‘Whose Law is Growth’: A Week and Thoreau's Early Literary Career
[In the following excerpt, Johnson relates the troubled ten‐year history of A Week, from the river trip to initial publication.]
As the above chapters indicate, the writing of A Week charts Thoreau's literary and intellectual development from his years at Harvard to its publication in 1849. But he was not simply becoming a mature artist during this period. He was also becoming a man, a frequently painful process that also had a marked impact upon A Week. “The changes which break up at short intervals the prosperity of men, are advertisements of a nature whose law is growth,” Emerson observed in “Compensation,” an essay that offers interesting insights into his own and Thoreau's early life. “Every soul is by this intrinsic necessity quitting its whole system of things, its friends, and home, and laws, and faith” (CW II:72). Thoreau, like Emerson before him, experienced precisely such “changes,” a series of disappointments, failures, and losses, during the writing of A Week. He also enacted a series of what Emerson described as “revolutions,” signing off from the church, refusing to pay the poll tax, and, in his move to Walden Pond, if not quitting at least putting some distance between himself and his family, friends, and neighbors in Concord. He moved to the pond, of course, on July 4, Independence Day. But genuine independence came more slowly, as gradually during the writing of A Week Thoreau began to resist the influence of those who had dominated his earlier literary career.
Foremost among these was Emerson himself, who was far more than a literary or philosophical influence. From the time Thoreau graduated from Harvard, Emerson took his young neighbor in hand, stimulating his reading, prompting him to begin a journal, overseeing his contributions to the Dial, and by example and advice directing his literary career. “If I feel overshadowed and outdone by great neighbors, I can yet love; I can still receive,” Emerson eloquently affirmed in “Compensation”; “and he that loveth, maketh his own the grandeur he loves” (CW II:72). Emerson, of course, was not overshadowed by his neighbors, at least not those in Concord, where Thoreau constantly suffered an invidious comparison with the older man. Thoreau did love his friend, from whom he received a great deal, but he could hardly be satisfied by sharing Emerson's grandeur. Thoreau was instead determined to match it, especially in his first book, which both he and Emerson hoped would justify the master's faith in his disciple. In fact, disappointed in Thoreau's initial failure to live up to expectations, Emerson persistently sought to influence the direction and to arrange for the publication of A Week. Thoreau, however, was determined to chart his own course in A Week, which became a very different book from the one Emerson wanted him to write. Thus, as the foreground of A Week is dominated by the loving friendship between the brothers who made the trip (a friendship that had itself been strained by their rivalry over a young woman), so its background was dominated by the increasingly strained friendship between Emerson and Thoreau.
Similarly, where A Week reveals his struggle to come to terms with John's death, the book was also a product of Thoreau's long struggle to establish himself as a writer. Through Emerson he gained a small foothold in the narrow world of literary Transcendentalism, where he came into fruitful contact with writers like Margaret Fuller, Bronson Alcott, and Ellery Channing. In fact, his earliest plan for giving an account of the 1839 trip to the White Mountains was one of a number of projected works inspired by the establishment of the Dial, and Thoreau's first book cannot be fully understood without reference to his varied contributions to that “Magazine for Literature, Philosophy, and Religion,” many of which later found their way into A Week. But, however valuable for his artistic growth, writing for the Dial offered Thoreau neither remuneration nor reputation. Nathaniel Hawthorne, who moved to Concord in 1842, helped him make contacts in Boston and, especially, in New York City, where Thoreau moved in 1843. There he became friends with Horace Greeley, editor of the Tribune, who later acted as an agent for his works. But Thoreau's efforts to find a place for himself in the New York literary world were futile. As it turned out, that failure and the collapse of the Dial in 1844, which might have combined to terminate his literary career, simply marked the end of his literary apprenticeship.
For the next five years Thoreau devoted most of his energies to books. During the fall of 1844, after deciding to move to Walden Pond, he began to gather material for the first draft of A Week, which he wrote in 1845. Events of 1846, especially his arrest that summer, profoundly influenced the direction of the second draft of the book, which Thoreau submitted to publishers in mid‐1847, by which time he was also completing the first version of Walden. His failure to secure a publisher for A Week in 1847 had significant consequences for the ultimate shape and content of the book, which he temporarily laid aside in order to write lectures and essays, including “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods,” which Horace Greeley placed in the Union Magazine. Greeley, like Emerson, also offered a good deal of fatherly advice. But just as Thoreau resisted Emerson's ideas about the direction his writings should take, so he resisted Greeley's ideas about the direction his career should take. Thus, instead of writing short articles for the magazines, as Greeley urged, Thoreau during 1848 doggedly worked on A Week and Walden, which were crucial to his own strategy for becoming a self‐supporting writer. Indeed, the failure of A Week is made all the more poignant by his great expectations, for by publishing the book at his own expense in 1849 he clearly hoped at once to free himself from the harsh necessities of the American literary marketplace and to step out from under Emerson's long shadow into the light of individual literary recognition.
Emerson began to cast that shadow even before he and Thoreau became friends.1 In 1834 the older man moved to Concord, his ancestral village, where, in the Old Manse, he wrote his first book, Nature. Thoreau read and reread the volume in the spring of 1837, shortly before his graduation from Harvard. At the graduation ceremonies he perhaps heard Emerson deliver the Phi Beta Kappa address, “The American Scholar.” A product of his own struggle with the problem of vocation, Emerson's address spoke to young men with a literary bent who were about to take their place in a country that offered few rewards to its writers.2 Indeed, speaking in the midst of the panic of 1837, the worst economic depression the country had experienced, Emerson gave an unblinking assessment of the obstacles to a literary life—poverty, uncertainty, and the hostility of society, all of which Thoreau later experienced. Emerson, however, also described the scholar's compensations. “He is to find consolation in exercising the highest functions of human nature,” he asserted. “He is one who raises himself from private considerations, and breathes and lives on public and illustrious thoughts” (CW I:62).
Emerson's inspirational ideas and presence in Concord had a profound impact on Thoreau. After a futile search for a teaching position, which was virtually impossible to find during the depression, Thoreau first founded a private school and then, in September 1838, took over the Concord Academy, which soon proved so popular that John left his position in Roxbury to join his brother in Concord. But Emerson, probably remembering his own frustrating years in his elder brother's English Classical School in Boston, where he had taught after graduating from Harvard, encouraged Thoreau's literary aspirations. It was no doubt Emerson who asked, “Do you keep a journal?” (J 1:5), the question that prompted him to make his first entry on October 22, 1837.3 Early Journal entries record his reading of some of Emerson's favorite authors, especially Goethe, whose ideal of self‐development and personal culture shaped each man's career. At meetings of the Transcendental Club at Emerson's home, Thoreau participated in discussions that also strongly colored his ideas, which were further quickened by the inspiration of Emerson's lectures. On December 6, 1837, for example, he traveled to Boston to hear Emerson deliver the introduction to a new series, “Human Culture”; thereafter, he heard each of the lectures at private readings in Concord. He delivered his own first lecture, “Society,” at the Concord Lyceum in April 1838. That summer Emerson delivered the “Divinity School Address,” generating a controversy that hardened Thoreau's own growing opposition to the institutionalized church, which a decade later he would attack in A Week. Some of the material that would ultimately find its way into the book was paying more immediate dividends, however, for early in 1839 Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller that Thoreau, “my protester,” had broken “into good poetry and better prose” (L II:182).
Although he took paternal pride in Thoreau's nascent literary abilities, Emerson was even more impressed by his young neighbor's practical attributes and knowledge of nature. After leaving the ministry in 1832, Emerson had initially planned to become a naturalist, so he had a keen interest in and a fairly secure grasp of modern science. But Thoreau's knowledge, he believed, had been gained directly through observation and experience, which Emerson valued more highly than book learning. “An education in things is not,” he impatiently exclaimed after hearing an address by Horace Mann, the educational reformer, in September 1839. “We are shut up in schools & college recitation rooms for ten or fifteen years & come out at last with a bellyfull of words & do not know a thing.” The complaint echoes “The American Scholar,” where he had earlier emphasized the role of nature and experience in education. By 1839, however, Emerson had discovered a type of his ideal scholar. Thus, in contrast to “wordmen” like himself, who “do not know an edible root in the woods” and “cannot tell our course by the stars nor the hour of the day by the sun,” Emerson offered the example of his “wise young neighbors,” who had the day before returned from their voyage up the Merrimack, where they had lived “by their wits on the fish of the stream & the berries of the wood” (JMN VII:238). The outlines of his 1862 funeral oration, “Thoreau,” eulogy of a writer who blended Emerson's own idealism and individualism with practical skills and an intimate knowledge of natural facts, had thus already begun to emerge.
Eager that Thoreau should have the opportunity to fulfill his early promise, Emerson helped establish the Dial, which he viewed as a golden opportunity for his young disciple. “We have a power of fine people who would write a few numbers of such book, who write nowhere else,” he explained to his brother William on September 26, 1839, a week after he and other members of the Transcendental Club decided to found a new journal: “My Henry Thoreau will be a great poet for such a company, & one of these days for all companies” (L II:225). Emerson, however, had to elbow out a place for Thoreau in that company. Margaret Fuller had been named editor of the Dial, but he took the liberty of accepting Thoreau's poem “Elegy” (“Sympathy”), which Emerson had earlier hailed as the purest and loftiest strain “that has yet pealed from this unpoetic American forest” (JMN VII:230‐31). When he read Thoreau's “fine critique on Persius” in March 1840, Emerson proclaimed it, too, “well worthy” of the Dial (L II:259). His letters suggest that, for various reasons, neither Thoreau nor Fuller was very enthusiastic about the prospect of publishing the article, but Emerson was determined. According to him, Thoreau had “too mean an opinion of ‘Persius’ or any of his pieces to care to revise them” (L II:280‐81), so Emerson revised it for him. He also peppered Fuller with advance requests that she accept the article. As he prepared to send it to her, however, Emerson foresaw some objections. It had too much “manner” and not enough “method,” and the piece was too long. “Yet it has always a spiritual meaning even when the literal does not hold,” he asserted, “& has so much brilliancy & life in it that in our bold bible for The Young America, I think it ought to find a place” (L II:287). Although she apparently asked for further revisions, Fuller could hardly refuse to print “Aulus Persius Flaccus” in the first issue of the Dial, from which Thoreau later lifted it for inclusion in A Week.
Thoreau's earliest plan for giving an account of the 1839 trip was but one of a number of writing projects occasioned by the establishment of the Dial. Encouraged by the acceptance of his first effort, he drew up a list of other essay topics: “Love,” “Sound & Silence,” “Horace,” “Greek Poetry,” “The Brave man,” “Memoirs of a Tour—A Chit‐chat with Nature,” “Music,” and “Hindoo Scripture.”4 In retrospect, ‘'Memoirs of a Tour,” his first title for a literary excursion, obviously strikes us as the most interesting and significant topic. But the other topics on the list give a clearer picture of his interests in 1840. Consequently, after making tentative efforts to reconstruct that “tour” in June, when he copied his excursion notes into the Journal and drafted a few additional passages, Thoreau turned his attention to one of the other topics, “The Brave man.”
