3. Allen boarded with the Thoreaus for his first few months in Concord, and Cynthia enrolled John for two terms in 1828, Henry from fall 1828 until graduation in 1833, and Sophia in 1833 (although Allen’s rolls are incomplete). See Kenneth Walter Cameron, “Young Henry Thoreau in the Annals of the Concord Academy (1829–1833),” Emerson Society Quarterly 9.4 (1957): 19; Hubert H. Hoeltje, “Thoreau and the Concord Academy,” New England Quarterly 21.1 (March 1948): 103–9.
4. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 10, 30; Corr., 1:308 (HDT to Henry Williams Jr., September 30, 1847).
5. Phineas Allen, letter to the editor, Concord Freeman, September 21, 1838; reproduced in TSB 193 (Fall 1990): 4–5; Gladys Hosmer, “Phineas Allen, Thoreau’s Preceptor,” TSB 59 (Spring 1957): 1, 3.
6. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 10, 33–34; Thomas Blanding, “Beans, Baked and Half–Baked (6),” Concord Saunterer 12.4 (Winter 1977): 14. Leslie Perrin Wilson edits the diary of one of these young women in “‘Treasure in My Own Mind’: The Diary of Martha Lawrence Prescott, 1834–1836,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 11 (2003): 92–152; see also George Moore’s diary, transcribed in K. W. Cameron, “Young Henry,” 5–14.
7. Gross, “Men and Women of Fairest Promise,” 7–9, 15.
8. K. W. Cameron, “Young Henry,” 3–8 (no records of this society survive); Dorothy Nyren, “The Concord Academic Debating Society,” Massachusetts Review 4.1 (Autumn 1962): 81–84.
9. Holbrook’s manifesto quoted in Carl Bode, The American Lyceum (New York: Oxford University Press, 1956), 12. The lecturer who so inspired Holbrook was Benjamin Silliman, founder of the American Journal of Science.
10. Robert A. Gross, “Talk of the Town,” American Scholar (Summer 2015), 34–35; Yeoman’s Gazette, January 17, 1829; records of the Concord Lyceum, CFPL. With the Concord Debating Club rendered moot, its members disbanded and joined the lyceum.
11. K. W. Cameron, “Young Henry,” 10; Ruth R. Wheeler, Concord: Climate for Freedom (Concord, MA: Concord Antiquarian Society, 1967), 152.
12. William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist, ed. F. B. Sanborn (Boston: Charles E. Goodspeed, 1902), 13.
13. George Frisbie Hoar, Autobiography of Seventy Years, 2 vols. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1903), 1:86; K. W. Cameron, “Young Henry,” 7, 14.
14. W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1902), 13; Thoreau, “Class Autobiography,” EEM, 114.
15. Hoar, Autobiography, 1:82.
16. Edmund A. Schofield, “Further Particulars on Thoreau’s Harvard Scholarship Awards,” TSB 264 (Fall 2008): 4–6. The monetary amounts are not recorded. Both William and Ralph Waldo Emerson received funds from the James Penn legacy as well, which, unlike Harvard’s end-of-year “exhibition” prizes, were not distributed by the Harvard Corporation but by the elders of Boston’s First Church of Christ.
17. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 53; Henry Williams, ed., Memorials of the Class of 1837 of Harvard University (Boston: George H. Ellis, 1887), 23–24.
18. Andrew Preston Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences (Boston: Ticknor, 1888): 196–97; Hoar, Autobiography 1:119.
19. Franklin Benjamin Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 154.
20. Their visit home was on Saturday, October 6. John Thoreau, letter to George Stearns, Concord, October 18, 1833, in K. W. Cameron, “Young Thoreau,” 15–16.
21. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 55; Harriet Martineau (who visited Harvard when Thoreau was there), in Retrospect of Western Travel (1838), in William Bentinck-Smith, The Harvard Book: Selections from Three Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960): 338–40. George Ticknor, who had studied in Germany before becoming the Smith Professor of French and Spanish, quit in disgust just as Thoreau arrived, complaining bitterly that after thirteen years of pushing for reforms, he’d given up hope: “In my own department I have succeeded entirely, but I can get these changes carried no further.” George Ticknor to C. S. Daveis, January 5, 1835, in Life, Letters and Journals of George Ticknor, 2 vols. (Boston: James R. Osgood, 1876, 1:400.
22. Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, 200; Hoar, Autobiography, 1:127; James Freeman Clarke, Autobiography, Diary, and Correspondence, ed. Edward Everett Hale (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1891), 43.
23. Charles W. Eliot, Harvard Memories (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 53–54.
24. Corr., 1:287–88 (HDT to Horatio Robinson Storer, February 15, 1847); Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 18; John Weiss, “Thoreau,” Christian Examiner, July 1865, 96.
25. Thoreau as Seen, 204; Weiss, “Thoreau,” 97.
26. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 50.
27. Frederick T. McGill Jr., “Thoreau and College Discipline,” New England Quarterly 15.2 (June 1942): 349–50.
28. Marshall Tufts, A Tour through College (Boston: Marsh, Capen, and Lyon, 1832), 40. Tufts printed his book anonymously; Thoreau’s classmates circulated it underground, inspiring their petition. Reproduced in Kenneth Walter Cameron, Transcendental Apprenticeship: Notes on Young Henry Thoreau’s Reading (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1976), 270–99.
29. Students could be reinstated the following year only if they passed a new set of examinations and presented certificates of good conduct. K. W. Cameron, Transcendental Apprenticeship, 268; Weiss, “Thoreau,” 101; Days of HT, 41–43.
30. McGill, “Thoreau and College Discipline,” 349–53.
31. Weiss, “Thoreau,” 101–2.
32. Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, 201–2; Clarke, Autobiography, 38.
33. Tufts, Tour through College, 5.
34. Robert D. Richardson Jr., Henry David Thoreau: A Life of the Mind (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986), 14; Hoar, Autobiography, 1:103.
35. Horatio Hale, Remarks on the Language of the St. John’s, or Wlastukweek Indians with a Penobscot Vocabulary (Boston: N.p., 1834).
36. Hoar, Autobiography, 1:100–102; Walden, 52.
37. Hoar, Autobiography, 1:101.
38. Clark A. Elliott, Thaddeus William Harris (1795–1856): Nature, Science, and Society in the Life of an American Naturalist (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2008), 178–79, 194; T. W. Higginson quoted on 191.
39. See Caroline Winterer, The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life, 1780–1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 2, 60, 77–83.
40. Walden, 144.
41. For a full accounting of Thoreau’s reading at Harvard, see Robert Sattelmeyer, Thoreau’s Reading: A Study in Intellectual History with Bibliographical Catalogue (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), 3–24.
42. Thoreau’s friends published a literary journal, Harvardiana, from 1835 to 1838; Thoreau does not appear in it.
43. Henry Seidel Canby, Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939), 50. Only one essay survives from Thoreau’s years with Phineas Allen, “The Seasons,” written when Thoreau was twelve. While childish in tone, it is alert to sensual impressions and structured on a Waldenesque seasonal cycle—just like thousands of others.
44. E&L, 59; Hoar, Autobiography, 1:87.
45. Sandra M Gustafson, Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 22–23; Peabody, Harvard Reminiscences, 87–88.
46. EEM, 110.
47. The Institute of 1770 library consisted of about 1,400 volumes when Thoreau arrived, but by 1836 it was big enough to be moved to 2 Holsworthy; see Kenneth Walter Cameron, Thoreau and His Harvard Classmates (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1965), 106–13.
48. Quincy misread his own handwriting, counting what should have been 4,068 as 4,668; the error was never detected. Had it been, Thoreau would still have managed a place in his 1837 commencement exercises, but he would have been twenty-first instead of nineteeth.
49. McGill, “Thoreau and College Discipline,” 350.
50. On July 13, 1835, “David H. Thoreau” played Cato defending the Roman Republic against Caesar; Thoreau’s text is reproduced in Translations, ed. Kevin P. Van Anglen, 145–47 (in Greek), 279–80 (translated into English); for Thoreau’s source in Addison, see Ethel Seybold, “The Source of Thoreau’s ‘Cato-Decius Dialogue,’” Studies in the American Renaissance (1994): 245–50.
51. W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist, 32.
52. Orestes Brownson, “Independence Day Address at Dedham, Massachusetts,” Works in Political Philosophy, Vol. 2: 1828–1841, ed. Gregory S. Butler (Wilmington, DE: ISI Books, 2007), 120, 115, 121; RP, 64.
