Romanticism

Critical Essays in American Literature

James Barbour, Thomas Quirk

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781138195707
• eBook ISBN: 9781317270447
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First published in 1986. This outstanding collection of major essays by some of America's finest literary scholars and critics provides students of American literature with a unique perspective of America's Romantic literature. Some of these essays make connections between authors or define Romanticism in terms of one of the works; others address major issues during the period; others offer a framework for specific works; and, finally, some give interpretations for the reader. All of the essays offer distinctive voices that will engage students in this rich and memorable period of American literature.

Thoreau Walden

DOI: 10.4324/9781315638249-7

The Successive Versions of Walden

J. Lyndon Shanley

DOI: 10.4324/9781315638249-8

The immediate beginning of Walden was in 1846 when Thoreau learned that the audience at one of his Lyceum lectures—probably the one on Carlyle on February 4, 1846—had expected to hear about his life in the woods. People on the streets and in stores and parlors had asked him, “What’s it like there?” “What do you eat?” “Aren’t you lonesome?” They seemed incredulous concerning his life; some were clearly bewildered, like the man who came to the hut looking for his dog but was incapable of listening to Thoreau’s attempts to help him; he kept repeating, “What do you do here?” ¹ Thoreau discovered that all this was more than idle curiosity and that people did want answers and enlightenment if they could be had. Sometime before March 13, 1846, he wrote in his journal in preparation for a lecture, “After I lectured here before, this winter, I heard that some of my townsmen had expected of me some account of my life at the pond. This I will endeavor to give tonight.” ²

This was no encouragement for Thoreau to let pass; he wanted to lecture and write for money, and his journal already contained the beginnings of the two major elements in Walden: the story of how he lived at the pond, and the comparison of what he lived for with what many people of New England lived for. From the time he went to the pond, he had noted in his journal the events and thoughts of his days, undoubtedly with the idea of using the notes for lectures and essays as he was even then using earlier ones in writing A Week. And he was also thinking of a lecture on the mean and sneaking lives led by many people in Concord and New England. Sometime between December 23, 1845, and March 26, 1846, he wrote the opening lines of the lecture in his journal; they consisted of the first sentence of “Economy,” 3, and all of “Economy,” 7, and they began: “I wish to say something to-night not of and concerning the Chinese and Sandwich-Islanders, but to and concerning you who hear me.” ³ With the stimulus of his townsmen’s questions, he set out to develop and combine the two elements.

Reprinted from The Making of Walden (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), pp. 18–33. Copyright 1957 by the University of Chicago Press. Reprinted by permission of the University of Chicago Press and J. Lyndon Shanley.

His first step in writing the first version was to gather the material which lay everywhere in his journals, not only those written at the pond but also the ones he had kept in earlier years. From notes of 1840 and 1841 he took items for his comments on clothes; ⁴ and from the journal he had kept while living at William Emerson’s on Staten Island in 1843 ⁵ he took the lyrical passage on the coming of spring, “Spring,” 13. He used the material of successive entries or even the parts of a single entry at widely scattered points in the first and later versions of Walden. For example, eleven consecutive journal paragraphs written on or near July 16, 1845, dealt with Alek Therien and other visitors, the advantages of a frontier or primitive life, and the mice at Walden; in the first version Thoreau used them in “Visitors,” in two places in “Economy,” and in the section on animals. Frequently, as a comparison of journal entries and the text shows, he adopted material from the journal with little change. Often, however, a journal entry was only the germ of a longer passage. He developed the following unpublished interlineation as the first draft of “Economy,” 56, in I; later he interlined the rest of the paragraph in III: “There is no place in the village for a work of art, or statue for instance if one had come down to us—for our lives our houses furnish no proper pedestal for it. It is more beautiful out of doors where there is no house—no man.” ⁶

In the cases just given, Thoreau took what he wanted from various journal entries and did not go back to them when he revised his work; in other cases, however, he used only some of the material at hand and later returned for more. In the first version he took over from his journal the material for “Economy,” 7, but not until the third version did he take over the first sentence of “Economy,” 3, which immediately preceded 7 in the journal. ⁷ He drew on the following journal entry of his third day at the pond, July 6, 1845, at five different times. He used three items in three widely separated places in the first version, and after writing the second version, he interlined two other items from this entry, again at some distance from one another:

July 6. [Version I. Cf. “Where I Lived,” 16:] I wish to meet the facts of life—the vital facts, which are the phenomena or actuality the gods meant to show us—face to face, and so I came down here. Life! who knows what it is, what it does? If I am not quite right here, I am less wrong than before; and now let us see what they will have. [Interlined in version II. Cf. “Where I Lived,” 20:] The preacher, instead of vexing the ears of drowsy farmers on their day of rest, at the end of the week,—for Sunday always seemed to me like a fit conclusion of an ill-spent week and not the fresh and brave beginning of a new one,—with this one other draggletail and postponed affair of a sermon, from thirdly to fifteenthly, should teach them with a thundering voice pause and simplicity. “Stop! Avast! Why so fast?” [At the beginning of “Reading” in version I, but not in text:] In all studies we go not forward but rather backward with redoubled pauses. We always study antiques [Thoreau’s italics] with silence and reflection. Even time has a depth, and below its surface the waves do not lapse and roar. [Version I, “Economy,” 8:] I wonder men can be so frivolous almost as to attend to the gross form of negro slavery, there are so many keen and subtle masters who subject us both. [Interlined in version II, “Economy,” 8:] Self-emancipation in the West Indies of a man’s thinking and imagining provinces, which should be more than his island territory,—one emancipated heart and intellect! It would knock off the fetters from a million slaves.

He did not always lift separable items and use them in more or less developed form. Sometimes he found suggestions for two or three different points in a single note. An unpublished leaf (HM 924), torn from a journal or notebook, contains a series of brief notes that Thoreau developed in “Visitors,” “The Ponds,” “House-Warming,” and “The Pond in Winter”; one of the notes reads (unless otherwise noted, italics here and in subsequent quotations from manuscripts indicate material interlined by Thoreau):

A place of pines—of forest scenes and events visited by successive nations of men all of whom have successively admired & fathomed it—but still its water is green and pellucid, not an intermittent spring—somewhat perennial in it—while the nations pass away offering its perennial well to the animal nations. A true well—a gem of the first water—which Concord wears in her coronet.

looking blue as amethyst or solidified azure far off as it is drawn through the streets. Green in the deeps—blue in the shallows. Perhaps the grass is a denser deeper heaven.

He used “a place of pines,” the “perennial” quality of the spring-well, and the observation on the green and blue of Walden’s water in “The Ponds,” 5, the color of the ice in “The Pond in Winter,” 16, and the major part of the note in “The Ponds.” ⁸

When he was actually writing out the first version, Thoreau did not simply leaf through his journals and take what he wanted as he found it. He first gathered his material and ordered it. The evidence for this is clear, even though not extensive. In the back of one of his journals of 1845–47 he wrote out a preliminary list of topics for the later part of the first version, and then he numbered the topics in the order in which he first intended to use them in Walden. ⁹ In the margin of the manuscript journal of July, 1845, he marked the order of the items on the advantages of a primitive and frontier life before he copied them in the first version. ¹⁰ In other cases, as with the following notes on clothing, he wrote out his material with the intention of working it over later. The phrase at the end indicates that he had previously assembled or written out other material on clothing.

Comparatively speaking tattooing is not necessarily the hideous custom it is described to be. It is the same taste that prints the calico which the wearer put off and on, and the consistent objection is rather to the fashion of the print than to the practice itself. It is not therefore barbarous because it is skin deep. [Compare “Economy,” 40.]

When I meet a fine lady or a gentleman dressed at the top of the fashion I wonder what they would do if there should be an earthquake or a fire should suddenly break out; for they appear to have counted on fine weather & a smooth course only. Our dress should to some extent be such as will fit equally well in good & in bad fortune. [Compare “Economy,” 37.]

When our garments are worn out we hang them up in the fields to scare crows with, as if the reason why men scare crows was in their clothes. I have often experienced the difficulty of getting within gunshot of a crow. It is not because they smell powder. [This appears in the first and other versions but not in text.]

It is true all costume off a man is grotesque. It is only the serious eye & the sincere life passed within it, which restrain laughter, and consecrate the costume of any people. Let Harlequin be taken with a fit of the colic in the midst of his buffoonery, and his trappings will have to serve that mood too. When the soldier is hit with a cannon ball rags are as becoming as purple. As soon in short as a man engages to eat walk work & sit & meet all the contingencies of life therein, his costume is hallowed, and may be the theme of poetry. [Compare “Economy,” 39.]

I have little hesitation in saying & [in the first version this phrase introduces material that is in “Economy,” 41]. ¹¹

In some cases he assembled notes on a topic by tearing pages out of his journals; hence the mutilation of the early manuscript journals and the presence of torn-out journal pages in the Walden manuscript and in miscellaneous manuscript gatherings.