The completed essay, which he sent to Margaret Fuller in July, clearly reveals the influence of Emerson. Thoreau retitled it “The Service,” possibly to distinguish it from “Heroism,” a lecture from the “Human Culture” series Emerson was then revising for Essays, but the change hardly disguised their connections. In “Heroism” Emerson remarked the absence of heroic traits in modern literature and called for more “books of this tart cathartic virtue,” works that remind us of the need for “the arming of the man,” whose assumption of “a warlike attitude” affirms “his ability to cope single‐handed with the infinite array of enemies” (CW II:147‐48). In “The Service,” with its imagery of fife and drums, knights and crusaders, Thoreau assumed that warlike attitude and so answered Emerson's call to arms. He was also recruited by Emerson's literary methods, as Thoreau gathered together scattered entries from the Journal into an essay on a single abstract topic, though the form such imitation took in “The Service” hardly flattered the Essays. Consequently, the militant young writer and his bellicose essay were vanquished by a tart critique penned by Margaret Fuller, who—complaining that she could still “hear the grating of tools on the mosaic” (C 42)—declined to print “The Service” in the Dial.
Thoreau was no luckier in love than in literature.5 After sending off “The Service,” he continued to jot passages for “Memoirs of a Tour” in the Journal, but by the summer of 1840 Thoreau must have had mixed feelings about his companion on that trip. A few weeks before their departure in 1839 the brothers had both met and fallen in love with Ellen Sewell, who stayed with their family during a two‐week visit to Concord. Immediately after their return from the White Mountains, John visited Ellen at her home in Scituate. The success of that visit accounts for the mournful note in many of Thoreau's journal entries on love and friendship that fall. But he joined John in a visit to Scituate during Christmas vacation, and Thoreau saw more of her in June 1840, when Ellen again visited Concord. In fact, his recollections of the 1839 voyage, which he began to jot down at that time, were informed by the more immediate impressions of boating with Ellen on the Concord River. In an entry later revised for A Week, for example, Thoreau wrote on June 19, “The other day I rowed in my boat a free—even lovely young lady—and as I plied the oars she sat in the stern—and there was nothing but she between me and the sky” (J 1:132; cf. FD 21 and W 46).
But the idyll did not last. In July, John again visited Scituate where he proposed to Ellen, who first accepted but swiftly changed her mind. “I heard that an engagement was entered into between a certain youth and a maiden,” Thoreau later observed in A Week, “and then I heard that it was broken off, but I did not know the reason in either case” (W 293). At the time, however, he was hardly as detached and dispassionate, for he himself proposed in a letter written to Ellen in early November. On November 9, after consulting her father, Ellen declined his proposal. Margaret Fuller, who asked him to pardon her long delay, rejected “The Service” in a letter dated December 1, 1840.
Emerson helped Thoreau weather this crisis in his life and career. Spurred by the organization of Brook Farm, Emerson decided to expand his household. He first approached the Alcotts, who had moved to Concord in 1840, but Mrs. Alcott wisely refused. But when John's failing health forced the brothers to close their school in the spring of 1841, Thoreau accepted an invitation to live with the Emersons, earning his room and board in return for work around the house and garden. The arrangement, however, was primarily intended to free Thoreau to work on his writing, especially the poetry Emerson praised so highly. “Thoreau is a scholar & a poet,” he wrote his brother William on June 1, “& as full of buds of promise as a young apple tree” (L II:402). He pressed Margaret Fuller to accept the poem “Sic Vita” for the July 1841 issue of the Dial and prepared her to receive other of Thoreau's poems. In September, a week after Thoreau reported to his friend Lucy Brown that he was in “the mid‐sea of verses” (C 46), Emerson exclaimed in a letter to Fuller, “H. T. is full of noble maddness lately, and I hope more highly of him than ever” (L II:447). Later in September, Emerson recommended his friend's poetry to Rufus Griswold, editor of The Poets and Poetry of America, but Griswold was evidently no more impressed by the poems Thoreau forwarded to him than Fuller was by Thoreau's efforts for the Dial.
He was clearly modeling his career on Emerson's. Emerson's interest in poetry, especially intense in 1840‐41, when he published poems like “The Problem,” “Woodnotes” numbers 1 and 2, “The Snow Storm,” “The Sphinx,” and “Fate” in the Dial, inspired Thoreau's ongoing efforts. Emerson also encouraged his plans for an anthology of English poetry, advancing Thoreau fifteen dollars to cover the expenses of his two‐week stay in Cambridge in November‐December 1841. In fact, Emerson, who someday hoped to publish his own commonplace book containing extracts from his favorite English poets, generously lent the notebook to Thoreau, who copied out twenty pages of extracts as a starting place for his own similar compilation.6 But of all Emerson's various literary activities, Essays was no doubt the most compelling example to Thoreau. Emerson began to work on the volume in earnest in the spring of 1840, about the time Thoreau drew up his first list of essay topics. Essays appeared in March 1841, shortly before Thoreau moved in with the Emersons, and its generally favorable and often enthusiastic reception no doubt had a profound impact on a young man struggling to articulate his own literary career. Consequently, in the fall of 1841, while he was transcribing portions of his early Journal, “Gleanings—Or What Time Has Not Reaped of My Journal,” Thoreau drew up a new list of eleven essay topics, one fewer than Essays: “Merrimack & Musketaquid,” “Sound and Silence,” “Bravery,” “Concord,” “Friendship,” “Books & style,” “Seeing,” “Obligation,” “Dying,” “Devil,” and “Journal.”7
Once again, his list was dominated by literary and philosophical topics à la Emerson. But, by placing “Merrimack and Musketaquid” at the head of the list, Thoreau signaled his growing interest in descriptive and narrative prose. Emerson had thought to call his volume “Forest Essays,” perhaps in an effort to evoke their growth in a natural realm, but he dropped half of that title and began the volume with “History,” which, “rather than nature, now appeared to be the best expositor of the divine mind.”8 In his plan for a similar volume Thoreau stuck with nature, obviously intending to introduce the reader to the withdrawn and unspoiled world of the rivers before embarking on more abstract meditations on topics like “Sound and Silence,” “Bravery,” “Friendship,” “Books & style,” and “Dying.” The river voyage was not, of course, destined to introduce a book of essays on these topics; A Week, however, would provide a setting for digressions on many of these same subjects.
Thoreau's plan to write about the brothers' voyage probably served emotional as well as literary needs. In the postscript to a long letter criticizing his poem “With frontier strength ye stand your ground,” later inserted in both “A Walk to Wachusett” and A Week, Margaret Fuller wrote on October 18, 1841: “The pencilled paper Mr. E. put into my hands. I have taken the liberty to copy it You expressed one day my own opinion that the moment such a crisis is passed we may speak of it. … Thus you will not be sorry that I have seen the paper. Will you not send me some other records of the good week” (C 57). It is, of course, impossible to say with any certainty exactly what that “pencilled paper” contained, but Fuller's closing words, “good week” (a phrase that seems to have been used to describe any extended period of recreation), suggest that the paper may have been related to Thoreau's projected account of the 1839 voyage.9 The “crisis” was possibly occasioned by their loss of Ellen Sewell and, perhaps, by Thoreau's guilt about having asked her to marry him after she had rejected his brother. In any case, we may speculate that, whatever its literary background and inspiration, Thoreau's plan to give an account of the voyage was given added impetus by his desire to reaffirm the bonds of friendship that had been strained by the brothers' competition for the love of Ellen Sewell.
In addition to altering radically its scale and conception, John's death in January 1842 dramatically raised the stakes riding on that account. What Thoreau had for two years planned as an essay would now become a book, at once a remembrance of and an elegy for his brother. Indeed, like so many other nineteenth‐ and twentieth‐century artists, including Anthony Trollope, Vincent Van Gogh (named after his dead brother), Gustav Mahler, James M. Barrie, and Jack Kerouac, who insisted that his books were written through him by his dead brother, Thoreau's mourning took the form of art, while his art took the form of mourning in A Week.10 But the book would carry an additional burden, one he had meditated upon nearly two years earlier. “On the death of a friend, we should consider that the fates through confidence have devolved on us the task of a double living,” he wrote in the Journal on February 28, 1840; “we have henceforth to fulfil the promise of our friend's life also, in our own, to the world” (J 1:114). For Thoreau, that responsibility was made all the greater by the fact that John was by far the more popular and, to some at least, the more promising of the pair. A Week would consequently be informed by two powerful motives. First, it promised to satisfy his own growing hunger for literary recognition. Second, the book, which would be dominated by their shared interest in nature, in the American Indian, in religious reform, and in literature (at the Concord Academy, John had taught the English branches, while Henry handled Greek and Latin), offered an opportunity to fulfill both his own and his brother's promise to the world.
Though its writing was delayed, A Week would thus become what Emerson in “Compensation” called one of those “compensations of calamity,” an unanticipated dividend of a seemingly unpayable loss. “The death of a dear friend, wife, brother, lover, which seemed nothing but privation, somewhat later assumes the aspect of a guide or genius,” Emerson affirmed, alluding to a series of traumatic losses he had experienced; “for it commonly operates revolutions in our way of life, terminates an epoch of infancy or of youth which was waiting to be closed, breaks up a wonted occupation, or a household, or style of living, and allows the formation of new ones more friendly to the growth of character” (CW II:73). The death of Emerson's first wife in 1831 had done precisely that, spurring him to quit the Unitarian ministry, to move to Concord, and to begin his first book. John's death had less immediate and dramatic results, but it played an important role in closing out Thoreau's own youth and in inspiring his first book. But Thoreau, whose projected collection of the English poets had progressed no further than voluminous extracts and whose plan for a book of essays had faded when he was denied permission to build a hut at Flint's Pond, was in 1842 neither artistically nor financially secure enough to embark on a book‐length excursion. During the next two years he therefore bided his time, occasionally jotting passages concerning the trip in the Journal and, perhaps more importantly, writing other works that would have a significant impact on the ultimate form and content of A Week.
In other ways as well 1842 represented a transitional period in Thoreau's career. In late March his prospects received a boost from Margaret Fuller's resignation as editor of the Dial. Emerson, who took charge, soon solicited an article from Thoreau, who had published only three poems in the Dial since the appearance of “Aulus Persius Flaccus” in the first issue. Significantly, however, Emerson did not ask for “The Service,” the only portions of which to appear in Thoreau's lifetime were later revised for A Week, but instead put him onto a radically different topic. “I read a little lately in the ‘Scientific Surveys’ of Massachusetts,” Emerson wrote Fuller on April 10, “and this day I have, as I hope, set Henry Thoreau on the good track of giving an account of them in the Dial, explaining to him the felicity of the subject for him as it admits of the narrative of all his woodcraft boatcraft & fishcraft” (L III:47). His suggestion proved crucial. In “Natural History of Massachusetts,” his finest work to that time, Thoreau sharpened his descriptive prose and took a significant step toward the seasonal patterns of A Week and Walden.
Emerson, however, was disappointed in the piece. Partly as a consequence, his hopes for American literature began to shift from Thoreau to Ellery Channing, who moved to Concord in 1842, and Charles King Newcomb, a young poet and writer at Brook Farm whose allegorical story “Dolan” appeared along with “Natural History of Massachusetts” in the July issue of the Dial. In a letter written on July 19 to Fuller, then vacationing in the White Mountains, Emerson praised Newcomb and continued: “I am sorry that you, & the world after you, do not like my brave Henry any better. I do not like his piece very well, but I admire this perennial threatening attitude, just as we like to go under an overhanging precipice It is wholly his natural relation & no assumption at all. But I have now seen so many threats incarnated which ‘delayed to strike’ & finally never struck at all, that I begin to think our American subsoil must be lead or chalk or whatever represents in geology the phlegmatic” (L III:75).
