Henry David Thoreau

526 Pages·1993·17.22 MB·English

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1837 1837
EVENTS OF 1836
General Events of 1837
SPRING JANUARY FEBRUARY MARCH
SUMMER APRIL MAY JUNE
FALL JULY AUGUST SEPTEMBER
WINTER OCTOBER NOVEMBER DECEMBER
Following the death of Jesus Christ there was a period
of readjustment that lasted for approximately one
million years.
–Kurt Vonnegut, THE SIRENS OF TITAN
January February March
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April May June
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
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July August September
EVENTS OF 1838
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1837 1837
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
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October November December
Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa Su Mo Tu We Th Fr Sa
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In South Scituate, Massachusetts a relative of the Mays, Edmund Quincy Sewall, Jr., little brother of Ellen
Devereux Sewall, began a journal “by the suggestion of Mr. Alcott.”
BRONSON ALCOTT
In Boston’s economy, books rated 3d in total value produced, 2d to clothing in persons employed, and 1st in
capital investment. From this year into 1851, Josiah Quincy, Jr. would be the treasurer for the initiative which
became the Boston Athenæum.
Nathaniel Hawthorne edited PETER PARLEY’S UNIVERSAL HISTORY.
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1837 1837
The founding of the Mount Holyoke Female Seminary, the 1st American school for women to have an
endowment.
The Concord school board had as its chair the Reverend Barzillai Frost, as its secretary Nehemiah Ball (who
in this year won election as Town Clerk), and as its 3d member Nehemiah’s brother-in-law Sherman Barrett.
Money for the school was being raised by a town tax, supplemented by small donations and by some state aid.
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The budget this year would be $2,132. , of which the Centre District, the section of the system which
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occupied the Town School building and three other more remotely located buildings, would receive $1,119. .
The head of the prudential committee of the Centre District was the owner of the local grocery store, Charles
B. Davis (who in this year would become Concord’s postmaster), and it would be he who would hire as the
new teacher replacing Eliezer J. Marsh a recent local college graduate, Henry David Thoreau. Hiring a recent
local Harvard College grad has been pretty much the tradition since 1700. Davis would agree to pay Thoreau
$500 a year, which, although it would render him by far the highest paid of the more than 16 teachers employed
in the system, was $100 less than had been paid in the previous year to Marsh. After Thoreau would resign the
post would pass to his classmate in Harvard College’s Class of 1837 William Allen. Here is what happened as
it was reconstructed (or invented!) in 1873 by Ellery Channing in THOREAU THE POET-NATURALIST / WITH
MEMORIAL VERSES:
Another school experience was the town school in Concord, which he took
after leaving college, announcing that he should not flog, but would
talk morals as punishment instead. A fortnight sped glibly along, when
a knowing deacon, one of the school committee, [Nehemiah Ball] walked
in and told Mr. Thoreau that he must flog and use the ferule, or the
school would spoil. So he did, ferruling six of his pupils after school,
one of whom was the maid-servant in his own house. But it did not suit
well with his conscience, and he reported to the committee that he
should no longer keep their school, as they interfered with his
arrangements; and they could keep it.
Waldo Emerson recorded in his journal having attended a convocation of the Concord school reform group, at
which Horace Mann, Sr. spoke:
Yesterday Mr Mann’s Address on Education. It was full of the modern
gloomy view of our democratical institutions, and hence the inference
to the importance of Schools.... Sad it was to see the death-cold
convention yesterday morning as they sat shivering a handful of pale
men & women in a large church, for it seems the Law has touched the
business of Education with the point of its pen & instantly it has
frozen stiff in the universal congelation of society.
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1837 1837
David Henry Thoreau made notes on Francis Beaumont’s and John Fletcher’s NICE VALOUR; OR THE
PASSIONATE MADMAN in his Miscellaneous Extracts notebook.
He also made extracts from a paper that had appeared in the October 1836 issue of Foreign Quarterly Review,
“Friar Rush and the Frolicsome Elves of Popular Mythology.”
