In February 1862 Bronson Alcott, having spent the night with the ailing Henry Thoreau, wrote Daniel Ricketson that their mutual friend was growing “feebler day by day.” Anticipating the loss that would come in just three months, Alcott eulogized his friend as “the most . . . wonderful worthy of his time”—an extravagant claim that raises two questions. First, why were acquaintances like Alcott and Ricketson so adamant about Thoreau’s greatness? Other authors gained champions after their death, but Thoreau, as a commentator put it, “became the property of a cult,” officiated by a cadre of friends who were “sensitive to every slight upon their Henry, and determined to make his name prevail.”1 Alcott’s eulogy hinted at the near deification that inspired this small group of defenders, who in the decades to come would play a major role in resurrecting Thoreau from the obscurity that closed in over his grave in spring 1862.
Equally puzzling is the fact that so few outside this Concord cult showed a similar confidence in Thoreau. In 1864, just two years after his death, Moncure Conway wrote an essay titled “The Transcendentalists of Concord” in which he recounted a walk with Emerson to the shores of Walden Pond, a setting, as Conway mused, that had inspired more poetry than any place of comparable size on earth. Standing on the shore, the two men discussed Thomas Carlyle, Theodore Parker, and Louis Agassiz but curiously gave little or no thought to the poet who had so recently made his home in the nearby woods. In Conway’s mind, it was Emerson who gave Walden its mystical associations. A half century later, a Boston Transcript correspondent approached a number of bathers at the pond and discovered that Thoreau was virtually unknown at this epicenter of his reputation. “I met in each instance with uncomprehending glances, and replies that plainly revealed the ignorance of the bathers concerning the Concord writer.” “So he was allowed to die quietly as he had lived,” Charles Adams wrote in the Yale Literary Magazine in 1865, and this, to the broader public, seemed to be the end of things. He had been an Emersonian at the “very heyday of Transcendentalism” and an abolitionist at the apogee of the antislavery crusade; that he failed to connect with the reading public on either account boded poorly for his reputation postmortem.2
In part, this was Thoreau’s own doing. He had no taste for fame, a critic observed, being a “kind of scribbling Timon, who, disgusted with men, had abandoned human society, and taken to the woods.” He dressed in drab clothing in order to meld into nature, and in so doing he faded from society. He made no attempt to promote a coherent creed, and for this reason his lectures and essays failed to build on one another. They would, some thought, be plundered for epithets but never elevate him to the rank of philosopher. And as Thomas Wentworth Higginson delicately put it, he had none of the “personal charm” that might have carried his reputation beyond the bounds of Concord. “We find it difficult to separate his traits as an author from his qualities as a man,” one critic noted a year after his death. Terms like egotistical, cynical, misanthropic, and solitary appeared in the press whenever a new Thoreau book was released.3
Thoreau’s approach to religion marred his reputation as well. Most natural historians treaded lightly around biblical interpretations of divine creation, but Thoreau seemed oblivious to the delicacy of this issue, and indeed he flaunted his iconoclasm. “I have no sympathy with the bigotry and ignorance which make . . . puerile distinctions between one man’s faith . . . and another’s,” he wrote. This troubled readers, as did his fascination with pantheism and Eastern religion. “That such a book as this has been written and published in the vicinity of Boston, is a fact to be pondered,” one amazed reviewer asserted. Even his nature writing seemed irreligious. “Bald in comparison with the glowing word-painting of many lovers of Nature,” his prose seemed a denial of nature’s sublimity.4 On top of that, the decades after his death brought a series of devastating retrospectives of his life and work by some of the most respected critics of the day—significant at a time when his reputation was at best still formative. And finally, Thoreau’s obscurity was attributable to an unreceptive cultural milieu. In an age of industrial ascent, material progress seemed vastly more important than the ideals he espoused.
In the course of events, however, the world would come to view Thoreau as the most wonderful worthy of his time. When Ticknor & Fields published an anthology of his essays in 1863, the New York Times predicted that this was “probably the last relics that the world will receive of Henry D. Thoreau,” but within a few years five more volumes reached the public, and Alcott declared confidently that the unpublished manuscripts contained material “for as many more.” In fact, five more did appear over the next three decades, along with four biographies issued in America and two in England. Coincident with the rise of American literature itself as an academic discipline, Walden assumed full canonical status at the turn of the century and went on to become a world classic, perhaps the most popular book in American literature.5
How did this happen, and what does it tell us about the idea of nature in America? In his 1939 biography, Henry Canby argued that Thoreau’s reputation grew steadily simply because the brilliance of his prose broke through the crust of unjustified criticism. In a sense he was correct, not so much because Thoreau’s writing had irrepressible literary appeal but because cultural currents were aligning: in many ways, Americans’ enthusiasm for industrial capitalism stood in dialectical opposition to their reverence for nature, and by the mid-1880s the luster of the former had been tarnished by a series of labor uprisings, titanic economic mergers, and deep-set financial panics. Americans, as Alexandra Krastin put it, “began to realize that the machine age had brought with it some unforeseen repercussions.” Ambivalent about their new economy, Americans turned to nature for relief. This shift triggered a revival of interest in Thoreau that no one, not even his closest friends, could have predicted or orchestrated.6 This chapter explores the complicated interaction between Thoreau’s ascendancy and the changing cultural milieu in the later nineteenth century and the way this ascendancy reflects the changing place of nature in America.
Surprisingly, it was Thoreau’s mentor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, who set the tone for this first generation of unsympathetic critics. At the apex of his career as America’s leading literary authority, Emerson delivered a eulogy at Thoreau’s graveside in 1862 and published it in the Atlantic Monthly, and the following year he composed a biographical sketch to accompany the anthology issued by Ticknor & Fields. Emerson had never been wholly comfortable with his protégé’s literary style. “The trick of his rhetoric is soon learned,” he wrote in his journal. “It consists of substituting for the obvious word & thought its diametrical antagonist. He praises wild mountains & winter forests for the domestic air; snow & ice for their warmth; villagers & wood choppers for their urbanity and the wilderness for resembling Rome & Paris. . . . It makes me nervous & wretched to read it, with all its merits.” In his correspondence, Emerson communicated this point of view to others, and in his biographical sketch he again drew attention to the ironic reversals that “defaced” Thoreau’s writing.7
Nor was he comfortable with Thoreau’s personality. “It seemed as if his first instinct on hearing a proposition was to controvert it, so impatient was he of the limitations of our daily thought. This habit, of course, is a little chilling to the social affections.” More directly, Emerson criticized Thoreau’s aloofness. With the nation plunged into civil war, the solitary life seemed, in retrospect, irresponsible. “Bred to no profession,” Emerson wrote, “he never married; he lived alone; he never went to church; he never voted; he refused to pay a tax to the State; he ate no flesh, he drank no wine, he never knew the use of tobacco.” He was, Emerson concluded, a mere “bachelor of thought and Nature” who failed to live up to his intellectual potential. “I so much regret the loss of his rare powers of action, that I cannot help counting it a fault in him that he had no ambition. Wanting this, instead of engineering for all America, he was the captain of a huckleberry-party.” These words, spoken by someone perceived to be Thoreau’s closest friend, spread through the press at a point where Emerson might have dwelled with greater enthusiasm on his young disciple’s literary contribution. A New York Times editor noted Emerson’s eulogy and drew his own conclusion that Thoreau was “a strange elfish creature—‘King of the Gypsies,’ as Emerson was wont to call him—shutting himself out from human concourse and sympathies, and holding weird revels with birds and beasts, fishes and flowers, in preference.”8
Emerson damaged Thoreau’s reputation in a less obvious way as well. In 1864 he compiled a selection of Thoreau’s letters for Ticknor & Fields as a sampling of classical thought in America and a reflection of the writer he had wanted Thoreau to be. But as Thoreau’s friend and biographer Franklin Sanborn later remarked, Thoreau’s correspondence on the whole was “much more affectionate, and less pugnacious than would appear from the published volume.” Sophia Thoreau persuaded Fields to insert a few domestic letters in the collection, but the compilation nevertheless confirmed public impressions that there was “no trace of emotion” in Thoreau’s personality. Higginson, who reviewed Letters to Various Persons, complained of the lack of “private history” in the selections and of the fact that Emerson included so little of Thoreau’s “beloved science of Natural History.” Others saw in the correspondence only what they expected from Thoreau: wise thoughts “mixed up with the queerest and oddest conceits” and satire with a “more or less an eccentric twist.” But with transcendentalism and nature appreciation on the wane, the letters contributed to the impression that Emerson’s disciple “belonged to another era.”9