Feeling that Thoreau had once again fallen short of expectations, Emerson for the first time acknowledged the possibility that his friend might never live up to his youthful promise. But others were more enthusiastic about “Natural History of Massachusetts.” Bronson Alcott proclaimed it “worthy of Isaac Walton himself,” observing that “the woods [torn] of Concord are classic now.”11 Somewhat more surprisingly, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who moved into the Old Manse in July 1842, also liked “Natural History of Massachusetts.” Although he recognized Emerson's tendency to pick up “queer and clever young men … by way of a genius,” as he observed of Ellery Channing, Hawthorne was impressed by Thoreau, who took him boating on Concord River and who, “being in want of money,” sold him the Musketaquid (immediately rechristened the Pond Lily) for seven dollars. “He is a good writer,” Hawthorne noted, “at least he has written one good article, a rambling disquisition on Natural History in the last Dial … so true, minute, and literal in observation, yet giving the spirit as well as the letter of what he sees, even as the lake reflects its wooded banks, showing every leaf, yet giving the wild beauty of the whole scene.” Hawthorne even found praise for Thoreau's “cloudy and dreamy metaphysics,” and he especially liked the poems included in the essay, “passages where his thoughts seem to measure and attune themselves into sponteneous verse, as they rightfully may, since there is real poetry in him.”12
But by September 1, 1842, when Hawthorne jotted down these observations, Thoreau's poetic efforts had begun to wane. His early ardor had been partially cooled by Margaret Fuller's severe criticisms of many of the poems he had submitted to the Dial. After she stepped down as its editor, Emerson saw fit to print one of Thoreau's poems in the July 1841 issue and eight more in the October 1841 Dial. Emerson had evidently come to view these poems as crude but solid filler, for that fall he noted in his journal that the chief virtue of Thoreau's poetry was that “mass here as in other instances is some compensation for superior quality” (JMN VIII:257). Probably because of Emerson's strictures, Thoreau burned the manuscripts of many of his poems (DHT 117). Consequently, whereas in September 1841 he had found himself in “the mid‐sea of verses,” during the late summer and fall of 1842 Thoreau wrote “A Walk to Wachusett,” which Hawthorne apparently encouraged him to submit to the Boston Miscellany of Literature, where it appeared in January 1843.
In retrospect the excursion seems like Thoreau's predestined form, but during 1843 he experimented with a number of formats that would also help shape A Week. Apparently planning “an article, lyceum lecture, or small book on subjects of central importance to him,”13 Thoreau sometime in mid to late 1842 transcribed Journal entries on “Hindoo Scripture” and “Books & style,” topics included in his early lists of potential writing projects. Before dropping the subject he drafted at least portions of an essay on the Laws of Menu, later revised for A Week. But Emerson, who had begun a series of extracts from Eastern scriptures in the July 1842 Dial, apparently found no use for the rather vaporous and abstract commentary, so Thoreau instead made some selections from the Laws of Menu for the January 1843 issue. That issue also contained his translation of Prometheus Bound, which Emerson also asked him to do, but none of his original poetry or prose. In contrast the April 1843 issue, which Thoreau edited, contained three of his poems (the last of them to be printed in the Dial), plus two pieces later inserted in A Week: “Dark Ages,” the brief essay on history drawn from his 1842 transcripts, and his translations of Anacreon. A Week would also receive portions of the lecture “Sir Walter Raleigh,” delivered in February, revised for the Dial, but apparently pigeonholed when Emerson returned to his editorial duties. In fact, Emerson found little to celebrate in any of Thoreau's writings. “Young men like H. T. owe us a new world & they have not acquitted the debt,” he dispiritedly observed in his journal in late March, as Thoreau was preparing to move to Staten Island; “for the most part, such die young, & so dodge the fulfilment” (JMN VIII:375).
But Thoreau and others had high hopes for the Staten Island venture, which marked his most serious effort to become a self‐supporting writer. Emerson, who helped arrange for him to earn his room and board plus one hundred dollars a year as a tutor to William Emerson's son, reported that Thoreau also hoped to earn a little extra money by doing clerical work for William or some other lawyer. A decade later a writer who in 1843 was polishing brass and standing watch aboard the American man‐of‐war United States would imagine just how deadly the life of a scrivener in a New York law office might be. Thoreau, however, viewed such part‐time work as a temporary expedient, “pending the time when he shall procure for himself literary labor from some quarter in New York,” and other members of the Emerson household were “charmed with the project” (L III:158). Hawthorne also felt the change would do him good. Noting that he would miss the companionship of the younger man, whose combination of “wild freedom” and “high and classic cultivation” Hawthorne found so stimulating, he sympathetically observed: “I am glad, on Mr. Thoreau's own account, that he is going away; as he is physically out of health, and, morally and intellectually, seems not to have found exactly the guiding clue; and in all these respects, he may be benefitted by his removal;—also it is one step towards a circumstantial position in the world.”14
Although he made a few contacts, Thoreau found that “circumstantial position” in the literary world elusive. In New York City, which was beginning to eclipse Boston as the center of American publishing, he renewed his acquaintance with Horace Greeley, the New England farm boy who, only six years older than Thoreau, had in the course of the previous decade worked his way up from journeyman printer to editor of his own newspaper, the successful New‐York Daily Tribune. Greeley would later act as an agent for his works, but in 1843 Thoreau peddled his own wares. He thus contacted J. L. O'Sullivan, editor of the Democratic Review, to whom Hawthorne had introduced him when O'Sullivan visited Concord the previous January. Thoreau offered him a review of J. A. Etzler's Fourierist tract The Paradise within Reach of All Men, a review Emerson wanted for the Dial, but O'Sullivan instead asked for “some of those extracts from your Journal, reporting some of your private interviews with nature, with which I have been so much pleased” (C 130). Thoreau, evidently eager not to be typecast, declined.
He had even less success with publishers. “I have tried sundry methods of earning money in the city of late but without success,” he wrote his mother on August 29. “Among others I conversed with the Harpers—to see if they might not find me useful to them—but they say they are making fifty thousand dollars annually, and their motto is to let well alone” (C 135). Emerson, who heard of Thoreau's experiences in “the limbo of the false booksellers” from friends in New York, was sympathetic. “I could heartily wish that this country, which seems all opportunity, did actually offer more distinct and just rewards of labor to that unhappy class of men who have more reason and conscience than strength of back and of arm,” he wrote on September 8; “but the experience of the few cases that I have lately seen looks, I confess, more like crowded England and indigent Germany than like rich and roomy Nature. But the few cases are deceptive; and though Homer should starve in the highway, Homer will know and proclaim that bounteous Nature has bread for all her boys. To‐morrow our arms will be stronger; to‐morrow the wall before which we sat will open of itself and show the new way” (C 136‐37).
Emerson's inspirational tone recalls “The American Scholar.” But the pep talk must have sounded like cant and complacency to Thoreau, who was confronting obstacles familiar to most nineteenth‐century American writers. Indeed, those “few cases” of indigent and starving writers, his own included, were all too illustrative of the harsh conditions on America's Grub Street. “Literature comes to a poor market here,” he replied to Emerson on September 14, “and even the little that I write is more than will sell” (C 139). He reported that O'Sullivan had accepted his revised review of Etzler's book, “Paradise (to be) Regained,” for the Democratic Review, in which “The Landlord,” his experiment in the “familiar essay or sketch so popular in mid‐nineteenth‐century periodicals” (DHT 141), would also appear in 1843. As he told Emerson, however, Thoreau had discovered that most periodicals, “overwhelmed with contributions which cost nothing, and are worth no more,” did not pay for contributions. He had therefore been forced into the desperate and equally unsuccessful expedient of selling subscriptions to the American Agriculturist, founded the year before and published in New York City (C 139). Though he stayed on in New York through the autumn, the wall never opened. Thus, despite his effort to break out of the circumscribed literary world of the Transcendentalists, Thoreau remained dependent on the Dial.
His final submissions to the Dial reflect the range of Thoreau's interests, interests that were to give A Week its eclectic quality. While in New York he responded to Emerson's request for a contribution with a batch of poems and a translation of Seven against Thebes, neither of which Emerson used, plus his second literary excursion, “A Winter Walk,” an essay that revealed his distaste for the city and his yearning for Concord. Ellery Channing “admired the piece loudly and long,” but Emerson, who appreciated its “faithful observation,” objected to its “mannerism,” the trick of calling “a cold place sultry, a solitude public, a wilderness domestic (a favorite word), and in the woods to insult over cities, whilst the woods, again, are dignified by comparing them to cities, armies, etc.” (C 137). Nonetheless, after making “pretty free omissions,” Emerson included “A Winter Walk” in the October 1843 issue of the Dial. Returning home for a brief visit, Thoreau in November delivered the lecture entitled “The Ancient Poets,” which he soon revised as “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.” for the Dial. The essay, later revised again for A Week, first appeared in the January 1844 issue, which also contained his translations of Pindar, sixteen lines of which he later quoted in A Week (W 244). The April 1844 issue contained more Pindar plus his enthusiastic notice of Nathaniel Rogers's Herald of Freedom, a review that he later recast for A Week. There, he would also seek to find a place for portions of his 1844 lecture on the conservative and the reformer, which Thoreau had probably originally hoped to publish in the Dial. But the April issue was the last, so he no longer had a dependable outlet for his diverse writings.
Thoreau's failure to establish himself as a writer by 1844, nearly five years after the establishment of the Dial, must have been made all the more painful by the current successes of his friends and associates. Disappointed in Thoreau, who he had hoped would become “a great poet … for all companies,” Emerson had increasingly turned his attention to Ellery Channing, whose first book, Poems, was published in 1843. Emerson, who had earlier favored Channing by making him the only writer paid for his contributions to the Dial, also uncharacteristically agreed to review the volume for the September issue of the Democratic Review, where his fulsome praise of Channing's Poems, echoed by Thoreau in the Journal, formed an ironic prelude to Thoreau's meager contributions to the periodical later that fall (L III:197‐98n; cf. J 1:459). Ellery “puts all poets & especially all prophets far in the background,” Emerson exclaimed in a letter to Margaret Fuller on December 17, 1843 (L III:230). That day Thoreau returned for good from his abortive literary venture in New York to Concord, where he began work in his father's pencil factory, making tools for other writers. By then Margaret Fuller was also working on the book about her recent trip west, published as Summer on the Lakes in June 1844. Emerson called it “a very good & entertaining book” (L III:255), and Horace Greeley liked it so much that he hired her as his assistant on the Tribune. Before joining the paper, she revised and expanded her Dial article “Great Lawsuit” as Woman in the Nineteenth Century, whose publication in February 1845, combined with her prominent role in the Tribune, made Fuller one of the most celebrated social and literary critics in the country. Meanwhile, in 1844 Emerson was busy working on Essays: Second Series, published at the end of October, which proved to be his best‐received volume to date. To Thoreau, the message must have seemed clear: genuine literary recognition depended on books.
