Three Letters by Henry David Thoreau

Travis Shaw

L632—19^th Cent. Am. Nature Writing

Prof. Irmscher

“Three Letters by Henry David Thoreau”

American Literature Manuscripts Collection

IU Lilly Library

            In Walden, Thoreau says, “To speak critically I never received one or two letters in my life…that were worth the postage” (89).  If that is true, then the contents of this essay, three letters written by Thoreau housed in in the Lilly Library, are perhaps not very interesting. 

Fortunately, Thoreau is not being completely truthful when expresses his disdain for news and letters in Walden, a fact which emerges in the opening lines of the first letter, a missive written to Emerson on Jan. 24^th 1843.  The letter opens: 

“The best way to correct a mistake is to make it right.  I had not spoken of writing to

you, but as you are about to write to me when you get my letter, I make haste on my

part in order to get yours the sooner.  I don’t well know what to say to earn the forth

coming epistle.”

Thoreau is clearly interested in his correspondence with Emerson, and I would argue that this and other discrepancies between his letters and Walden are what make this sort of textual comparative analysis so enjoyable.

            By far, the contents of the first letter are the lengthiest and most interesting of the three and, for this reason, require a bit of background.  By Jan. 1843, Thoreau had been living with the Emerson family for nearly two years.  At the time of writing, Emerson is away from home, touring New York City’s lecture circuit and thinking about the upcoming edition of the Dial, which he edited with the assistance of Thoreau.  The letter actually comes from a series of exchanges between Emerson and Thoreau that took place in the few months of 1843, during which they worked out some of the editorial plans for the upcoming issue of the magazine.  For this reason, the series is referred to by the Thoreau Society’s website as “The Dial Letters.”  The letter in the Lilly collection is the first letter in this series.

On Jan. 24, 1843, Thoreau, the Emerson’s live-in handyman, is at home with the rest of the Emersons:  Lydia, Emerson’s wife, and Edith and Ellen, their two young daughters.  Thoreau’s letters describe a busy and lively household, and despite whatever he says about domestic life in Walden, he seems to be enjoying himself.  He says Edith, the younger of the two daughters, is making “rapid strides” in her speech “as well as well as over the carpet,” and the improvements in her speech keep Thoreau entertained throughout the series of letters.  For example, on Feb. 10^, 1843, Thoreau writes, “[Edith] talks a language of her own while she understands ours.  While she jabbers Sanscrit, Parsee, Pehivi, say ‘Edith go bah!’ and ‘bah’ it is.  No intelligence passes between us.  She knows.  It is a capital joke,--that is the reason she smiles so.”

            The sentiment between the Thoreau and the Emerson’s seems as genuine as Thoreau’s interest in baby Edith’s language games is, which shows that Thoreau was intimately involved in the day-to-day events around the house.  Thoreau jokes that Lidia “almost persuades [him] to be a Christian” though he fears he “as often relapse[s] into Heathenism,” he says Ellen tells him every morning that “Papa may come home tonight,” and he reports that (friend? relative?) Elisabeth Hoar “flits about these cleanings.”  A passage written as a post-script in Thoreau’s letter to Emerson dated Feb. 20 speaks volumes of the Emersons’ regard for Thoreau:

            “Last evening we had the ‘Conversation,’…of which Henry was the champion, and

Elizabeth Hoar and Lidian…his faithful squiresses…I have given you no idea of the

Scene, which was ineffably comic, though it made no laugh at the time…Henry was

Brave and noble; well as I have always like him, he still grows upon me.”

The scene in Lydia’s description is hard to follow in the original letter but her affection for Thoreau is obviously generous and sincere.

            Thoreau goes on to report that he had tea at Nathaniel Hawthorne’s place with a Mr. O’Sullivan.  Again, the letters and the lore do not match.  “To a philosopher,” Thoreau says in Walden, all news, as it is called, is gossip, and they who edit and read it are old women over their tea” (89).  The irony is not only in that they are having tea, but also that the subject of the men’s conversation happens to be editing and publishing.  Thoreau reports that Mr. O’Sullivan expresses his admiration of Emerson’s poems and requests a list of them, and that he (Mr. O’Sullivan) would like Thoreau to write for his “‘Review,” which Thoreau is “glad to do.”  Yet another level of irony is the way Thoreau weaves the report gossip fit for any tea-party of old women:  [Mr. O’Sullivan] is a rather puny looking man, and did not strike me.  We had nothing to say to one another, and therefore we said a great deal!”  Though definitely not the epic meeting of philosophers, the scene has an ordinary charm all its own.

            The rest of the letter recounts a local bit of gossip that actually turns out to have enormous significance in the life of Thoreau, the near jailing of Bronson Alcott and Charles Lane for the nonpayment of poll taxes.  The event foreshadows Thoreau’s famous arrest in July 1846 for the same (mis)deed.  According to Thoreau’s letter, Alcott and Lane’s run in with “the state” seems to have caused a local stir, and Thoreau adds, with amusement, “a good anecdote to the rest” of the reports.  The story is brief and jumps around incoherently (to me) but the upshot is that he and Lane decide they “should agitate the state” and storm off to protest, so it seems, but they wind up at the Universalist Church, and there, Thoreau’s anger cools off:

            “…when over the audience I saw our hero’s head moving in the free air

            of the Universalist Church, my fire all went out—and the state was safe as far as I

            was concerned, but Lane, it seems had cogitated and even written on the matter in

            the afternoon…”

Though Thoreau tells the story for comic effect, the issue itself—paying taxes to a government that actively supported slavery—was quite serious, nearly provoking a violent confrontation, it appears, between Thoreau and some of Concord’s radical intellectuals and the local state authorities. 