If Emerson damned with faint praise, James Russell Lowell, an equally renowned critic, was openly hostile. In 1865 Lowell picked up the seven volumes of Thoreau’s work then in print and published a retrospective in the North American Review, a journal he edited. He began by applauding those writers in Thoreau’s generation who cast off the burden of European tradition. It was not until “Emerson cut the cable and gave us a chance at the dangers and glories of blue water” that American belles lettres flourished. Lowell then offered a few words of praise for the imagery Thoreau crafted to advance this literary liberation. An essayist himself, Lowell considered his subject a formidable stylist in the American tradition of pure, simple presentation. But this brought him to a critique common among early reviewers: there was no philosophical continuity in these brilliant stylistic flourishes. The phrases and sentences, so elegantly crafted in their own right, failed to connect. Thoreau’s flashes of insight gave the reader “the feeling of a sky full of stars,—something impressive and exhilarating certainly, something high overhead and freckled thickly with spots of isolated brightness; but whether these have any mutual relation with each other, or have any concern with our mundane matters, is for the most part matter of conjecture.”10
Where it was discernible, Thoreau’s message was unconvincing. As an exercise in self-reliance, the Walden experiment was, in Lowell’s eyes, a hoax: he “squatted on another man’s land; he borrows an axe; his boards, his nails, his bricks, his mortar, his books, his lamp, his fish-hooks, his plough, his hoe, all turn state’s evidence against him.” Walden merely glorified Thoreau’s own failures. “Was he poor, money was an unmixed evil. Did his life seem a selfish one, he condemns doing good as one of the weakest of superstitions.” And finally, Thoreau’s natural history was nothing more than pretension. “He thought everything a discovery of his own, from moonlight to the planting of acorns and nuts by squirrels.”11
The reason for Lowell’s animus is important, first because the review had a profound effect on subsequent criticism, and second because it illustrates the vast differences between Thoreau’s work and the midcentury literary mainstream that Lowell so brilliantly represented. Most biographers attribute Lowell’s tone to an 1858 incident involving an essay Thoreau published in Atlantic Monthly, also edited for a time by Lowell. Describing a pine rising up out of the Maine woods, Thoreau wrote that it was “as immortal as I am, and perchance will go to as high a heaven, there to tower above me still.” Lowell found the passage impious and struck it out. This prompted an angry response from the author, and there is reason to believe this influenced Lowell’s opinion of Thoreau. The two had been on friendly terms at Harvard, and Lowell’s review of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers in 1849 suggests that early on he thought highly of Thoreau’s writing. The editing incident seems to have soured this relation, and given Lowell’s stature as a literary critic, his revenge was sweet.12
In the background, however, were more fundamental differences that suggest Thoreau’s dissonant relation to midcentury cultural trends generally. At Harvard Lowell had been a young literary radical aspiring to break free of Calvinist norms and embrace a more cosmopolitan literary world. The journal Anthology, first published in 1804, encouraged writers like this, and the North American Review, founded in 1815 as its successor, continued to explore secular literary topics. But by the time Lowell became editor, the journal had become a bulwark of propriety and a hedge against freethinking philosophies such as those espoused in Concord. As a member of the Boston elite and a Harvard professor of modern languages, Lowell “stood like a colossus bestriding the narrow world of criticism” and had “no compunctions about advertising his aristocratic views.” America, in his opinion, had transcended its boorish frontier origins after two centuries of settlement and had entered the court of world civilizations. Thoreau’s celebration of simplicity and his “life in the woods” struck at the heart of this genteel complacency. As Townsend Scudder wrote, Thoreau “stamped on the corns of worthy, public-spirited, philanthropic, hard-working, respectable men,” and none represented this class more forcefully than James Russell Lowell.13
Lowell was also signatory to a subtle rivalry between Harvard academics and Concord transcendentalists that hinged in good part on the latter’s celebration of nature’s divinity. In 1838, during his last year at Harvard, he had been suspended for several months for failing to conform to the prescribed curriculum, and his parents sent him to Concord to “rusticate.” Lowell was “philosophically slothful,” as a later scholar put it, and understood very little of what the Concord transcendentalists wrote. Although more secular than the Harvard divines who vilified Emerson, he distrusted the transcendentalists’ revolt against convention and their emphasis on nature. In his critique of Thoreau, he wrote, “We look upon a great deal of the modern sentimentalism about Nature as a mark of disease.” His dismissive phrases were repeated in the press, underscoring a general understanding that simple descriptions of nature were unacceptable in genteel literary circles. With the publication of Lowell’s 1865 essay, “the pattern was set,” Lewis Leary wrote nearly a century later. Thoreau had become, in the eyes of the critics, “an eccentric, anti-social, a hermit, good perhaps as a diarist of woods and stream, but hardly to be taken seriously.”14
Following on the heels of Lowell’s essay, Unitarian minister and literary critic William Rounseville Alger reviewed Thoreau’s published works in a curious book titled The Solitudes of Nature and of Man. Like Lowell, Alger had been kinder to Thoreau while the latter was alive. In an earlier essay on friendship, Alger quoted him at length, claiming that his commentary on this subject in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers was “a composition which every one enamored of the theme should peruse and ponder.” Ten years later, in 1866, Alger wrote in the Monthly Religious Magazine that Thoreau’s friendships were in fact “few and feeble” and his expressions of disgust for humanity legion. In Solitudes, published that same year, Alger, like Lowell, discredited Thoreau’s nature writing, but where Lowell’s scorn was veiled, Alger’s was unmistakable. “Few persons have cherished a more preposterous idea of self than Thoreau. . . . This poisonous sleet of scorn, blowing manward, is partly an exaggerated rhetoric; partly, the revenge he takes on men for not being what he wants them to be; partly, an expression of his unappreciated soul reacting in defensive contempt, to keep him from sinking below his own estimate of his deserts.” Playing on fresh memories of the Civil War, Alger pointed to a satire in Walden detailing a battle between red and black ants. What might have been a clever metaphor suggesting the transience of current events became an inexcusable slight to America’s wartime sacrifice. Whether motivated by religious, cultural, or personal animus, Alter’s message was clear: Thoreau’s preference for nature over society amounted to a “scornful depreciation of others.”15
A fourth challenge to Thoreau’s reputation came in 1880 from Robert Louis Stevenson, writing in London’s Cornhill Magazine. Unlike Lowell and Alger, Stevenson endorsed Thoreau’s life in the woods. As Emerson said, he “pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail; the hunted fox came to him for protection; wild squirrels have been seen to nestle in his waistcoat.” Still, the Walden recluse failed to measure up to the Scots writer’s standards. His relation to nature was a matter of “womanish solicitude” rather than outdoor adventure. “There is apt to be something unmanly, something almost dastardly, in a life that does not move with dash and freedom, and that fears the bracing contact of the world.” The Walden experiment might have been an affirmation of the American pioneering spirit—“a man’s work”—but instead Thoreau wasted his time befriending animals.16
Stevenson’s critique, published in 1880, shows the lasting influence of Emerson and Lowell, but it also hinted at a change in the idea of nature in the closing decades of the century. For critics informed by Emerson, Lowell, and Alger, nature held no magic as a literary form. In 1880, however, there were signs of change. Late-Victorian Americans, too young to have participated in the westward movement or the Civil War, were ready to view the Walden experiment not as a desertion from duty but a test of self-reliance and reaffirmation of manhood. Although Stevenson’s essay was easily as caustic as those of Lowell and Alger, it suggests that the concern over Thoreau’s retreat into nature seemed less odious.17
These retrospectives were the product of personal motives, but they were also coincident with larger cultural and economic factors. The carnage on the battlefields of the Civil War suggested an unfathomable savagery latent in American civilization, nurtured, perhaps, in the long confrontation with raw nature in a wilderness setting. In the midst of the horrifying reports of death and destruction at Shiloh, Antietam, and Fredericksburg, the Atlantic Monthly published Thoreau’s “Autumnal Tints,” a celebration of nature in New England. A New York Times review of the essay began by praising the richness of Thoreau’s imagery but quickly turned satirical: “‘King of the Gypsies’ he was called while he lived, the forest was his home, and birds and herbs his most familiar companions. He was on talking terms with oaks. The aspen forgot to tremble in his presence, the mimosa to shrink at his approach.” A few years later, a Portland editor reacted similarly to Thoreau’s writings: they “relate chiefly to Nature and its objects, [and] . . . to his own crooked phylosophy [sic] of life and such things.” The dismissive tone in reviews like these underscores the war’s effect on nature-related imagery, and in this context Thoreau’s life of “simple savagery” in the Walden woods was singularly unappealing. His Puritan forebears held to the idea that too much raw nature coarsened the soul. Midcentury romantics overturned this notion, but after the Civil War the old coin of Puritan antiprimitivism again gained currency. As John Burroughs said a half century later, Thoreau’s “sudden plunge into the great ocean of primal energies . . . gave readers . . . a chill from which they are still sneezing.”18