As he took over his raw material, Thoreau broke it up, changed it in detail, developed it, and finally ordered it so that he might offer his hearers and readers, not the immediate, random, and intermittent notes of a journal, but a reflected-on and consciously shaped re-creation of his experience. A torn leaf in the Walden manuscript gives us a glimpse of how he roughed out such a piece as the story of investigating, wrecking, and removing James Collins’ shanty. He went over it at least twice, for he made one set of interlineations in ink and another in pencil (here and elsewhere, angle brackets 〈 〉 indicate canceled material in manuscripts):

[Tom; two words not clear] became a dead cat—and buried at last. Lintel none but perennial passage for hens under the door board. I threw down this dwelling (next day) [pencil:] this morning—drawing the nails—and removed it to the pond side in small cart loads one early thrush gave me a note or two by the way—which was encouraging [second interlining in pencil:] as I drove along the woodland path. Penurious[?] Seeley neighbor Irishman—as I was informed by young Patrick treacherously transferring in the intervals the still tolerable straight driveable nails—staples spikes to his pocket—and then stood to look on unconcerned in the sun and pass the time of day. (There by the ponside [sic] they bleached—warped) [pencil:] & then spread the boards on the grass to bleach and warp back again in the sun (upon the grass) Seeley with his spring thoughts gazing freshly up at the devastation seeking [for “seeing”?] there is a dearth of work—he there to represent spectatordom jingling his pockets lowly—a transaction of singular quietness.

Thoreau must have begun to write out the first version of Walden late in 1846 or early in 1847. He had finished part of it by February 10 and 17, 1847, when he lectured at the Concord Lyceum on his life at the pond; ¹² but he was still at work later in the winter and spring, for in this version he wrote of the icecutters of the winter of 1846–47: “This winter [later changed to ‘In the winter of 46 & 47’] as you all know there came a hundred men”; and “They have not been able to break up our pond any earlier than usual this year as they expected to—for she has got a thick new garment to replace the old.” Speaking of his housekeeping earlier, he had said: “I trust that none of my hearers will be so uncharitable as to look into my house now—after hearing this, at the end of an unusually dirty winter, with critical housewife’s eyes, for I intend to celebrate the first bright & unquestionable spring morning by scrubbing my house with sand until it is as white as a lily—or, at any rate, as the washerwoman said of her clothes, as white as a ‘wiolet.’” ¹³ He wrote these passages with the possibility of reading them in lectures in 1847. They were not written, as were some later additions, merely as if he were at Walden.

There is no conclusive evidence that he completed this version before he left the pond in September, 1847, but since he was writing about the ice-cutters of “The Pond in Winter” by early spring, ¹⁴ it seems reasonable to conclude that he would have written the remaining twenty-seven pages of version I by September, or even earlier. The fact that he later interlined “Left Walden Sept. 6, 1847” at the end of this version also suggests that he had finished before that date.

Thoreau’s own statements seem to imply that the first version was longer than it actually was. The first draft of the first paragraph of Walden (in version III, 1849) begins: “At the time the following pages were written I lived alone in the woods.” Late in 1853 or very early in 1854 he changed this to read as it does in the published text, “the following pages, or rather the bulk of them.” In the unpublished preface of version VII, 1854, he said: “Nearly all of this volume was written eight or nine years ago in the scenery & under the circumstances which it describes, and a considerable part was read at that time as lectures before the Concord Lyceum. In what is now added the object has been chiefly to make it a completer & truer account of that portion of the author’s life.” By the phrases “the bulk of them” and “nearly all of this volume” Thoreau may have meant that he had written more of Walden at the pond than at any other one time; certainly, the version of Walden he wrote at the pond was only about half as long as the final text.

A detailed description of the first version is given in the Appendix. Its general nature can be suggested here by comparing it briefly with the final text. The first version has the spirit and the style of Walden, but the spirit is not so strongly developed and the style is not so finished. Mark Van Doren said of Walden, “it was written in bounding spirits, with eyes twinkling and tongue in cheek.” ¹⁵ So it was, and Thoreau wrote with the same joy and humor and challenging assurance at the beginning. There is a considerable difference, however, between the first and the last versions; the flavor is the same, but at the end it is much richer, since, as time went on, Thoreau added m...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Introduction
• Emerson, Essays
• Thoreau, Walden
• Poe, Short Stories
• Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter
• Melville, Moby-Dick
• Whitman, Leaves of Grass