53. EEM, 60–61.
54. Corr., 1:30 (HDT to Orestes Brownson, December 30, 1837); Days of HT, 46 (John Thoreau to Helen Thoreau, June 24, 1836); Brownson, “Independence Day Address,” 124.
55. Corr., 1:2–4 (Augustus Peabody to HDT, May 30, 1836), 7–8 (HDT to Henry Vose, July 5, 1836), 12–14 (HDT to Charles Wyatt Rice, August 5, 1836).
56. Walden, 50; J, 8:66.
57. Philip Gura, American Transcendentalism (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007), 69.
58. William Simmons, “Report to the Overseers,” in K. W. Cameron, Thoreau’s Harvard Years, 8–9; Days of HT, 47.
59. Autobiography of Hon. John S. Keyes (CFPL online), 48–49.
60. Charles Hayward Jr., who died weeks later of typhoid fever during his first term at Harvard’s Divinity School; quoted in Charles Stearns Wheeler’s obituary of Hayward, in K. W. Cameron, Transcendental Apprenticeship, 257.
61. Morton Berkowitz, “Thoreau, Rice and Vose on the Commercial Spirit,” TSB 141 (Fall 1977): 1–5.
62. EEM, 115–18; 115.
Chapter Three
1. E&L, 65.
2. Corr., 1:16 (James Richardson to HDT, September 7, 1837); EEM, 103; PJ 1:36, March 14, 1838.
3. “Sic Vita,” in CEP, 542–43.
4. Thoreau as Seen, 153, 71.
5. See Dick O’Connor, “Thoreau in the Town School, 1837,” Concord Saunterer, n.s., 4 (Fall 1996): 150–72.
6. The building, which still stands, is now in use as the Masonic Lodge and has for many years been the site of the annual meetings of the Thoreau Society.
7. William Ellery Channing II, Thoreau: The Poet-Naturalist (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1873), 24; Edward Waldo Emerson, Henry Thoreau as Remembered by a Young Friend (1917; Concord, MA: Thoreau Foundation, 1968), 20–21.
8. Edward Waldo Emerson interview notes, box 1, folder 14, CFPL; Thoreau as Seen, 216; Martin Bickman, Uncommon Learning: Henry David Thoreau on Education (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), xvii. O’Connor suggests, based on other evidence, that Durant may have been a genuine discipline problem (“Thoreau in the Town School,” 161–63).
9. Corr., 1:19–20 (HDT to Henry Vose, October 13, 1837); Prudence Ward to Caroline Ward Sewall, September 25, 1837, Thoreau-Sewall-Ward Letters, letter #14, Thoreau Society Archives, Henley Library.
10. Sanborn, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1917), 128–29; JMN, 5:349 (August 2, 1837). The line from Emerson found its way into “Self-Reliance.” Harmon Smith puts their first meeting in April 1837; see My Friend, My Friend: The Story of Thoreau’s Relationship with Emerson (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1999), 6–8.
11. PEJ, 1:5.
12. Ibid.; Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Early Lectures of Ralph Waldo Emerson, 1833–1842, ed. Stephen E. Whicher, Robert E. Spiller, and Wallace E. Williams, 3 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1959–1972), 2:261; EEM, 8–9.
13. “Likeness to God,” in William Ellery Channing I, The Works of William E. Channing, 6 vols., 8th ed. (Boston: James Munroe, 1848), 3:235. Rev. William Ellery Channing, Boston’s leading Unitarian minister, and Harvard’s Edward Tyrrel Channing were brothers; Ellery Channing, who became Thoreau’s closest friend, was their nephew, as was the reformer William Henry Channing.
14. “Nature,” in E&L, 7; Emerson, Early Lectures, 2:215.
15. Ralph L. Rusk, The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1949), 266. After Lydia Jackson and Ralph Waldo Emerson were married in September 1835, he started calling her “Lidian,” presumably for the sake of euphony—a change that Lidian Emerson accepted (ibid., 213).
16. Emerson, Early Lectures, 2:215–16; LRWE, 7:22.
17. JMN, 5:452, 453, 460. Henry endeared himself to Lidian about this time by making “some neat little cowhide shoes” for her hens, to keep them from scratching up her garden seeds. Ellen Tucker Emerson, The Life of Lidian Jackson Emerson (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1992), 68.