The reform spirit that animated so much of Thoreau’s writing had dissipated as well. The Civil War ended the nation’s great national ignominy, and those looking for meaning in the great battlefield catharsis wanted to believe that the nation had been finally and conclusively cleansed. The idea of perfecting existing social institutions gave way before an alternative vision: the spectacle of industrial progress. From this vantage, Thoreau’s pronouncements on slavery, society, and government seemed all too impatient and imperious. Nor was transcendentalism in the air. Preoccupied with industrial growth and westward expansion, Americans had become less pietistic and idealistic, putting their faith not in the power of ideas but in the idea of power. “In a society that regarded chaos as natural, that made greed a virtue, that placed financial achievement before personal integrity, culture was not likely to flourish,” the literary historian Granville Hicks wrote. In 1888 Oliver Wendell Holmes pronounced his era’s judgment on transcendentalism: there had been “too much talk about earnestness and too little real work done.” The Concord philosophers lacked commitment to “the common duties of life”—a charge easily laid on Thoreau’s doorstep.19 Industrializing America had little time for Walden’s relentless criticism of material values and still less for a self-proclaimed idler. Larger factories, faster locomotives, and new industrial technologies quickened the flow of material goods, and the rise of commercial advertising encouraged consumers to express themselves through acquisitions. The nation, as Alexandra Krastin wrote in Saturday Evening Post, was “lusty and growing” and “hardly in the mood for a pungent philosophy extolling the unfathomed richness of a simple life.”20
In the midst of the Industrial Revolution, the transcendentalist faith in individual salvation dissipated. The words in Emerson’s essay on self-reliance—“trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string”—had captured the mood of a post-Puritan age grounded in the inestimable worth of each individual soul, but they seemed vaguely threatening in a society where people marched to the rhythm of the machine. Holmes expressed these subtle reservations: “It may well be imagined that when Emerson proclaimed the new doctrine . . . to his young disciples . . . of . . . trusting to intuition, . . . without reference to any other authority, he opened the door to extravagances in any unbalanced minds, if such there were, which listened to his teachings.” Emerson’s commitment to self-reliance echoed the individualism of the pioneering West, and with the saga of manifest destiny drawing to a close, Americans were thinking of themselves as a society rather than an aggregation. “We are all linked together,” E. C. Gale wrote in the Yale Literary Magazine. “Man and man, nation and nation, by bonds indissoluble, although invisible. It is madness to attempt to stand alone.” Industrial discipline, trade union organization, and partisan politics all seemed to bear out the need to be part of something larger. One Thoreau was admirable a New York Times critic observed; a nation of Thoreaus would mean “a return to the habits of his favorite Indians.”21
Industrial capitalism stripped the idea of individualism of its dangerous antinomian implications and transformed it into a philosophy of business self-promotion, synonymous with speculative boldness, unabashed opportunism, and shrewd competition. At a personal level, the new industrial economy demanded self-discipline rather than self-reliance, and middle-class families read this into their strictures on good manners, hard work, and suppressed self-gratification. Evangelical preachers delivered the same message to working-class families, raising sobriety, punctuality, responsibility, and respect for property to the rank of high virtues. Temperance, which had strong roots in the 1840s reform ferment, became more than a crusade against rum; it was, as Daniel Walker Howe notes, a “new secular code of conduct promoted by the market place and practiced by people in their everyday lives.”22
Thoreau’s prose style, like his thoughts on individualism, seemed outmoded in the postbellum world. Granville Hicks summarized the heady renaissance spirit that energized Thoreau’s writing in the 1850s:
Emerson had hacked away at Puritanism, slashing off this and salvaging that, tempering what remained at the forge of German idealism, until the very essence of Protestantism stood forth hard and sharp and bright in his essays. Thoreau had stripped from the pioneer spirit the husks of materialism, reducing it to an inexorable demand for independence of soul. Hawthorne, brooding over the consequences of pride and isolation, had conceived darkly beautiful allegories of sin and death. Melville had found in the harsh reality of Nantucket whalers and navy frigates a vision of the undying struggle against cosmic evil.23
By the 1870s American writers had settled into a new role as genteel entertainers bent on sentimentalizing social problems and, according to Hicks, sheltering readers “from sordid contacts with the facts of the fierce industrial struggle.” These tastes would change again with the appearance of literary realists like Mark Twain, William Dean Howells, Rebecca Harding Davis, and Bret Harte, but the hallmark of the 1870s was gentility, erudition, abstraction, circumlocution, euphemism, and a predictable message that reassured more than it aroused. In this climate Thoreau’s sparse but heavily loaded phrasing seemed, as Canby put it, “too staccato, . . . and his subjects too homely.” Henry James, literary spokesman for the age, considered Thoreau’s prose to be “imperfect, unfinished, inartistic; . . . [and] only at his best . . . readable.” Middle-class readers “cared for truth,” Daniel Gregory Mason wrote in 1897, “but they preferred the comfortable variety; and this lightening bolt, trying to purify the air, gave them a headache.” Thoreau pestered more than he reassured.24
In this new social climate, the essays on nature and society issued posthumously by Ticknor and Fields met a somewhat cold reception. Cape Cod, published in 1865, won a number of favorable reviews praising Thoreau’s freshness, but they did little to change the overall impression that he despised society, and A Yankee in Canada, published a year later, again generated mixed reviews. When Anti-slavery and Reform Papers appeared, also in 1866, Alcott wrote in his diary that the essays would “come at the fitting moment and be widely read,” but in fact the message only confirmed Thoreau’s reputation for cynicism. His stirring memorialization of John Brown, his antigovernment pronouncements, and his personal secession from the commonwealth ran counter to the longing for reconciliation between North and South and solidified the impression that he was too doctrinaire for the more pragmatic and chastened postwar mood. For these and many other reasons, the 1870s was a low point in Thoreau’s reputation as a writer.25
The weight of the 1870s cultural milieu pressed on Thoreau’s literary record, but there were countervailing forces that kept him in the limelight, if not as a literary genius, at least as a fascinating study in one man’s relation to nature. Although very few of the eulogies that followed his death in 1862 celebrated his genius as a writer, they suggest a lingering fascination with his character. He “lived and died in that little New England town,” according to one, “a puzzle to those around him while alive, an object of rather confused encomium, now that he is dead.” Although evasive about his literary merit, these memorials carried the seeds of a kinder reception. “Thoreau was the most thorough child of nature which our age has produced,” the Boston Recorder reported in 1863. “Every thing he wrote has the scent of the wild woods.” Thomas Wentworth Higginson found his departed friend’s most endearing trait to be “his veneration for every little songster of the wood.” In celebrating this sense of compassion, the eulogies anticipated the manner in which Thoreau’s reputation would be resurrected in the coming decades.26
Thoreau’s relation to nature would be the basis of this resurrection, but it was brought on in part by the fact that even though he published little in his lifetime, he wrote a great deal. Shortly before he died, Thoreau gave his unpublished manuscripts to his younger sister, Sophia, who took this as a mission to bring them to the attention of the world. Sophia’s accomplices in this project were Alcott, Emerson, and James T. Fields, junior editor of the Boston firm Ticknor & Fields. As Robert Sattelmeyer points out, Thoreau “enjoyed the good will of two of America’s most enterprising figures in literary publishing and promoting”: Fields as his publisher and Horace Greeley of New York as his informal literary agent. With encouragement from Fields, Greeley, Alcott, Channing, and Emerson, Sophia prepared Excursions in 1863, containing several of his Concord essays, along with Maine Woods and Cape Cod in 1864, Yankee in Canada in 1865, and Anti-slavery and Reform Papers in 1866. Fields reissued Walden shortly after Thoreau’s death, and in 1871 he purchased the remaining copies of A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers from Sophia, removed the title page bearing the Munroe imprint, and replaced it with his own, listing it as a second edition. In the 1880s excerpts from Thoreau’s journal began appearing under the imprint of Fields’s successor, Houghton Mifflin.27 This amazing stream of new works in print suggests the decisive role of Thoreau’s friends and publishers in burnishing his reputation, but again each successive publication saw light in a popular culture more receptive to nature writing. Each prompted another round of critical appraisal, and each moved Thoreau closer to the center of a growing national discussion of the importance of nature to American civilization.