FOREIGN QUARTERLY REVIEW
He also copied the poem that begins “My Mind to Me a Kingdom Is” that has often been attributed to Sir
Edward Dyer (although, more likely, it had been penned by Edward De Vere, 17th earl of Oxford):
My mind to me a kingdom is;
Such perfect joy therein I find
That it excels all other bliss
Which God or nature hath assign’d.
Though much I want that most would have,
Yet still my mind forbids to crave.
No princely port, nor wealthy store,
No force to win a victory,
No wily wit to salve a sore,
No shape to win a loving eye;
To none of these I yield as thrall,—
For why? my mind despise them all.
I see that plenty surfeit oft,
And hasty climbers soonest fall;
I see that such as are aloft
Mishap doth threaten most of all.
These get with toil and keep with fear;
Such cares my mind can never bear.
I press to bear no haughty sway,
I wish no more than may suffice,
I do no more than well I may,
Look, what I want my mind supplies.
Lo! thus I triumph like a king,
My mind content with anything.
I laugh not at another’s loss,
Nor grudge not at another’s gain;
No worldly waves my mind can toss;
I brook that is another’s bane.
I fear no foe, nor fawn on friend,
I loathe not life, nor dread mine end.
My wealth is health and perfect ease,
And conscience clear my chief defence;
I never seek by bribes to please,
Nor by desert to give offence.
Thus do I live, thus will I die,—
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Would all did so as well as I!
At the Smolensk Lutheran Cemetery on Vasilievsky Island near St. Petersburg, Russia, a headstone was added
to the gravesite of Leonhard Euler.
Is it possible that Henry Thoreau derived his life motto “Simplify, simplify” from the method used in algebra
class?
“To what end do I lead a simple life at all, pray?
That I may teach others to simplify their lives?
—and so all our lives be simplified merely, like an
algebraic formula?— Or not, rather, that I may make
use of the ground I have cleared — to live more
worthily and profitably?”
— Henry Thoreau, September 26, 1855
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At the early height of his career, Waldo Emerson recorded his aunt Mary Moody Emerson’s name in his
journal as the 1st on his list of his 7 most vital “benefactors” but commented also that he would rather take
gifts of thought from others, “as we take apples off a tree without any thanks.”
Seeing that there had recently been a state-funded geological survey, the Boston Society of Natural History
propositioned the Massachusetts legislature to fund also a similar botanical and zoological survey. The new
president of the society he had helped form in 1831, George B. Emerson, would not only be appointed by
Governor Everett as commissioner of the survey but would himself over the following nine summers, in
conjunction with the botanist Dr. Dewey, perform its investigation of trees and shrubs. A circular with twenty
questions was posted to some fifty landowners in the state. During his summers the schoolmaster would be
visiting shipyards in Boston and New Bedford and elsewhere along the coast, along with sawmills, machine
shops, and woodworking shops fashioning furniture, agricultural implements, etc.
Rebecca Stanley Mann, Horace Mann, Sr.’s sister, died.
The American Institute of Instruction, with which George B. Emerson was heavily involved, secured the
appointment of Massachusetts Representative Horace Mann, Sr. as Secretary of a newly formed State Board
of Education.
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1837 1837
MISCELLANEOUS WORKS OF EDWARD GIBBON, ESQ.
WITH MEMOIRS OF HIS LIFE AND WRITINGS, COMPOSED BY HIMSELF: ILLUSTRATED FROM HIS LETTERS,
WITH OCCASIONAL NOTES AND NARRATIVE, BY JOHN, LORD SHEFFIELD (London: B. Blake, 1837). This
volume would be in the library of Waldo Emerson and Henry Thoreau would peruse it and find himself
somewhat distressed by the life that was being revealed, during the winter of 1840.
