields to include the lengthy (yet vain) account of his own life in order to justify through narrative his subsequent doubt.³⁹

What may have prevented Thoreau from modifying his portrayal of the Fields after 1850 was his decision during the second major phase of revision to make “Baker Farm” a more structurally pivotal chapter. While the Fields material which appears in the 1847 draft, in which there were no chapter divisions, comes very late in the manuscript, in the 1854 Walden “Baker Farm” is considerably more central: it is the tenth chapter out of eighteen, the first chapter of the second half of the book. In the revised text the Good Genius's urgings represent a renewed call to commitment, resolving whatever doubt the first half of the book may have engendered and moving forthrightly ahead toward “Spring” and the “Conclusion.” Thoreau could thus hardly de-intensify the exasperating encounter that crystallized this doubt, which in its turn occasioned the introspective reaffirmation. In the revised version, then, the narrator's identity is even more sharply tied to John Field's and even more strongly requires Field's obtuseness.

And yet, while in an odd sense “Baker Farm” holds the two halves of Walden together largely by depicting John Field as an Irishman apart, by the 1850s Thoreau seems uncomfortable enough with his characterization of Field to have tried, with mixed results, to soften its edges. In “Spring,” for example, when the narrator declares that “in a pleasant spring morning all men's sins are forgiven” and that “through our own recovered innocence we discern the innocence of our neighbors” (W, 314; emphasis added), he seems almost to acknowledge Thoreau's guilt over the earlier portrayal of his “nearest neighbor” and figuratively, though at best obscurely, to welcome John Field back into the book.

At about the same time that Thoreau placed this near-apology in “Spring,” he also tinkered with the immediate frame of “Baker Farm” itself. First, although he added the seeming slur about the unworthiness of “some Irishmen” whose shadows “had no halo,” he made a point of putting that comment in the mouth of a visitor to Walden (“One who visited me declared that …”) and then followed it with a long digression which seems to challenge the whole idea of shadow-election as the “superstition” of “an excitable imagination” (W, 202). Second, after leaving Baker Farm to explore in “Higher Laws” the competing claims of sensuality and purity, Thoreau suddenly introduces the enigmatic figure of John Farmer, who, though not identified as Irish, seems symbolically kin to John Field. Farmer, however, experiences an awakening to—or more accurately, toward—self-culture which is explicitly denied Field:

John Farmer sat at his door one September evening, after a hard day's work, his mind still running on his labor more or less. Having bathed he sat down to recreate his intellectual man. … He had not attended to the train of his thoughts long when he heard some one playing on a flute, and that sound harmonized with his mood. Still he thought of his work. … But the notes of the flute came home to his ears out of a different sphere from that he worked in, and suggested work for certain faculties which slumbered in him. They gently did away with the street, and the village, and the state in which he lived.

(W, 221-22)

Much like Thoreau washed by the rain before the advent of his Good Genius in “Baker Farm,” the cleansed Farmer hears music in the air which prepares him to receive a new message: “Why do you stay here and live this mean moiling life, when a glorious existence is possible for you?” Unlike Thoreau, Farmer is unable “actually [to] migrate thither”; but the chapter ends with the possibility of redemptive self-cultivation still thick in the air, as Farmer “practise[s] some new austerity,” letting “his mind descend into his body and redeem it, and treat[ing] himself with ever increasing respect” (W, 222). Through the symbolic redemption of John Farmer, Thoreau may subtly extend the same possibility to John Field—albeit without his wife and children—a possibility which the rhetorical requirements of “Baker Farm” itself refused to allow.

For all its revisions, however, Walden still doesn't welcome little Johnny Riordan into its pages. Even though the longest of Thoreau's several Journal entries on Johnny occurs precisely when Thoreau was “engrossed” in the first revisions of the second phase of Walden (including the revisions just detailed above),⁴⁰ even though Thoreau was pulling considerable material from the Journal pages around Johnny into the text, and even though Johnny “dares to live” (J [The Journal of Henry David Thoreau], 3:149) and his “greater independence” and “closeness to nature” (J, 2:116-17) square exactly with Thoreau's larger project, Johnny cannot wedge his way into Walden to displace or at least comment upon Thoreau's treatment of John Field. If Sattelmeyer is correct in arguing that Thoreau's decision to let stand certain inconsistencies created by his revisions to Walden is “a mark of [his] maturity as a writer,”⁴¹ then what do these apparent evasions mark?