However inauspicious they seemed at the time, his circumstances in 1844 set the stage for A Week. Although he had failed to become Emerson's long‐awaited Transcendental bard, he had become a prose writer of considerable promise.15 Moreover, like John's death in 1842, a loss that inspired the book, Thoreau's literary failures and disappointments during 1843 and 1844 helped spark a revolution in his life and writings, determining him to grasp the first opportunity to begin A Week. Thus, after a walking tour of the Berkshires and Catskills with Ellery Channing, Thoreau in August declined his friend Isaac Hecker's invitation to undertake a similar tour of Europe, observing, “I cannot so decidedly postpone exploring the Farther Indies, which are to be reached you know by other routs and other methods of travel” (C 156). The opportunity to embark on both an inward and a literary exploration presented itself when Emerson purchased Wyman Field on the shore of Walden Pond in September. The purchase marked a crucial turning point in Thoreau's life and writings. Three years earlier he had been denied permission to build a hut at Flint's Pond, where he had hoped to write a book of essays, including “Merrimack & Musketaquid”; he now received Emerson's blessing to build at Walden Pond, where Thoreau would finally gain the solitude and independence he needed to write A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers.
In anticipation of his move to Walden Pond, he gathered material for A Week, a process informed by his memories of John Thoreau. On the first page of the Long Book he inscribed its opening epigraph, concluding: “Be thou my muse, my Brother” (J 2:3, W 3). By invoking his brother, Thoreau reaffirmed their joint aspiration and endeavor: as John inspired the writing of the book, so its completion might fulfill the early promise both young men had displayed. Moreover, the initial transcripts in the Long Book are divided between descriptions of the voyage plus other passages on sailing from the early Journal and numerous entries on friendship, topic of the longest digression in the first draft and the published version of A Week. The theme of fellowship was further developed in various incidents he jotted down in the Long Book, from their friendly meetings with lockmen and boatmen to Thoreau's encounter with Rice, an innkeeper he had met during his trip to the Berkshires and Catskills in 1844. As he sifted through the Journal of 1837‐44, Thoreau also revised and recopied material that revealed the brothers' mutual love of nature and literature as well as their shared fascination with the American Indian, including passages on Indian relics, quotations from and estimates of various writers, examples of Thoreau's own poetry, and entries on flowers and birds, natural phenomena that he closely associated with his lost brother. He then wrote a lecture on the fish of Concord River, drafted in the Long Book and delivered at the Concord Lyceum March 25, 1845. With his preparations nearly complete, he gathered a few more scattered entries from the Journal, adding the exquisite description of water lilies used in “Saturday.” Finally, just before numbering each passage in the Long Book according to its designated chapter in the first draft, he wrote the final paragraph of A Week, with its resonant depiction of the brothers' return to Concord.
That triumphant note of fulfillment and expectancy must have echoed Thoreau's feelings as he completed preparations for his first book and began preparations for his new life at Walden Pond. Some of his friends in Concord, however, were dubious about both ventures. “These things go together,” Emerson grumpily noted in his journal in 1845. “Cultivated people cannot live in a shanty, nor sleep at night as the poor do in a bag” (JMN IX:195‐96). At the other end of town Hawthorne, who had earlier been so supportive, had now begun to doubt that Thoreau would ever fulfill his youthful promise. Planning a new series of books for Wiley and Putnam, a New York publisher, Evert Duyckinck in the summer of 1845 asked Hawthorne to contribute a volume and solicited the names of other potential contributors to the American Library. Since Duyckinck, who was born the same year as Thoreau, was especially interested in new talent, “young men with fresh material, with truly American styles,”16 Thoreau might have seemed tailor‐made for the series. Indeed, in “The Old Manse,” the prefatory essay to his own contribution to the series the American Library, Mosses from an Old Manse (1846), Hawthorne would soon describe Concord and its river in ways that testified to his fruitful association with Thoreau. Yet Hawthorne was hardly encouraging. “As for Thoreau, there is one chance in a thousand that he might write a most excellent and readable book; but I should be sorry to take the responsibility, either towards you or him, of stirring him up to write anything,” he wrote on July 1, 1845. “The only way, however, in which he could ever approach the popular mind, would be by writing a book of simple observation of nature, somewhat in the vein of White's History of Selborne” (DHT 243‐44), a reference to Gilbert White's The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1793), a work almost exclusively concerned with the natural phenomena, especially the animals and birds, of a secluded region of England, and one that consequently made few references to its villagers and none to cultural, social, or political developments in the world around it. Since Duyckinck, a city man deeply involved in contemporary affairs, already distrusted the Transcendentalists and strongly opposed the cult of the rural, Hawthorne's comments were hardly likely to fire the editor with zeal to sign up Thoreau for the American Library.
Ironically, Thoreau probably soon began the first draft of A Week, which promised to be far more than “a book of simple observation of nature.” But he had not yet overcome the problems associated with writing an extended narrative. He gathered material and wrote the first draft in 1844‐45, roughly half‐way between the essay conceived in 1840 and the book published in 1849. Its intermediate position is revealed by the length of the first draft, which—despite its ambitious design and numerous digressions—is closer to that of an extended essay than to that of the published version. Although he established the rhythm of A Week, with its alternating flow of action and meditation, advance and withdrawal, he had failed to achieve a completely coherent narrative structure. For example, in addition to the untitled introduction, later called “Concord River,” the first draft contained eight chapters, one for each day the brothers had spent upon the rivers, including both Thursday, September 5, and Thursday, September 12, indicating that Thoreau had not yet discerned the symbolic and structural advantages of playing upon the Creation in his own account of the brothers' recreation. Moreover, his depiction of the voyage was frequently sketchy, while his introduction of digressions was sometimes rather awkward and forced. Finally, the first draft merely hinted at the concerns, notably reform, Indian‐white relations, and literary history, that would account for the rapid growth of A Week during the following years.
Some of those concerns are more clearly evident in Thoreau's other writings during 1845. After he finished gathering materials for the first draft, he wrote “Wendell Phillips before Concord Lyceum,” drafted in the Long Book and swiftly published in Garrison's Liberator on March 28. Thoreau's growing involvement in the debates over slavery and the annexation of Texas had obviously softened his attitude toward reformers, “those earnest reprovers of the age,” as he called them elsewhere in the Long Book (J 2:117). But he sought to put controversy behind him when he moved to Walden Pond, where Thoreau devoted himself to aesthetic pursuits. He immediately began jotting down Journal passages destined for Walden, which he seems to have planned from the beginning of his sojourn there, and writing A Week. When he completed the first draft, probably in the fall of 1845, he began the lecture on Thomas Carlyle, a topic that indicated his persistent interest in writers and writing. After he delivered the lecture before the Concord Lyceum on February 4, 1846, he began to revise and expand A Week.
Though relatively brief, the additions to the first draft offer revealing glimpses of Thoreau's interests and methods of composition. Having included two leaves from the 1842 essay on Manu in the first draft, he began to quarry other unpublished writings. To a brief digression on music in “Monday” he added passages from his 1840 essay on bravery, “The Service.” Margaret Fuller had criticized its crude mosaic method, so it is ironic that Thoreau sought to use bits and pieces of “The Service” in the far more ambitious mosaic of A Week. But by 1846 he had learned to muffle his tools. Indeed, since heroism is a strong theme in A Week, his depiction of the brothers' exuberant response to a drummer near Nashua seems far more appropriate here than in “The Service,” where Thoreau failed to locate that response in specific circumstances. Heroism had also been an important theme in “Sir Walter Raleigh,” from which he copied out two pages of extracts for addition to the first draft of A Week. Although he later skimmed the essay for the discussion of literary style in “Monday,” at first Thoreau adopted only a few passages about Ralegh's History of the World. “For the most part an author only writes history, treating it as a dead subject,” he observed, “but Raleigh tells it like a fresh story” (MH 19). Thoreau's own effort to vivify history is illustrated by another addition to the first draft, a two‐page account of an Indian ambuscade of a group of soldiers near Thornton's Ferry, germ of a longer more extended re‐creation of that incident in A Week.
By the summer of 1846 he was ready to read portions of the manuscript to friends. In a diary entry headed Thoreau's Book, Alcott on Sunday, July 12, reported: “Read some parables to the children at Emersons. Dined there. And after much conversation and hearing some of his late verses, we walked to Thoreaus who read some passages upon his ‘Concord and Merrimac Rivers’ a pastoral Book now ready for the Press.”17 A few days after that round of Transcendental walks, talks, and readings, Emerson began excitedly to spread the news. “In a short time, if Wiley & Putnam smile, you shall have Henry Thoreau's ‘Excursion on Concord & Merrimack rivers,’ a seven days' voyage in as many chapters, pastoral as Isaak Walton, spicy as flagroot, broad & deep as Menu,” Emerson on July 16 wrote Charles King Newcomb, who had asked advice about a trip to the White Mountains. “He read me some of it under an oak on the river bank the other afternoon, and invigorated me” (L III:338).
The immediate effect of Thoreau's work on A Week, then called an “Excursion,” was thus to rekindle Emerson's flagging enthusiasm. Sitting on the bank of the stream and listening to the opening chapters, with their depiction of the flora and fauna of the rivers, Emerson must have thought that Thoreau had finally hit upon his proper metier. Here at last, Emerson's imagery suggests, was a subject that brought into play Thoreau's intimate knowledge of nature, a knowledge given an added dimension by the serene philosophizing both men valued in the Laws of Menu and other Eastern scriptures. In fact, the letter hearkens all the way back to Emerson's 1839 Journal, where he applauded his “wise young neighbors” for their mode of travel to the White Mountains. Congratulating Newcomb in advance on “the good week” before him, Emerson offered conventional advice about railroad and stage routes, but he clearly felt that Thoreau's excursion would offer a fresh and far more original approach to the White Mountains.
Emerson, who was arranging for the publication of a number of books in 1846, pressed for the swift publication of the “Excursion,” but despite Thoreau's assurances the book was evidently far from ready for submission. Earlier that year Emerson had struck a bargain with James Munroe and Company of Boston for the publication of his Poems and for a smaller edition of the second series of Ellery Channing's poems, for both of which Emerson bore the cost of printing. When he wrote Newcomb in July, Emerson was negotiating for the reprint of some of Carlyle's works by Wiley and Putnam, the publisher of the American Library, which he hoped would soon include Thoreau's book. Thoreau, however, was then revising his Carlyle lecture, which he sent off to Horace Greeley in August. Greeley's gloomy remarks about “writing to sell,” the one thing “calculated to make a scoundrel of an honest man” (C 170), probably had little effect on Thoreau, who obviously hoped the obstacles confronting articles like “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” would be overcome by his version of a travel book, a far more popular format. But unless he had begun a second draft of his book, which is possible but unlikely, Thoreau read to Emerson from the untidy and heavily revised first draft, from which he would have to prepare fair copy before submission to a publisher. Moreover, Thoreau's entries in the Journal during the summer of 1846 indicate that he planned substantial additions before preparing a final copy.
