Lesson 131: Thoreau, Walden, Part 1
Reading assignment: Modern views of Walden. Download here. [download id=”52185″]
Of all the autobiographies in this course, this one is by far the most influential in modern times. It was not influential until after his death in 1862. Here is a summary of the publishing history of the book.
Walden was published on August 9, 1854. Two thousand copies were printed, selling for $1 each. Unlike Thoreau’s first book, Walden enjoyed moderate success from the first, and it continued to sell reasonably well after Thoreau’s death in 1862. But in the 1870s and 1880s, critics attacked Thoreau’s character and style of life, accusing him of crankiness and irresponsibility.
In the 1890s a group of admirers who had not known Thoreau personally but who had been affected by his writings began actively to promote him. One of the first substantial biographies of Thoreau, The Life of Henry David Thoreau, was published by an Englishman, Henry Salt, in 1890. Walden was reprinted several times in both America and England during the second half of the nineteenth century. In 1893 and then 1906, relatively complete editions of Thoreau’s writings were published, increasing the accessibility of his work and his general popularity.
Beginning in the 1930s, interest in Thoreau began to rise markedly. Henry Seidel Canby’s 1939 biography, Thoreau, reached the best-seller lists. In July 1941, the Thoreau Society of America was founded at a meeting in Concord. Still active today, the Thoreau Society’s purpose is “to honor Henry David Thoreau, by stimulating interest in and fostering education about his life, works, and philosophy and his place in his world and ours, by coordinating research on his life and writings, and by acting as a repository for Thoreauviana and material relevant to Henry David Thoreau, and by advocating for the preservation of Thoreau Country.”
Thoreau’s popularity continued: six editions of Walden were published in 1948, eleven in 1958, and twenty-three in 1968, along with many editions of his other works. In 1966, a project to edit and publish all of Thoreau’s writings was undertaken by a group of scholars under the sponsorship of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Under the editorship of Walter Harding (1966-1972), William L. Howarth (1973-1979), and Elizabeth Witherell (1980-present), the project, The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau, has published fourteen of its projected thirty-volume series with Princeton University Press. The Princeton Edition of Walden was published in 1971.
To understand Walden, you must understand that it was a hostile reaction by a man who was not happy with the new world of industrialism that was about half a century old in the United States in 1845. The world was in the first stage of the greatest change in mankind’s history: the Industrial Revolution. Thoreau sensed this. For 26 months, he attempted to live outside this world, but he could not. He was part of it, both geographically and culturally. He went into town several nights a week. He was no hermit.
New England was where this economic transformation began in the United States: the textile mills. By 1845, it had spread into all of the American economy.
Walden achieved wide popularity within intellectual circles during the 1930s. This was the era of the Great Depression. There was greater hostility to the free market in this decade than in any other decade in American history, before or since. Thoreau was a critic of commerce. This established his reputation among anti-capitalist intellectuals. The world of the college campus still reflects this hostility in the humanities departments. This is why the book is still assigned. I include it in this course in order to prepare students for the challenges they will face in college. Students should be prepared to deal with the outlook in Walden.
Thoreau was a “green.” He is revered by the “back to nature” and “back to the land” movements. But in his case, it was all play-pretend. His 26 months in a shack by a pond was all the land he could tolerate. He never went back.
As with Frederick Engels, the co-founder of Marxian Communism in 1843, Thoreau was a practicing capitalist. He worked in his family’s pencil-manufacturing business for most of his adult life, just as Engels worked in his family’s textile firm all of his adult life.
To understand the magnitude of what was taking place in 1845, view this video.
[Note: if you get through this, you will notice an error. I spoke of Adam Smith as a demand-side economist. I meant to say “supply side.”]