The story is also interesting because Alcott and Lane’s brush with the law set a precedent for Thoreau when he was arrested for not paying his poll taxes in July 1846.  In fact, biographical sources say he developed their defense into an elegant rhetorical argument of civil disobedience[i].  The Lilly letter seems to corroborate this fact.  Thoreau says that Sam Staples—Thoreau’s friend and the jailer who would infamously arrest Thoreau and keep him locked up overnight in jail—tells Thoreau’s sister Helen that he is not sure what motivated Mr. Alcott:  “‘I vum—I believe it was nothing but principle—for I never heard a man talk honester.’”  This principle, so it seems, would develop into Thoreau’s impassioned defense for civil obedience.

            The letter closes with a sincere expression of gratitude to Emerson and his wife for their “long kindness” to him:  “I have been your pensioner for nearly two years and still left free as under the sky—It has been as free a gift as the sun on the summer—though I have sometimes molested you with my mean acceptance of…but for once thank you as well as heaven.”  Perhaps the relations are a bit more strained than the rest of the letters in the Dial series suggests.  It is not clear whether Thoreau is issuing an apology for a specific offense or perhaps feeling the effects of two years’ dependence.  In either case, the friendship and generosity the Emerson’s gave to Thoreau continued unabatedly.  In March 1845, Thoreau began building his famous cabin on Emerson’s fourteen acres at Walden, where he lived for two years.  The gratitude Thoreau expresses to Emerson in this letter seems, indeed, to be heartfelt.  And yet, as critics have often pointed out, that type of appreciation much more subdued in Walden.   

            The next two letters are short, the first of which is dated Oct. 30, 1850, and the second one Sep. 22, 1856.  The recipient of the first letter is Charles Sumner, who seems to have lent Thoreau some geographical survey reports.  Thoreau says he is pleased with the “faithful reports with their admirable maps and plates,” and then he trenchantly says the books give “some atonement for the misdeeds of our government.”  In the briefest of thank-you letters, Thoreau memorably bristles at (we can presume) the government’s policy of slavery. 

The second letter, since we have already discussed it in class, does not need much comment.  It is written to an admirer who asks for Thoreau’s advice on what to bring on hiking trip to the White Mountains.  Thoreau advises him not to take a gun, which Thoreau believes “will affect the innocence of your enterprise.”  Not that he would need a gun; for the mountains are now disappointingly tame:  “If you chance to meet with a wolf or a dangerous snake, you will be luckier than I have been, or expect to be.”  Thoreau then gives some advice regarding equipment.  About clothing, he says, “Wear old shoes; carry no thin clothes.”  Not only is this ostensibly banal comment actually quite humorous, it also shows how remarkably consistent Thoreau’s thinking can be.  As we talked about in class, Thoreau spends a lot of time discussing the importance of sturdy, well-fitting clothing, particularly in “Economy.”  One particularly salient link between the letter and Walden relates “thick” clothing to good economy and moral character:  “While one thick garment is, for most purposes, as good as three thin ones, and cheap clothing can be obtained at prices really to suit customers; while a thick coat can be bought for five dollars…where is he so poor that, clad in a suit, of his own earning, there will not be found wise men to do him reverence?”

            In summary, these three letters in the Lilly’s American Literature Manuscript Collection reveal a different side of Thoreau.  We see a young man who is neither as self-reliant nor as solitary as he presents himself.  In the first letter his dependency on the Thoreau’s seems to be a source of some pain and tension, and in the second letter he is returning a batch of borrowed books.  Furthermore, we see in all of the letters that Thoreau is quite sociable, even over tea.  Though a cynical reader might want to cast judgment and clamor about the discrepancies between these sides of Thoreau, I believe that it makes more sense to read Walden in tandem with the letters, seeing the two as different modes, indeed different moments, of discourse, each with its different set of rhetorical aims.      

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[i] “When Thoreau went into town to pick up a shoe at the cobbler’s in 1846, he was confronted by Sam Staples, who charged him with the nonpayment of his poll taxes.  Thoreau’s nonpayment had been a protest against government support of slavery.  Staples and Thoreau were good friends, but Thoreau’s refusal to bend (and Staple’s refusal to back down) forced the issue, and Staples marched Thoreau off to the county jail.  Hearing the rumor, his horrified mother ran back to notify the family, and someone—probably Thoreau’s Aunt Maria—appeared at the jail shrouded in a veil and paid the tax; Sam, however, had settled in for the night and was not about to set Thoreau free.  The next day, Thoreau was, in Staple’s words, ‘as mad as the devil’ and refused to leave until Staples threatened to throw him out bodily, whereupon Thoreau retrieved his shoe and disappeared into the huckleberry fields where, he wrote in the essay that immortalized his protest, ‘the State was nowhere to be seen.’  The incident aroused much commentary, especially among Thoreau’s friends.  Legend has it that Emerson, seeing Thoreau behind bars, exclaimed, ‘Henry, why are you here?’  To which Thoreau replied, ‘Waldo, why are you not here?’  Alcott recorded in his journal an ‘earnest talk’ with Emerson, who though Thoreau’s action ‘mean and skulking, and in bad taste.  I defended it on the grounds of a dignified non-compliance with the injunction of civil powers.’  Thoreau’s reaction was to develop Alcott’s line of defense into an elegant and impassioned essay, which he tried out first as a lecture at the Concord Lyceum in Jan 1848, then published as ‘Resistance to Civil Government’ in the first and only issue of Elizabeth Peabody’s Aesthetic Papers, May 1849." ("Biography" of Thoreau, more or less quoted from Book Rags:  http://www.bookrags.com/biography/henry-david-thoreau-dlb3/).