GIBBON’S LIFE AND WORKS
According to Professor Walter Roy Harding’s THE DAYS OF HENRY THOREAU (NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1966):
“A Review From Professor Ross’s Seminar”
WALTER HARDING’S BIOGRAPHY
Chapter 4 (1837-1838) -After graduation from Harvard, Henry David Thoreau taught
school in Concord but quit after two weeks as a result of a dispute over corporal
punishment. He searched in vain elsewhere for a teaching position. He then turned
to his father’s pencil business and through Harvard library research developed a
superior pencil.
Thoreau was developing his friendship with Waldo Emerson, who introduced him to
members of the “Hedge Club” (begun in 1836) who became known as the
Transcendentalists. Some members of the Hedge Club were: FH Hedge, Rev George
Ripley, Rev Orestes Brownson, Rev Jones Very, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth Peabody,
Bronson Alcott, Rev Theodore Parker, C.P. Cranch, Rev John Sullivan Dwight and Thoreau
(in fall of 1837.)
The Emerson/Thoreau friendship flourished. Many like Lowell saw him as an inferior
copy of Emerson, but Emerson defended Thoreau’s originality. Bronson Alcott moved
to Concord to be near Emerson and became a friend of and influence upon Thoreau.
Thoreau delivered his first lecture to the Concord Lyceum on April 11, 1838.
(Robert L. Lace, January-March 1986)
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1837 1837
Yet another edition of Adam Ferguson’s THE HISTORY OF THE PROGRESS AND TERMINATION OF THE ROMAN
REPUBLIC (London: Jones & Co.).
(Just because Henry Thoreau considers something “preserved death” doesn’t mean it isn’t going to sell like
hotcakes.)
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George W. Boynton engraved a 5 /2 inch by 5 inch map of Boston for the BOSTON ALMANAC of this year.
MAPS OF BOSTON
THE RHODE-ISLAND ALMANAC FOR 1837. By Isaac Bickerstaff. Providence: Hugh H. Brown.
Walton Felch’s A COMPREHENSIVE GRAMMAR, PRESENTING SOME NEW VIEWS OF THE STRUCTURE OF
LANGUAGE: DESIGNED TO EXPLAIN ALL THE RELATIONS OF WORDS IN ENGLISH SYNTAX, AND MAKE THE
STUDY OF GRAMMAR AND COMPOSITION ONE AND THE SAME PROCESS. ABRIDGED FROM A WORK PREPARING
FOR PUBLICATION (Otis, Broaders and Company, 122 pages). [Volume 2832 of Harvard reading textbooks
preservation microfilm project]
FELCH’S GRAMMAR
He would republish this in 1841 (the copy behind the big button above is actually the republished version, the
original version owned by Henry Thoreau not being readily available as yet in electronic text), and would
argue that the “prevailing system of grammar, which in substance we have received from the ancients, will be
found, upon careful inspection, to be radically defective and erroneous; — how defective and erroneous, no
one is prepared to conceive, till he has given the subject more attention than a short essay like this article could
evince.” His authorial intent was to correct the absence of a progressive or ethical agenda in current grammar
construction: “And in the first place, the purpose of grammar is not distinctly set forth. Indeed, it is proposed
as ‘the art of speaking and writing correctly.’ Thus our grammarians would give us ‘the art’ without the
science, — a heap of blind, and peradventure incongruous, rules of composition, with no principle for their
basis. And it seems not to have entered their thoughts, that one may speak grammatically and yet incorrectly;
— that his speech may be incorrect in point of perspicuity, meaning, fact, time, place, order, taste, manners,
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1837 1837
morals, &c.”
It was in this year that Concord would be erecting a Battle Monument at the Old North Bridge,
commemorating the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, and marking the graves of the fallen British soldiers.
This would lead the above grammarian, moralist, and phrenologist Walton Felch, sometime between 1838 and
1844, to commit his act of “authorized grave robbing” (authorized, indeed, formally, by the Concord Board of
Selectmen!). With full permission he recovered the skulls of two of the British soldiers, one of them with a
most picturesque bullethole. The soldiers’ skulls would become exhibits for his phrenological lectures, for
both of them displayed, he asserted, the same over-developed bump over the brain area of combativeness and
the same deficient hollow over the brain area of merriment — soldiery, he would point out, had for such
persons been a natural fit.