Thoreau’s first popular endorsement came not in America but in England, a country with a tradition of nature writing dating back at least to Gilbert White’s 1789 Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne. Thoreau’s descriptions of Concord were heavily influenced by British romantics like William Gilpin and William Wordsworth, and these affinities resonated with readers in that country. Author George Eliot, who used pastoral settings in her novels, introduced Thoreau to British readers in 1856 with an announcement in Westminster Review identifying Walden as a “bit of pure American life.” Other reviews followed, stressing Thoreau’s characteristically American independence and portraying him as “a kind of half-wild man of the woods” who confirmed the British readers’ disdain for America’s materialist bent.28
Where Gilpin and Wordsworth wrote about nature mostly for upper-class readers, Thoreau’s unadorned style and simple love of nature appealed across class lines. In Thoreau British working people found a set of values that challenged industrial capitalism and offered an alternative to England’s machine-dominated culture. Rank and file in the Labour Party, according to Henry Canby, carried copies of Walden as pocket pieces “and knew it by heart.” He was particularly popular among Christian and Fabian socialists, whose interpretations gave him a modern cast. British socialists saw their country stripped of its virtue by luxury-loving aristocrats and self-satisfied capitalists, and they looked to Walden as a vision of living a pure and temperate life free of the compulsions of modern industrialism. In his England’s Ideal, Edward Carpenter titled a chapter “Simplification of Life,” and Robert Blatchford, author of Merrie England, praised Thoreau for pointing the way to a more natural society.29
America’s reluctance to shower similar acclaim on Thoreau inspired his friends to greater efforts. At least since 1863, Bronson Alcott had been planning a reminiscence about the great literary figures he had known in and around Concord, and in 1871 he began holding monthly “parlor conversations” with fashionable Boston folk about these authors. Nearly eighty years old, he used his perspective on literature to rank them according to achievement. Least significant was Oliver Wendell Holmes and just above him James Russell Lowell. Next in Alcott’s estimation were Longfellow, Whittier, and Alcott’s neighbor Hawthorne. Margaret Fuller was a “coming woman,” ranking just below Theodore Parker, and Ellery Channing was near the top of his list—an “almost unknown but a peculiar genius.” Next came Thoreau, and at the top of the list, of course, was Emerson. Alcott’s recollections drew interest, and this encouraged him to compose a “Book of Characters,” as he called it, “just as it fell from his lips, having all the interest of biography with the added conversational charm which biography cannot have.” His Concord Days, published in 1872, touched on all the writers he had known, but he was especially careful in drawing out the endearing qualities in his friend Henry Thoreau.30
Concord Days was forthright. Anxious to establish critical distance even while demonstrating an intimate knowledge of his friend, Alcott wrote that Thoreau was “over-confident by genius, and stiffly individual, dropping society clean out of his theories.” Thoreau’s preference for nature over society had been a matter of disagreement between them, but Alcott did his best to distinguish this as Thoreau’s most enduring literary accomplishment. “His style of thinking was robust, racy, as if Nature herself had built his sentences and seasoned the sense of his paragraphs with her own vigor and salubrity.”31 The praise was heartfelt but hopelessly enmeshed in confusing stylistic constructions. Trained as a poet and Neoplatonic philosopher, Alcott had difficulty mastering the mundane biographical details that supported his defense of Thoreau. As Hawthorne’s son Julian observed, “The man couldn’t write.” His prose was “figurative and epigramatical,” according to naturalist Wilson Flagg, and however appropriate this was to poetry, it was not suited for biography. Thoreau, Alcott wrote, was “suffused with an elegiac tenderness, as if the woods and brooks bewailed the absence of their Lycidas, and murmured their griefs meanwhile to one another,—responsive like idyls.” Concord Days was clearly more supportive than Emerson’s eulogy, but it did little to cut through the misconceptions that stood in the way of a more positive reception for Thoreau.32
Other intimate biographies followed. Shortly after Thoreau’s death, Ellery Channing had confided in Franklin Sanborn that the two of them had been entrusted with “the care of [Thoreau’s] immediate fame,” and before the end of the century both would write biographies of Thoreau, each as confusing as Alcott’s. In 1862 Channing borrowed Thoreau’s journal from Alcott and recorded extracts enough to expand his own thoughts on Thoreau into a book-length study. As luck would have it, Sanborn was editing the Boston Commonwealth at the time, and in this Channing published his “Life of Thoreau” in weekly installments in 1863–64.33 Ten years later—a year after Concord Days appeared—he published Thoreau, the Poet-Naturalist: With Memorial Verses.
Like Concord Days, Poet-Naturalist was openly defensive. Chipping away at an image hardened by years of denigration in the press, Channing gave Thoreau a human face. He was not a misanthrope; he simply “claimed the right of choosing his own company, wherein he differed little from other people, save in being more select.” The long essay on friendship in Week showed that he gave human relations deep and serious thought, and he was affable and even affectionate with his close friends. Aware of the pitfalls in Thoreau’s social philosophy, Channing reduced these complex thoughts to a sentimental common denominator: “to live rightly, never to swerve, and to believe that we have in ourselves a drop of the original Goodness besides the well-known deluge of original sin.”34
Biography was not a well-recognized genre in the 1870s, and in any case the task of redeeming Thoreau was daunting. Like Alcott, Channing was far too disorganized to paint a coherent image of someone this complicated. To render a solitary and event-starved life appealing, he combined his reminiscences of Thoreau with selections from the journal and his own poetic tributes—all tossed together, as a New York Times critic put it, “without much apparent reason, except to show that Mr. Channing can write worse verse than prose when he tries.” His phrasing, in contrast to Thoreau’s own spare and precise constructions, was a blend of affected classical erudition and Victorian sentimentality. As he wrote in one particularly opaque passage, Thoreau’s natural history “looked to fabricate an epitome of creation, and give us a homeopathy of nature. . . . Forests whispered loving secrets in his ear. For is not the earth kind?”35
The public image of Thoreau as misanthropic was difficult to dislodge, and some reviewers simply selected excerpts from Poet-Naturalist that fitted their own preconceptions. “We are unable to find in this memoir, or in Thoreau’s books, convincing evidence of that human kindliness which some of his admirers have claimed for him,” one wrote. And indeed, Channing’s portrait was riddled with ambiguity. A solitary individual himself, he made little effort to explain Thoreau’s aloof behavior, and others who knew Thoreau pointed out that Channing actually exaggerated his friend’s reclusiveness. Nor was he adept at highlighting Thoreau’s nature studies. As a later biographer put it, Channing “served only to emphasize that an age as well as a man was dead.”36
Yet unlike Lowell, whose essay put words in his victim’s mouth, Channing let Thoreau speak for himself. The strategy made sense, given Channing’s vastly different writing style. Around three-fifths of Poet-Naturalist was made up of quoted matter, the bulk of it from the unpublished journals. “More than most men, Thoreau put himself into his writings,” a reviewer explained, “and Mr. Channing, whose power of appreciation we should rate higher than his faculty of expression, has had the art to perceive this at least, and to fashion his work accordingly.” In his own voice, Thoreau emerged from the book a compassionate friend of nature and humanity. “One wanders as through a devious woodland path,” a reviewer wrote, “wherefrom we emerge with a much better notion, gathered we know not how, of the forest than would ever be obtained in the beaten high road.” Thoreau remained an oddity, but his eccentricities at least seemed more human.37
Poet-Naturalist also revived a theme introduced earlier by Emerson in his graveside address. “Fishes swam into his hand, and he took them out of the water,” Emerson wrote. “He pulled the woodchuck out of its hole by the tail, and took the foxes under his protection from the hunters.” Building on impressions of Thoreau as a child of nature, Alcott and Channing stressed their friend’s miraculous powers over woodland creatures. Birds, beasts, trees, plants, blossoms, and even reptiles “spoke to him their ‘various language,’ and found in his pages a faithful and eloquent interpreter.” Reviewers, even those skeptical of Thoreau’s commitment to humanity, accepted these characterizations. A. D. Anderson wrote in the Nassau Literary Magazine that “the first thing to attract our attention is his love for Nature. The birds fluttered about his head as he walked beneath the trees, and the squirrels chattered on as if no human being were near.” Shaker spiritualist Leila S. Taylor admired the “strange sympathy [that] drew all animals to him.”38 Concord Days and Poet-Naturalist aggregated these anecdotes into a new, more romantic image of Thoreau that was beginning to make sense to urban readers pining for the woods their parents or grandparents left behind in moving to the city. The biographies fused Thoreau, Walden Pond, and nature into a single self-reinforcing incarnation, and Americans weary of urban ills and industrial conflict were ready to appreciate this sentimentalized vision.
