Gale - A Study Guide for Henry David Thoreaus Walden

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Henry David Thoreau

1854

Though Henry David Thoreau's Walden; or, Life in the Woods (1854), a collection of nonfiction essays, has become a timeless classic, it bears the historical marks of preCivil War tensions. The first chapter, Economy, for instance, employs imagery from both southern and northern American economies, which were different. The growing northern industrialism, Thoreau saw, was destroying the human relationship with nature and with humane values. Southern slavery using forced labor on plantations was even worse and immoral. In the South were real slave drivers, but in the North the ambitious were slave drivers of themselves.

Thoreau was not just a famous naturalist but also a political activist. He came from an abolitionist liberal family and helped slaves escape to Canada on the Underground Railroad. He never paid his state taxes, refusing to uphold a government that supported slavery and that was engaged in the Mexican-American War to take land from a neighbor country. He wrote and fought on behalf of John Brown, the militant abolitionist. The point is that Thoreau stood up for what he believed in. Some said he copied his mentor, the philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, but he pointedly says in Walden that a true philosopher lives the truth he speaks of, and Emerson rarely left his study or the lecture hall. Thoreau, on the other hand, tested out the transcendental idealism of his Concord group of intellectual friends by building a cabin at Walden Pond with his own hands, so that he could live a pure and innocent life in nature without reference to society.

Thoreau's view of social reform inspired, among others, Leo Tolstoy, John Muir, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., and the protesters of the 1960s, who did not want to live lives of hypocrisy and overconsumption. Walden today is a world classic of spiritual and environmental inspiration, very American in its flavor, and furthermore appreciated as a literary masterpiece of great beauty and artistry. The book, though seemingly random and verbose in its eighteen chapters spread over various topics, is actually highly organized. Each chapter is an essay on a season or subject but also develops an autobiographical account of how he lived his two years at Walden. It is sequenced as one symbolic year, from spring to spring, with each season given its importance as a phase of life. Thoreau describes both his inner landscape and the outer landscape in detail, showing how human intelligence dovetails with nature's intelligence. He uses many allusions to classical myth and philosophy and also to Oriental classics like the Bhagavad Gita as well as to current topics. Many copies of the text have footnotes explaining the allusions; if not, these allusions need not get in the way. The student of Thoreau can let thought flow with his sentences, and it will be clear what he is getting at by the end of the paragraph. His thought is not tedious, for his memorable insights are sprinkled with humor, surprise, beauty, and aphorisms, or pithy sayings, which readers can take with them for life.

Thoreau was born David Henry Thoreau on July 12, 1817, in Concord, Massachusetts, to Cynthia Dunbar Thoreau, an abolitionist, and John Thoreau, a merchant and later a manufacturer owning a pencil factory. He had an older sister, Helen, and a younger sister, Sophia. He was close to his elder brother, John, and with their parents they were used to rambles in nature around Concord. Though he was deeply religious from childhood, he hated church and preferred to be outdoors. He was a serious child who liked to spend time alone. The Thoreau boys were educated at the Concord Academy, a private school. He was the scholar of the family and therefore chosen to go to Harvard, since there was enough money for only one child to go. At Harvard, Thoreau did well in Greek and Latin and in modern languages. He graduated in 1837 and spent some time with a friend in a shanty he had built at Flint's Pond, one of the ponds Thoreau compares to Walden Pond in Walden.

Henry followed his older siblings as teachers and taught at Center Public School in Concord. Thoreau resigned because he was forced by the school board to use corporal punishment on the children. He could not find another teaching job and so went to work in his father's pencil factory. He was practical and helped his father improve the pencils after researching German methods of mixing graphite. His father's company led the market in America.

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the philosopher of Concord, befriended young Thoreau and saw his potential. Thoreau had read and admired Emerson's essay Nature while he was at Harvard, and after graduation Emerson became his mentor. At Emerson's home in Concord, Thoreau was exposed to Emerson's library and guests in the beginning days of the transcendentalist movement in New England, composed of Boston intellectuals and Unitarian clergymen. In 1838 Thoreau started a school in Concord and taught there with his brother. Henry taught science and languages, while John taught English and math. They took the children on nature hikes and taught them practical skills. The brothers built their own boat and went on a tour of the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, which Thoreau described in his first book,