The nature of those additions and the direction of A Week were profoundly influenced by his arrest that summer. About the time he read portions of the manuscript to Emerson and Alcott in July, Thoreau was drafting in the Journal extended passages apparently intended for the digression on Hindu scripture in “Monday.” He also ironically suggested that a comparison of “the God of New Englanders with the god of the Greeks” would be useful (J 2:260), but in general his tone was contemplative rather than combative. In sharp contrast, alluding to his arrest on July 23 or 24, he savagely denounced “dead institutions”—the church and the state (J 2:262). Emerson, who described the state as “a poor beast who means the best: it means friendly,” disapproved of Thoreau's stand and its consequences. “Don't run amuck against the world,” Emerson pleaded (I did not “run ‘amok’ against society,” Thoreau replied in Walden; “I preferred that society should run ‘amok’ against me, it being the desperate party” [Wa 171]). Contrasting Thoreau to the abolitionists, “hot headed partialists,” Emerson desperately exhorted his young friend, “Reserve yourself for your own work” (JMN IX: 446). If he had then realized the full impact of the arrest and its aftermath on Thoreau's work, especially on the invigorating book Emerson had praised so highly a week earlier, he no doubt would have been even more upset and depressed. In the first draft of A Week Thoreau had extolled the simplicity of the Greek poetry and the elevation of Hindu scripture, literary and spiritual analogues to the natural world celebrated in A Week. He now began to underscore the conflict between Christianity, later a target of his harsh critique in “Sunday,” and the pagan religions celebrated in A Week, a dichotomy that was to prove far more controversial than his assault on the state in “Monday,” which the 1846 Journal entry on “dead institutions” also anticipated.
Thoreau's trip to Maine at the end of the summer of 1846 had a more subtle impact on A Week. In the first draft he had devoted only three brief paragraphs to the week he and John had spent in the White Mountains. But, perhaps in anticipation of his ascent of Mount Katahdin, Thoreau in late August drafted an account of the 1839 walking tour through the White Mountains to link the two “Thursday” chapters in the first draft of A Week. After his trip to Maine, which began on August 31, the same day he and John had begun their journey seven years earlier, mountains were again much in Thoreau's thoughts. During the fall of 1846 he drafted in the Journal a detailed account of his experiences in Maine, culminating in the ascent of Katahdin, that home of “Chaos and Old Night” (MW 70), an incident that also influenced his treatment of various ascents in A Week. He decided to omit the reminiscences of the walking tour through the White Mountains, a section that might have tended to domesticate Agiocochook, or Mount Washington, which stands remote and mysterious in “Thursday.” But he revised portions of “A Walk to Wachusett” for inclusion in “Monday” and greatly expanded the account of his ascent of Saddleback Mountain in “Tuesday,” which he had only briefly described in the first draft. These twin ascents thus anticipate the final climb to “the summit of agiocochook” (W 314), tallest of the peaks that came to just above the slowly formed alluvial plain of A Week.
As he worked on A Week and Walden during the winter of 1846‐47, Thoreau received conflicting advice about the direction his literary career should take. On February 5 Horace Greeley informed him of the final arrangements to print “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” and invited him to follow it up with similar articles on Emerson, Hawthorne, and others. Probably thinking of Margaret Fuller's Papers on Literature and Art, a collection of her Tribune articles published in the American Library in 1846, Greeley assured Thoreau: “In a year or two, if you take care not to write faster than you think, you will have the material of a volume worth publishing, and then we will see what can be done. There is a text somewhere in St. Paul … which says ‘Look not back to the things which are behind, but rather to these which are before,’ & c.” (C 174). Thoreau, no doubt eager to catch up with Emerson and Channing, whose volumes of poetry had recently appeared, as well as with his old foe Margaret Fuller, was indeed looking ahead, but not to a collection of literary profiles. By then he had completed part of the first version of Walden, which he read as “A History of Myself” before the Concord Lyceum on February 10. He was also forging ahead with the second draft of A Week.
In contrast to Greeley, Emerson considered these books, and especially A Week, as far more crucial to Thoreau's literary career than works like “Thomas Carlyle and His Works.” Announcing the publication of that article in Graham's Magazine, Emerson on February 27 wrote Carlyle, “You are yet to read a good American book made by this Thoreau.”18 In a letter to Margaret Fuller written the following day, he told her that Thoreau's “Excursion” would “soon be ready” and continued: “Admirable, though Ellery rejects it altogether. Mrs. Ripley & other members of the opposition came down the other night to hear Henry's Account of his housekeeping at Walden Pond, which he read as a lecture, and were charmed with the witty wisdom which ran through it all” (L III:377‐78). For different reasons from those of communitarians like the Ripleys and others from the Fourierist community at Brook Farm, Emerson had never really approved of Thoreau's “housekeeping,” but he, too, was apparently won over by the lecture, germ of “Economy” in Walden. He was, however, far more interested in A Week. Thus, at the end of a letter written on March 12 to Evert Duyckinck of Wiley and Putnam, to whom he inquired about printing the book, Emerson noted that Thoreau had published the article on Carlyle and a number of pieces in the Dial, “but he has done nothing half so good as his new book” (L III:384).
The letter to Duyckinck indicates that both A Week and Emerson's view of it had changed significantly since Thoreau had first read portions of it to him in 1846. Describing it as “a book of extraordinary merit,” Emerson observed, “It purports to be the account of ‘An Excursion on the Concord & Merrimack Rivers,’ which he made some time ago in company with his brother, in a boat built by themselves.” In contrast to his letter to Newcomb in July 1846, when Emerson described that excursion as “a seven days' voyage in as many chapters,” to Duyckinck he indicated that it purported to be such an excursion. Reading the manuscript, which Emerson estimated to be as long as Dickens's Pictures of Italy, that is, about seventy thousand words or nearly twice its first‐draft length, had clearly revealed it to be very different from the travel narrative Emerson had earlier believed Thoreau was writing. In 1846 he described the book as a combination of Isaak Walton and Manu; in 1847 he omitted the reference to Manu, which would hardly have been a selling point to Duyckinck, a staunch Episcopalian who had little patience with the Transcendentalists' embrace of the East. Moreover, although he once again invoked Walton (Thoreau rarely escaped that comparison), Emerson now described a book that sounded as if it had been written by a Walton who had at various times forsaken his angling equipment, put on spectacles, and joined Sir Thomas Browne in the library: “This book has many merits. It will be as attractive to lovers of nature, in every sense, that is, to naturalists, and to poets, as Isaak Walton. It will be attractive to scholars for its excellent literature, & to all thoughtful persons for its originality & profoundness. The narrative of the little voyage, though faithful, is a very slender thread for such big beads & ingots as are strung on it. It is really a book of the results of the studies of years” (L III:384).
Only fragments of the second draft have survived, so it is impossible to say with any certainty exactly what those “studies of years” then included. But Bronson Alcott, to whom Thoreau read additional portions of the manuscript on March 13, offers further hints about the nature and contents of the book early in 1847.19 Emphasizing the figurative meaning of Thoreau's title, Alcott observed, “The symbol [of the rivers] is well chosen, and serves him admirably. These streams flowing as gracefully through the continents and defining so the banks of his Nature, while his genius glides so meditatively and descriptively along its currents, with senses the freshest and most healthful, and eye direct on nature the while.” Like Emerson, he stressed the book's value to naturalists, but Alcott also recognized Thoreau's characteristic fusion of natural fact, pastoral imagery, and classical allusion: “It is Virgil, and Gilbert White of Selbourne, and Izaak Walton, and Yankee settler all, singing his prose poems with remembrances of his readings and experiences in the woods and road‐paths.” At the same time, Alcott insisted that it was a “purely American” book, “fragrant with the lives of New England woods and streams, and could have been written nowhere else.”
Alcott was, however, sensitive to the elegiac overtones of Thoreau's depiction of New England. The book explores “the remoter haunts of the simplest‐mannered of our beasts and birds, the fishes, and the natural mankind surviving still in our farm houses, and on the hillsides and plains, with their rustic speech, manners, and arts.” But these loving depictions of primitive men and of primeval nature did not blur the author's “perception of the ill turns she is put to here in New England, and by the simplest too, and least vitiated of the population.” Indeed, in Thoreau “the rocks, and animals, and woods, and the green earth” had at last found an author “to whom they could declare their grief and shame at the bereavement of their red brethren, and the wrongs these have endured from their oppressors the whites.” Thoreau had clearly begun to establish the link between the exploitation of nature and the destruction of the Indians, one of the most significant changes between the first and second drafts of A Week. By the time he read portions of the manuscript to Alcott on March 16, however, Thoreau had not yet fully developed that theme, for sometime after April 8 he began to draft the Hannah Duston story for “Thursday,” where it served as a brilliant conclusion to the story of Indian‐white relations in A Week.
Alcott's commentary suggests that Thoreau had also begun to incorporate a good deal of the material that was to give the final version its distinctly literary flavor. “It has the merit, moreover, that, somehow, despite all presumption to the contrary, the sod, and sap, and fibre, and flavor of New England have found at last, a clear relation to the literature of other and classic lands,” he explained, “and we drink off here the significance also of the literature the oldest and freshest; Egypt, India, Greece, England, from the poet's hands, as he scoops the waters for us from the rivers.” Through quotations, extracts, and, possibly, translations like those of Anacreon in “Tuesday,” Thoreau had clearly begun to mingle the waters of the Concord and Merrimack with the deepest sources of his own inspiration. As in the first draft of Walden, he evidently also inserted a large number of his early verses in the second draft of A Week. “Poems are here, also, vigorous and rugged enough to defy Quarles or Donne, and as sound and seasonable as theirs,” Alcott remarked. Like the translations of Anacreon, many of these poems had no doubt first appeared in the Dial, which Thoreau quarried for additional material. “Criticisms, too, we have of the like radical quality and toughness,” he continued: “Homer, Hesiod, Eschylus, and Chaucer, have got some one to look a little into their merits now and modernize and make them indiginous and home‐felt once in Concord and abroad aside[?] the translator's genius.” Thoreau had praised Aeschylus in the early Journal (J 1:82 ff.), and he may have used portions of either his translation of Prometheus Bound from the Dial or his unpublished translation of Seven against Thebes in the second draft of A Week, though none of this material appears in the published version, which contains no references to the Greek dramatist and only two lines from Hesiod's Works and Days (W 63). But Alcott's reference indicates that Thoreau had already incorporated “Homer. Ossian. Chaucer.” from the Dial in “Sunday” (Homer) and “Friday” (Ossian and Chaucer), thus providing a frame for a growing number of digressions on writers and writing in A Week.
Alcott vigorously defended what was to become the most controversial digression in A Week, an attack on the Christian church that Thoreau had at least begun to mount by early 1847. “And if Jerusalem is wakened by an Arab's warble here,” he asserted, “it seems but a trial of spies, and we delight the rather in the audacity, feeling that the Holy City even, has no good right to detain, nor aught to bestow that can quicken the healthful morning spirits of our traveller; and are all the more disposed to hope, he will provoke alike Hebrew, pagan, and Christian too, still lingering on, to overtake him if they can, as he goes blest and bright over the Magian mountains in the distance.” That dense and allusive remark resists complete penetration, but Alcott's general meaning seems clear. Others might view the critique of the church in “Sunday,” that “Arab's warble,” as simply profane and blasphemous, a threatening prelude to an assault on the Holy City itself. But Alcott, whose love of the Pilgrim's Progress had spurred Thoreau's interest in the book, saw the critique in the context of a larger spiritual quest in A Week, a quest that prompted Thoreau to explore the various streams of man's spiritual heritage as the brothers charted the course of the Concord and the Merrimack. Indeed, as Alcott shrewdly perceived, Thoreau's goal was audaciously to provoke his readers to undertake a spiritual journey similar to that figured by the various journeys in A Week, with its ascents of Wachusett, Saddleback, Agiocochook, and other “mountains in the distance.” Thus, among his friends in Concord, Thoreau's strategy in A Week was well understood, but it is doubtful that Evert Duyckinck proved to be as sympathetic and understanding.