An early sign that Thoreau’s reputation was changing came in 1871, when James Russell Lowell republished his 1865 critical retrospective in an anthology titled My Study Windows. The North American Review once again deferred to Lowell’s “masterly criticism” and predicted that Thoreau’s following would “steadily diminish as times goes on,” and John Nichol quoted Lowell approvingly in his 1882 American Literature, but this time Thoreau defenders were prepared. James Leonard Corning mused that the study windows “must have been a little smoky,” and Emerson himself characterized Lowell’s critique as foolish and confused. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, speaking with a great deal of personal and literary authority, noted that it was hard “for one who thus knew him to be quite patient with Lowell in what seems almost wanton misrepresentation.” Time was “melting away the dross from his writings,” Higginson reasoned, leaving his literary legacy secure. “Indeed, it has already survived two of the greatest dangers that can beset reputation,—a brilliant satirist for a critic, and an injudicious friend for a biographer.”39
The opinions voiced by Emerson and Higginson might have had some effect on Lowell. In 1885, shortly after Emerson’s death, he returned to Concord to deliver a lecture on the 250th anniversary of the town’s founding. Standing in the place where he had been “bound out” during his Harvard years, he commented on the town’s literary legacy. Unable to dismiss Thoreau on this celebratory occasion, Lowell at last raised the Concord naturalist to the level of Emerson and Hawthorne: “If we have stars enough—which I sometimes doubt—to make a whole constellation . . . , then we have in these men of Concord, those three eminent stars which make the belt of Orion.”40
It would be convenient to say that Thoreau’s friends understood the waning influence of transcendentalism and reinvented Thoreau as a sentimental nature writer. But extracting his reputation from the morass of negative commentary was more complicated than that. The defensive posture in these biographies resulted in “two Thoreaus,” as a critic put it, “one that of his admirers, and the other that of his detractors.” Some considered him an ascetic and others a selfish epicurean; some found him lazy and others a font of energy. Fellow Harvard classmate John Weiss described him as “repellent, cold, and unamiable,” while Thomas Wentworth Higginson remembered him as “guided by a fine instinct of courtesy.” Some came away from his writing spiritually uplifted and others convinced he was a heretic. In Emerson’s eyes he was a practical failure, but to others he was a prophet of successful living. Whether he would become a giant among American writers or disappear into the underworld of scholarly footnotes was still an unsettled question.41
New cultural developments in the closing decades of the century helped bring Thoreau’s qualities as a writer into focus. Among these was a cultural movement called the Colonial Revival, fashioned around a heightened interest in old-time architecture, furniture, decor, and lifeways. Although it is difficult to pinpoint the causes of this complex cultural form, it likely originated as a nostalgic reaction to the social disorder of the late nineteenth century. The 1880s brought economic depression, widespread political corruption, working-class upheavals, and an unprecedented influx of European immigrants, all of which shook the confidence of the northeastern Anglo-American establishment. This in turn triggered a wistful longing for an earlier and more bucolic era. Church steeples, village greens, and meadows fringed with stone walls—places where “every body knows his neighbor and his neighbor’s neighbor”—became comforting images against a backdrop of rapid urbanization and demographic change.42
With the coming of the nation’s centennial in 1876, Concord assumed particular importance in the Colonial Revival. The “rude bridge that arched the flood,” immortalized by Emerson, had long since disappeared, but neighbors planted an avenue of pines along the road to the site, adding to the suggestion of a shrine, and in 1875 the town commissioned a Minute Man statue from its own Daniel Chester French, a nationally known sculptor. Visitors streamed into town to stand at the place where New England farmers touched off the War for Independence, and in this and subsequent years locals reenacted the battle to the cheers of onlookers.43
A mere eddy in the tide of industrial progress, the Colonial Revival nevertheless offered an opportunity to express misgivings about modernity in culturally approved ways. Harriet Mulford Lothrop, writing in 1888, noted with regret that Concord’s colonial meetinghouse had given way to a block of commercial buildings, and other writers simply ignored the town’s business economy. In fact, by this time literary tourism had indeed become the town’s business. Thousands of visitors each year traced the footsteps of America’s literary greats in a pilgrimage that invariably ended at the Authors Ridge in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery. With luck, the “literary prowler” would chance into a conversation with someone who had known one or more of these prominent figures—perhaps even an aging Franklin Sanborn, Bronson Alcott, or Ellery Channing.44
Thoreau had spent a lifetime romanticizing the Concord countryside, and his work featured prominently in this new tourist economy. The family home had become an elegant hotel, and local shops carried an inventory of Thoreau memorabilia—plates, inkstands, pen-and-ink portraits, paper cutouts, and sketches of the hut. In light of this, local recollections softened. “Most of Thoreau’s towns-people remember him as a serious, blue-eyed, strong-featured man, whom they met occasionally on the streets, or here and there in the woodlands, or on the river,” Hannah Hudson wrote in Harper’s in 1875. He was enigmatic and “possibly a little brusque in manner and language” but nevertheless an American genius. In his New England in Letters, Rufus Rockwell Wilson observed that it was “not Emerson or Hawthorne, but Henry David Thoreau of whom one hears most . . . today.” Concord’s premodern image and Thoreau’s doctrine of simplicity melded into a “corrective to the orgiastic excesses of the Gilded Age,” as the historian Gary Scharnhorst put it. Person and place, according to the English biographer Henry Salt, were mutually reinforcing, like the association between Wordsworth and the Lake District, Sir Walter Scott and the Highlands, Robert Burns and the Ayrshire Fields, and Gilbert White and the town of Selborne.45
Careful campaigning by friends and supporters helped cement this association. To ensure Thoreau a role in the remaking of Concord, Alcott, Channing, Sanborn, and Sophia Thoreau linked his memory to Walden Pond and did their best to render both iconic. Barksdale Maynard, in his history of the pond, suggests that it was already considered sacred as early as 1863. While this may be true, it discounts the protracted efforts by Thoreau’s friends to cement the connection between person and pond. As late as 1896, Philip Hubert recalled traveling past Walden by rail with an “intelligent-looking fellow passenger” from North Acton who expressed complete ignorance of the pond’s literary significance. “Such is fame, or, at all events, Thoreau’s fame,” Hubert concluded. “Its trump is not heard more than six miles away.” In Hubert’s sample of one, Walden was just another pond, but elsewhere there were signs that the waters of Walden, as Maynard indicates, were becoming sacred.46
Alcott and Channing were doing their best to accentuate this by regularly guiding pilgrims to the site of the hut. The structure itself had been moved to the bean field before Thoreau died and then moved again to the Brooks Clark farm, farther north. It was finally demolished in 1868 and some of the sheathing used to repair outbuildings. At the pond, trees and brush closed in around the cellar hole. “Abby walks with me to Walden,” Alcott wrote in his journal in 1863. “We find the old paths by which I used to visit him from ‘Hillside’ but the grounds are much overgrown with shrubbery, and the site of the hermitage is almost obliterated.” That fall Channing walked with Calvin Greene of Rochester, Michigan, to the site. They searched for the cellar hole but “could not fix it.”47 In June 1872 Alcott and Iowa suffragist Mary Newbury Adams visited Walden and commemorated what they supposed to be the site of the hut with a stone Adams brought up from the pond. Alcott saw this as a fitting tribute to Thoreau, and two years after his visit with Adams he noted in his journal that he, Sanborn, and Charles Dudley Warner of the Hartford (CT) Courant had each contributed to what by this time was a noticeable pile of rocks. “The pyramid is insignificant as yet,” he wrote, “but could Thoreau’s readers add theirs, the pile would rise above the treetops to mark the site of his hermitage.” The path to the site, he noted with satisfaction, “bears the marks of frequent footsteps.”48
In 1866 the Fitchburg Railroad Company constructed a picnic ground and bathing facility on the west shore of the pond and later added a dance platform, lunch tables, swings, merry-go-rounds, wooden horses, seesaws, shaded seats, a football ground, walking paths, dining and boating facilities, and, according to a newspaper correspondent, “other abominations with which all nature’s sanctuaries near our great cities are fast being polluted.” Amusement parks like this were a common means of boosting revenue for railroad and street-railway companies, but the public response to the railroad’s “Lake Walden” resort was revealing. The New York Tribune complained that the pond had “degenerated into a resort for picnic parties” from which “all the privacy and wildness” had been destroyed.49 Sophia Thoreau wrote to Daniel Ricketson, complaining that “associations have rendered the spot so entirely sacred to me, that the music and dancing, swinging and tilting, seemed like profanity almost,” and in 1872 naturalist Wilson Flagg expressed dismay that “assemblages of people” visited the pond not for nature observation but “for ice-creams and soda-water, and for repeating in the country the amusements of the city.” In 1900 the dance pavilion burned, and the rest of the facility met a similar fate in 1902.50
Walden’s reputation as sacred and wild crystallized in the protest over its rising recreational use. As Hubert suggested, its meaning had not yet penetrated the popular consciousness, but among those caught up in the Colonial Revival, its waters had become as sacred as the soils of the Concord battlefield. Literary pilgrims sensed the poet’s presence as they walked its shores, and in the nearby woods the leaves “rustled the name of Thoreau.” Nature writer Hamilton Mabie saw in the pond a likeness of Thoreau: “One gets an impression of distinct individuality from this little sheet of water,” he wrote, “which holds itself apart from the wooded heights that encircle it, and rises and falls by some mysterious law of its own.” Like Thoreau’s writing, the waters were “so clear that the most delicate forms of ether are reproduced in it.”51 Primeval, pure, hallowed, and mysterious, the consecrated pond lent specificity to Thoreau’s aery transcendentalism and symbolized the timelessness of his writing.
