Civil Disobedience and the Walden years, 1845–1849[edit]
Map of Thoreau sites at Walden Pond
I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived. I did not wish to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor did I wish to practise resignation, unless it was quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.
— Henry David Thoreau, Walden, "Where I Lived, and What I Lived For"[36]
Thoreau needed to concentrate and get himself working more on his writing. In March 1845, Ellery Channing told Thoreau, "Go out upon that, build yourself a hut, & there begin the grand process of devouring yourself alive. I see no other alternative, no other hope for you."
[37] Two months later, Thoreau embarked on a two-year experiment in
simple living on July 4, 1845, when he moved to a small, self-built house on land owned by Emerson in a
second-growth forest around the shores of
Walden Pond. The house was in "a pretty pasture and woodlot" of 14 acres (57,000 m
2) that Emerson had bought,
[38] 1.5 miles (2.4 km) from his family home.
[39]
Original title page of
Waldenfeaturing a picture drawn by Thoreau's sister Sophia
On July 24 or July 25, 1846, Thoreau ran into the local
tax collector, Sam Staples, who asked him to pay six years of delinquent
poll taxes. Thoreau refused because of his opposition to the
Mexican-American War and
slavery, and he spent a night in jail because of this refusal. The next day Thoreau was freed when someone, likely his aunt, paid the tax against his wishes.
[40] The experience had a strong impact on Thoreau. In January and February 1848, he delivered lectures on "The Rights and Duties of the Individual in relation to Government"
[41] explaining his tax resistance at the
Concord Lyceum. Bronson Alcott attended the lecture, writing in his journal on January 26:
Heard Thoreau's lecture before the Lyceum on the relation of the individual to the State– an admirable statement of the rights of the individual to self-government, and an attentive audience. His allusions to the Mexican War, to Mr. Hoar's expulsion from Carolina, his own imprisonment in Concord Jail for refusal to pay his tax, Mr. Hoar's payment of mine when taken to prison for a similar refusal, were all pertinent, well considered, and reasoned. I took great pleasure in this deed of Thoreau's.
Thoreau revised the lecture into an essay entitled
Resistance to Civil Government (also known as
Civil Disobedience). In May 1849 it was published by
Elizabeth Peabody in the
Aesthetic Papers. Thoreau had taken up a version of
Percy Shelley's principle in the political poem
The Mask of Anarchy (1819), that Shelley begins with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time—and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action.
[43]
At Walden Pond, he completed a first draft of
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, an
elegy to his brother, John, that described their 1839 trip to the
White Mountains. Thoreau did not find a publisher for this book and instead printed 1,000 copies at his own expense, though fewer than 300 were sold.
[31]:234 Thoreau self-published on the advice of Emerson, using Emerson's own publisher, Munroe, who did little to publicize the book.
Reconstruction of the interior of Thoreau's cabin
Replica of Thoreau's cabin near Walden Pond and his statue
In August 1846, Thoreau briefly left Walden to make a trip to
Mount Katahdin in
Maine, a journey later recorded in "Ktaadn", the first part of
The Maine Woods.
Thoreau left Walden Pond on September 6, 1847.
[31]:244 At Emerson's request, he immediately moved back into the Emerson house to help Lidian manage the household while her husband was on an extended trip to Europe.
[44] Over several years, he worked to pay off his debts and also continuously revised his manuscript for what, in 1854, he would publish as
Walden, or Life in the Woods, recounting the two years, two months, and two days he had spent at Walden Pond. The book compresses that time into a single calendar year, using the passage of four seasons to symbolize human development. Part
memoir and part spiritual quest,
Walden at first won few admirers, but later critics have regarded it as a classic American work that explores natural simplicity, harmony, and beauty as models for just social and cultural conditions.
American poet
Robert Frost wrote of Thoreau, "In one book ... he surpasses everything we have had in America."
[45]
American author
John Updike said of the book: "A century and a half after its publication, Walden has become such a totem of the back-to-nature, preservationist, anti-business, civil-disobedience mindset, and Thoreau so vivid a protester, so perfect a crank and hermit saint, that the book risks being as revered and unread as the Bible."
[46]
Thoreau moved out of Emerson's house in July 1848 and stayed at a home on Belknap Street nearby. In 1850, he and his family moved into a home at
255 Main Street; he stayed there until his death.
[47]
Later years, 1851–1862[edit]
Portrait of Thoreau from 1854
In 1851, Thoreau became increasingly fascinated with
natural history and travel/expedition narratives. He read avidly on
botany and often wrote observations on this topic into his journal. He admired
William Bartram, and
Charles Darwin's
Voyage of the Beagle. He kept detailed observations on Concord's nature lore, recording everything from how the fruit ripened over time to the fluctuating depths of Walden Pond and the days certain birds migrated. The point of this task was to "anticipate" the seasons of nature, in his words.
[48][49]
He became a
land surveyor and continued to write increasingly detailed natural history observations about the 26 square miles (67 km
2) town in his journal, a two-million word document he kept for 24 years. He also kept a series of notebooks, and these observations became the source for Thoreau's late natural history writings, such as
Autumnal Tints,
The Succession of Trees, and
Wild Apples, an essay lamenting the destruction of indigenous and wild apple species.
Until the 1970s, literary critics
[who?] dismissed Thoreau's late pursuits as amateur science and philosophy. With the rise of
environmental history and
ecocriticism, several new readings of this matter began to emerge, showing Thoreau to be both a philosopher and an analyst of ecological patterns in fields and woodlots.
[50][51] For instance, his late essay, "The Succession of Forest Trees", shows that he used experimentation and analysis to explain how forests regenerate after fire or human destruction, through dispersal by seed-bearing winds or animals.
He traveled to
Quebec once,
Cape Cod four times, and Maine three times; these landscapes inspired his "excursion" books,
A Yankee in Canada,
Cape Cod, and
The Maine Woods, in which travel itineraries frame his thoughts about geography, history and philosophy. Other travels took him southwest to
Philadelphia and New York City in 1854, and west across the
Great Lakes region in 1861, visiting
Niagara Falls, Detroit, Chicago,
Milwaukee,
St. Paul and
Mackinac Island.
[52] Although provincial in his physical travels, he was extraordinarily well-read. He obsessively devoured all the first-hand travel accounts available in his day, at a time when the last unmapped regions of the earth were being explored. He read
Magellan and
James Cook, the
arctic explorers Franklin,
Mackenzie and
Parry,
David Livingstone and
Richard Francis Burton on Africa,
Lewis and Clark; and hundreds of lesser-known works by explorers and literate travelers.
[53]Astonishing amounts of global reading fed his endless curiosity about the peoples, cultures, religions and natural history of the world, and left its traces as commentaries in his voluminous journals. He processed everything he read, in the local laboratory of his Concord experience. Among his famous aphorisms is his advice to "live at home like a traveler."
[54]