Although Emerson told Duyckinck on March 12 that the manuscript was “quite ready,” Thoreau continued to revise and expand A Week during the spring and summer of 1847. Alcott on March 16 simply noted that his friend planned to print the book “some day,” perhaps indicating that Thoreau had not authorized Emerson to approach Duyckinck, who announced in the Literary World: “Henry D. Thoreau, Esq., whose elaborate paper on Carlyle, now publishing in Graham's Magazine, is attracting considerable attention, has now completed a new work of which reports speak highly. It will probably be soon given to the public.”20 Thoreau, however, did not send the manuscript to Duyckinck until May 28. “I should not have delayed sending you my manuscript so long,” he explained, “if I had not known that delay would be no inconvenience to you, and advantage to the sender” (C 181). If his other revisions and additions compared in style and force to the Hannah Duston story, written during the two and a half months between Emerson's inquiry and Thoreau's submission, the delay had indeed been advantageous. But in other ways it was costly, since by May, Duyckinck, whose aggressive literary nationalism disturbed his employers, had been dismissed as editor of the Literary World and had lost influence with Wiley and Putnam, the major backers of that journal and the publishers of the American Library.21
As he waited impatiently for Duyckinck's answer, Thoreau worked on A Week and Walden. On June 14 he again wrote Duyckinck, telling him that he would wait two weeks for an answer, and asking him to return the manuscript for “corrections” (C 173). He had possibly also decided to make further additions and to shift some material from the manuscript of A Week to the first version of Walden, which he completed that summer. In any case, he resubmitted the manuscript of A Week to Duyckinck on July 3. Thoreau must have received a negative answer between July 27, when he sent an inquiry to Duyckinck (C 184), and August 6, when Emerson approached his longtime friend William Henry Furness about the possibility of finding a publisher for A Week in Philadelphia:
I write because Henry D. Thoreau has a book to print. Henry D. Thoreau is a great man in Concord, a man of original genius & character, who knows Greek, & knows Indian also,—not the language quite as well as John Eliot—but the history monuments & genius of the Sachems, being a pretty good Sachem himself, master of all woodcraft, & an intimate associate of the birds, beasts, & fishes, of this region. I could tell you many a good story of his forest life.—He has written what he calls “A week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers,” which is an account of an excursion made by himself & his brother (in a boat which he built) some time ago, from Concord, Mass., down the Concord river & up the Merrimack, to Concord, N. H.—I think it a book of wonderful merit, which is to go far & last long. It will remind you of Izaak Walton, and, if it have not all his sweetness, it is rich, as he is not, in profound thought.—Thoreau sent the manuscript lately to Duyckinck … who examined it, & “gave a favorable opinion of it to W. & P.” They have however declined to publish it.
(RLF 60‐61)
This description of the book differs markedly from that contained in Emerson's letter to Duyckinck five months earlier. To Duyckinck, Emerson had noted that it “purports” to be an account of an excursion but that the narrative of the voyage was “a very slender thread for such big beads & ingots as are strung on it.” Indeed, Thoreau possibly altered the title from “An Excursion” to “A Week” to de‐emphasize the travel motif. But to Furness, Emerson characterized it as primarily a travel book, once again extolling the originality and self‐sufficiency of the brothers' voyage. Moreover, whereas he alluded to Thoreau's knowledge of Greek—probably one of those “studies of years” he had cited in the letter to Duyckinck—Emerson gave far greater prominence to his friend's knowledge of “the history monuments & genius” of the Indians, an element of A Week that Thoreau had reinforced as he revised and expanded it during the spring and summer of 1847. But for Emerson, Thoreau remained most notable as a “master of all woodcraft, & an intimate associate of the birds, beasts, & fishes,” a characterization that recalls Emerson's reason for asking Thoreau in 1842 to review the scientific surveys, a subject that had also admitted of “the narrative of all his woodcraft boatcraft & fishcraft” (L II:47). “Natural History of Massachusetts” had disappointed Emerson, probably for many of the same reasons he would finally be disappointed by A Week. In fact, although he no doubt tailored his descriptions of Thoreau's book to suit different auditors, one strongly suspects that Emerson would have liked A Week better if it had turned out to be more like the relatively simple narrative he described to Furness and less like the compound volume he had described to Duyckinck.
Emerson's letter to Furness also offers interesting sidelights about Thoreau's hopes and plans for the publication of A Week. Near the end of the letter he observed, “I have promised Thoreau that I would inquire a little in N. Y. & Philadelphia before we begin to set our own types” (RLF 61). Three years earlier, in April 1844, when Emerson was seeking a publisher for Fuller's Summer on the Lakes, he had written her that “Henry Thoreau has been showing me triumphantly how much cheaper & every way wiser it would be to publish the book ourselves paying the booksellers only a simple commission for vending it & conducting personally the correspondence with distant booksellers” (L III:250). Given his experience in manufacturing and marketing pencils, Thoreau may also have contemplated such an entrepreneurial method of publishing his own book, but Emerson was probably bluffing. He told Furness that A Week would be about as long as his own Essays, an estimate Thoreau also gave in a letter to a Boston publisher on August 28 (C 185). If that estimate is accurate, either the earlier estimate was low or the second draft had expanded from roughly seventy thousand to nearly ninety thousand words since Emerson had approached Duyckinck five months earlier, indicating just how rigorously Thoreau had worked over the manuscript during the spring and summer of 1847. Finally, Emerson noted that Thoreau, who was willing to accept “any reasonable terms,” was “mainly bent on having it printed in a cheap format for a large circulation” (RLF 61). Thus Thoreau, who in “Thomas Carlyle and His Works” had faulted both the English writer and Emerson for directing themselves to a narrow audience of intellectuals, was himself clearly determined to speak to what he had there described as “the Man of the Age, come to be called working‐man” (EEM 251).
A Week, however, was not destined to be printed in any format in 1847. In response to Emerson's letter Furness replied that he would contact publishers but that he was “doubtful of success” (RLF 63). Emerson wrote Margaret Fuller on August 29 that Thoreau was “on the point of concluding the contract” for A Week (L III:413), but the manuscript was still making the rounds of publishers when Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6 to move in with the Emersons. On September 19 Furness wrote that he had talked to a friend in Philadelphia about Thoreau's book, but that the publisher was not interested. “He is run down, he says, with applications to print” (RLF 66). Ten days later William Emerson, who also acted on Thoreau's behalf, wrote that he was waiting for an answer from Harpers, but apparently none came before Emerson sailed for England on October 5. Finally, on November 14, Thoreau wrote him: “I suppose you will like to hear of my book, though I have nothing worth writing about it. Indeed, for the last month or two I have forgotten it, but shall certainly remember it again. Wiley & Putnam, Munroe, the Harpers, and Crosby & Nichols have all declined printing it with the least risk to themselves; but Wiley & Putnam will print it in their series, and any of them, anywhere, at my risk. If I liked the book well enough, I should not delay; but for the present I am indifferent. I believe this is, after all, the course you advised,—to let it lie” (C 191).
Thoreau's indifference may have been defensive, for Emerson strongly opposed any delay. “I am not of opinion that your book should be delayed a month,” he responded. “I should print it at once, nor do I think that you would incur any risk in doing so that you cannot well afford. It is very certain to have readers & debtors here as well as there” (C 195). Thoreau obviously did not wish to pursue the subject, for in a chatty reply to Emerson's letter he neither responded to the advice nor mentioned A Week (C 199‐201). But on December 27, in a letter to James Munroe and Company concerning some other matters Emerson asked him to attend to, he firmly stated, “I may as well inform you that I do not intend to print my book anywhere immediately” (C 198).
The failure to find a publisher for A Week in 1847 influenced both his writings and his views of writing as a trade. Thoreau was not exaggerating when he told Emerson that he had not looked at A Week for “a month or two,” since during the fall and winter of 1847 he wrote two lectures, “Ktaadn” and “The Relation of the Individual to the State,” both delivered before the Concord Lyceum early in 1848. In a letter to James Elliot Cabot, who had inquired about Emerson's itinerary in England and, apparently, about A Week. Thoreau replied on March 8, “My book, fortunately, did not find a publisher ready to undertake it, and you can imagine the effect of delay on an author's estimate of his own work.” But, noting that he liked the book “well enough to mend it” after he had “dispatched” his lectures, written “mainly for my own pleasure and advantage,” he continued: “I esteem it a rare happiness to be able to write anything, but there (if I ever get there) my concern for it is apt to end. Time & Co. are, after all, the only quite honest and trustworthy publishers that we know” (C 210).
Despite his emerging view of writing as an end in itself, Thoreau still needed money, and he continued to work toward the more immediate publication of A Week. In the letter to Cabot, coeditor of the Massachusetts Quarterly Review, founded in 1847 as the successor to the Dial, he inquired, “Is your journal able to pay anything, provided it likes an article well enough?” Apparently the answer was no, for at the end of March he sent a revised version of “Ktaadn” to Horace Greeley, who paid him ＄25. Thoreau then turned to A Week. He initially did not plan to make major revisions, however, for on April 16 Alcott reported that “Thoreau has a Book nearly off his hands.”22 But on May 19, declining a request for short articles that Greeley might sell “readily and advantageously” (C 223), Thoreau explained, “My book is swelling again under my hands” (C 225).
A Week was indeed “swelling” during the early months of 1848. As early as January 12 Thoreau told Emerson that, in addition to “Ktaadn,” he had written “what will do for a lecture on Friendship” (C 204), presumably yet another and even longer version of the extended digression in the first and second drafts of A Week. Those earlier versions contained numerous Journal entries from the late 1830s and early 1840s, when his friendship with Emerson had been flourishing. That the two men remained close is revealed by their letters during Emerson's tour of England during 1847‐48, in one of which Thoreau sent along “The good how can we trust?,” his recent verses “on that universal theme—your's as well as mine, & several other people's,” a poem that soon found its way into the essay on friendship in A Week (C 200, W 281). But other additions in the 1848 version of the essay, which Alcott pronounced “superior to anything” he had heard, bear witness to a certain awkwardness between Thoreau and Emerson.23 Apparently alluding to Emerson's departure for Europe a few months earlier, for example, Thoreau wrote: “Suppose you go to bid farewell to your Friend who is setting out on a journey. … Have you any last words? Alas, it is only the word of words, which you have so long sought and found not; you have not a first word yet” (W 273).
Thoreau, however, soon received a reminder of Emerson's early help and encouragement. In March 1848 H. G. O. Blake, a teacher from Worchester, reread “Aulus Persius Flaccus” in the 1840 Dial and wrote that he found in it “pure depth and solidity of thought” (C 214n). Thoreau replied that he had not read the article in years and “had to look at that page again, to learn what was the tenor of my thoughts then” (C 214). Pleased with the early effort and possibly also remembering Emerson's enthusiasm about it, he later inserted a corrected version of “Aulus Persius Flaccus” in “Thursday,” from which he omitted another Dial article, “Herald of Freedom.”
