On the Birthday of Henry David Thoreau

Reproduction of Thoreau's cabin at Walden Pond & statue of him

It's July 12 and this is the birthday of Henry David Thoreau. He was actually born David Henry Thoreau in Concord, Massachusetts in 1817. The family pronounced their name "thorough" but everyone today seems to say "the-row." 

He spent a lot of time out in nature as a child and his mother encouraged him to learn as much as he could from nature. He went to Harvard but it wasn't an experience he enjoyed. He didn't leave with a diploma because that cost an additional five dollars. 

His father had a pencil factory and he worked there for some time. He also tried working as a public school teacher, but he was opposed to corporal punishment.

He became friends with Ralph Waldo Emerson and in 1841 he was invited to live with them and work as a handyman, gardener and do some childcare. His time with the children was less of a tutor and more about nature walks and stories. He stayed with them for 2 years and met many of the Transcendentalists in Emerson's circle. It was a community of writers and thinkers that included the Alcotts and Nathaniel Hawthorne. 

A well-known abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau not only wrote on the terrors of slavery but also opened his home in Concord as a safe haven spot on the Underground Railroad for escaped slaves making their way to Canada.

In 1844 Emerson bought land on the shore of Walden Pond and he allowed Henry to build a small cabin in the woods beside this pristine, 61-acre pond. I have visited there and read Walden and much of Thoreau's writing. 

The myth of Thoreau and Walden that seems to have appeared in the latter part of the 20th century is that he was a kind of hermit isolated in the woods. The cabin was less than two miles from the village of Concord and he regularly had dinners with friends, still worked sometimes for the Emersons, visited his mother for tea and cookies, and had frequent visitors.

One of his famous essays is "Civil Disobedience" which he wrote after being jailed for one night due to failure to pay a poll tax. He was not an anarchist but he wrote about a non-violent approach to the opposition of traditional law and order. He felt that many Americans blindly follow these laws and behaviors throughout their lives.

He didn't go to the woods to write a book about the experience. The book he was intent on working on there became A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. That was about a trip he had taken with his brother. 

Henry lost his brother John to lockjaw in 1842. John had been sharpening a razor when he cut his finger. Tetanus quickly set in and he died a painful death from it in his brother's arms days later.

Henry did finish the book and published it himself, but it sold fewer than 300 copies.

The book is about an 1839 boat trip Thoreau took with his brother to and from Concord, Massachusetts, and Concord, New Hampshire. It is his first book and being that he was writing it at Walden Pond we can see many of the things that motivated him to go to the woods and that will appear later in the Walden book. He writes about poetry, literature, philosophy, Native American and Puritan histories of New England, friendship, sacred Eastern writings, and Christianity.

He also kept a Walden Pond journal and after he left in 1846 he worked it into the manuscript that we know as Walden, or a Life in the Woods. It was not published until 1854 and made his reputation and has become a classic of nature writing and memoir.

In the book he states his intention in the experiment at Walden this way: "I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived." 

Today The Thoreau Society is probably gathering at Walden Pond in celebration of his life and work. The Thoreau Society was founded in 1941 and is the oldest and largest society devoted to an American author. 

I have visited Walden and the other authors' homes in Concord and tried to imagine the community that was there in Thoreau's time. In the third chapter of Walden, "Reading," Thoreau describes how he derives enlightenment from reading Homer and other great writers, men who spoke of the truth when most of society is not content to strive after such truths and instead wastes their time reading popular fiction and newspapers. He believed that we should instead be dedicated to improving the intellectual culture. He believed the village of Concord could become a different kind of "university."

His experiment was not an anti-social, got-to-get-away-from-society one. Many of his readers or those who have just heard about what he did have built or found their own cabin in the woods hoping to learn or write something similar. There was much that Thoreau learned in those two years, but in the book he says, "I learned this, at least, by my experiment; that if one advances confidently in the direction of his dreams, and endeavors to live the life which he has imagined, he will meet with a success unexpected in common hours."