Philippe Thoreau, of the parish of Saint Helier in the Isle of Jersey, had a son John who emigrated to America and opened a store on the Long Wharf in Boston. He married Jane Burns, daughter of a well-to-do Scotchman from the neighborhood of Stirling. John’s son John, a lead-pencil maker of Concord, Massachusetts, married Cynthia Dunbar, daughter of the Reverend Asa Dunbar, of Keene, New Hampshire. Of their four children Henry David Thoreau, the author of Walden, was the third. He was born at Concord on July 12, 1817.
After his graduation at Harvard in the Class of 1837, Thoreau taught school, learned surveying and the art of making lead-pencils, and began writing and lecturing. The episode in his life which gave him more than a local reputation was his camping out by the shore of Walden Pond. He spent two years and two months there studying how ‘to live deliberately.’ His hut, built by himself, might have seemed bare and cheerless to a victim of civilization. There was no carpet on the floor, no curtain at the window. Every superfluity was stripped off and life ‘driven into a corner’ in the hope of discovering what it was made of. Thoreau sturdily resisted the efforts of friends and neighbors to burden him with trumpery, refusing the gift of a door-mat on the plea that it was ‘best to avoid the beginnings of evil,’ and throwing a paper-weight out of the window ‘because it had to be dusted every day.’
He raised his own vegetables in a patch of ground near by, made his own bread, and spent his leisure time in recording his observations of nature and in writing his first book, A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. When he was satisfied with this taste of life ‘reduced to its lowest terms,’ he went back to civilization.
A Week on the Concord and Merrimack was a failure, as publishers say; meaning that it did not sell. Having published at his own expense, Thoreau was financially embarrassed when seven hundred and fifty copies of an edition of a thousand came back on his hands. He said to a friend: ‘I have added several hundred volumes to my library lately, all of my own composition.’[42] His second venture, Walden, was more fortunate. He printed a few articles in the ‘Boston Miscellany,’ ‘Putnam’s Magazine,’ the ‘New York Tribune,’ ‘Graham’s Magazine,’ and the ‘Atlantic Monthly,’ but at no time could he be said to live by literature.
His income from his lectures must have been small, and apparently he made no effort to obtain engagements. He had an exalted idea of what constitutes a good lecture, and was suspicious of oratory. He told his English acquaintance Cholmondeley that he was from time to time congratulating himself on his ‘general want of success as a lecturer.... I do my work clean as I go along, and they will not be likely to want me anywhere again.’
When Hawthorne was corresponding secretary of the Salem Lyceum, he invited Thoreau in behalf of the managers to give them a lecture. The invitation was accepted. The lecture must have had the fatal defect of being ‘interesting,’ for Thoreau was asked to speak before the Lyceum a second time the same winter.
Thoreau was a radical Abolitionist and for six years refused to pay his poll-tax, on the ground that the tax went indirectly to the support of slavery. For this delinquency he was once lodged in the town-jail over night. In 1857 he made the acquaintance of ‘one John Brown’ as a Southern-born president of a Northern college naïvely describes that terrible old man. When two years later news came of the desperate attempt at Harper’s Ferry, Thoreau gave in a church vestry at Concord his impassioned ‘Plea for Captain John Brown,’ which one of his admirers regards as the most significant of his utterances.
Of the twelve volumes forming his collected writings two only were seen by Thoreau in book form. The remaining ten have been made up of reprinted magazine articles or selections from journals and letters. The list is as follows: A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers, 1849; Walden; or, Life in the Woods, 1854; Excursions (edited by R. W. Emerson and Sophia Thoreau), 1863; The Maine Woods, 1864; Cape Cod, 1865; Letters to Various Persons [with Poems], 1865; A Yankee in Canada, with Anti-Slavery and Reform Papers, 1866; Early Spring in Massachusetts, 1881; Summer, 1884; Winter, 1888; Autumn, 1892; Miscellanies, 1894; Familiar Letters of Henry David Thoreau, 1894.
Thoreau ‘travelled widely’ in Concord and made a few trips elsewhere. Aside from his excursions to the Maine woods, the White Mountains, Cape Cod, and Staten Island, he took no long journey until 1861, when he went as far west as Minnesota. He was in ill health then, and a violent cold terminating in pulmonary consumption brought about his death (May 6, 1862). It has been often mentioned as a strange fact that this man who almost symbolized the out-of-door existence, who chanted its praises, and who was unhappy unless he had at least ‘four hours a day in the woods and fields,’ should have died, at the age of forty-five, of exposure to the elements which (according to his whimsical philosophy) were more friendly than man.