To a certain extent they indicate that the same issues of self-identity which so strongly shaped “Baker Farm” are still at work at the end of Walden. From one angle the story of Johnny, as Thoreau was shaping it in the Journal, threatens to undo too much of the crucial rhetorical work accomplished by the treatment of John Field in “Baker Farm.” For by emphasizing Johnny's determination to educate himself—he goes to school no matter how cold it is—and in general to meet the world as bravely as possible, Thoreau was in the early 1850s specifically rewriting the pessimistic ending to that chapter, in which the narrator asserts that Field, “with his inherited Irish poverty or poor life, his Adam's grandmother and boggy ways, [will] not … rise in this world, he nor his posterity, till their wading webbed bog-trotting feet get talaria to their heels” (W, 209). In the Journal, Johnny figuratively becomes John Field's posterity; as a four-year-old in 1850, Johnny represents Field's “poor starveling brat” coming of age. And, far from wading web-footed through the bogs, Johnny, “lively as a cricket,” scampers past the wealthier and more duck-like Concordians who “waddle about cased in furs” (J, 3:150).

In another sense, the remarkable extent to which Thoreau himself was coming to identify with Johnny in the Journal equally threatens to undermine the mature autonomy toward which Thoreau's narrator was struggling. Not only does Johnny receive a winter coat from Thoreau, but the Journal records that the “countless patches” on Johnny's other clothes—and perhaps the clothes themselves—“hailed from, claimed descent from, were originally identical with pantaloons of mine” (J, 3:241). Even in this brief description Thoreau modulates from kinship (“hailed from”) toward paternity (“claimed descent from”) to an anxious identity. Elsewhere in the Journal Thoreau imagines himself as Johnny, even composing a multi-stanza folk ballad—“I am the little Irish boy / That lives in the shanty. / I am four years old to-day / And shall soon be one and twenty” (J, 2:117)—which purports to sing of life through Johnny's eyes. But while we may be tempted to see in Walden traces of Johnny's vivid Journal presence,⁴² the revised text as a whole moves toward an ethic of self-exploration that—however strong Thoreau's fascination with “the little Irish boy”—could only awkwardly admit a last-minute alter ego, especially an Irish one, to its “private sea” (W, 321). “Let every one mind his own business,” Thoreau insists in the “Conclusion,” “and endeavor to be what he was made” (W, 326).

Of course by keeping Johnny out of Walden Thoreau willfully disregards one of the key lessons of his Good Genius in “Baker Farm”: “We should come home from far, from adventures, and perils, and discoveries every day, with new experience and character” (W, 208). Whatever discoveries Thoreau was making about the Irish after 1850, he didn't bring all of them “home” to Walden. But he did bring them to the Journal, and it is literally among those pages that another reason for Johnny's absence suggests itself. For “inclosed between the leaves of one of the journals,” remark the editors of the 1906 Journal in a footnote to the 28 January 1852 entry on Johnny, lay “some loose sheets of manuscript” containing a “more complete sketch of the little Irish boy, made up, with some revision, from the original entries” (J, 3:242). If Thoreau had other publication plans for the Riordan material—to issue it as a separate sketch, for example, or as part of some other work—then we might see his decision to exclude Johnny from Walden as an attempt to exert some control over both his literary product and the market in which he had to trade it.⁴³ This would have been a brave attempt in midcentury America, for all around Thoreau the expanding commercial and industrial markets were systematically undermining most forms of autonomous living.⁴⁴

As “the most powerful and articulate critic of agricultural capitalism that America produced in the decades before the Civil War,”⁴⁵ Thoreau often demonstrates an astute understanding of the effect that these changes had on individual Americans. But he could at other times appear equally insensitive, as we have seen in his treatment of the Irish in the drafts of Walden. However much Thoreau's more private Journal reflections and certain fairly subtle revisions to Walden protest to the contrary, the public text of Walden by and large bars the Irish from the new ideology of work and play that Thoreau was attempting to formulate. Although Thoreau hoped to live outside the “restless, nervous, bustling, trivial Nineteenth Century” (W, 329) and to “speak somewhere without bounds” (W, 324; original emphasis), the Walden which he reshaped in the 1850s did not, in the end, fully accomplish those goals.

Notes

1. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, ed. J. Lyndon Shanley (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), 84. Subsequent quotations from Walden are from this edition and are cited parenthetically as W.

2. Charles Sumner, The True Grandeur of Nations: An Oration Delivered Before the Authorities of the City of Boston, July 4, 1845 (Philadelphia: Henry Longstreth, 1846), 5-6.