The omission of the tribute to Nathaniel Rogers and other material from “Thursday” illuminates significant shifts in emphasis as Thoreau revised A Week. His initial determination to avoid polemics had been shaken by his arrest in 1846, after which he began to use A Week to express a wide variety of social, political, and religious concerns. Some of this material, including extracts from the unpublished lecture on the conservative and the reformer and brief satires of clothing and fashion, was shifted to the first version of Walden, but other digressions in A Week, notably the extended critique of the Christian church in “Sunday” and the attack on the state in “Monday,” testified to his growing militancy. His hostility to church and state was intensified by the ignoble conclusion of the Mexican War in the summer of 1847, when he was probably further embittered by his failure to find a publisher for A Week. As he read A Collection from the Newspaper Writings of Nathaniel Rogers, published that summer, Thoreau no doubt responded strongly to the abolitionist's comments on slavery, the military, and the bankruptcy of American institutions, issues he dealt with in the 1848 lecture “The Relation of the Individual to the State.” Probably in late 1847 or early 1848 he also revised “Herald of Freedom” for insertion in “Thursday,” where it joined a revised version of the unpublished 1843 essay “Conversation,” his somewhat labored effort at social satire, and his account of the desperate journey undertaken by the “poor wretch” from New York, a dark parable informed by Thoreau's own futile efforts to find work in New York City during 1843. Together, these sections underscored the moral, social, and economic failures of New England, also the theme of “Economy” in Walden. By omitting these sections from “Thursday” in 1848, Thoreau in A Week as in Walden thus shifted attention from the failures of New England life, depicted in the opening chapters, to the promise of life in New England, a promise that underlies his celebration of the autumnal landscape in “Friday” and his ecstatic vision of “Spring,” then the concluding section of Walden.
To fill the gaps left by the late omissions from “Thursday,” Thoreau introduced additional material on colonial history and European literature, his other central concerns as he revised and expanded A Week during 1847 and 1848. In place of “Herald of Freedom,” tribute to the editor of a newspaper in Concord, New Hampshire, Thoreau in 1848 added a passage on the early settlement of that town from Benjamin L. Mirick's History of Haverhill, Massachusetts, which he had also consulted when drafting the Hannah Duston story in 1847. But, in contrast to her story, final scene in a tragic drama of destruction in A Week, the passage on the settlement of Concord occasioned an optimistic meditation on the possibility of living a true frontier life despite the destruction of Indians and the wilderness. “The frontiers are not east or west, north or south, but wherever a man fronts a fact,” Thoreau affirmed (W 304), thus forging an additional link between the preliminary voyage of discovery in A Week and his efforts to apply those lessons in Walden, the record of his various efforts to “stand right fronting & face to face to a fact” (S 157, Wa 98).
Other additions to “Thursday” also played a role in a narrative of decline, fall, and renewal. The article “Aulus Persius Flaccus” helped chart the decline in European literature from Homer in “Sunday” to Anacreon in “Tuesday” through the works of the Roman satirist, representative of the decay of the Greco‐Roman tradition. To “Thursday” Thoreau also added a critique of Goethe, at least partly in response to Emerson's tribute to the German master in “Representative Men,” a series of lectures already well known in England and the United States. As Hannah Duston represented the Fall of Man in history, so Goethe, another imitator, represented the Fall of Man in literature, the final loss of the originality and spontaneity of the early Greeks. But as the destruction of the wilderness by civilization might be reversed by leading a true frontier life, so the collapse of European literature into artificiality might be overcome by establishing a native American tradition, a program that informs Thoreau's various digressions on writers and writing in A Week.
He made similar adjustments in the treatment of another crucial issue. His elegiac concerns, which had determined Thoreau to write A Week, provided a central unifying thread for its various strands, from his digressions on reform, defined as a matter of life and death, to his explorations of New England's dark colonial past, scene of the destruction of the Indians and their world, to his meditations on writers and literary immortality. Other passages, however, seemed incongruous in a book conceived of as an elegy for his brother, whom Thoreau associated with the unspoiled and enduring natural realm celebrated in A Week. He therefore canceled descriptions of fishing and hunting, the digression on guns, the most vituperative portions of his meditation on graveyards, and his rather strident defense of mercy killing. He also omitted the attack on museums, “the catacombs of nature,” which appeared before the description of autumn flowers in “Friday.” “Men have a strange taste for death who prefer to behold the cast‐off garments of life,” he observed, “rather than life itself” (Appendix, no. 13). Thoreau apparently realized that such passages blurred his own focus on “life itself,” a vital drama of growth, fruition, death, and rebirth in A Week.
As he put the finishing touches on A Week, he also began to revise Walden with an eye to early publication. The first version of Walden was only slightly longer than the first draft of A Week, but Thoreau did not expand it significantly in 1848. Instead, he worked on improving its style. He wrote a second version, revised it, and wrote a third version “so close upon II that they seem almost one piece” (S 28). Thoreau clearly hoped to see Walden published soon after A Week, which he continued to revise and expand. Following a walking tour through southern New Hampshire with Ellery Channing in the late summer of 1848, Thoreau added numerous bits of local lore and descriptive passages to shore up the book's narrative elements. But he also added to its contemplative sections, jotting entries that autumn in the Journal on reformers, Christianity, Greece and Rome, and the East, many of which entered the pages of A Week.
Emerson, who had returned from Europe in July, was far less pleased with some of Thoreau's late additions to A Week than with “Ktaadn, and the Maine Woods,” which was published serially from July through November 1848. In October, after reading a critique of the Bhagavad‐Gita added to the discussion of Hindu scripture in “Monday,” Emerson impatiently remarked in his journal: “I owed,—my friend & I,—owed a magnificent day to the Bhagavat Geeta. … Let us not now go back & apply a minute criticism to it, but cherish the venerable oracle” (JMN X:360). He had, of course, earlier first encouraged Thoreau to read and then to gather extracts from various Eastern scriptures for the Dial, but Emerson now clearly felt that his friend's continuing awkward embrace of the East was misguided and regressive. In sharp contrast, after reading the final installment of “Ktaadn” in the Union Magazine, Emerson a few weeks later exclaimed: “We have not had since ten years a pamphlet which I have saved to bind! and here at last is Bushnell's; and now, Henry Thoreau's Ascent of Katahdin” (JMN XI:20). The entry, headed “American Literature,” could not have linked more dissimilar works than Horace Bushnell's An Argument for “Discourses on Christian Nature” and Thoreau's narrative of his 1846 trip to Maine. Implicitly, however, Emerson felt that each writer was contributing to American literature by engaging a subject that suited his peculiar interests and talents. Moreover, despite the complex issues raised in “Ktaadn,” in which he was profoundly concerned with man's relation to and place in nature, Thoreau's spare account was almost purely narrative and descriptive, “a woodsy, outdoors essay filled with the odor of pine trees and the rushing waters of mountain streams” (DHT 229). That is, it was precisely the kind of work Emerson had thought A Week would be until he discovered that Thoreau had radically different ideas abut his first book.
For different reasons Horace Greeley was also troubled by the direction Thoreau's works were taking. Having placed “Ktaadn,” the editor also wrote an enthusiastic introduction to some extracts from the essay published in the Tribune. But he kept urging Thoreau to write shorter articles, suggesting “an essay on ‘The Literary Life’” (C 229). Thoreau declined, citing his work on A Week and Walden. “You must write for the magazines in order to let the public know who and what you are,” Greeley replied on October 28. “Ten years hence will do for publishing books” (C 232). Thoreau evidently replied that he had no intention of waiting ten years to publish his books, for Greeley on November 19 kindly offered to place passages from either of the books in magazines in advance of publication, adding the warning: “You may write with an angel's pen, yet your writings have no mercantile, money value till you are known and talked of as an author. Mr. Emerson would have been twice as much known and read if he had written for the magazines a little, just to let common people know of his existence” (C 232). He was no doubt amused by Greeley's witty paraphrase of Paul's admonition to the Corinthians, but Thoreau, understandably eager to declare his independence from Greeley as well as Emerson, ignored the offer and the warning.
Even if he had been considering Greeley's advice to write for the magazines, the appearance of James Russell Lowell's Fable for Critics probably would have determined Thoreau to publish his books as soon as possible. Pairing Thoreau and Ellery Channing, Lowell in the poem wickedly satirized them as imitators of Emerson:
There comes ———, for instance; to see him's rare sport,
Tread in Emerson's tracks with legs painfully short;
How he jumps, how he strains, and gets red in the face,
To keep step with the mystagogue's natural pace!
He follows as close as a stick to a rocket,
His fingers exploring the prophet's each pocket.
Fie, for shame, brother bard; with good fruit of your own,
Can't you let neighbor Emerson's orchards alone?
Besides, 'tis no use, you'll not find e'en a core,—
———has picked up all the windfalls before.(24)
Lowell's charge was hardly new, but it must have been particularly galling to Thoreau in 1848. As early as August 1840, after visiting Emerson in Concord, Theodore Parker wrote in his journal: “In our walk E expressed to me his admiration of Thoreau, & his foolish article on ‘Aulus Persius Flaccus’ in the Dial. He said it was full of life. But alas the life is Emersons, not Thoreau's, & so it had been lived before” (L II:324n). But, as Emerson replied, Thoreau was then “but a boy,” at best a somewhat promising apprentice writer. During the years of the Dial he continued to follow in Emerson's footsteps, but Thoreau also began to branch out on his own. After the failure of the Dial in 1844 he was increasingly independent of Emerson, whose example and advice Thoreau often ignored. Emerson was put off by his refusal to pay the poll tax, a stand Thoreau vigorously defended in the 1848 lecture soon to be published as “Resistance to Civil Government.” Initially, at least, Emerson also disapproved of Thoreau's life at the pond, celebrated in Walden. Nor had Emerson's influence altered the direction taken by A Week, whose publication Thoreau no doubt hoped would finally still charges that he was a mere imitator of Emerson.
By February 1849, having completed A Week and preparing to make a fair copy of Walden, Thoreau was again ready to approach publishers, this time on his own. He first sent A Week to Ticknor and Company, apparently with an advance inquiry about Walden. On February 8 they proposed to publish Walden—which had gained a certain notoriety from puffs in Greeley's Tribune and through Thoreau's lectures in Salem, Gloucester, and Concord that fall and winter—allowing him 10 percent on the retail price (C 236). A Week did not fare as well; on the sixteenth they agreed to publish it only at his expense, after a down payment of ＄450 (C 237‐38). Thoreau refused both offers, either because A Week was in more finished form or because he believed it should precede Walden. He next sent A Week to Emerson's publisher, James Munroe and Company, who offered to let Thoreau pay costs out of expected sales, as long as he guaranteed full reimbursement to the publisher. Walden was to follow publication of A Week. He agreed to those terms, despite the worries and warnings of his family. His mother feared that he was “putting things into his book that never ought to be put there,” while his Aunt Maria thought parts of A Week were blasphemous and darkly prophesied it would not sell enough copies to pay the publishing costs (DHT 246). As it turned out, she was right, but Thoreau's literary friends were more encouraging. “Mr. Alcott delighted my wife and me … by announcing that you had a book in prep,” Hawthorne wrote him. “I rejoice at it, and nothing doubt of such success as will be worth having” (C 238).
