HENRY DAVID THOREAU


October 10, 2021


Henry David Thoreau (1817-62) was considered one of the main literary writers in the 19th-century American Renaissance.


He was the third child of John and Cynthia Thoreau. He was christened David Henry Thoreau but he switched his first and middle names in the mid-1830s, perhaps to “affirm a measure of independence from his family and to signify a new person he had become through his Havard education and friendships with Ralph Waldo Emerson and other Transcendentalist” (Cain 11).


John Thoreau was in the pencil business while Cynthia was a member of the Concord Women’s Anti-Slavery Society. Of the other three children, the oldest was Helen, followed by John Jr., [then, Henry,] and Sophia (12).


Besides expanding his father’s pencil business, Thoreau continued to write and taught throughout his life. In 1838 he opened a private school at home but shortly thereafter took over Concord Academy, where his brother John joined him as a fellow teacher in 1839. The pupils studied formal subjects such as English, mathematics, and foreign languages. But for the Thoreaus, “it was equally important that they learn how to make maps, survey a piece of property, collect Indian relics, and see the landscape with alertness and insight.” (20)


Thoreau never married; neither did his brother or sisters, all of whom lived in the family home (20). Like his sister Helen, Thoreau also died from tuberculosis in 1862.


Thoreau entered Havard College in 1833 and learned Greek and Latin, mathematics, physics, philosophy, history, English, theology, and foreign languages (Italian, French, German, Spanish) (13).


Between terms in 1835-36 Thoreau taught school in Canton, Massachusetts, and in 1836 he boarded with the Unitarian minister Orestes Brownson a trenchant social critic and author. Brownson was at work on his Transcendentalist manifesto. He and Thoreau studied German, and Thoreau developed a passion for Johann Wolfgang von Goethe‘s Italian Journey (1816), a record of the author’s residence and travels in Italy from 1786-88, and an account of his interests in history and botany (13).


At the same time, in 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82) led Thoreau to the other strong minds who took part in the gatherings of the Transcendental Club in Massachusetts.


As a member of the transcendentalists, like Emerson and other German thinkers such as Kant, Goethe, and others, Thoreau stressed “the correspondences between an individual and nature and the sheer indwelling presence of the divine in all men and women.” (17)

In other words, Thoreau believed that nature is itself the embodiment of God and that by connecting with nature, we could recover our own innate good human qualities. This idea is similar to Emerson, who was for Thoreau “a teacher, an intellectual and spiritual adviser, and perhaps something of a father and an older brother as well.” (16)

In Nature (1836), Emerson claims,


In the woods, we return to reason and faith…all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or parcel of God. (The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson. NY: AMS Press, 1968, p.10)


Like Emerson, transcendentalists have deep gratitude and appreciation for nature, not only for aesthetic purposes but also to observe and understand the structured inner workings of the natural world/God. In Walden, Thoreau’s description of the pond as “it both changes and remains faithful to itself, different yet the same through the passage of seasons” emphasizes this aspect (44). Meanwhile, transcendentalists saw divine experience inherent in everyday life, rather than believing in distant heaven; they saw physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.


In a sense, Thoreau’s faith in the spirits in nature is thought of as a spiritual extension of pantheistic animism that is derived from the Greek classics. In a broader sense, transcendentalism represented “an effort to break free from the heritage of Calvinism,” which emphasized mankind’s innate sinfulness, the sovereignty of God, and the authority of the Bible. (17) 


While transcendentalists promoted the inherent goodness of people and nature, they viewed society as a source of corruption and that people are at their best when truly independent and self-reliant.


Thoreau believed that social structures that impair the self must be confronted and resisted (31). As he protested, “we do not ride on the railroad, it rides upon us” (“Where I Lived…”), indicating that the railroad development in Massachusetts is a system the businessmen and manufacturers welcomed but that was built on the backs of underpaid, overworked laborers. While the construction invited profitable large scale of production of milk, eggs, fruits, and garden vegetables, such production forced farmers to work harder than ever before. By the early 1850s, the railroad solidified Massachusetts’s position as “the state is most thoroughly given over to extensive industrial development.” (30)


In 1845-47, Thoreau went to the Walden pond for wisdom, quiet reflection, and self-understanding:


“I did not know that the world was suffering for want of gold…A grain of it will gild a great surface—but not so much as a grain of wisdom.” (qtd. in Cain 33)


In Walden, Thoreau raised an argument to spur changes in the structure of society as a whole. Nevertheless, Thoreau suggested that these structures do not matter because we have the capacity to change our lives whatever and however we are situated. “Society is an enemy, not an excuse.” It is your life that he tells you must be changed. (31)


For the Transcendentalist Thoreau, the conservation of an undisturbed natural world is extremely important as it emphasizes a skepticism toward capitalism, westward expansion, and industrialization in 19th century America.


At last, Thoreau’s emphasis on nature’s agency is worth mentioning:


“this curious world which we inhabit is more wonderful than it is convenient, more beautiful than it is useful—it is more to be admired than enjoyed then, than used.” (qtd. in Cain (ed.), A Historical Guide to Henry David Thoreau, p. 14)

 

Thoreau was a cultural historian, an anthropologist, and a writer. He enjoyed studying nature but, even more, delighted in the opportunity to write about it when he felt it had saturated his consciousness. In his journal, May 10, 1853, he claimed,


If I am overflowing with life, am rich in experience for which I lack expression, then nature will be my language full of poetry,–all nature will fable, and every natural phenomenon be a myth. (qtd. in Cain 53)


For Thoreau, writing of/in/with nature was the fundamental fact of existence and everything else he made secondary to it.


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PS 1: I also admire Thoreau’s anti-war standpoint based on the fact that he was arrested in July 1846 for failing to pay his poll tax, a tax that he argued meant giving support to the Mexican War. He believed that “the real goal of the Mexican War was the expansion of slavery south and west” (35). But yeah, actually the tax he refused to pay was not connected to any funding for the Mexican War. But even he didn’t pay the tax, he should not be jailed under Massachusetts law. So both sides were wrong in this case. 


PS 2: “The Emerson/Thoreau friendship had always been intimate yet edge, uncomfortable, and rivalrous” (39). “Each claimed that he hoped for intimacy and regretted that the other was not providing. Thoreau concluded that Emerson was patronizing him, whereas Emerson was baffled by his friend’s inclusiveness and failure to cultivate his talents. But the point above all to remember is that these two men loved one another.” (17)



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