3. Sumner, 6.

4. Robert D. Richardson, Henry Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1986), 55, 57.

5. Exceptions here are Leonard N. Neufeldt's “Thoreau's Enterprise of Self-Culture in a Culture of Enterprise,” American Quarterly 39 (Summer 1987): 231-51; and Linck C. Johnson's “Revolution and Renewal: The Genres of Walden,” in Critical Essays on Henry David Thoreau's “Walden”, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), 215-35.

6. The Journal of Henry David Thoreau, ed. Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen, 14 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), 6:158. Journal passages written after Spring 1848 are quoted from the twenty-volume 1906 edition of Thoreau's complete works (in which the fourteen Journal volumes are numbered independently) and cited parenthetically as J, followed by appropriate volume and page numbers. Passages written before Spring 1848 are quoted from the first two volumes of the Princeton University Press edition of Thoreau's Journal (Journal 1: 1837-1844, ed. Elizabeth Hall Witherell et al. [1981]; Journal 2: 1842-1848, ed. Robert Sattelmeyer [1984]) and cited parenthetically as PJ, followed by volume and page numbers.

7. William Ellery Channing, “Self-Culture,” in The Works of William E. Channing, D. D. (Boston: American Unitarian Assoc., 1877), 14, 21, 19. Subsequent quotations from this and other selections in Channing's Works will appear parenthetically as WEC.

8. Henry D. Thoreau, Early Essays and Miscellanies, ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and Edwin Moser, with Alexander C. Kern (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975), 117; hereafter cited as EEM.

9. Quoted in John R. Betts, “Mind and Body in Early American Thought,” Journal of American History 54 (March 1968): 793, 794, 799. Bancroft and Cogswell further claimed that they were “the first in the new continent to connect gymnastics with a purely literary establishment” (793).

10. Guy Lewis, “The Beginning of Organized Collegiate Sport,” American Quarterly 22 (Summer 1970): 223.

11. Betts, “Mind and Body,” 800; Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, ed. Stephen E. Whicher (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 81, 301, 402.

12. Quoted in Richardson, 55.

13. Harriet Martineau, Society in America, 3 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1837), 3:156; Catharine E. Beecher, Letters to the People on Health and Happiness (1855; rpt., New York: Arno, 1972), 8, 121; Henry Adams, History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, ed. Earl N. Harbert, 2 vols. (New York: Library of America, 1986), 1:42.

14. “Why We Get Sick,” Harper's New Monthly Magazine, October 1856, 642, 646, 643.

15. Bruce Laurie, Artisans into Workers: Labor in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Hill and Wang, 1989), 16; Daniel T. Rodgers, The Work Ethic in Industrial America, 1850-1920 (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1974), 19.

16. Rodgers, 19; Laurie, 16.

17. Quoted in Rodgers, 5-6 (original ellipsis and emphasis).

18. Steven A. Riess, City Games: The Evolution of American Urban Society and the Rise of Sports (Urbana: Univ. of Illinois Press, 1989), 13; Stephen Hardy, How Boston Played: Sport, Recreation, and Community, 1865-1915 (Boston: Northeastern Univ. Press, 1982), 43.

19. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, “Saints, and Their Bodies,” Atlantic Monthly, March 1858, 586; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Centenary Edition, ed. Edward Waldo Emerson, 12 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1876), 5:134, 65, 69, 106, 65.

20. Lemuel Shattuck, Report to the Committee of the City Council Appointed to Obtain the Census of Boston for the Year 1845 (1846; rpt., New York: Arno, 1976), 146-47. Shattuck acknowledges a decrease in cholera in 1845, but notes with alarm a rise in diseases of the respiratory and digestive organs. He meticulously documents, for example, “a decided increase” in deaths due to “Enteritis, or inflammation of the bowels,” in “Bowel Complaints,” and in “Diseases of the Stomach and Bowels” (147).

21. Kathryn Kish Sklar, Catharine Beecher: A Study in American Domesticity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1973), 151.

22. Catharine E. Beecher, A Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841; rpt., New York: Source Book, 1970), 13; hereafter cited as T.

23. According to Waverly Root and Richard de Rochemont's Eating in America: A History (New York: William Morrow, 1976), American per capita consumption of meat was a whopping 178 pounds per year during the 1830s, a total not surpassed until 1970 (139).

24. David S. Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1989), 101.

25. Neufeldt, 239; Sklar, 307 n.

26. Sklar, 166.

27. Robert A. Gross, “Culture and Cultivation: Agriculture and Society in Thoreau's Concord,” Journal of American History 69 (June 1982): 45.