Thoreau soon discovered the woes of having “a book in prep.” “I am glad to know of your interest in my book,” he gracefully replied to Hawthorne, “for I have thought of you as a reader while writing it.”25 That was probably a reference to their shared experience aboard the Musketaquid, or Pond Lily, but the experience of seeing A Week into print may well have reminded him of the Preacher's gloomy admonition: “Of the making of books there is no end; and much study is a weariness of the flesh.” In the note to Hawthorne, dated February 20, Thoreau remarked that he had not yet convinced the printer to take the manuscript, which he must have begun to send off in batches soon after that. In his rush to complete two books, however, Thoreau had not made fair copy of the second draft of A Week, which he had heavily revised and expanded since sending it around to publishers in 1847. Consequently, when he began to receive proof sheets in March, he found that the printer was having difficulty reading the manuscript, which would constitute a larger and costlier book than anticipated. To Elizabeth Peabody, who requested a copy of his essay “Resistance to Civil Government” for the first volume of Aesthetic Papers, a harried Thoreau responded on April 5, “I have so much writing to do at present, with the printers in the rear of me, that I have almost no time left, but for bodily exercise” (C 242). The remark suggests that he was revising later portions of the text even as he corrected proofs of earlier sections, an awkward procedure that caused him to overlook numerous errors. Even so, by the time he sent back the last of the proofs on April 30, he had made more than a thousand corrections, many of which the printer ignored.
Added to his concern for his elder sister Helen, who was dying of tuberculosis, these complications must have dampened the excitement Thoreau felt as publication of his first book approached. Moreover, Emerson, who since 1846 had put increasing pressure on him to complete and publish A Week, was now considerably less enthusiastic about the project. On May 22 he wrote friends in England that he had “nothing very good to tell you of the people here, no books, no poets, no artists,” later adding as an afterthought, “I ought to say, however, that my friend Thoreau is shortly to print a book … which, I think, will win the best readers abroad & at home” (L IV:145). Bronson Alcott, however, was more generous. “Today comes Henry Thoreau to town and gives me a copy of his book,” he noted on May 26, after Thoreau returned from Boston with advance copies. “An American book, worthy to stand beside Emerson's Essays on my shelves.”26 Finally, nine years and nine months after Henry and John Thoreau had embarked from Concord on August 31, 1839, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was officially published on May 30, 1849. Despite the book's long gestation, Thoreau was still only thirty‐one, five years younger than Emerson had been when Essays appeared in 1841.
Notes
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Additional details concerning the early Emerson‐Thoreau relationship are given in DHT, especially pp. 59‐73, and Rusk.
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See Henry Nash Smith, “Emerson's Problem of Vocation,” in Emerson: A Collection of Critical Essays, ed. Milton Konowitz and Stephen Whicher (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice‐Hall, 1964), pp. 60‐72. Merton Sealts, “Emerson on the Scholar, 1833‐1837,” PMLA [Publications of the Modern Language Association of America] 85 (1970): 185‐95, traces Emerson's shifting view of the scholar, while the national context of Emerson's address is sketched by Larzar Ziff, Literary Democracy (New York: Viking, 1981), pp. 18‐23.
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For a discussion of the relationship between the Journal and Thoreau's early literary projects, see Robert Sattelmeyer's Historical Introduction to Journal 1: 1837‐1844 (J 1:592‐613) and William Howarth, The Book of Concord (New York: Viking, 1982).
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“Index rerum” (HM 945), p. 19. The list is undated, but Thoreau probably wrote it in early 1840. The handwriting is characteristic of his early period and all the topics except “Hindoo Scripture,” in a different ink and probably a later addition, are in his Journal of 1837‐40.
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For a more detailed account of his relationship with Ellen Sewell, see DHT, pp. 94‐104, and Lebeaux, who stresses “the far‐reaching implications of the rivalry” that developed between Henry and John for her affections (p. 116).
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Sattelmeyer, “Thoreau's Projected Work on the English Poets,” p. 242.
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“Index rerum” (HM 945), front endpaper [verso].
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Rusk, p. 278.
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Pointing out that Fuller had visited the Emersons only a short time earlier, between October 2 and October 8 or 9, when Thoreau had been living there for six months, Thomas Blanding plausibly argues that the “pencilled paper” contained records of her week‐long visit, not records of the trip depicted in A Week. For a full discussion of the issue see Blanding's “Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Margaret Fuller's ‘Good Week,’” Concord Saunterer 17, no. 1 (1984): 6‐9; and the author's response, “More on Thoreau's A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and Margaret Fuller's ‘Good Week,’” Concord Saunterer 17, no. 3 (1984):17‐20.
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In a review of Mary Lee Settle's The Killing Ground, Aaron Latham mentions various artists who have experienced such traumatic losses and describes the impact of the death of his sister on his own literary career (New York Times Book Review, July 11, 1982, p. 1).
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The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, ed. Richard L. Herrnstadt (Ames: Iowa State Univ. Press, 1969), p. 89 (Aug. 2, 1842).
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American Notebooks, pp. 357, 355 (Sept. 1‐2, [1842]). In the entry for Sept. 2, Hawthorne noted: “Ellery Channing called to see us, wishing to talk with me about the Boston Miscellany, of which he heard I was to be Editor, and to which he desired to contribute.” Hawthorne was not to be its editor, but he evidently had some influence with the journal, where his “Virtuoso's Collection” had appeared in May 1842. For his other efforts on Thoreau's behalf, especially a letter on October 21, 1842, recommending Thoreau as a possible contributor to a new periodical edited by Epes Sargent, see DHT, pp. 139‐40.
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Kenneth Cameron, Transcendental Climate, 3 vols. (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1963), III: 901. This volume contains a facsimile and transcript of the notebook, edited as “Transcripts, 1840‐1842” in J 1:405‐29.
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American Notebooks, p. 369. The following day Hawthorne and Emerson had a long talk, during which they discussed Channing's poems, which Emerson praised as “poetry for poets,” and Thoreau's departure, about which the two “agreed pretty well,” though Hawthorne observed that “Mr. Emerson appears to have suffered some inconveniency from his experience of Mr. Thoreau as an inmate” (p. 371).
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For a detailed discussion of Thoreau's early stylistic development, see Charles R. Anderson, “Thoreau and the Dial: The Apprentice Years,” in Essays Mostly on Periodical Publishing in America, ed. James Woodress (Durham, N.C.: Duke Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 92‐120.
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Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1956), p. 114.
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“Diary for 1846,” Houghton Library MS∗59M‐308 (15), pp. 190‐91. In the same diary, Alcott on December 31, 1846, recorded: “Passed the afternoon and evening with Thoreau at his Hermitage on Walden. He read me many passages from his Concord and Merrimac Rivers—A Week” (p. 350). The entry suggests that Thoreau had by then changed the tentative title of the book, though, as indicated below, Emerson continued to refer to it as an “Excursion” until August 1847.
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The Correspondence of Emerson and Carlyle, ed. Joseph Slater (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1964), p. 415.
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Portions of Alcott's extended commentary on A Week appear in The Journals of Bronson Alcott, ed. Odell Shepard (Boston: Little, Brown, 1938), pp. 213‐14. The complete text has been edited by Walter Hesford, “Alcott's Criticism of A Week,” Resources for American Literary Scholarship 6 (1976): 81‐84, from which all of the following quotations are taken. As Hesford notes, Alcott recopied the passage into his journal of 1849 after reading both the published version and reviews of A Week, so he may have revised and expanded his original impressions accordingly.
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Literary World, Mar. 27, 1847. Quoted in The Raven and the Whale, p. 192.
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The circumstances surrounding Duyckinck's dismissal, which Perry Miller calls “the major crisis of his career” (p. 209), are described in The Raven and the Whale, pp. 186‐202. A Week apparently did not make much of an impression on Duyckinck, who made no mention of receiving or reading the manuscript in a fairly detailed diary of his reading and other activities during 1847. See Donald Yanella and Kathleen Malone Yanella, “Evert A. Duyckinck's ‘Diary: May 29‐November 8, 1847,’” Studies in the American Renaissance 1978, ed. Joel Myerson (Boston: Twayne, 1978), pp. 207‐58.
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The Letters of A. Bronson Alcott, p. 137.
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Quoted in F. B. Sanborn, Henry D. Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1882), p. 304.
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James Russell Lowell, A Fable for Critics (New York: Putnam, 1848), p. 30. After a visit to Concord in the late 1830s, “Lowell wrote a friend that Thoreau so imitated Emerson's tone and manner that with his eyes shut he wouldn't know them apart” (DHT 66).
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The letter, dated February 20, 1849, is printed in Kenneth Walter Cameron, Companion to Thoreau's Correspondence (Hartford: Transcendental Books, 1964), p. 184. Hawthorne later had kind words for A Week and Walden, both of which he included in a list of six “good American books” he asked his publisher to send to his friend Monckton Milnes, noting “that these books must not be merely good, but must be original, with American characteristics, and not generally known in England” (Edward C. Peple, Jr., “Hawthorne on Thoreau: 1853‐1857,” Thoreau Society Bulletin 120 [Spring 1972]: 1‐3).
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The Journals of Bronson Alcott, p. 209.
Abbreviations
C: The Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau. Ed. Walter Harding and Carl Bode. New York: New York Univ. Press, 1958.
CW: The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Alfred R. Ferguson et al. 3 vols. to date. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1971‐.
DHT: Walter Harding. The Days of Henry Thoreau. Enlarged and corrected edition. New York: Dover, 1982.
EEM: Henry D. Thoreau. Early Essays and Miscellanies. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer and William Moser, with Alexander C. Kern. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1975.
FD: The text of the first draft of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Edited below, Part 2.
HM: Manuscripts in the Henry E. Huntington Library, San Marino, Calif. References include the number of the manuscript, the number or title of the division within the manuscript, and, for paginated leaves that were part of the second draft of A Week, Thoreau's page numbers (recto and verso).
J: The Journal of Henry D. Thoreau. Ed. John C. Broderick et al. 2 vols to date. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1981‐. Since page proofs are not yet available, I have not included page numbers in references to Journal 3: 1848‐1851 (forthcoming).
JMN: The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. William H. Gilman et al. 16 vols. Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1961‐83.
L: The Letters of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Ralph L. Rusk. 6 vols. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1939.
MH: Manuscripts designated bMS Am 278.5 in the Houghton Library, Harvard University. References include the folder number within bMS Am 278.5 and, for paginated leaves that were part of the second draft of A Week, Thoreau's page numbers (recto and verso).
MW: Henry D. Thoreau. The Maine Woods. Ed. Joseph J. Moldenhauer. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1972.
RLF: Records of a Lifelong Friendship, 1807‐1882, Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Henry Furness. Ed. H. H. Furness. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1910.
S: J. Lyndon Shanley. The Making of Walden. Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1957.
W: Henry D. Thoreau. A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Ed. Carl F. Hovde, William L. Howarth, and Elizabeth Hall Witherell. Historical Introduction by Linck C. Johnson. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1980.
Wa: Henry D. Thoreau, Walden. Ed. J. Lyndon Shanley. Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971.
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Henry David Thoreau: The Uncivil Historian
Symbolic Landscape in the Greylock Episode of Thoreau's Week