The Colonial Revival melded Walden, Concord, and Concord’s native son into an elaborate symbolic nexus that benefited Thoreau in ways few other authors could claim. His public image was embellished by yet another development in the last decades of the century: a summer philosophic institute run by Concord intellectuals that drew preceptors and students from all across the country. The idea of a “university” conducted by Boston-area philosophers originated as early as 1840 with Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau. It came to nothing, but three decades later a Platonist, H. K. Jones, held a series of Socratic conversations in Concord that inspired Alcott to organize a similar program at his Orchard House. With help from Emerson, Blake, Sanborn, and Ednah Dow Cheney, he formed a club in 1879 to study the “diffusion of the ideas and tendencies proper to the nineteenth century.” The early meetings were informal, but Sanborn, as the school’s business manager, widened the focus and recruited transcendentalists, Hegelians, Platonists, Aristotelians, and pragmatists from around the country to participate in a four-week summer session.52
Participants viewed the Concord School of Philosophy as a way of rekindling the embers of transcendentalism and keeping Concord at the center of the nation’s intellectual life. Emerson offered a suggestion that “the most will say the least,” but among a group of philosophers intent on conveying their rarefied comprehension of the infinite, the injunction was futile. A Worcester journalist noted that much of the discussion was “impossible for an untrained person to follow,” but he found a “curious charm in listening to what you don’t understand . . . and a great satisfaction in knowing that men have come, by pure thought, to absolute faith in a personal God, and in the immorality of the soul.” In 1880, with more than 150 people attending from all points of the country, the school moved to Concord’s Second Parish Church, and what had initially been a round of ridicule from the press ripened into expressions of praise for a forum on the “great questions of the human mind.” In its third year, it drew five or six hundred women and men, mostly teachers, writers, college professors, and clergymen, and the substance of the discussions was widely reported across the country. The sessions were conducted in a bohemian atmosphere, with an unstated consensus that “philosophy begins and ends with Emerson, and eloquence with Alcott, and the art of the romancer with Hawthorne.” In addition, each participant “bows and worships at the shrine of Thoreau.”53
The Concord School of Philosophy once again drew Thoreau into the cultural limelight. His portrait hung over the classroom, and each year the school featured an “evening devoted to Thoreau and his unpublished manuscripts,” during which his old friends Harrison Blake and Franklin Sanborn read from the journal and urged the audience to relive “the spirit of Walden.” Among the most popular features in the curriculum, the Thoreau readings were ritual-like, with an appreciative Ralph Waldo Emerson sitting close to the podium. Obtuse metaphysical discussions were set aside as the audience listened to Thoreau’s refreshingly direct descriptions of the Concord countryside. The selected passages emphasized his kindness, courtesy, and “acute sense for the rights of others.” According to one, this threw “new light, or certainly very unfamiliar light, upon the character of this unique author.” His reputation began to grow outward from his close circle of admirers.54
Friends and publishers kept Thoreau’s reputation alive through sheer force of will in the 1870s, but the 1880s brought a more positive dynamic. Writing in 1882, the naturalist John Burroughs expressed confidence that those who disapproved of Thoreau in Lowell’s day would eventually come to appreciate his brilliant, if polarized, perspectives on nature and society. “The world likes a good hater and refuser almost as well as it likes a good lover and acceptor, only it likes him farther off.” Charles Abbott, another naturalist, agreed: the world was “growing wiser”—becoming more tolerant—and there was no better evidence of this “than the increase in numbers of those who now ponder as seriously over Thoreau’s suggestive pages as they were once entertained by the polished periods of Lowell.” Speaking for an age beginning to think differently about society and nature, Abbott cryptically reminded readers that “Lowell is tame, Thoreau is savage.” In 1862 this would have been an indictment; in 1895 it was an invitation to follow the Concord naturalist into the “haunts of nature.”55
That the Concord School of Philosophy readings emphasized Thoreau’s nature writing was no accident. Blake and Sanborn sensed that after four decades of industrial expansion, the machine age had lost its power to inspire, and urban dwellers were looking back on the pioneering era with a sense of nostalgia. That the search for Thoreau was taking a new turn was evident in a biography published in London and Boston in 1877 by Alexander Hay Japp, a Scots author writing under the pseudonym H. A. Page. Confused by the conflicting views presented by Lowell, Channing, and Alcott, Japp drew together a variety of sources and pieced them into a “consistent view of the man’s character.” He offered no new information, but his interpretation was original, and like Channing he used long quotes from Thoreau to support his points.56
Japp’s Thoreau: His Life and Aims was indeed a watershed. It was the first biography written by someone not personally acquainted with Thoreau, and because he was not a member of the Concord cult—not even an American—his perspective seemed more genuine. More important, he was the first to confront the conundrum of Thoreau’s binary approach to nature and society. Where others stumbled over Thoreau’s polarized opinions, Japp saw them as two sides of the same philosophy. First, it was through nature that Thoreau rekindled his love of mankind after battling the alienating forces of slavery, the state, and the industrial system. Second, Thoreau judged society according to the standards he saw in his natural surroundings. Nature was pure and honest, and he expected the same from humans. Third, Japp saw a strain of socialism running through Walden and Maine Woods. In studying Native culture, he observed, Thoreau learned that the poorest members of a tribe “enjoyed as good a shelter as the richest, and . . . none were starving while others were in luxury.” Industrial society could achieve the same if its products were distributed fairly. While Thoreau was in fact no primitive socialist, Japp’s interpretation helped modernize his antimaterialism for an age far different from his own.57 The biography was even more significant as a capstone to the child-of-nature myth. Thoreau’s profound spiritual connection to the woods around him reminded Japp of the medieval monk whose life had been recently and piously recorded in Margaret Oliphant’s Francis of Assisi. Both men, during their wilderness sequester, realized that all creatures were bound in a common calling. Peace with nature, they taught, was a lost legacy of humanity. Japp quoted Robert Burns’s “To a Mouse”:
I’m truly sorry man’s dominion
Has broken Nature’s social union,
And justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
And fellow mortal!58
In living out this Edenic relation to nature, Thoreau authenticated the life of the saint. The similarities, Japp hoped, would kindle interest in a Christian socialism that embraced both humans and animals.59
As with Alcott and Channing, the critical reaction to Japp was uneven. The North American Review, even without prompting by Lowell, who retired as editor in 1873, remained convinced that Thoreau’s influence would “steadily diminish over time,” and J. V. O’Connor ridiculed Japp’s comparisons in the Catholic World. The saint enjoyed “miraculous power” over animals; Thoreau’s claim rested on his “ability to bring a mouse out of its hole or tickle a trout.” Others, however, found these comparisons intriguing. William Sharp’s article in Encyclopedia Britannica endorsed the idea that in Thoreau’s presence, beasts, birds, and fishes “forgot their hereditary fear of man.” To readers searching for a tangible connection to nature in the postfrontier age, Japp’s mutually reinforcing references to Thoreau and Saint Francis—both known for their tender hearts, their austerity, their purity of thought, their singleness of purpose, and their unassuming garb—seemed far more convincing than Lowell’s characterization of Thoreau as a cynic and fraud.60
Japp’s biography appeared at a critical moment. The popularity of antebellum authors like Emerson, Lowell, Alcott, Fuller, and Hawthorne was on the wane, and Thoreau no longer derived status from his association with the American literary renaissance. Japp offered a different perspective on his significance. Comparison to Saint Francis, however fanciful, set the stage for Thoreau’s entrance into an emerging field of nature studies that combined, as one reviewer put it, the “eye of the naturalist” and the “mind of the poet.” Japp stripped Thoreau’s reputation of its transcendental accents and presented him as a childlike prophet of nature. As much as Japp accomplished in unlocking the meaning of Thoreau’s social cynicism, it was his comparison to Saint Francis that lodged in the public mind.61 The child-of-nature myth, formulated by Emerson, Alcott, and Channing and crystallized by Japp, turned Thoreau’s reputation in a new direction: the saintlike imagery lingered in subsequent accounts of Thoreau’s life.