Theirs but to do or die.
Henry Thoreau copied a poem by Henry Howard, Early of Surrey into his Miscellaneous Extracts notebook:
Description of Spring
Wherein each thing renews, save only the Lover
The soote season, that bud and bloom forth brings,
With green hath clad the hill and eke the vale:
The nightingale with feathers new she sings;
The turtle to her make hath told her tale.
Summer is come, for every spray now springs:
The hart hath hung his old head on the pale;
The buck in brake his winter coat he flings;
The fishes flete with new repairèd scale.
The adder all her slough away she slings;
The swift swallow pursueth the flies smale;
The busy bee her honey now she mings;
Winter is worn that was the flowers' bale.
And thus I see among these pleasant things
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Each care decays, and yet my sorrow springs.
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1837 1837
A survey was prepared for a new canal along Maine’s Georges River.
C.F. Hathaway of Waterville, Maine began transforming the labor of Americas’s rural women into men’s
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shirts.
Charles T. Jackson, M.D.’s FIRST REPORT ON THE GEOLOGY OF THE STATE OF MAINE (Augusta: Smith &
Robinson, Printers to the State).
DR. JACKSON’S 1ST RPT.
During this year Dr. Augustus Addison Gould became a corresponding member of the Rhode Island Natural
History Society and a corresponding member of the Natural History Society of Athens. On page 119 of this
report by Jackson on Maine geology is a list of shells found there by Dr. A.A. Gould.
During this year Captain Frederick Marryat passed through Rhode Island and made some observations about
railroads and cemeteries:
Stepped on board of the Narangansett steam-vessel for Providence. Here is a fair specimen of American
travelling:— From New York to Providence, by the Long Island Sound, is two hundred miles; and this is
accomplished, under usual circumstances, in thirteen hours: from Providence to Boston, forty miles by railroad,
in two hours — which makes, from New York to Boston, an average speed of sixteen miles an hour, stoppages
included.
I was, I must confess, rather surprised, when in the railroad cars, to find that we were passing through a church-
yard, with tomb-stones on both sides of us. In Rhode Island and Massachusetts, where the pilgrim-fathers first
landed — the two States that take pride to themselves (and with justice) for superior morality and a strict
exercise of religious observances — they look down upon the other States of the Union, especially New York,
and cry out, “I thank thee, Lord, that I am not as that publican.” Yet here, in Rhode Island, are the sleepers of
the railway laid over the sleepers in death; here do they grind down the bones of their ancestors for the sake of
gain, and consecrated earth is desecrated by the iron wheels, loaded with Mammon-seeking mortals. And this
in the puritanical state of Rhode Island! Would any engineer have ventured to propose such a line in England?
I think not. After all, it is but human nature. I have run over the world a long while, and have always observed
that people are very religious so long as religion does not interfere with their pockets; but, with gold in one hand
and godliness in the other, the tangible is always preferred to the immaterial. In America everything is sacrificed
1. THE BOOK OF GEMS. THE POETS AND ARTISTS OF GREAT BRITAIN. EDITED BY S.C. HALL (London: Saunders and Otley, Conduit
Street 1836-1838). Thoreau had made extracts from these three volumes into his Literary Notebook 1840-1848 and his
Miscellaneous Extracts 1836-1840.
THE BOOK OF GEMS, I
THE BOOK OF GEMS, II
THE BOOK OF GEMS, III
SAMUEL CARTER HALL
2. His factory would close its doors on May 6, 1996, after announcing dissatisfaction with production levels at a wage rate of $7.50
per hour. (It had, you see, become much cheaper to produce Hathaway-quality men’s dress shirts by the abuse of foreign laborers.)
Maine would retain at least temporarily, however, its other three great attractions — the ocean, Mount Ktaadn, and L.L. Bean.