18. James Russell Lowell quoted in Thoreau as Seen, 180, Ednah Littlehale Cheney quoted in ibid., 120. See also Henry S. Salt, The Life of Henry David Thoreau (London: Richard Bentley, 1890; revised version of 1908, edited by George Hendrick, Willene Hendrick, and Fritz Oehlschlaeger. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1993, 2000), 29–30, for David Haskins’s similar observation, in which he remarked the identical effect of Emerson’s magnetism on himself. The resemblance between Emerson and Thoreau became “a quiet joke in Concord,” said Moncure Conway, who thought it wholly superficial. Moncure Daniel Conway, Autobiography, Memories and Experiences, 2 vols. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1904), 1:143.
19. James Russell Lowell, “Fable for Critics,” in Thoreau as Seen, 4; W. E. Channing, Works, 3:381.
20. PEJ, 1:73–74.
21. Ibid., 38. All that survives of the lecture “Society” are “Scraps” in Thoreau’s Journal (ibid., 35–39).
22. Ibid., 31–32 (March 4, 1838); Corr., 1:36–37 (HDT to John Thoreau, March 17, 1838).
23. Priscilla Rice Edes quoted in Thoreau as Seen, 180–81; Sophia, John and Henry D. Thoreau, “Nature and Bird Notes,” Berg Collection, New York Public Library. The plants have been removed and preserved in separate envelopes; it is unclear when they were added or how they were positioned.
24. Translations, 148, 281. Note that cenotaph is, as Thoreau knew, Greek for “empty (kenos) tomb (taphos).”
25. Corr., 1:27–30 (HDT to John Thoreau, November 11 and 14, 1837). By April 1838, as the Ward letters show, the Thoreau household was in an uproar over the Cherokee removals; Emerson wrote his letter of protest on April 23, 1838. Interestingly, “Hopewell” evokes the 1785 Treaty of Hopewell between the United States and the Cherokee Indians, named for a site in South Carolina, which had originally protected the Cherokee by establishing the western border of the United States; the treaty was, as history shows, ignored.
26. Kenneth Walter Cameron, Thoreau and His Harvard Classmates (Hartford, CT: Transcendental Books, 1965), 91–93.
27. To Set This World, 11, 16–19; Michael Sims, The Adventures of Henry Thoreau: A Young Man’s Unlikely Path to Walden Pond (New York: Bloomsbury, 2014), 91.
28. Henry Petroski, The Pencil: A History of Design and Circumstance (New York: Knopf, 1990), 110–14; Edward Waldo Emerson Papers, series 1, box 1, folder 11 (interview of EWE with Warren Miles), CFPL. For the story about the encyclopedia article, see Edward Waldo Emerson, Thoreau as Remembered, 32.
29. Finding high-quality graphite was a continuing problem: after they used up their Bristol graphite, the Thoreaus bought graphite from the Tudor Mine in Sturbridge, then imported it from Canada.
30. Corr., 1:31–32 (HDT to Orestes Brownson, December 30, 1837), 34–35 (HDT to David Haskins, February 9, 1838).
31. Ibid., 37 (HDT to John Thoreau, March 17, 1838.
32. PEJ, 1:46 (May 10, 1838).
33. W. E. Channing II, Poet-Naturalist (1873), 2.
34. Advertisement in Yeoman’s Gazette (Milton Meltzer and Walter Harding, A Thoreau Profile [New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1962], 38). They would admit students for free if they could not pay (Days of HT, 76). At full enrollment, with all students at full pay, the annual gross income for both brothers would have totaled $600, less any outlay for books and supplies. For comparison, Henry Thoreau
had been offered $500 annually as teacher of the Concord Center School.
35. On Transcendentalism and educational reform, see Wesley T. Mott, “Education,” in The Oxford Handbook of Transcendentalism, ed. Joel Myerson, Sandra H. Petrulionis, and Laura Dassow Walls (Oxford: University of Oxford Press, 2010), 153–71; and Martin Bickman, Minding American Education: Reclaiming the Tradition of Active Learning (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 2003).
36. E&L, 67, 70.
37. Sanborn, Life of Thoreau, 204; Edward Waldo Emerson, Thoreau as Remembered 22; George Hendrick, ed., Remembrances of Concord and the Thoreaus: Letters of Horace Hosmer to Dr. S. A. Jones (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977), 73; Thoreau as Seen, 109.
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