28. See Charles Fanning, The Irish Voice in America: Irish-American Fiction from the 1760s to the 1980s (Lexington: Univ. Press of Kentucky, 1990), 74; Hardy, 28; and Laurie, 25-26.

29. Gross, “Culture and Cultivation,” 53.

30. Oscar Handlin, Boston's Immigrants: A Study in Acculturation, rev. ed. (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1959), 82; Gross, “Culture and Cultivation,” 43.

31. Hardy, 28-29. Fears about the Irish were not new in the late 1840s—indeed, the memory of the Charlestown Convent Fire and subsequent riot in 1837 burned bright in the minds of Boston natives and immigrants alike—but it was only after the beginning of massive famine emigration that such anxieties became distinctly national concerns. See, for example, Handlin, 187-89.

32. Fanning, 74; George Potter, To the Golden Door: The Story of the Irish in Ireland and America (Boston: Little, Brown, 1960), 466-67; Handlin, 185.

33. Frank Buckley, “Thoreau and the Irish,” New England Quarterly 13 (September 1940): 400, 397; George E. Ryan, “Shanties and Shiftlessness: The Immigrant Irish of Henry Thoreau,” Éire-Ireland: A Journal of Irish Studies 13 (Fall 1978): 77-78.

34. Ryan, 77.

35. In Dark Thoreau (Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1982), Richard Bridgman poses similar questions, but ventures no answers; see 108.

36. Robert Sattelmeyer, “The Remaking of Walden,” in Writing the American Classics, ed. James Barbour and Tom Quirk (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1990), 58. The two indispensable sources for information about the successive drafts of Walden are J. Lyndon Shanley, The Making of “Walden,” with the Text of the First Version (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957); and Ronald Earl Clapper, “The Development of Walden: A Genetic Text,” (Ph.D. diss., Univ. of California, Los Angeles, 1967).

37. See, for example, Handlin, 70-72, and Norman Ware, The Industrial Worker, 1840-1860: The Reaction of American Industrial Society to the Advance of the Industrial Revolution (1924; rpt., Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1990), 106-48.

38. Tellingly, in the original Journal entry Thoreau records that “he [i.e., Field] changed seats” (PJ, 2:177), but in the final text he changes the account to read “we changed seats” (W, 208; emphases added).

39. In Thoreau's Wild Rhetoric (New York: New York Univ. Press, 1990), Henry Golemba provocatively argues that Thoreau's “xenophobia” is part of a rhetorical strategy designed to give his persona sufficient “Yankee shrewdness” and unsentimental toughness in order to make Walden a more attractive text to its presumably xenophobic audience (176-77). I would agree that Thoreau's incipient nativism is in part a rhetorical necessity, but only as required by Walden's own logic, not by any constraints posed by potential readers.

40. Shanley, The Making of “Walden,” 31.

41. Sattelmeyer, 60.

42. In “The Bean-Field,” for example, Thoreau specifies that his formative initial visit to Walden Pond occurred “when I was four years old” (W, 155). In “Winter Animals” Thoreau's description of the hares that visit his cabin makes them sound at first suspiciously like destitute Irish children, coming “round my door at dusk to nibble the potato parings which I had thrown out” (W, 280); but he then reveals that the “poor wee thing[s], lean and bony” could “scud” over the snow with remarkable “elastic[ity],” thereby (much like Johnny) “asserting [their] vigor and the dignity of Nature” (W, 281). And in the “Conclusion,” after relating the anecdote about the little boy who tells the traveler that the swamp before him did have a hard bottom (the traveler, his horse “up to the girths” in muck, simply hadn't reached it yet), Thoreau says, “So it is with the bogs and quicksands of society; but he is an old boy that knows it” (W, 330)—figuring himself, in a sense, as an adult version (an “old boy”) of little Johnny.

43. For an excellent discussion of Thoreau's complicity with the market ideology that he abhorred, see Michael T. Gilmore, American Romanticism and the Marketplace (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1985), 35-51.

44. As Ware reports, “the progress of the Industrial Revolution destroyed, not only the semi-agricultural factory population, but the New England farm that made its independence real” (74). And Gross reminds us in “Transcendentalism and Urbanism: Concord, Boston, and the Wider World,” (Journal of American Studies 18 [December 1984]) that “at the very moment Thoreau was striving to control his own life in the face of the market, the railroad was sweeping up the remaining old-time farmers on the outskirts into the triumphant new world of agricultural capitalism” (378).

45. Gross, “Culture and Cultivation,” 44.