Another turning point in Thoreau’s reputation was the publication of selections from the journal, an achievement brought to fruition once again by Thoreau’s friends and defenders. As early as 1863, Alcott had proposed a collected works in seven volumes containing a sampling of journal entries arranged according to morals, politics, letters, and poems. All of this was to be completed “when [Thoreau’s] . . . editor appears.” Alcott, Emerson, Channing, and Sanborn each considered editing the journal at one time or another, but rendering this immense body of material—forty-seven manuscript volumes—in a form acceptable to readers was a daunting prospect. Emerson warned that it “would require the combination of a Linnaeus and a poet” to complete the project.62 In any case, Sophia Thoreau, who held rights to the journal, refused to release it. For these reasons, they lay untouched, first in Alcott’s attic and then in the Concord Library, for nearly two decades.
In 1874 Sophia returned briefly from Bangor, having moved there a year earlier, and announced her intention to bequeath the journals to a younger executor. She had been, as Thoreau biographer Henry Canby described her, “fanatical in her desire to carry out what she thought would have been her brother’s wishes,” and when Channing and Alcott published their own biographies of Thoreau, she took issue with the approach. And so it was to a third friend, Harrison G. O. Blake, that she commended the literary rights. Alcott considered Blake a “fitting person to edit selections from them” but mused privately that the “man may not yet be born suited to accomplish this task in a manner worthy of the author and his subjects.”63
In 1876 Sophia Thoreau—the last in the family line—died in Bangor and was buried in Concord. The manuscripts were sent to Blake in Worcester, who began cultivating interest by reading passages at the Concord School of Philosophy. Shortly after the 1880 reading, a newspaper correspondent mused that “a fresh volume from the hand of this dead writer would send a thrill of joy throughout the reading world.” Having dispensed with an earlier plan for sorting the material by subject, Blake decided on seasons as the organizing principle, as it would emphasize the importance of nature in his work. He pared back the philosophical asides to present Thoreau on his best terms, stressing once again the child-of-nature theme. The entries would bring the reader “into closest contact with nature, making him see its sights, hear its sounds, and feel its very breath upon his cheek.” Early Spring in Massachusetts appeared in 1881, and Summer, Winter, and Autumn in 1884, 1887, and 1892. Blake, like Alcott and Channing, had fulfilled his long-standing debt to his deceased friend.64
The four volumes were not an ideal platform for overcoming entrenched skepticism. The journal entries were fragmentary, like isolated stars in the firmament, as Lowell said earlier, and the result, a reviewer summarized, was “hardly a systematic or philosophic one.” The idea of combining passages from a single season over the course of twenty-four years did violence to Thoreau’s original intentions, however obscure these may have been. They highlighted his changing style and perspective, but this was both a strength and a weakness. One reviewer marveled at how little he had matured over these years, while another found it revealing to note the differences in style and tone over time. As Isabella King pointed out in the Harvard Register, the entries in the early volumes showed “more plainly the actual contact with mankind, while those of later years evince the closer communions with nature, for the love of which Thoreau withdrew, to so great an extent, from the society of his fellow-men.”65
Reaction to the volumes highlights the uncertainty about nature in the industrial era. As Blake anticipated, critics acknowledged only those entries that confirmed their own preconceived notions. Thoreau’s single-minded devotion to nature, according to one, seemed self-indulgent and “absurdly egotistical,” and his refusal to publish the journals himself confirmed his disdain for society. Others found the combination of poetry and science appealing. “He wrote something remarkably pretty about water-lilies, and in the next few lines informed the reader that there are seven varieties of lily pads to be found in the Concord River.”66 The reviews were mixed, but the volumes accomplished a great deal in bringing Thoreau into the public eye. They piqued interest in his innermost thoughts—in the logic behind his sometimes bizarre behavior—and they showed that his character invited not so much condemnation as understanding. Perhaps he was a cynic, a reviewer concluded, but “if we cast aside superficial judgments and look deeper we find that he was something more. There is surely a healthy, sane side to this outwardly repellent nature!” The volumes gave face to a still largely unknown author, and to the surprise of many, the face bore a certain charm. The volumes also gave the child-of-nature myth an aura of authenticity. “The lightning is his candle, the woods are his library, the clouds his pictures, the grass his carpet, the foliage his tapestry, berries are his reflection, the opening and shutting of the flowers mark for him the time of day.” The portrait of Thoreau in his natural element helped clarify his reasons for abandoning society.67
Publication of the journals brought to light another feature of Thoreau’s writing that would become increasingly significant over the years. He had mastered, as one biographer said, the “brief gnomic sentence” that packed “much thought into little room.” His terse and often ironic flashes of insight, “sermons in themselves,” were classically transcendental, a style he borrowed from Emerson, who used these disconnected thoughts to symbolize the spontaneous expressions of the soul. But they were also convenient capsules of Thoreauvian thought, eminently useful to newspaper editors searching for filler copy. They were as innocuous as they were timeless, valued by editors because they enlightened all readers and offended none. Scattered through the press and across the nation, these sentimentalized insights into nature and human character became building blocks in Thoreau’s reputation.68
In 1890 Blake selected a series of thoughts on nature to publish as a pocket version of the four volumes. Designed as a “traveling companion” for those on trains or in hotels, it provided a generous sampling of the brand of inspirational aphorism so appealing to late-Victorian readers. Sensing a market in nature-based sentimentalism, Blake claimed they were certain to lift the reader “above the world of care and sadness into that fairer world which is always waiting to receive us.” Without bothering to contradict the old notion that Thoreau was a cynic, he wrote that it was his friend’s “personal character which gives such power to his words.” During the year in which Selections from the Writings of Henry David Thoreau was published, Henry Salt observed “quite a carnival of Thoreauism” in the press, stimulated in good part by Blake’s efforts.69 Walden went through six American reissues between 1889 and 1902 on its way to becoming a literary classic; Thoreau’s collected works were published in 1894 in eleven volumes and his entire corpus, including the journal in its entirety, in 1906.
Blake’s volumes attracted the interest of several biographers at a critical point in the evolution of Thoreau’s reputation. As the New York Times pointed out in 1880, “In a few years, the persons who saw most of Thoreau in the flesh will have gone the way of all the earth, and the best things to be said of him by them will then be lost.” Most previous critical and biographical studies had been written by those who knew Thoreau, but for this reason they were generally too defensive of their opinions to alter accepted interpretations.70 In the years after publication of the journals, others tried their hand at chronicling his life, some using firsthand knowledge but others writing from a distanced perspective. Free of the compulsion to challenge or defend Thoreau, these biographers were open to exploring the many ways he fitted the changing mood of late-century America.
The biographies of the 1880s and 1890s were crucial in another sense. They were the first to present Thoreau in light of the new popular appreciation for nature as a counterpoint to a machine-dominated culture that was beginning to seem more oppressive than liberating. The first of these new biographies was Franklin Sanborn’s Henry D. Thoreau, published in 1882 in Houghton Mifflin’s American Men of Letters series. Like earlier biographies written by those who knew Thoreau, the effort suffered from lack of perspective. Perhaps because there were so few dramatic incidents in Thoreau’s life, Sanborn packed his biography with disconnected details about “Concord and its famous people” and detoured through a dense thicket of transcendental and utopian thought. He contributed several new anecdotes to the child-of-nature myth, but when it came to the complicated issue of personality, he confused as much as he clarified. Thoreau was cold yet courteous, cynical but also deeply spiritual, withdrawn but forthcoming among friends. He participated in family life, but even around friends he sat stiff and erect and walked with “clenched hands as if deeply intent upon a purpose.” A failure at life, he nevertheless offered a vision of successful living. As one reviewer summarized, Sanborn’s biography might be “considered as a vindication, a criticism, a eulogy, or a biography,” but it was “in no one of these aspects . . . a very successful literary performance.” Another reviewer concluded that “as one reads his printed words, and supplements them with such light as his friends throw upon his life, he cannot well escape the idea that in many things Thoreau was a mere wind-bag and a sham.”71
Still, Sanborn’s rambling account helped to humanize Thoreau as only someone who knew him intimately could have done. The reader was treated to a pleasant if erratic tour through the village in the company of “all sorts of Concord people” while awaiting an introduction to Thoreau, who seemed to interact freely and easily with these townspeople. Sanborn also published a selection of letters written while Thoreau was living in the Emerson household, reinforcing the idea that his friend could be charming, domestic, and even gossipy. The correspondence showed, as one reviewer concluded, that “in general, Thoreau’s misanthropic bark was much worse than his bite.”72
In 1890 Henry S. Salt, another British biographer, published Life of Thoreau. Clearly the best biography to that date, it was, with the exception of Japp’s study, the first written by someone who had not known Thoreau personally. A Christian socialist on familiar terms with George Bernard Shaw and William Morris, Salt was, like many British radicals, intrigued by the ethical implications of Thoreau’s principle of simplicity—so intrigued, in fact, that he abandoned his teaching position at Eton, moved to a cottage, and became a disciple of simple living. In his biography, he carefully pared away the decades of criticism, leaving Thoreau less at odds with himself and society. Where Japp compared him to a medieval monk, Salt portrayed him as a modern critic of society. Honing Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” on the stone of British socialist and trade union ideology, Salt highlighted his description of government as an instrument of oppression. More than any other writer, it was Salt who prepared American readers to think of Thoreau as a critic of capitalism at a time when their passion for industrial progress was waning.73
In 1892 Sanborn published a revised edition of his 1882 biography and followed this in 1901 with Personality of Thoreau. As the last of Thoreau’s intimate acquaintances, he lent his authority one more time to the task of burnishing his friend’s image: “I have lived there, off and on, for more than sixty years,” he wrote of his home in Concord, “and . . . I have never seen or heard of a more industrious resident. His tasks began before the earliest haymaker or wood-chopper went to his work, and were continued after the latest evening seamstress had set her last stitch.” In 1901 Annie Russell Marble released Thoreau: His Home, Friends and Books, a classic Colonial Revival piece that wrapped Thoreau in the idyll of Concord country life. By the time Marble wrote, the old shibboleths had been chipped away, leaving readers more intrigued than offended by his “complex nature.” Marble made a convincing case that, as British writer Francis Underwood put it, Thoreau’s “tender heart for children, woodchucks, ducks, and fishes” was a virtue to be emulated rather than scorned.74
In the last decades of the century, Barksdale Maynard noted, “living recollection” yielded to systematic biography, and in the process the old reminiscences, antagonistic or friendly, fell away. Time, like friends, biographers, and publishers, was on Thoreau’s side. The legacy of negative criticism lingered, but as Maynard noted, his talents as a writer were beginning to loom larger than his eccentricities as a person. As Horatio Powers wrote in the Dial, his cynicism was justified, perhaps, in light of his hatred of slavery, and although he lived free of material possessions, “he was not the fool to think that this course would do for all.” He thought highly of himself, but he expressed his egoism honestly and at times humorously. Every good writer, a reviewer reflected, was “more or less of a skulker, or hider of himself,” and most were in the habit of “calling a spade a spade.” Writing in 1908, Salt proclaimed that “it has taken fifty years to do it, but we are at last beginning to get rid of certain false notions concerning Thoreau by which the minds of his readers have been obsessed.”75
The events of the 1880s—the Colonial Revival, the Concord School of Philosophy, the journal publications, the new biographies—provided the circumstances under which Thoreau would become a writer of American classics at the turn of the century. His essays were included in a variety of literary anthologies, and he was on his way to becoming, at least to some, a popular hero. Blake’s editions had demonstrated that withdrawing from nature was not an act of cynicism but rather a personal sacrifice that yielded succor for a world burdened by an overbearing industrial system. His literary mission was still not clear—too imprecise to be science and too concrete to be philosophy—but his approach to nature fitted the late-Victorian temper: it was neither rhapsodic, like the images drawn by romantics such as Rousseau and Chateaubriand, nor savage, like the Darwinian struggle so many modern naturalists embraced.76 Nor did Thoreau’s prose seem as unvarnished as it had in the 1870s. During these decades, realism, naturalism, and regionalist literature reinforced the value of spare, vigorous, folksy prose, and this trend gave Thoreau’s writing credibility. “The truths of nature quiver in his talk, as color quivers on a chameleon,” Donald Mitchell wrote appreciatively in 1899. Likewise, his social criticism resonated with the pessimistic undertones in naturalist and realist novels.77
Secularization removed another limitation on Thoreau’s reputation. In the 1840s even Emerson, the most gentle of all iconoclasts, had been vilified in the Cambridge-Boston press, and Thoreau, who openly challenged not only Calvinist doctrine but the supremacy of Christianity itself, had come under withering attack. Well into the 1870s his critics condemned the undercurrent of pantheism and Eastern philosophy in his writing, but in the next decade these objections all but disappeared. To late-century critics, Thoreau’s passion for nature seemed religion enough. A Catholic World correspondent writing in 1878 expressed shock at Thoreau’s attitude toward Christianity, but after reading Week and The Maine Woods, the reviewer found that the “jar and discord of Thoreau’s theological opinions melted away in the harmony of the great music which he made us hear among the hills and scenes which he loved so well.” In a more tolerant atmosphere, his description of nature loomed larger than his rejection of the church.78
In an age marked by political scandal and saddled by bloated corporations, Thoreau’s critique of social institutions seemed less troubling than it had in the years after the Civil War. Once considered a solitary cynic standing against the tide of progress, he was joined in the 1880s by a chorus of writers such as Henry Adams, Theodore Dreiser, Frank Norris, and Edith Wharton, whose novels portrayed the demoralizing effects of the new industrial order. Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner coined the term Gilded Age in 1873 to signify the combination of glitter, greed, materialism, and corruption that characterized their society, and against this backdrop the moral benefits of simple living became clear. S. A. Jones concluded his study of Thoreau with the prediction that “when our latter-day mad race for wealth, only wealth, shall have brought to us the inevitable result . . . , it will be the ‘hermit’ of Walden, not the Sage of Concord, that will lead them.”79
In the wake of the Civil War, America was not prepared for the books and essays Thoreau’s friends and publishers rushed into print. The devastating critiques by Lowell, Alger, and Stevenson, the waning of the reform impulse, and the fascination with industrial progress diverted them from the satisfactions of a life lived in close communion with nature. By the 1880s, the nation was ready to appreciate Thoreau. In part, this resulted from the persevering efforts of friendly biographers working to repair the damage done by earlier critics. In part, it reflected the mellowing of memory in Concord, as locals found Thoreau an unanticipated boon to the town’s tourist economy. But mostly, it came with the vast changes in American culture and society at the end of the century. The Industrial Revolution had distanced the nation from its Arcadian roots. The quiet revere in nature had been eclipsed by the breathtaking vision of a towering Corliss engine thrumming effortlessly astride a giant flywheel or a bustling locomotive traveling at speeds unheard of in the days of horse and wagon. But by the 1880s Americans, for a variety of reasons, were beginning to distance themselves from the machine. An anonymous reviewer in 1888 reflected on Emerson’s complaint that Thoreau wasted his considerable engineering talents in conducting huckleberry parties. Perhaps, the reviewer surmised, Thoreau “had undertaken an enterprise more arduous and requiring higher genius than building railways or discovering the North Pole.” It had been his mission, the reviewer concluded, to reunite humanity and nature. At the end of the century, critics and biographers were ready to appreciate the audacity—even the necessity—of this cause.80 Encouraged by a band of dedicated defenders, they welcomed a new writer into the literary galaxy.